Them

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  There is no need to dwell on Tatiana’s reaction to Bertrand’s family when, shortly before their wedding, he brought her to the du Plessix’ genteel, shabby family estate in the Vendée for the obligatory introductions: “Tout a fait brave,” she would describe her future in-laws to her friends, “but they haven’t bathed since the Middle Ages.” As for his relatives’ astonished reaction to Tatiana, he had strayed much too far from their ways to pay attention to it. On the bride’s side of the family, her status-conscious Russian relatives were overjoyed by their girl’s fiancé: His polish, his elegance, his gift for Slavic languages charmed them at first sight, and the affection they bore him was always amply returned. His title particularly satisfied Uncle Sasha’s elitism: One can imagine his elation when he was able to order, as a wedding gift for his beloved niece, a twelve-piece silver toiletry set embroidered with viscountal crests.

  A year and a half into her marriage, in June 1931, Tatiana writes her mother to tell her that yours truly, then nine months of age, has just been weaned. “The little girl is growing,” Tatiana relates at the end of a long letter which also describes the success being enjoyed in Paris by her sister Lila, who with Uncle Sasha’s help had been able to emigrate from the Soviet Union earlier that year. (Lila had just won a beauty contest in Paris.) “I’ve just stopped nursing the child,” Tatiana resumes,

  and therefore I’m driving to Vilna tomorrow to a friend’s house for the Trinity holiday, it’ll be the very first time I shall have left her. Luckily there’s a phone, and one can telephone every hour, day and night…. The child is growing prettier, and to the great envy of Bertrand already says “Mama” and “Nyanya”. She weighs 10 kilos: a truly fantastic weight. Write me what you want me to send you in the next parcel! No doubt your lilacs are blooming and beautiful. Loving kisses to you and Père.

  That letter of June 1931 is the last one of Tatiana’s missives from Warsaw to have survived. In the following months, some somber turn of events dispatched the du Plessix home to France. For by the next letter, dated spring 1932, Tatiana is back in Paris, living with Bertrand and me at Square Henri Pathé, near the Tour Eiffel, and her new hat business is already flourishing.

  I write you now from a village where we’re spending Easter with friends, we’ll return in three days. Babushka is looking after the little one, and is sleeping in our apartment. I’ve been absolutely exhausted, these past weeks, by the Easter hats. I’ve made an unbelievable quantity of them, so much work! Moreover Bertrand most inconveniently came down with grippe: I’ve had to look after him more carefully. Here I’m already well rested: it’s a true 18th century country house with no conveniences, but extremely sympathetic. And, most important, one doesn’t have to think of anything. In the mornings—instead of hats, I collect salad. Uncle Sasha will be coming back in a month from Asia. His expedition has ended very sadly. His boss [Georges-Marie Haardt] died of pneumonia, and Babushka will worry frantically about Uncle Sasha until she gets definite word that he’s left that dreadful place. It’s all terribly sad…. The little one grows at an unbelievable rate, and when nurses in the park are told that she’s only 1½ they’re very chagrined, because she looks at least 2½ years old.

  Tatiana and eight-month-old Francine, Warsaw, 1931.

  Tatiana sunbathing by the Mediterranean in the early 1930s.

  The following letter, dated a few months later, shows the du Plessix still prospering on a summer vacation in the south of France.

  Beloved Mamulenka,

  We’ve already had two weeks at the sea shore, where we’ve rented a dacha from one of our friends. Francine has been swimming for the first time: she really loves it, and cries when she has to leave the water. She’s very sunburned…. I’m sending you a shot of the family, and of Froska naked. She’s very appetizing, in a month she’ll be two years old, and I think to myself “Well, just look at what I produced!” I feel as if I’ve just given birth to her…. Babushka is at her brother’s at Arcachon, and Tyotya [Aunt Sandra]is at a spa healing her legs. Later she’ll come to us, so write her at this address.

  But two years later, in September of 1934, my father seems to be out of a job again, Mother’s hat business appears to be the mainstay of the du Plessix’ finances, and the family has not been able to afford even a summer vacation.

  Beloved Mamulenka,

  I congratulate you on your name day—today we celebrated Francine’s fourth birthday. She received lots of presents. We’ve had a big change. I’ve dismissed her nyanya, who had to return to Poland. But everything’s fine, Froska gets along very well with her new governess, who by the way is far more suitable than the old nurse. I’ve again been so submerged in work that I didn’t take any vacation. But I feel well because I didn’t stop the gymnastics, I did them every day all summer. Bertrand for the time being is working at home. Sasha went to Boston for a year, where he’s going to lecture on portrait painting and reorganize the museum. It’s a wonderful uncle we have.

  There are several versions of why the du Plessix left Warsaw, apparently in a precipitate way, in 1931. According to my mother’s face-saving account, the decision to leave was taken of my father’s own free will, because he wanted to go to work for the Agence Havas, France’s leading news agency, which had offered him a job as correspondent. But everyone else I have talked to, including those friends and relatives who loved my mother, put the blame squarely on her. According to their reports, after a few months the provincial constraints of a less-than-glamorous diplomatic post—the rigid protocol, the dinners for the Papal Nunzio, the entertaining of commercial attachés from Oslo and Addis Ababa—made her restive for Paris and led her to commit some serious faux pas. One might have sympathy for her. She had fled the barbaric East, crying out, “To Paris! To Paris!” as desperately as Chekhov’s protagonists cry out “To Moscow!” And rather than enjoy the glamorous cosmopolitan life she’d coveted, she’d been brought to a dinky Polish city nine tenths of the way back to the Soviet nightmare she’d fled—in retrospect, it doesn’t seem quite fair.

  The kinder rendering of the particular transgression that led to the du Plessix’ dismissal from Warsaw is that my mother had loudly announced, at an official dinner, “Je déteste les Polonais.” The more serious allegation is that the penniless couple was undone by my mother’s proclivity for high living and her inability to limit herself to the modest diplomat’s salary, which was their only source of income. According to this variant, she put great pressure on my father to furnish her with the luxuries she had always dreamed of—good clothes and furs—and my father, who himself loved to put on a show, complied. He appears to have sold diplomatic favors to shady commercial interests, to have gotten caught, and to have been asked to resign. This is the account I received from both my great-aunt Sandra, who adored my mother but was mindlessly candid, and my aunt Lila, who disliked her sister and was savagely shrewd. The hysterical denials issued by my mother when she learned that I’d been given this version of the story only corroborate the veracity of my aunts’ reports.

  At first, the du Plessix’ Paris life seemed to hold to the same fashionable pattern it had had in Warsaw: They continued to be one of the handsomest couples in town, to win waltzing prizes at balls. They retained close ties with the diplomats whom they had met in Warsaw—among them were William Bullitt; George Kennan; John Wiley, my godfather, who had been second in command at the American embassy in Warsaw and had become their closest friend there; and an entrancing chargé d’affaires at the German embassy, Hans Gunther von Dincklage, also known as “Spatz,” who was later transferred to Paris and was to reenter my mother’s life in a curious way during World War II.

  My mother rented a little atelier a few blocks from home where, with the help of an assistant, she designed and sold her hats. As my father worked in various businesses—I suspect he never found his proper niche after being eased out of the diplomatic corps and resented my mother bitterly for having ruined his career—they cultivated moneyed acquaintances who mig
ht make up the clientele for Tatiana’s business. To upgrade her standing in the Paris monde, Tatiana struck a deal with one of Paris’s most prominent couturiers, Robert Piguet (of Fracas and Bandit perfume fame), whereby he dressed her for free on the condition that she wear only his clothes.

  Then, within a few years of their return from Warsaw—probably in early 1935—another event darkened my parents’ lives. One afternoon, Tatiana came home earlier than expected from her atelier—perhaps she had a migraine, to which she was prone—and found her husband in bed with her friend Katia Krasin, one of the three sisters whose erotic appetites seem to have affected my family’s destiny. This is an episode which, in later years, my mother related with that matter-of-factness which is often the readiest mask for deep pain. With generous leniency toward my father, she put all the blame on the Krasin woman—a vampish dark-haired beauty married to an alcoholic Polish aristocrat—for whose charms many a Parisian husband had strayed. “Listen, how could Bertrand help it?” my mother commented a half century later. “He was so seductive, he had such charm that every woman in Paris was ready to open her legs for him; plus [she often used that word for emphasis, pronouncing it in the Russian way, “plious”] “plious Katia was drugged much of the time, and very beautiful, and a famous nymphomaniac, she threw herself at him…. It wasn’t his fault at all,” she concluded, shrugging her shoulders. Tellingly, Tatiana’s next missive to her mother, a breezy note dated 1935, is the first of her letters that makes no mention whatever of Bertrand. It is also the first of her missives to reflect the stranglehold of censorship during Stalin’s terror: Any letter that gave a negative impression of Soviet Russia now risked being intercepted and destroyed, and many Russian citizens had begun to be imprisoned or sent to labor camps on the mere ground that they had received compromising letters from abroad. Tatiana seems shrewdly cognizant of these dangers and even knows to include comments flattering to the Soviet regime.

  Mamulenka,

  I write you from the country, where I’m resting for 24 hours. Notwithstanding my great love of reading, in Paris I’m so occupied with work and social life that for months on end I don’t open a book. I only have time for newspapers. I saw here at the cinema the sports parade in Moscow, it’s truly remarkable. The health and beauty of the youth and of the sports give the nation great honor. Sports are practiced here also, but only in privileged circles…. I’m dreaming of tearing myself away in the fall for winter sports, which I’ve already not done for three years. Francine now looks wonderful. She goes to kindergarten, and is learning to read and write. She’s huge and very noisy and quick—but on the whole an absolute treasure.

  PS. For heaven’s sake don’t give anyone anything about Mayakovsky—anything. It would be unpleasant for me if anything were said about that.

  Seeing that her social milieu in Paris is predominantly conservative and that tensions between the Soviet Union and Western democracies are growing by the day, it is understandable that Tatiana now wants to conceal her romance with the Soviets’ national hero. What is far more opaque, in these years of her life, is her true attitude toward my father’s tryst with Katia Krasin. Tatiana could afford to be lenient about that episode fifty years later, but at the time she must have been deeply hurt, deeply shocked. She was, after all, the daughter of decorous, Puritanical Russian gentry; she had been a virgin when she married my father; her most beloved female mentors were her gentle, very devout Babushka and Aunt Sandra; her notoriously scrupulous sensibility had early been derided by Elsa Triolet, who reported that Tatiana “fainted at the sound of the word merde.” And it must have been agonizing to come home one afternoon and see her husband and her old friend wrangling on her bed. (When I try to imagine the episode, I see it in tones of glaring white—Katia’s pale skin and amber hair, the sunlight on the white sheets—and even I, to this day, am offended.) My very first memory of my father and mother together, in fact, concerns a dreadful quarrel in their bedroom at Square Henri Pathé, and I have often wondered whether it was related to the Krasin incident.

  In this first memory of my parents, I am in their bedroom, standing by my father on the window side of the bed, and a large object flies high above us, thrown by my mother toward my father to the sound of violent imprecations. As the missile thuds behind us, missing us by a few inches, I turn around to look at it. It is a squat, yellow tome, a telephone book. Standing across the room, by the door of her closet, my mother continues to shout, waving her arms. My father stands very still, looking at her with a faint smile, attempting to look bemused. After a few more stormy imprecations, she looks at herself briskly in the mirror that faces the closet, smooths her hair, and leaves the flat, slamming a door behind her. If the altercation concerned a sexual transgression, it probably related to my father’s fling with beautiful, drugged Katia, for none of his later affairs would have evoked a tantrum—from that day on, my mother slept in a different room.

  And from that time on, my memories of family life are totally fragmented, as if stored in drawers of memory that never connect—moments alone with my father, alone with my mother, alone with my beloved Babushka and great-aunt Sandra. Although my parents continued to live in the same apartment until the fall of Paris in June 1940, I can remember very few occasions I shared with both of them, and this sense of their great apartness gave me a feeling of superfluity, of unworthiness, that was to last for many years. I have only two other recollections of seeing my parents together before 1939: In one, we are standing side by side at Babushka’s deathbed, clutching one another’s hands, each of us weeping profusely as she rasps her last breaths. In another, we are sitting at the dining-room table of our apartment, I bite lustily into an apple, and in a rare moment of shared contentment my parents’ eyes meet somewhere over my head to offer me that most precious treasure—approval of the fact that I exist at all.

  But these are exceptional moments, for they lead quite separate lives. I am left with one particularly vivid memory of my father announcing that he’s taking me to see a friend, whisking me into his car. Hurray! We drive at reckless speed through the Paris streets; he is one of those impatient, foolhardy drivers who enjoy scaring others with the risks they take. And Father is particularly eager to scare me because I’m a sissy, because my reclusive governess is turning me into an invalid, and it is all the fault of the Russian women—my mother and the governess she insists on keeping. Wouldn’t I like to change governesses for a young, pretty one who would take me horseback riding, teach me tennis? I am appalled by this notion. No, no, I shout, but the shout is also a cry of alarm for the dangerous swerve Father takes around the quai de Passy, burning a red light, narrowly avoiding a collision as he passes a Peugeot that had the right of way. I am not unused to this: His scaring me, my shouting back is part of a familiar game. He often drives like this during our summer trips together. See how fast we can go! The speedometer reading 150, 160 kilometers per hour as we catapult down a country road, Father relishing my yells, accelerating to make me cry out all the louder. As he drives, he talks to me constantly; he seldom stops talking, and in his monologues the word “intelligence” and the word “Jews” often recur—anti-Semitism is one regrettable element of Vieille France ideology he never shed. “All those Jewish friends of your mother’s!” “Jews are intelligent but detestable.” “Léon Blum! Another Jew ruining France.” I strive hard to retain neutrality throughout his monologues—I sense there’s something very wrong about saying a whole people are detestable, and I’m concentrating so on remaining neutral that as we cross the Seine to the Left Bank I don’t even ask whom we’re going to see. The car comes to a halt a few blocks from the river, and I read the street sign, rue des Saints Pères. “This is going to be a lovely visit,” Father repeats, “an invitation to tea!” We get out of the car and cross a pretty courtyard. I still think we might be dropping in on yet another of his monocled former colleagues from the diplomatic corps who will give me lemonade and go on raving about the influx of foreigners polluting Fran
ce, the threat of war. So the surprise is all the greater.

  We enter a small hall and see a woman in red standing above us at the head of a red-carpeted stairway, and the walls on either side are red, all about her is drenched in red. She is laughing with pleasure, her white teeth and pale skin and dark hair seem to be the only substances that are not red. She wears a floor-length tea gown of that color, she sparkles with rubies, she holds out her red-tipped hands to me, saying, “At last I see her! What a darling!” I go slowly up the stairs, startled, pleased that I am pleasing; Father also seems to be delaying the trip upward, prolonging his pleasure in her approval of me; the woman is beautiful and inviting, and I go toward her with great avidity, with the same delight I take in anyone who pays as keen attention to me as she does. I go toward her like a puppy, smelling a new perfume, sniffing her great redness. She takes us into a drawing room, and I make conversation with father’s friend, showing off my knowledge of world capitals, multiplication tables, kings of France, feeling suddenly grown-up and adequate. And what is most glorious is that the lady finds me amusing, finds me fascinating. She hangs on my every word and asks many questions, her velvet slippers daintily crossed as she pours tea. She laughs a great deal, she asks me more questions, the fire burns hot, there are red stones on her wrist, she speaks French with a faint foreign accent that is unlike my mother’s. And I shall not see her again for some years because she is American, in a few months’ time World War II will be declared, and she will have gone home. During one of father’s army leaves, I shall ask to see her again, and he will ruefully say, “I’m so glad you liked her, darling. She had to go back when the war began.” Her name, I realized much, much later, was Bettina Ballard, and she had been, in those years, head of the Paris bureau of Vogue magazine, an institution that, not unlike the Krasin sisters, would continue to intrude upon my family’s destiny.