And then in the middle of that race, I went kerplunk. I woke up one morning, delirious, with a 105-degree temperature and internal hemorrhages and was declared to have one of the more extreme cases of mononucleosis on record. Doctors prescribed total rest for two months and partial rest for at least another year. I returned to the United States in the autumn of 1956 to pursue my convalescence, and this homecoming requires a stylistic note: As I stood on the boat deck, waving to the emotional parents waiting impatiently for me on land below, I was wearing a Chanel suit of pink and gray tweed, which they had offered me as a present a few weeks earlier for my twenty-sixth birthday. The first and last item of haute couture I would ever own, it marked the end of my life in fashion. A few months later, it was in this particular outfit that I met my future husband, the reclusive, contemplative painter Cleve Gray, and redeemed my life by setting forth on that quiet rural existence, in a snug, dark house, which I had dreamed of since childhood.
For Cleve Gray was to be the savior of my adulthood, just the way Alex had been the savior of my youth. While loving and admiring Tatiana and Alex, he remained critical of them and was generally appalled by the world of fashion; he understood the various ways in which my path in life must diverge from theirs; he honored and encouraged our differences while never trespassing on my filial affection. The spoiled child of an obsessively doting, neurasthenic mother who would have made a shambles of a less stalwart son, he had lost much of his youthful arrogance during four years’ service in World War II, yet was still plagued by many problems—a tendency to passivity and reclusiveness, a blend of shyness and great impatience, occasional lack of social skills. But there was a sterling integrity and depth to him, which it was never in my hustling parents’ character to possess: Radically—at times pitifully—devoid of any self-promoting impulses, he was as guileless, as incapable of advancing his own ends, as Alex was skilled at that art. He was as loyal as my parents were fickle, as wary of appearances as they were haunted by them, as indifferent to social status as they were obsessed by it. And through his probity and tenderness he offered me a greater self-assurance and stability than I had ever dreamed of achieving. A summa cum laude graduate of Princeton in art history, his learning in the very field in which my parents thought they excelled was far deeper than theirs. And both my parents, initially taken by his handsomeness and wonderful manners, soon recognized his superiority in many areas of culture and of general common sense, and grew to adore him for the remarkable human being he was.
The texture of filial and maternal bonds can be greatly altered by a daughter’s marriage. What was wondrous about my definitive farewell to the world of fashion and my new life was that my relations with Mother gradually improved. Perhaps we had been greater rivals than I’d ever realized for Alex’s love and the world’s attention. Though I’d been more or less self-reliant since I’d left college, perhaps it was also a relief to my parents—as Tatiana had coolly said about her own mother—to have “one less mouth to feed.” Moreover, there was a strong streak of traditionalism in my eccentric parents, and they may have wished, above all, for their daughter to “make a good match” with a man they approved of. Within months, Mother was boasting to her friends that Cleve was “the world’s best son-in-law”—it helped that he was Jewish, spoke fluent French, had landed on Normandy Beach a few weeks after D-Day, and had been the first GI to call on Picasso and Gertrude Stein right after the liberation of Paris, all her rather simplistic hierarchy of manly valor.
I went on to have two sons, born sixteen months apart. And as meticulously as I had crafted a body, a quiet country life, a marriage, a decor radically different from Tatiana’s, I offered my children all that I had not received from her in my youth: I drove daily car pools, made dinner for them most nights of the week, gave them their first skiing and tennis lessons, tried to offer them constant companionship, constant conversation. If my relations with Tatiana reached an unprecedented level of serenity in those years, it may also be because I was continuing to fulfill most mothers’ secret wish: the desire that their daughters not repeat their mistakes, that they better them in every aspect of the art of living.
Through my children, I also grew more aware of Tatiana’s Confucian streak, her potential for family dutifulness. Both she and Alex adored their grandsons from the start, and I was amused and gratified to see that they lavished far more attention on them than they had on me—perhaps they had been mellowed by their success, by the achievement of most of their ambitions. They could not see enough of my children and were thrilled to call off dinner parties in order to baby sit for them. An abiding memory: Mother running up the stairs upon coming home from Saks the first time I brought my first baby to Seventieth Street, rushing into our room shouting, “Il est là! Il est là!” and sweeping the six-week-old into her arms, repeatedly cooing, “Joli garçon! Joli garçon!” She grew to be hilariously competitive about my children, as she was about most aspects of life. They worshiped her, and at the age of three my oldest son, Thaddeus, repeatedly announced, “I’m going to marry Grandma when I grow up.” How she rubbed that in—“He wants to marry me, not his mother.”
Our friendship was not without its difficulties. Unable to master more than a few paragraphs in English, in the following decades Tatiana was never able to read more than a few pages of my writings beyond those that were translated into French. She grew proud of me solely on the basis of hearsay that I was achieving “a reputation.” Moreover, I’d saved my soul and my sanity by carving out a private world that she could not invade and incorporate into her great kingdom, and I had to keep my frontiers closely guarded. My husband and I visited my parents almost weekly. But if Mother could have had her way she would have had us perpetually under her all-engulfing control, attending the same parties she and Alex attended, joining them in all the summer sites they vacationed in every year: Va-et-Vient, Ischia, Venice, the Lido. Our one capitulation to her wishes, a month spent at Va-et-Vient with our children in 1965, turned out as wretchedly as I’d feared: We couldn’t stand my parents’ hectic social pace, and they, in turn, constantly derided our need for seclusion. So from then on, I politely said no to most of her varied offers and demands. No, Maman chérie, we can’t join you at the Lido next summer; no, Mother, don’t make a copy of your Dior suit for me, it is simply too formal for my kind of life; no, we can’t join you at the April in Paris ball next month.
Thaddeus and Luke Gray playing doctor with “Grandpa Liberman,” 1963.
In the first months of my marriage, my husband, whose life would have been far easier if he had said no early on to his own extremely invasive parents, asked me, “Why do you always say no to your mother?” Within a year, he’d understood enough to cease asking the question. And over time, Mother was also wise enough to realize that my achievements had depended on my ability to carve out a realm of my own. So we visited across our borders, hugging profusely but still somewhat armed, able to discuss my children’s education, whatever books we’d both read in French, the illness and death of old friends.
It is ironic that my career took off the very year Mother’s declined. In the spring of 1965, just as I was submitting my first pieces to The New Yorker, the ax fell on Tatiana of Saks. To all appearances, her trade seemed to be flourishing. “Tatiana’s hats are works of art in themselves,” a Saks press release had boasted the previous fall. “Prim, Proper and Pretty,” the Chicago Sun-Times praised her last collection. “Tatiana specializes in the Bow Geste,” Lois Long had written in her New Yorker column “On and Off the Avenue,” praising the way in which the designer’s “massed bows of inch-wide black satin ribbon give a charming, bunchy look to basically neat shapes.” Yet Saks’s management decided that the hat department of the Salon Moderne was losing too much money. And with no great ceremony, Tatiana was fired by her friend Adam Gimbel—due to the general demise of custom-design fashions, Sophie of Saks, who, miraculously, remained Mother’s close friend, was to close the Salon Moderne altogether four yea
rs later.
Tatiana and her first grandson, Thaddeus, on our Connecticut terrace, summer 1960.
What I find most astounding about Tatiana’s twenty-three-year tenure at Saks is that not even at the zenith of her career was she ever offered a raise and that she never dared to ask for one. This timidity concerning money, which she shared with her father, was part of her Old World culture, her grande dame quality—talk of personal finances was far more taboo to her than talk of sex. It also had to do with her self-demeaning modesty. For however well she sold, Mother never thought she was selling enough. “I’m not worth more than they’re giving me,” she told Alex whenever he urged her to ask Adam Gimbel for a raise. And so the fabulous Tatiana of Saks ended her career receiving the same salary she had been offered more than two decades earlier as a refugee—a little more than eleven thousand dollars a year. Moreover, upon retiring she never even received a pension. “She’s a countess,” Gimbel told my stepfather when he got up his courage to raise the issue, “and everyone knows you’re well off now.”
The demise of Tatiana’s calling in the early and mid-1960s had deep roots in the culture at large, for it was based on the sudden obsolescence of the hat, a singular chapter in the annals of Western fashion, which was provoked by innumerable socioeconomic factors. A small sampling: the general process of democratization ignited by the Kennedy era and the consequent blurring of class distinctions that hats had always delineated (Jack Kennedy, one might note, was the first presidential candidate of the century to campaign without a hat); the first stirrings of a feminist movement, which rebelled vociferously against the dictatorship of fashion; the rising influence of the young, who had always been exempted from the wearing of hats. By the late 1960s, the only persons showing enthusiasm for headgear were members of the counterculture, whose eccentric varieties of symbolic hats—coonskin caps, Che Guevara berets, calico pioneer sunbonnets, Native American headbands—mainly served to express sympathy for oppressed political and racial minorities, for much that was tribal, ethnic, primitive.
However flamboyant her facade, Tatiana’s aesthetic had been one of quiet elitist moderation, of seductive yet tamed femininity. And nothing could have been more abhorrent to her than the forthright, egalitarian sensuality that accompanied the demise of the hat and was reflected in the high fashion magazines that had been her bibles since her youth: Helmut Newton’s lascivious Valkyries, Deborah Turbeville’s shots of seemingly masturbating girls. Some years after her retirement, she shyly brought out an album of her press clips to look at with me—John Rawlings or Horst P. Horst photographs of daintily groomed Jean Patchett modeling Tatiana’s exquisite boaters, bretons, toques. “Don’t women still want fashions that are becoming, like mine were?” she wistfully asked me.
My heart always aches when I imagine the dejection Mother must have suffered upon the last Friday of work, upon the first Monday of having to stay home. In 1965, she was only fifty-nine, still filled with volcanic energy. Her habit of hard daily work, pursued since the age of nineteen, must have been quite as addictive as any drug she ever took; and its cessation must have been as anguishing as her father’s giving up his gambling. If I had to live my life over again, I would try to visit with her more often in those first years of her retirement, to praise the valor of her career, to make her sense that in her moments of affliction her often intractable daughter was her best pal, her most loyal admirer. If I had another life to live, I would be a pure friend of Tatiana, enjoying a comradeship unburdened by the inevitable debris of mother-daughter relations. What a gigantic appetite and gift she had for friendship! She might occasionally play by Alex’s brutal rules of social pragmatism, as she had by abandoning the difficult Nada, but her true loyalties, radically unlike his, extended far, far beyond New York’s “useful” persons. It included dozens of friends from the 1940s and a number of charity cases—down-and-out Russians, meek and very boring little Quaker ladies sent her by the Wileys—whom she fed and sheltered because they had been put in her care.
In the years that followed her retirement, I also discovered other dimensions of that dutifulness toward family, which she was displaying so passionately to her grandchildren. By then, she had persuaded Alex to support quite a few of her down-and-out relatives. The Libermans sent monthly stipends to my great-aunt Sandra, who upon reaching her mid-sixties had to retire from the music school where she had taught voice for several decades. They equally supported my grandfather, whose wife, the sweet Zinochka who had been so kind to me in Rochester, had died of cancer in 1958. Mother and Alex then invited him to live with them at Seventieth Street, and he occupied my old childhood room on the third floor for more than two years, until a hearty, comely middle-aged French woman fell head over heels in love with the handsome old man and whisked him off to her bed-and-breakfast in the Hudson Valley. Moreover, throughout the 1950s and 1960s my parents also gave financial aid to my mother’s half brother, Eugene “Jika” Jackson, who now had a family of his own but could work only part-time after a debilitating car accident. And for a while they even sent several thousand dollars a year to my father’s cousin, Uncle André Monestier, whose fortunes had never recovered from the economic havoc wrought by World War II.
Another family grief had befallen Mother shortly before her retirement. It was in tragically timed circumstances that she heard in 1963 about the death of her mother, Lyubov Nikolaevna Orlova. In the late 1950s, correspondence between the United States and the Soviet Union, although far improved since the Stalin era, was still haphazard. One letter out of four may have reached its destination, and Soviet citizens could still get into trouble for corresponding with a “capitalist power.” Still, some Soviets and westerners took their chances. Mother’s sister, Lila, who then lived in Paris, began to write their mother in 1957, with no ill effect, but I much doubt if she informed my mother that she’d resumed the correspondence, for the sisters, over the years, had strayed far apart. Moreover, Mother was totally under the sway of her beloved John Wiley, a protégé of John Foster Dulles who had persuaded her that it was highly dangerous to write to Russia. Mother, who had her own share of paranoia about the Soviet Union, took his advice as gospel truth.
Compound this with a certain lazy, self-protective streak in my mother’s character and with the difficulties presented by writing with an impaired right arm: Tatiana did not contact her mother until April of 1963, after John Wiley had reluctantly given her the green light. She finally wrote, giving news of the past eighteen years since the war’s end, news of my growing up, of my marriage, of my children, sending photographs of all of us. A month or so later, she received a note from her stepfather, telling her that Lyubov Nikolaevna had died of heart failure the very day before Tatiana’s letter arrived. True to the stoical narcissism that runs through most women in my Russian family, my grandmother had gone to the hairdresser the morning of her death, come home, sat down in her favorite armchair, and passed on.
It doesn’t get much more Greek than that, does it? Only a few weeks before, Lyubov Nikolaevna had complained to Lila—as she’d complained for the previous six years—about Mother’s silence. I inherited my grandmother’s letters upon Lila’s own death in the late 1990s and have read the following maternal cris de coeur: “Could you think of a few good reasons why Tatiana does not write to me?” “If you see Francine and her little children, will you please write me all about them?” “I’ve never been so hurt by anything as by Taniousha’s silence.” Tatiana might well have defied John Wiley’s counsel if Lila had passed on such comments, and her letters could have offered my grandmother a great solace in her last years. But an intractable paranoia informed the sisters’ relations. Mother told me about her loss one afternoon when I came in from Connecticut. She was sitting on the Chinese sofa, looking unusually pensive, and waved me over to sit by her. “I wrote to my mother for the first time in many years,” she said impassively, “she died the day before my letter arrived.” It was the first time in my life that she had even mention
ed her mother without my solicitation. She stood up, sadness in her eyes, blew me a kiss, and walked up to her room.
So that is another instance when I should have tried to restore tenderness, made a greater effort to offer some consolation. But this sudden allusion to a mother whom she’d never mentioned, with whom I’d always assumed she’d had glacial relations, caught me off guard.
Moreover I was living the self-absorbed pace of most women in their thirties—raising my children, while also increasingly writing about and working for political causes, so much so that in the late 1960s my heavy involvement in the antiwar movement was to create yet new sources of tension between Tatiana and me. True to her émigré origins even then, as tourism and student exchanges between the United States and the USSR had begun to flourish, she remained archaically opposed to any détente with the communist world. As far as she was concerned, the only good commie was a dead commie, and on the basis of what she had read in New York’s leading Russian-language paper, Novoye Russkoye Slovo, she was gung ho on the Vietnam War. My husband was as fervent an antiwar activist as I, and her opposition to our views grew particularly vociferous whenever she drank—a teetotaler all of her life, after retirement she had begun to indulge more and more heavily. During our visits to New York, as she watched Cleve designing Eugene McCarthy posters or heard me making phone calls about some forthcoming peace rally, she would scowl at us over her Scotch or her glass of Bordeaux, growling, “You sell out to Hanoi? You play into hands of Vietcong?”
But can we ever invent an ideal parent? In those very years, returning from an antiwar demonstration in Washington, D.C., in the company of Cleve and Dick Avedon, I mused nostalgically: “What would I have been like if I’d had a mother who would have understood me…like Hannah Arendt, say?” “You’d have become a fashion model,” Avedon answered, deadpan.
Them Page 41