Them

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  Iva S. Patcevitch (“Uncle Pat”) at the summer estate in Stony Brook, Long Island, which he shared with us from 1944 to 1947.

  Luxury and extravagant comfort were essential, as they were to Alex, to make Pat feel secure. Even in his early, impoverished first seasons in New York, Pat booked two seats whenever he went alone to the theater in winter—the second seat was for his coat. Throughout much of his life, he carried in his vest pocket a miniature gold swizzle stick from Cartier designed to remove excess bubbles from his champagne. Pat’s rarefied aesthetic sense would have deterred him from taking a wife whose beauty and style were less than very grand. And, indeed, Nada Patcevitch was an austerely handsome woman who, although she would later suffer much from her husband’s innumerable seductions, had been, in the 1930s, one of England’s great beauties.

  Tatiana and Alex on the terrace of our summer house in Stony Brook, 1946.

  Yet beneath the surface of Pat’s hauntingly beautiful physique, his ready, flirtatious wit, his superficial but glittering, multifaceted culture, lay a rigorously disciplined character. An indefatigable worker, in every way moderate with the exception of his ambition and his phenomenal libido, Pat had every possible attribute needed for the presidency of a prestigious publishing company. Like Alex and many other successful émigrés, he was also a considerable snob, and in no way did the two men complement each other better than in their very disparate forms of snobbery. Alex was strictly an achievement and fame snob. Pat had the genetic snobbism of a finicky horse or dog breeder: He went for caste and blue-blooded lineage, fawning on old New York WASP grandes dames such as Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., or Mrs. John Hay Whitney, to whom Alex would never have given the time of day.

  In 1943, the year after Port Jefferson, the Patcevitch-Liberman clan began to share a vacation house every summer, a habit they were to continue for the following four years. After a problematic rental in Greenwich, Connecticut, at a property whose pond was filled with leeches and where poison ivy took its toll on all, we shared three consecutive summers in a wonderful house in Stony Brook, Long Island, a rambling colonial structure that we came to look on as a second home. Owned by a grand Catholic family that had come into hard times, it overlooked an inlet of Long Island Sound; the house was surrounded by large lawns and had a private squash court. A multitude of children had inhabited the house in the last generation. And apart from the master bedroom, which the Patcevitches occupied, the living quarters had been divided into many small, monastic chambers, which enabled my parents and the Patcevitches to entertain successive waves of houseguests. Since Nada was the only adult in our extended family who did not work, it was there that she and I kept each other company while Mother, Alex, and Uncle Pat were in the city. How lucky Mother had been to find yet another substitute mom for me! Gitta Sereny had a full-time job these days and was visiting us only on occasional weekends.

  For the next few years, as Pat and Alex went about their own bonding rituals—discussing Condé Nast by the hour, playing squash and chess—Mother and Nada were inseparable, proclaiming that they were not only each other’s best friends but “like sisters.” Indeed, they were both tall, generous, cultivated, imperious women who terrified their husbands into satisfying their every whim, and for the following seasons they copied every detail of each other’s style: They swept up their blond hair in similar classic rolls, used the same hues of ruby-red lipstick and nail polish, chose a “twin” look for summer wear (shorts and men’s shirtwaists tied just above the midriff), wore equal amounts of barbaric jewelry to the beach, and aped each other’s way of laughing (slightly bent over at the waist, right hand over the heart, hee hee hee). But although Tatiana had become Nada’s best friend upon Alex’s orders and for a few years seemed attached to her, she and Nada were very different women. Mother—a true nester—was deeply attached to her home, loathed traveling, and declared that she would leave Seventieth Street only feet first; Nada was one of those British dilettante expatriates to whom lightly learned wanderings—be it in Afghanistan, Tibet, or North Africa—were an essential part of their identities. Mother was a dedicated career woman who finished every professional task with exacting perfectionism; Nada’s desk was littered with two decades’ worth of unfinished travel essays, unfinished short stories, barely begun novels.

  Their physiques were equally distinct. My amply proportioned mother was a Juno-esque size-sixteen earth goddess; the delicate, skittish Nada was a virginal Diana whose great violet eyes surmounted a sharply aquiline nose and a thin, distinctly unsensuous mouth. She was five feet nine and wore a size ten, and it soon became an ideal of mine to achieve that borderline emaciation that characterized Nada’s frigid style, an effort much encouraged by the two women. “Don’t you think we should begin to watch her weight, Taniousha dear?” Nada would say to Mother as they tallied up the week’s report about me. “Absolutely Nadiousha, I’ll tell Sally to cut out the apple pie.” “And the breasts are growing awfully big….” “There’s always plastic surgery,” Mother would answer reassuringly.

  An average Stony Brook summer weekday: When I enter Nada’s room, she is sitting up in bed, her makeup already applied with exquisite skill, offering her morning’s litany of complaints as Sally stands over her breakfast tray. (“Ooh, those breasts,” Sally used to whisper to me. “I can’t stand looking at those breasts, like little dead frogs.”) The toast is soggy, Nada is singing out into the morning, the war is still on and you can’t travel anywhere, my volume of Cyril Connolly has disappeared, and you haven’t thanked me properly, you little horror, for that bathing suit I bought you yesterday. Then every morning after gripe time came that procession which was the central ritual of our day: Nada with her baskets, her beach mat, her oils, her slender amethyst-charged arms leading the way to our little inlet beach for our daily sunbath. These are still the years when any fashionable woman’s summer life is focused on achieving the darkest, most cancerous tan possible. On August weekends, when Mother is on vacation full-time with us, she and Nada and I spread out our arms and legs side by side for Pat and Alex to judge, asking, “Who’s the darkest of us all?” For this purpose, week after week Nada and I lie there with the stillness of sacrificial victims, turning our bodies by a few degrees an hour to achieve maximum exposure to the sun, occasionally taking an hour off to move to the bulrushes to the left of the beach, where we could take off our swimsuits and, as Nada put it, “tan the whole package.”

  And then we’d turn to our reading. From the time I’d been a small girl, I’d been happy to lie on a beach by the hour with a book, but at Stony Brook there were many interruptions, for Aunt Nada liked to talk to me during our sunning sessions, dredging up her recollections, her accounts of innumerable unfinished projects. For Nada’s mind—oh, heavens, it resembled an exploded emporium, or one of those Third World towns in which half-built hotels stand rusting in the middle of trafficked squares. She would read me excerpts from her unfinished novels or short stories, one of which, I recall, had the opening sentence “Her dream lapped about her like a warm bath.” At other times she would discuss one of her unfinished historical studies—a history of the papacy or of Mayan sculpture. Or else scraps of her past came tumbling out of her chatter: her presentation at Court, when she had been dreadfully ashamed to have dropped her handkerchief before the queen; Bucharest in the twenties, Baden-Baden in the thirties, when she had been courted by the earl of so-and-so, the duke of this-and-that; the glacial, indifferent mother who let a nanny do all the bringing up; that nanny’s ghoulish, man-hating humor; that favorite couplet of Nanny’s, which Nada repeated to me weekly, Nanny’s idea of great fun: “Pray tell me Ma, what is that mess/That looks like raspberry jam?/Hush hush my child that is your pa /Run over by the tram.” How Nada laughed at that, her thin torso shaking on her beach mat, her carefully painted lips curling savagely over her white teeth.

  By the time the Patcevitches were firmly established in our lives, just after Pat’s ascension to power, he had fallen out of lo
ve with Nada and gone on to many other pursuits. With genteel diligence they tried to hide their divisions during their last years together. On Friday nights, Pat’s arrival in Stony Brook with my parents was attended by barrages of endearments—Beloved Nadiusha! Patsy, darling! He would often bring her some jeweled bauble to wear as a token of his repentance, and there would be much public hugging, accompanied by oohs and ahs from that weekend’s audience: “How superb, what style Patsy always has!” Yet I was always aware of the dread between Nada and Pat—their bitter mutterings in the bedroom a wall away from mine, the banging of their bedroom door as he left to sleep in an empty guest room. A very pretty, bright twenty-four-year-old divorcée who was spending a summer weekend with us in 1944, Peggy Riley (who was to enter New York cultural history as the distinguished essayist and lecturer Rosamond Bernier), tells the following story: It was a Sunday night, she needed a ride back from Stony Brook to New York, so she accepted Pat’s offer to drive her into town. Their trip was slowed by heavy traffic, and once in the city, Pat asked Peggy to come up to his flat in order to telephone Nada, who was in a perpetual state of nerves whenever he drove without her. He waited until after he had made his call and reassured his wife that he was safely in Manhattan to make a lunge for the pretty Peggy. “That was Pat all over,” Rosamond told me recently as we shared memories of that decade. “He had to make that call to Nada first, like a good little boy, before pouncing on you.” Bauble after repentant bauble came Nada’s way, the most memorable of them being a three-inch-high “dog collar” of tourmalines and small diamonds, which covered the entire height of her slender neck down to the edge of her frail shoulders and remained her stylistic trademark, not unlike my mother’s macelike garnet ring, until her marriage, and her New York life, came to an end.

  Nada and Francine in the squash court of the summer house in Stony Brook.

  Each summer spent in the Stony Brook house yields one or two memories that stand out above all others.

  Nineteen forty-four: The summer’s emotions center on the Allied landing on Normandy and our armies’ march toward Paris. Ensconced in our summer home since early July with old Sally to keep house for us, Nada and I have tacked up a large map of western Europe on the wall of the dining room; armed with pushpins, we daily track the Allies’ progress eastward and southward from Omaha Beach. Nada, who like Pat has spent half of her wanderer’s life in France, is fully as excited as I am. Those sales Boches will soon be kicked out, we rejoice every day, our beloved Paris will be freed before the summer’s over! However unpolitical they are, Alex, Mother, Uncle Pat are equally jubilant—Paris, for all of us, is still the center of the universe, our emotional heartland, the mecca from which all culture and civility flow. On an early August weekend, the Libermans and Patcevitches have assembled a large number of friends for Sunday lunch. It is a typical Libermánshchestvo table, groaning with food, ablaze with laughter and trilingual talk. Edna Woolman Chase has brought her daughter, the peppy writer Ilka Chase; the sparkling Peggy Riley is here with her lover, a tall, brooding Russian photographer named Constantin (“Kostia”) Joffe; Aunt Elena Shuvalov hovers over her son Andriusha, who’s about to leave for Exeter; our dear friend Albert (“Albie”) Kornfeld, the editor of House and Garden magazine, has just regaled us with a tale of how he took the Queen Mary for the single purpose of abiding by his mother’s wishes that her ashes be scattered in midocean. (“What do you think I’m doing?” he snapped at the nosy steward who burst into the cabin to ask why Albie was leaning perilously out of his porthole. “I’m scattering Mother!”) Also present are our principal financial supporters, Beatrice and Fernand Leval, and our nostalgic warblers, Claude Alphand and Sasha de Manziarly, the latter of whom has always been a special friend to me.

  The table—a wooden plank has been set up outdoors on top of a trestle to accommodate sixteen people—is drenched in sunshine, the wine is flowing, and as we feast on Sally’s southern fried chicken and blueberry pie the talk soon centers on one speculation: When will our beloved Paris be liberated? The Allies are marching southward toward the Sarthe, Sasha de Manziarly announces; they might reach Le Mans next week; their next goal will be the Loire. Many at the table are pessimistic: The Germans’ resistance has often been stiffer than expected, a lot of blood is yet to be shed. Mother is always the greatest pessimist of all, a trait Alex traces to all the tragedies she’s witnessed. “They’ll never be in Paris before October,” she announces glumly. “Not a chance! Les Boches will fight like savages!” But on this perfect summer day, most of the guests opt for a more moderate view, and before I know it—this is, after all, a predominantly Russian table—everyone is taking bets. “I bet anyone one hundred dollars that Paris will be liberated by September 10,” says Sasha de Manziarly. “I bet you one hundred dollars not before September 15!” Alex calls out. “Two hundred dollars that it will be earlier, by the fifth!” says Pat, always ready to raise the stakes.

  But I’ve been listening to the radio as compulsively as I’d listened to it three years ago as a ten-year-old, when I was still nursing delusions about my father’s death, and I think they’re all crazy—they’re underestimating the heroism of resistance fighters who’re staging uprisings all over France. “Paris will be liberated by August 26!” I speak up. “Any thirteen-year-old who accurately predicts that date deserves a bracelet from Cartier,” Sasha de Manziarly says. “Are you putting your bets on August 26, young lady?” “Most definitely,” I answer. “Cartier it’ll be,” Sasha announces. Mother, Nada, and Pat glow with pride at their darling’s precociousness. Alex’s mustache twitches with mild displeasure—he’s always wary of my being the center of attention, and he disapproves of my being offered jewelry by any man, for whatever reason.

  Sure enough, in the following weeks the Allies sweep southward and eastward so swiftly that Nada and I are repositioning our pushpins twice a day. On August 17, American troops take Orléans, on August 19 they cross the Seine at Mantes, and on that same day resistance units stage insurrections all over Paris, capturing the Hotel de Ville and all post offices. Our armies reach Paris on the twenty-fifth, one day before I’d predicted it. At 6:00 P.M., Free French forces led by General Leclerc come marching up the Champs Elysées, and a few hours later my idol, Charles de Gaulle, rides into the city on top of a tank. The entire family is still assembled at Stony Brook. Mother and I, Pat and Nada weep and hug one another with joy, and Alex, who until the end of his life we will never once see cry, is opening champagne for everyone, his mustache trembling with emotion.

  A few weeks later, as we’re resettled at Seventieth Street, Mother begins to establish phone contact with a few relatives in Paris: Aunt Sandra, Aunt Lila, the Monestiers, all have survived the Occupation safely. And sure enough, during my first weeks back at Spence, a little black box is delivered to me from Cartier. The gallant Sasha has kept his word and has sent me a beautiful gold bracelet. For some years—until it disappears during a hotel stay, perhaps stolen, perhaps left behind in a moment of sensual abandon—it remains my most prized possession, a perennial reminder of my mother-land’s liberation.

  That was the historic summer of 1944. My two most vivid memories of the summer of 1946—I was then fifteen, going on sixteen—are the following: Aunt Nada and Uncle Pat offered me, as a gift for my upcoming birthday, a luxury I’d craved for several years and which my parents hadn’t been able to afford: time at a horseback-riding summer camp in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, which my classmates at Spence had raved about. Alas, I enjoyed very little of this treat. At the end of my second week, my horse bolted while crossing a mountain trail, I fell onto my right side and splintered my collarbone into some thirteen pieces. An angelic camp counselor accompanied me on the small, shaking mountain train that connected Steamboat Springs to Denver—the most physically painful experience of my life, including childbirth—and booked me into Denver Children’s Hospital. She kindly spent a night by my bedside to see me through the first of what would be five rounds of surgery. After sh
e left me to resume her duties, I was on my own. My parents phoned every few days for the next fortnight to send their love. But this did not minimize the extraordinary bouts of depression that swept over me each time I woke from the successive anesthesias, which were still of the chloroform-mask kind: Coming to after each of these ordeals, lying in a ward filled with sobbing children, I wept not out of some indefinite sorrow, as I did in earlier years, but out of solitude and distinct physical pain. Yet not a shred of blame was in my thoughts. Not until many years later, when narrating this episode to others—“You mean they didn’t fly out?” startled friends would say—did I begin to think it odd that Mother and Alex felt no need to be with me. For back then, age fifteen, I was already so used to fending on my own that the thought did not once occur.

  My other vivid memory of Stony Brook in 1946 has to do with Mother and Alex asking me to pose in the nude. For over half a century I seem to have repressed the memory of that episode, which resurfaced only after my mother’s death in 1991, when I came into possession of several boxes of photographs that had been stored at Seventieth Street. I don’t recall the words my parents used to talk me into posing—I only know it was suggested to me on an August morning as the three of us sat alone at breakfast, and I particularly recall the soothing, almost obsequious tone in which Mother kept repeating, “We’ll all go down there together, Frosinka, darling, we’re all doing this together.” “There” was that spot on our little inlet beach, to the left of the house, in whose tall bulrushes Nada and I used to sunbathe naked. “We’ll stand around in the bulrushes together, where it’s so pretty,” Alex said gently, his green eyes pleading. “Is that okay with you, darling?” “Why, sure, I guess so,” I answered, vaguely pleased and flattered and yet apprehensive. All three of us were prudish about our bodies, the project did not seem at all natural, yet as soon as they proposed it I wanted to do it immediately, that very morning, in order to have it over with.