Them

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  I kneel down on the sealing stone which stands between me and the dead, that separates his body from mine…. And then suddenly my liberation comes. I am free now, kneeling on the stone, suddenly free and shaking, my head resting against the rusty metal handle that could be lifted for our reunion. I weep, I shake, I pound at the floor with my head, I kick it, I beat it with my hands…. He is there, he is there, he is there. Above all else he is now allowed to live in my memory, totally restored and whole now, as if resurrected, the reality of his death accepted, faced.

  In 1976, shortly after the Lovers and Tyrants excerpt that includes this passage was published in The New Yorker, I came to New York on my weekly trek. I knew that my resuscitation of the dreaded Lieutenant du Plessix, my unveiling of the many delusions and deceits would not be enthusiastically received. It was late evening. Alex, who was making himself some Ovaltine in the kitchen, gave me his kiss a bit more coolly than usual. “Mother wants to see you,” he said, his mustache intimating “You don’t deserve a warning, but she’s not exactly at her happiest.”

  As I came into Mother’s room, she was in bed, and sure enough she had The New Yorker in hand, as if to prove that she had just reread the page she was about to comment on. “This is terrifying,” she said, pointing to the passage above. And then she spoke a sentence that she parsed into two distinct phrases: “How could you?” she spoke, looking at me straight in the eye. “Tell the truth this way?” she added, looking away from me and slumping lower into her bed. “I needed to tell it,” I replied gently, “in order to heal myself.” “Heal?” she asked, incredulous, as if the word was totally absurd. She shrugged her shoulders impatiently, lay down on her side, drew the covers over her head, and pretended to go to sleep.

  I went back to the country the next morning and did not see Mother and Alex again until the following week, by which time we’d all learned that the Book-of-the-Month Club had chosen Lovers and Tyrants as its main selection. My parents had to face the next phase of their quandary: How to deal with this wretched book, now that they knew it was going to be a success? They resolved the problem in the only way they knew: They immediately started planning a party.

  Yet whatever gallant facade they put up throughout those months and for years to come, until the end of their lives whatever pride Mother and Alex took in me remained admixed with a measure of terror and vexation: What is this dreaded daughter going to write next? What will be next on her list of rectifications and exposures? (“It would be so wonderful if you stuck to religion, darling,” Alex suggested repeatedly. “It’s what you write about best.”) Coming in from the country one afternoon, I saw my mother sitting in Alex’s chair in the dining-room window, hunched over a magazine. As she heard me enter, she shot me a long, nasty sideways glance that was straight out of nineteenth-century rural Russia, the glance of a mean, distrustful old peasant woman seeing an interloper invade her chicken coop or kitchen garden. What kind of dirty tricks might she be up to now? What’s the fastest way of getting her out of my yard?

  They have all my sympathy. It must be wretched to have a child who writes. I thank the stars I do not have one—what a potential invasion of privacy, of everything I myself hold most dear! From the mid-1970s on, my literary vocation gave a wary, bittersweet undertone to my relations with my parents that I regretted and yet relished: It commanded their guarded respect, and it conferred the only measure of power I’d ever had over them. As Mabel Moses put it: “Thank God you’ve become a writer…. The Madam, she never even looked at you before you wrote that book.”

  Since I’ve summoned up the image of Mabel—standing in front of me in her white smock, hands on hips, about to break out in a big laugh and a shout of “Get out of here!”—I should account for an alteration in the Libermans’ domestic staff that had occurred some years earlier. In 1970 or so, when Jean, the reclusive Frenchman who had served for two decades as my parents’ majordomo, retired to France, he had been succeeded by a lithe, spunky Spaniard named José Gomez. José was a slender Barcelonan of middling height with swift, distrustful brown eyes and a manner that tended, with strangers, to be terse and verging on arrogance. It should be said that José was homosexual (a proclivity that could only raise the high esteem my mother had for him) but was severely closeted, and this self-censorship in itself might have caused the frequent brusqueness of his manner. Irascibility and Catalonian pride were also built into José’s self-image, and one of his many idiosyncrasies was his adamant refusal to ever wear anything but jeans and a turtleneck during his working hours, even when serving at table: It was an eccentricity that Alex announced as being “suited to our democratic age and very chic” and that my impatient mother tolerated because of the uncanny swiftness with which José ran upstairs and accomplished any task she set him to.

  Tasks there were, for upon turning sixty Mabel had developed some cardiac problems, and José was now charged with the beckoning of carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and other services demanded by brownstones—duties he performed with a gruff efficiency that delighted my parents and with a possessive, truly dogged devotion to the house and in particular to Alex. No errand imposed on him by “the Boss”—going to the Russian stores at Brighton Beach to pick up some Russian videotapes for Mother or scouring Manhattan to find a rare kind of French sausage—was too demanding or far-fetched. So for more than a decade, the perennially grouching José, playing Leporello to Alex’s chaste Don Giovanni—“Io non voglio più servir”—had made life possible for the Libermans at a time of rapidly deteriorating health.

  The next phase of Mother’s decline took place in 1981, when she had a five-hour gallbladder operation, which kept her in the hospital for two and a half months. She suffered from most every possible complication that could have arisen. She caught pneumonia, and as soon as she recovered from it she suffered a brain infection that took weeks to clear up. She had received large doses of Demerol every four hours around the clock in the days that followed the surgery, and she insisted on continuing them throughout her hospital stay. Whenever doctors tried to decrease the frequency of her shots, she noticed the lapse; she demanded—moaning with true or alleged pain—to return to her original schedule. By the time she was ready to go home, her addiction to the drug was in full swing. I remember being struck with the fact that she thought of Demerol as nourishment. Upon one of my visits to the hospital, she was half sitting up, pushing away a bowl of Jell-O, elaborating on the pain caused by any food she tried to take. “I only need tea and this,” she said, pointing to the needle lying on the table. “You must leave, I need the bedpan,” she added brusquely, ringing for the nurse. I left the room, knowing that she was going to try and get her shot ahead of time. The gaze that followed me out of the room was weary, blank, devoid of any recognizable affection, telling me, “I don’t care about the world out there, I don’t care whether I ever see you again, I can no longer distinguish between you and that world I’m refusing, I have no desire left outside of this needle.”

  A few days before she was due to be discharged, I received a phone call from my parents’ physician, Isadore Rosenfeld, a brilliant doctor capable of great dedication to his patients. “How can I get her to stop this Demerol?” he asked. “Each time I try to lower the dose, Alex says, ‘Please, please keep her on it, I can’t stand to see her suffering.’ But I’m not allowed to keep on prescribing this stuff to her without registering her as an addict.” I explained to the doctor that I’d never been able to discuss any of Mother’s substance abuses with Alex; that as I’d learned during her alcoholic phase, his handling of her addictions was woven into the very texture of their marriage and was an issue he wished to deal with all by himself. “You may have to end up registering her,” I said, on the brink of tears. Isadore drew an exasperated sigh. “With these kinds of dosages,” he said as he hung up, “she’s going to turn into a vegetable.”

  In order to keep Mother on her injection schedule, after she came home registered nurses were hired to live full-time
at Seventieth Street; since Alex was chafing to return to his studio, the nurses also accompanied the Libermans to Connecticut on weekends. One of them, Regan, was an athletic, bluntly outspoken redhead in her midthirties with whom I played tennis early on weekend mornings, before Mother’s wake-up time. Throughout those months, Regan became the only person, outside of my husband, to whom I could talk about my mother’s addiction. Her attitude toward the issue was critical and devoid of all subtleties. “Your mother’s the kind of person who’s only happy when she’s zonked,” she’d explain as we rested between tennis sets. “Staying zonked is her main goal in life.” I told Regan about the Benzedrine and Nembutal addictions of Mother’s working years, the booze of her early retirement years. “Go figure,” she said. “Addicts are born to be addicts.”

  But Regan may have been too critical for her own good and unwilling to comply with Alex’s complex subterfuges, which focused on never having anyone mention—or, God forbid, discuss—Mother’s addiction. Within six months, Regan had been replaced by a quiet, very dignified Filipino in her midforties, Melinda Pechangco, who had been Mother’s favorite nurse during her hospital stay but had been unavailable to come home with her earlier. Melinda wore her dark hair in a neat bun and had a reserved but genial manner and a soft, chuckling laugh. One of eight children born to a health inspector on the Philippine island of Visayan, she had had as tough and demanding a training as any nurse can have: As an apprentice midwife—part of her training at nursing school—she had walked dozens of miles each day through her country’s swamps, often delivering babies with implements not more sophisticated than banana leaves. Later, when she had moved to the United States, she had spent years as head nurse of intensive care units, which had become her specialty.

  Yet notwithstanding her arduous life, Melinda retained a distinction and innate elegance that delighted Mother. She dressed in chic tweed suits by daytime; and on weekend evenings in Connecticut, when she accompanied my parents to social occasions at Oscar de la Renta’s, she wore quiet black silk and pearls. Upon such occasions, Melinda was the soul of discretion: Insisting that she was on a strict diet, she went upstairs to watch television while the rest of the guests socialized, coming down only to fetch Mother when it was time for her Demerol shot. “What a grande dame!” Mother commented to me when Melinda was out of earshot. The big difference between Melinda and her predecessor is that her severe sense of propriety led her to adhere to that code of secrecy and denial with which Alex wished to camouflage Mother’s habit. She privately deplored Mother’s addiction—“If I’d been alone with her I could have cured her of it,” she told me years later, “but with Alex around it was impossible—he was incapable of ever denying her anything she asked for.” But while sternly turning down her patient’s constant pleas for larger and more frequent doses, she felt it proper to follow Alex’s strategy of silence.

  After coming home from the hospital Mother declined to even walk around the block and refused to go out in the daytime except for a twice-a-week visit, in a limo, to Kenneth’s. She became increasingly dependent on Genna, who came to Seventieth Street every few days to bring her Russian fare and the newest Russian magazines. Her passion for visiting with her grandsons remained undiminished (Thaddeus was now pursuing a career in finance; Luke had become an artist), but they reported that she occasionally dozed off in the middle of a conversation. And she still enjoyed playing canasta once or twice each week, though friends related that she was too muddled to think her way through a game; in order to keep up her spirits, they purposefully lost several games a month to her. (How Mother could fake! She pretended to me that she always won, and every few months she would conspiratorially hand me a check, saying, “I’ve just won big games, buy yourself something to wear.”)

  My parents also cut down on their socializing a great deal after her addiction began, and due to this novel seclusion Mother and I, during her last decade, began a curious new sartorial relationship: Whenever I visited New York to spend an evening with friends, she asked me to come into her room to say good-night after I had dressed for dinner. “Montres toi!” she would command, scrutinizing me at length through her bifocals, and always offering some comment, such as, “You look like bag lady today, come even closer so I can see why you look so poorly!” Or “Very nice—what would we do without shawls?” However drug-muddled her brain, she somehow rallied, became lucid and vivacious, when there was something about my getup to praise or censure: “Thank God, some curl in your hair, but why that skirt when you should always wear pants?” I winced under her gaze, but what else did I have to offer her? I was now her surrogate fashion plate, the sole vehicle of her narcissism, the only body she had left to exhibit and scrutinize.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Tatiana’s Last

  Throughout the 1980s, it was in the intimate quarters of my parents’ country house that the subterfuges which attended Mother’s drug habit and Alex’s enablement of it became most obvious. And as the addiction progressed, the aura at Hillside became more and more sinister. Mother grew increasingly fussy about her diet. Barely picking at the delicacies Genna found in obscure Russian cookbooks, persuading him to cook six, eight dishes for her to try at each meal, she sat at the table in a state of crystal isolation, staring at herself every few minutes in her pocket mirror. Genna, fattened by the vast amounts of food he was forced to provide, isolated by the restrictions imposed by the AIDS epidemic and the Libermans’ diminished social schedule, lolled about and whined about the boredom of country life. Alex, more cynical and distant than ever, rose out of his gloom and bristled to attention only when some issue of sexuality was raised—Was such-or-such an actress sexy? Was Napoleon secretly gay? In this hothouse world severely removed from the realities of the 1980s, mealtime conversation was restricted to Genna’s and Mother’s limping discussions of Russian poetry and the two men’s often nasty sparring, which mostly consisted of them doing malicious imitations of each other’s voices or pronouncements. In the evening, Mother’s manner grew more aggressive; she hurried everyone to eat faster so she could get her 8:00 P.M. Demerol shot and retreat to the pornographic movies Alex brought up to the country every weekend (in recent years, this had been one of the Libermans’ favorite leisure occupations—“Bring on the ah-ah girls,” Mother would say to Alex after dinner on most nights they were alone, mimicking the porn actresses’ orgiastic panting). “Who wants soup?” she’d say over dinner. “Boubous, only you’re having soup—hurry up and eat it.” “I don’t want soup if I’m the only one to have it,” Alex would demur. “But it’s already in front of you,” she’d agitate. “So hurry up and eat it!”

  The meal was dispatched with a speed which often left guests with severe indigestion, and then would come the charade concerning Mother’s evening injection. A few minutes after the dessert course, Mother, gesturing to her stomach, rose and said to Alex words to the effect of “Boubous! I didn’t digest that chocolate cake, come upstairs and help me to take my medicine!” Or else, if the family meal was being held at my house, she would cough loudly throughout dinner and at the end of the meal say, “Boubous, my cough is getting worse! Please drive me home for my cough syrup!” As I watched these histrionics, I marveled at the naïveté that laced the Libermans’ worldliness—a naïveté made all the more remarkable by the elaborate other measures Alex took to hide my mother’s addiction. (In 2004, I contacted a young man my parents had hired in my mother’s last two years to take over José’s duties as majordomo. This fellow let me know that he could not speak to me because Alex had made him sign a “confidentiality agreement” as a condition of employment.)

  In 1982 or so, Alex and Dr. Rosenfeld decided that Mother could get along at home without any skilled nursing care—Alex, who was spending nearly half of his large salary on the production of his sculptures, had grown terribly short of money. Except for daily visits from a health professional who administered the noon and 4:00 P.M. injections, all nurses were then dismissed, and Alex himself took
charge of Mother’s shots. He gave her a needle at 8:00 A.M. before he went to the office and also took care of the 8:00 P.M. and midnight injections himself. What worried me the most is that Mother woke him in the middle of the night to give her the 3:00 or 4:00 A.M. dose. Beyond my concern for Alex not getting enough sleep at a time of worsening health—he had suffered from severe diabetes for a few decades and had recently developed cardiac symptoms—I wondered how his increased involvement in her drug habit might affect the dynamic of their marriage: For the half century she’d held sway over him, it had been his principal challenge and pride and joy to tame this formidable creature by fulfilling her each and every whim. But now that the tables were turned, now that drugs gave him total power over her, might their relationship be altered by the loss of the challenge? Might she lose her old magic for Alex? And could it be that keeping Mother zonked was Alex’s solution for getting her out of the way, acquiring more emotional space in which to create his art? “Alex’s studio,” Andre Emmerich had often said, “played the same role for him that mistresses play in other men’s lives.”

  Throughout the years during which Mother’s health began to wane, Alex was having extraordinary success in all of his vocations. A new chapter in his life had begun when he started his friendship with Si Newhouse Jr., who soon after being named chairman of Condé Nast in the mid-1960s raised Alex’s salary to a half million dollars. (He hiked it to a full million in 1980.) Young Newhouse had begun seriously to collect contemporary American painting and sought out Alex as his adviser. Impressed by the excellence of Si’s eye, Alex took him gallery hopping every Saturday. The fact that Si bought four Liberman paintings in addition to his Motherwells, de Koonings, and Rauschenbergs could only strengthen the two men’s bonds. By the early 1970s, Alex, who had become his boss’s father figure and closest friend, had also helped Si to weather the major crisis that affected Condé Nast in those years: the company’s dismissal of the extravagantly eccentric Diana Vreeland, who had been Vogue’s editor in chief since 1962. Alex’s firing of Vreeland—and his general reputation of never standing up for anyone—led the famous editor to coin one of her finest bon mots: “I’ve known White Russians, and I’ve known Red Russians, but I’ve never known a yellow Russian.”