So efficacious was her proselytizing that she briefly converted me, though as a rebellious teen I was hardly eager to adopt any of Mother’s practices. It began at the end of my junior year at Spence. I must have talked about the importance of my spring exams, which would be crucial to the process of college applications. I was intent on getting into Bryn Mawr, and she must have felt my keen obsession to succeed, for one night as I was boning up on Milton she stole into my room and handed me a little round, white pill: “Take it before the exam,” she said. “You’ll see, it’ll do marvels for you.” I indeed felt unusually lucid throughout my exam and was impressed not only by the result, an A+, but by the fluency, the exhilarated ease with which my ideas poured out. I stress “impressed,” rather than “seduced.” For the sense of being “speeded up” did not suit me. I was high-strung enough already, with an uncomfortably fast resting pulse, and the experience unsettled me, even frightened me. So from then on and into my last two college years, when I transferred to Barnard, I occasionally accepted a pill from Mother before an English or philosophy exam. For reasons of fetishism or perhaps good sense, I reserved the “speedies,” as I called such pills, for those subjects, sensing that taking them for math or even history might be counterproductive. And it was with an air of disappointment that she would see me marching off to the latter exams without her talisman. “Are you really sure you don’t want one?”
The same process inevitably led Mother to convert me to sleeping pills. The severe bouts of insomnia I’d had since my father’s death occasionally returned, and when I was sixteen or so she must have been kept up by the sound of my pacing about long past midnight. For one night she came into my room holding yet another kind of pill, yellow this time, and said, with some annoyance, “Instead of creating this pandemonium, please take this and go to sleep!” This habit, alas, was far more pernicious. By the time I was nineteen, I was taking Nembutal once or twice a week, whenever sleep did not readily come to me. And by the time I’d worked for a few months at my first postcollege job, I was totally addicted: I handled the midnight-to-8:00 A.M. shift at United Press, writing radio bulletins, and lived in a basement-level studio on West Eleventh Street. The tensions of the work—it was in 1953, during the McCarthy hearings—were compounded by the stress of the intolerably noisy trucks that reverberated through my little room, and I doubled, tripled my doses of preceding years.
My mother’s habit of pushing her pills on me could well have turned out to be disastrous. It took a happy marriage and a move to a serenely calm rural site for me to kick the barbiturate habit. And it took me many more years to admit to myself that Mother had been hooked on drugs for much of her life, that drugs may have been at the heart of her exuberant energy and dynamism and charm and, yes, success. In the late 1960s, when I’d begun to suspect that the pills were also having a perilous effect on her health and observed the gusto with which she started to consume alcohol after her retirement, I tried to talk about it to Alex and encountered an impenetrable wall of denial. He, of course, had known about her addictions all along. But just as adamantly as he’d protected her, all those decades, from the reality of the world, shielding her from any worrisome information, he now protected her reputation as a model of purity and uprightness. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he’d say icily, his mustache twitching with an almost villainous snarl. “She takes an absolutely normal amount of medications.”
But pace on my mother’s peddling and addictions and Alex’s devious enablement of them. Part of the Libermans’ arrogant charm, part of the power they emanated, was their projection of endless self-confidence. The tactics they used to uphold the myth of their perfect marriage were similar to those used to erect the Soviet government’s propaganda facade: No chink in the perfect society must ever be admitted, even if it was clearly perceived by all outside observers. Like the gang in the Kremlin, the Libermans exuded an absolute assurance that in every possible area of their life—in every one of their habits and proclivities—they had made the most perfect choices, had created the greatest achievable harmony.
I cannot leave my parents’ beloved bedroom—the room I went into on a morning of my fifteenth year to hear Alex whisper, “My father died last night,” the room in which he added, a few seconds later, “We don’t become adults until our parents have died,” the room that my husband and I entered to announce that we were expecting our first child—without recalling a few incidents that reinforce my sense of Alex and Mother’s minimal libido, perhaps, even, of their sexual naïveté.
Incident one: Considerably more sophisticated than my parents realize, I’m in my late teens, and Alex has called me to his studio in the library for “a little talk.” It must be 1949 or so, for his first minimalist pictures are hanging on the walls, pristine black circles on white ground. I’m sitting on a high stool, my back to the window, facing him. Gently, very methodically, with a tinge of embarrassment in his voice and with his lips faintly, priggishly pursed, he outlines the various measures a woman can take to avoid becoming pregnant. “There are condoms,” he says, “certain rubber objects, which men can put on their…dum-dums, you know…you understand,” he adds, perhaps beginning to sense my expertise on such issues, though like most aspects of my private life I carefully guard it from my parents’ voyeurism. “There are diaphragms, which women can use and which I believe are quite comfortable. There is the possibility of the man withdrawing before orgasm…a time-honored tactic!” he adds, attempting a smile. “But the best method of all,” he continues, and only then does his voice take on a tone of clarion enthusiasm, “there is abstinence!” Some seconds pass, he may be observing what that last, buoyantly offered option is having on me. “It might be very beautiful for you to retain your virginity until you get married,” he quietly offers. Another wait, and then he adds, “Your mother has often refused herself, made herself unavailable, and that is an absolutely central part of her great magic….” “I already have a diaphragm,” I shoot back.
Incident two: The following episode, which occurred three decades later, some twenty-five years into my marriage, also reveals Alex’s extremely close relationship to my husband in the decades that preceded my mother’s death. Cleve and I are encountering some common sexual difficulties related to his cardiac medications. Upon a visit to New York, Cleve tells me he has related the details of our vicissitudes to Alex. I’m irate at this disclosure. For whereas I’ve been using a strategy of filial secrecy since my teens, my husband tends to open our lives to Alex’s frequent questioning in the same manner in which he once allowed the meddling of his own invasive parents, and we often clash about our filial tactics. So I let him have it, but the harm is done, and it is with apprehension that I drop in on Alex during his daily rest on his bed. “Hello, darling,” he says. “I’m sorry about your troubles.” I mutter something about the nonimportance of it all, yet he wants to explore it further. “But listen,” he says. “One can very well come to orgasm without an erection.” “Without an erection?” I ask, incredulous, and then add, teasing, “That’s a good one!” “I assure you,” he insists with that tone of annoyance that always appears when I’ve contradicted him. In such instances, he has the habit of repeating a statement, breaking up his sentence into syllabic units for purposes of emphasis. “You-can-ver-y-well-have-an-or-gasm-with-out-an-er-ec-tion,” he repeats. The notion sounds wackily medieval, recalling the edicts of heretical religious sects that approved only those forms of sexual contact that excluded penetration. But this time around I don’t argue it. I simply bid him good-night with a kiss on the cheek (which he accepts grudgingly, as if still smarting from my sarcasm) and leave his room, thinking, Boy, that’s the wackiest one I’ve heard from him yet.
Memory now bids me to move across the third-floor landing and into my own quarters.
When you came into my room, the first piece of furniture you saw, splunk between the two windows, was the large white desk at which I worked throughout six years of Spence and four
years of college. The rest of the furnishings were inconsequential: chintz-covered twin beds, a white chest of drawers, a white dressing table placed between the two mirrored doors that gave out to the bathroom and to the hallway. It is at this big 1920s-vintage desk, which Mother bought at auction a dirty brown and painted glossy white, that I studied for my exams, dreamed of a variety of vocations, scribbled in my first journals, wrote my first infatuated missives to diverse Lotharios at Exeter and St. Paul’s, pinned up photos of my various heroes and crushes (de Gaulle, Anthony Eden, Rita Hayworth), that I first read Dostoevsky novels, and wrote my undergraduate thesis on Kierkegaard. It is also in this room and at this desk that I ceased to mourn my own blood father, thus learning to forget if not to reject him.
In his pivotal essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (the original and far more eloquent title is “Traüer Arbeit,” “the work of mourning”), Sigmund Freud constantly reminds us that grieving for a loved one is a hard, slow, patient labor, a meticulous process that must be carried out over a far longer amount of time than contemporary society tends to allot us. Crucial to this toil, Freud tells us, is our careful examination—“piecemeal,” as he puts it—of each association, each place and belonging once shared with the departed. (Don’t hasten to put his/her clothes away; continue to polish his/her silver.) Equally essential are those traditional gestures of ritualized grief (memorial services, visits to a grave or commemorative site) that confirm the absence of the dead one. In this “slow, long drawn-out,…and gradual work of severance,” Freud writes, “each single one of the memories and situations of expectancy which demonstrate the libido’s attachment to the lost object is met by reality’s verdict that the object no longer exists.”
What happens if the enormous energy available for the labor of grief does not find its proper tools or associations? It can become what Freud calls “pathological mourning.” Like those spirits of the dead in Greek literature who, if improperly mourned, often return to cause mischief—devastating crops, destroying whole towns—the psychic energies of mourning can wreak grievous harm if they’re repressed. They tend to turn inward in a dangerous process of self-devouring (as when we say that we “eat our heart out”). They can metamorphose into what we now call depression, a condition for which Freud preferred the more resonant, tradition-laden term “melancholia.” And, most tragically, they can give rise to self-hatred and self-destruction: “This delusion of inferiority is completed by sleeplessness…and by a suppression of the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life.”
Rereading Freud over the years, I finally understood the full emotional context of the nightly fits of weeping that had plagued me in the first two years after my father’s death. For in my particular case of mourning, there were precise historical and geographical obstacles to my performing any of those ritualized gestures needed, as Freud puts it, “to confirm the absence of the dead one.” His burial site—a vast military cemetery on Gibraltar—lay thousands of miles across the ocean and was made further unreachable by war. Moreover, the fact that Alex hated every association with my father restrained my mother and me from ever mentioning him and encouraged us to erase most every trace of the warrior lying in his military grave thousands of miles across the ocean.
But the depressions and fits of tears that overcame me in Rochester and on other strangers’ beds may have also been caused, in some part, by the manner in which Mother and Alex had constantly shunted me away during our first two years in the United States. For as soon as I settled into my bright, cheerful room at Seventieth Street, which gave me my first true sense of rootedness and permanence, my grief was greatly becalmed. As my new parents gambled, laughed, dined, and entertained the years away, as I watched them seek the company of the powerful, talented, and wealthy, I began to play their game, I began to forget with them, for it was by far the easier and lazier path. We were the newly minted family off to a phenomenal start in the new country, and I had already transferred to my charming, generous stepfather much of the affection I had borne to the dead warrior. I now joined my new parents in their memory-destroying dance, I collaborated like a traitor, I came to know the euphoria of burying the past rather than burying the dead. As for my nightly terrors, by mid-to late adolescence they were efficiently repressed, waning apace with most memories of my father, with most conscious interest in his life or death.
In 1948, as a freshman at Bryn Mawr, I landed the role of Ismene in a college production of Jean Anouilh’s Antigone. (It was the only time my parents came to visit me at college—they declared my performance to be terrific and for some years deplored that I was not following my true calling for the stage.) As I sat in my room at Seventieth Street on a weekend home, studying Ismene’s lines, here were some of the themes, recently clarified by a course in Western civ, that ran through my mind: Antigone, custodian of primeval ritual observances, confronts her uncle Creon, the archetypal male technocrat who is ready to violate any divine law that stands in his way for the sake of political expediency. Having put Antigone’s brother to death on grounds of treason, Creon has forbidden him all traditional burial rites. Against the advice of her accommodating sister, Ismene, Antigone safeguards her dead brother from suffering the greatest dishonor in Greek society: being “left unburied, food for the wild dogs and wheeling vultures.” Following the dictates of her conscience and of the Greek religion, she offers her brother the burial rites forbidden him by Creon and suffers the consequences, going to her own grave “unsung, unwed.” Female hearth versus male polis: As I memorize my lines, a proto-Marxist and militantly secular tomboy, I sympathize totally with the docile, panicky Ismene, even enjoying moments of approval for the tyrant Creon. Prosperity and survival above all! The forces of progress must prevail! Antigone, in my eyes, is an unintelligibly archaic creature, morbid and freakish in her addiction to rites that I find antiquated, meaningless. How I disdain Antigone when she tells Ismene, “You’ve chosen to live, and I to die.” How I relish the moments when I chide my sister for venturing on “hopeless quests,” for being “much possessed by death.”
Only decades later did I grasp the link between Ismene’s limp obedience to Creon and my own cowardice toward the rites and rights of a dead one lost in war. Only recently have I realized that the role of Ismene, “that beauteous measure of the ordinary,” as Kierkegaard describes her, was the one my mother and I had played together for some years. And I would continue to play it for decades to come.
The year after my rendering of Ismene, I received an unsettling letter from Uncle André and Aunt Simone Monestier, with whom I’d visited at length for the two previous summers I’d returned to France. They were informing me that my father’s body, which had been buried in Gibraltar, was about to be repatriated, that his remains were due back at the ancestral vault in Brittany the coming July, that the entire du Plessix family was gathering for the final burial; everyone, of course, expected me to come. I recall the exact spot on which I stood in my New York bedroom as I read this missive, the precise quality of the April light slanting through my window. I remember a sense of being fiercely assaulted by that letter, of being threatened in some very private space of me, which I now realize was the site of an inchoate, deeply sunken grief: How dare they ask me to cross the ocean and appear on such-and-such a day for an abstract and tedious family duty! I remember thinking those very words: “tedious,” “abstract.”
So even though I fully planned to be in France that summer, I wrote back to the Monestiers telling them not to expect me; I crassly lied and said I could not leave the States that year. “Thank you for letting me know darling ones,” I wrote. “There’s no way I can make it. I’m so glad you’ll be there”—by which I meant, Thanks for minding my business, just take care of it without me, don’t bother me with memory. That is one cycle of emotions I lived through in my room on Seventieth Street. And what incentives my parents and their friends gave me for silencing and burying my grief! What a good time we had together, whenever they g
ave me time!
The addition of the Patcevitches to our family greatly enhanced the merriness of my youth. Iva Patcevitch, the Russian émigré who in the fall of 1942 succeeded Nast as president of Condé Nast, was the son of a high official in the czarist government who had been the governor of Tula Province. A man of myriad gifts with an uncanny talent for finances, his capacity to charm others quite equaled Alex’s, and he embodied, in the eyes of New York society, the most glamorous values of the old Russian aristocracy. A cadet at the St. Petersburg Naval Academy at the time the revolution broke out, Pat arrived in New York in the early 1920s. He was brought to Nast’s attention by the tycoon’s daughter, Natica, who had met the young émigré at a party. Pat was immediately hired and played a crucial role in holding the company together during the depression.
Uncle Patsy, as I called him, who lavished affection and generosity on me throughout my adolescence, was an exquisitely beautiful piece of work. His aquiline features were graced by long-lashed eyes of deep turquoise blue and topped by a mane of platinum hair that had grown silvery very prematurely, in his twenties. He was a gifted athlete who moved with a sinuous, Nijinskian walk, and his gorgeous physique, which he particularly flaunted in summer by wearing extravagantly minimal bikinis, recalled a perfectly chiseled Fabergé object. There were few things in life he couldn’t do well. He knew reams of poetry in three languages. He played the piano beautifully and was a specialist in the most arcane areas of Russian music—César Cui was a particular favorite. A chess champion in his youth, he was equally unbeatable at most any parlor or lawn game you can imagine—dominoes, backgammon, croquet. He was a stupendous ballroom dancer, played marvelous squash, was an exceptional chef and gardener, and did it all with no apparent effort, with more sprezzatura than any male seducer I’ve ever met.
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