Them

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  Alex and Tatiana at their country house in Connecticut in the late 1980s, during one of their last years together. (Dominique Nabokov)

  Yet however ill she was, however discarded she felt, until the very end Mother never lost her need to study and perfect her looks. “I’m dying, we’re all dying, Frosinka,” she moaned to me on the phone every few days. “Listen, can you go down to my closet at Hillside and get me my rose satin pajamas and the St. Laurent velvet jacket? Alex is sending a car for them, I need them for tonight.” And occasionally I saw her trying to recapture her spell over Alex by the most traditional feminine wiles. On one such occasion, on an afternoon when he lay resting in my old room, she sat at her dressing table for an hour, carefully painting her face, putting electric curlers in her pathetically thin hair, in preparation for making a late-afternoon visit to him. Next came the decision-making process: She sat in a chair in front of her closet, Melinda gently advising her on which pantsuit to put on. Finally, there came the tedious labor of slipping her needle-torn limbs into the vestment. And then, once dressed, leaning on her cane, her aureole of blond hair surmounting her wasted face, she hobbled across the corridor to what had been my old room, knocked timidly on the door, heard her husband’s tender words, hobbled to the bed, and lay down next to him. She held his hand, telling him how lonely and wretched it was to sleep alone in their bedroom, grouching about the fact that she had not had anything decent to eat all week, asking him when he could come downstairs and have dinner with her again. And he lay quietly in his place, looking at her with a sorrow and compassion admixed with dread, stroking her arm, happy that she still had the strength to put on her finery for him. “If you knew what pain I’m in,” she then moaned. “No one knows what pain I’m in…. Is it time for my next piqûre?”

  Her end came swiftly. By the last week of April 1991, Alex was at home, somewhat stabilized, but Mother was waning fast. “I’m really worried about her this week,” Alex called on a Thursday. “You’d better come, she’s…I can’t tell you, she’s different.” I arrived at about 6:00 P.M. It was the first time I’d sensed that she was in a terminal state. She sat in a chair splunk in the middle of her bedroom in a white terry-cloth bathrobe, without a trace of makeup, her hair very flat and slicked to her scalp—it was the first time she had ever let herself go in this manner, the first time her chair was pulled out this way into the middle of the room, the first time she hadn’t had the strength to sit at her dressing table and stare at her image in a mirror, she was dying from a dearth of mirrors….

  “What’s new?” she whispered weakly as I came in. It was also the first time she had ever addressed me in English. I sat down and quietly told her about the only thing that had always seemed to interest her, whatever her state of health: what the boys were up to. She appeared to listen patiently, with some interest, but her eyes were devoid of any emotion, any desire, and after a minute her head began to nod. I helped Melinda move her to her bed. Her lips moved, her trembling hand confusedly rose toward the blue-tinted spectacles on her night table, then fell again on her bed. She made an effort to open her eyes and looked at me up and down, with all the strength her gaze could muster. “I think,” she whispered, “you’re wearing pants. You must always wear pants.” She closed her eyes. I sat with her another ten minutes and then left the room. Those were the last words I heard her say.

  I had the illusion that she would linger some time in this way, so I returned to the country for the night. But the following evening, a Friday, Alex called to say that she’d suffered horrible abdominal pains, and he’d had to take her to the hospital. The diagnosis was ischemic bowel, almost certainly a fatal case. There was a fearful scene at the hospital, he related: As he left her in her room shortly before midnight, she was crying out, “I want to die at home, take me back, don’t abandon me….” As she shouted this, she paced dementedly through the room, with a sudden, demonic fund of energy, the nurses had to hold her away from him—the love of his life was clutching at him, howling, begging him to take her with him as he fled her room. “I can’t get that terror out of my head,” he repeated to me in the next days. She lived on for another day and a half, but he never returned.

  On Saturday morning, I rushed in to see her at the ICU. My mother lay in a quiet space filled with the sound of softly whirring machines, looking thirty years younger and both peaceful and angry—looking very pink in the face, as if sunburned—nothing ugly, nothing dreadful here except for the mouth twisted slightly askew by the respirator tube—as I held her wrist, her hand, she felt very hot, I realized it was her high fever—when I pressed my forehead to hers, there was no response, though I’d been expecting one, as I’d been expecting one for most of our years together—I had a sense of recall, I thought back to previous moments of her life when she had looked just this way, fiercely pink, her brows furrowed as in concentration—ah yes, there it was, she’d looked this way when she used to lie in the sun, on rocks and sand dunes and beach chairs and boat decks in Long Island or Europe, fiercely imbibing the sun, her brows deeply furrowed, as they were now, as if concentrating on the beautiful fierceness of the sun—I was so happy to see her die young and beautiful, the way she would have liked to have seen herself, to have others see her, in her last moments—I put my flooded cheek against her burning face, and asked her forgiveness for any pain I’d ever caused her and poured out mine, for whatever that was worth.

  I came home to Seventieth Street. I walked into the dining room. It was dinnertime. Cleve had come in from the country also. Alex rose from his chair by the window. “Here,” he said rather formally, “you sit here,” assigning me to the same place, facing the garden, where my mother had sat for a half century. I was taking over for a brief while, I had a keen sense of taking over.

  The doctor’s phone call came at 2:00 A.M. Cleve and I went to visit with Alex in my old bedroom for a half hour. He lay in his pajamas, his hands folded behind his head as if it were his evening rest hour, looking blank, resigned, relieved. There were no tears. Man of iron, then or at any other time, few would ever see him cry.

  “I worked with her at Saks, she was terrifying!” one woman in the crowd of many visitors said at Frank Campbell’s Funeral Home two days later. Numerous colleagues of Alex’s from Condé Nast were there—editors from Vogue, Self, Glamour, Mademoiselle, Gourmet, GQ, Details, Condé Nast Traveler, Vanity Fair, Allure—as were many luminaries from the Libermans’ world: the de la Rentas, the Kissingers, Pat Buckley, Lady Dudley, and the Ehrteguns, and Bill Blass and Kenneth Jay Lane.

  The funeral service was at the Russian church on Park Avenue and Ninety-third Street. Alex, Melinda, and I had chosen her garment, a brown satin tunic. The Orthodox ritual requires the coffin to be open for the first part of the service, as three members of the immediate family must file by it to “recognize” the deceased before the coffin can be closed. The Orthodox service also calls for worshipers to stand throughout the service, but by special dispensation Alex sat in a chair, head a little bowed, eyes cast downward, tearless throughout. By then, he had a bad cardiac cough, and Melinda, whom he’d asked to stay on indefinitely to take care of him, was holding his cough syrup. She gave him a spoonful after his first coughing fit, and he took it like a penitent child, head still bowed, eyes still cast downward. His colleagues were terrified by the change that had come over him. “When I saw him at the funeral, so ashen and desperate,” the eerily perceptive Anna Wintour recalls, “I knew he was going to put his entire former life behind him.”

  At the appointed time, Thaddeus and Luke and I went up to pay our last regards to Mother. She looked so peaceful, so fragile, and for the first time so polite. It remains an image I shall treasure all my life, an image dear to me and consoling, an image the serenity of which I would like to share with others. I cherished that particular aspect of her mien that day—so polite, for the first time so polite. I wished I’d known her like that all my life—benevolent, with the good athletic tan, the total serenity, and that polit
eness, I wished I could have sat with her alone for hours there in that church, weeping and speaking to her.

  Then from under my ocean of sorrow, amid that brutal sense of severance which is most deeply suffered by daughters, something akin to a sense of gratitude emerged: Dear God, I’ve survived her.

  After the service, Alex, too tired to offer the hospitality himself, asked Cleve and me to take out to lunch those friends who had traveled to New York for the occasion: the Parisian crowd and a few who had come from other parts of the United States. We sat around the table in a Lexington Avenue restaurant around the corner from Seventieth Street, sharing reminiscences of Tatiana. The time she had greeted our friend Frederic Tuten as he arrived at Hillside by saying, “Take off sweater, ees disgusting.” That time in the 1940s when high hairdos were in fashion and the woman sitting behind her at a theater had asked her to remove her hat and Mother had turned around and angrily said, “Tees not my hat, tees my hair.” The time she’d chewed off Helen Frankenthaler’s ear for bringing her fresh flowers—it was bad manners for guests to bring fresh flowers, Mother said, it forced a busy hostess to take time out and put them in a vase, only plants would do for the occasion. The time a team of Vanity Fair editors had come to Hillside to see Alex—Mother had appeared in a large straw hat and all her jewels and proceeded to speak exclusively to Genna in Russian over lunch; in midmeal, she had suddenly looked at the lunch guests and announced, in English, “Thees week we go to New York to see S/M at Mine-shaft,” and then resumed speaking Russian to Genna. The time in the 1970s when Alex had taken the whole family to dinner at the Tour d’Argent in Paris and had ordered a fabulous bottle of wine and the sommelier had begun to go through the whole folderol of smelling the cork, candling, tilting the wine, and Mother had so impatiently asked him to hurry up and cut out the nonsense that the sommelier, grown nervous, spilled the fabulous wine all over the tablecloth and our clothes. And the time she’d sat on a beach in St. Tropez and undressed Lucien Vogel with her toes—she had these miraculously agile toes with which she could undo a man’s tie, unfasten his shirt and pants, take off much of his clothing, and as she performed her act (she said that back in the twenties as a poor young Russian exile just arrived in France she’d sat on beaches and done it for money) she ceaselessly emitted a series of low, sadistic chuckles. Over that lunch, we talked about Tatiana’s scathing brilliance and her appalling rudeness and her occasional tenderness and her rage to live and her extravagant acts of kindness and her absolute uniqueness.

  Tatiana Yakovleva du Plessix Liberman, photograph by Irving Penn, c.1960.

  Alex had gone home to rest immediately after the funeral service. As I came home from lunch, he was waiting for me at his old post in the dining room, in the gray chair by the window that overlooked the garden. There was an attentive, almost excited air about him as I walked in, which let me know he had been waiting eagerly for my report, the way he had when I had come home from my psychoanalytic sessions or from any important occasion which he had not been able to attend.

  “How did she look?” he asked.

  TWENTY-TWO

  After Tatiana

  My memories of mourning Mother, in the days that followed her death, remain shrouded in the hundreds of yards of fabric—the fine wools and silks and velvets—that passed through my hands as I cleared out her clothes. They were all hanging in the long series of closets that ran the entire depth of Seventieth Street’s cellar, a half century’s hoard of them, hung with pitifully little care on the kind of cheap wire hangers on which clothes are returned from the dry cleaner. Many of them were now mildewed, torn, or stained with rust—there was something disturbing about the sight; it spoke of my parents’ narcissism, sloth, and self-centeredness. Might it ever have come into her mind to give her discarded apparel to charity or even to institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum? Civic-mindedness was hardly the Libermans’ forte. So here was an unfolding panorama of my mother’s life as a fashion icon: the genteel tweed dresses she had worn as a hardworking émigré during our first American years; the wide-shouldered black outfits—shades of Joan Crawford’s Mildred Pierce—she had put on to board the Queen Mary when she returned to Europe in the postwar years; the beige silk suit, bearing the Sophie of Saks label, that she wore to my wedding in 1957; the numerous copies, made to order in various hues, of Dior’s 1960s A-line dresses, of which she had one original.

  Some of Mother’s clothes had still been redolent of her perfumes; sorting them, handling these powerful vestiges of her presence, was both boring and extremely painful. The impulse to clear them out instantly was hardly mine: Disposing of the dead’s belongings is a risky business, and I would have preferred to keep her personal effects in place for months, letting go of them gradually, piece by piece. The task of discarding, in fact, was imposed on me by Alex, and in a surprisingly brusque manner, a day or so after the funeral. He had been lying on his bed in my old room, and as I was going up the stairs to my new quarters, he’d called out to tell me he was going out to dinner that night. “But is that wise, darling?” I asked. “Are you well enough?” It was in a burst of fury, with a kind of meanness I’d never yet witnessed in him—Dr. Jekyll suddenly turned into Mr. Hyde—that he snapped, “I’m going out tonight, and from now on don’t ever delve into my affairs!” He continued to look vexed and barked after me, “And please clear out Mother’s closet as fast as possible. I want everything out in the next three days!”

  Amid the painful emotions his abrupt, icy rudeness evoked in me, I found myself suddenly murmuring the word “gypsy.” The association was not totally unexpected. I’d occasionally given thought, in the past, to the gypsy provenance shared by Alex and his mother, seeing it as a source of their volatility and frequent deviousness. Perhaps this is the way gypsies deal with death, I said to myself on that occasion, with no need to take time out for the work of grief, with an impulse to erase all traces of the dead with utmost speed. (Researching their culture a few years later, I learned that gypsies do indeed deny the very validity of grief or mourning. Under the gypsy ethos, everything connected to the dead must be burned within twenty-four hours of their passing: tent, clothes, pillows, household items, drinking vessels. And under the banner principle that life must be lived exclusively in the moment, whatever personal grief there be, even for a person who had supposedly been deeply loved, must be kept minimal.)

  A few weeks after Mother’s funeral, I went to France to finish research for my book in progress, a task which I’d postponed for months because of my parents’ ill health. By late May, with Alex settled at Seventieth Street in the company of Melinda and Yuri and slowly resuming his schedule at Condé Nast, I felt his condition enough improved to leave the country. One evening, a few days after I’d arrived in Avignon, I got a call from Cleve. “Guess what?” he said. “Alex has sold Seventieth Street.” “Sold Seventieth Street?” I cried out. “It’s not possible, he never even told me he was putting it up for sale!” “Well, that’s the nature of the beast,” Cleve commented. We talked for a while, I pouring out my hurt and my disbelief, Cleve, as usual, trying to calm me down. The shock was fierce. Couldn’t Alex at least have given me a call? Seventieth Street was a space infused with even more rites of passage than the country house I’d called home for more than three decades, it had been Mother’s creation far more than Alex’s—every inch of it, every object, every mirror placement were dictated far more by her tastes and predilections than his own, which, as the family joked, would tend to have expressed themselves in an icy cube. Where would Alex be, indeed, without that house of Mother’s creation, which played a pivotal role in the Libermans’ scramble to success?

  So I mulled it over. I recalled a time when, lying in his hospital bed, Alex had expressed the wish to move into a flat in which he could “pick up the phone…to get the lightbulb changed.” An hour after Cleve’s call I collected myself and phoned him back. “Where might Alex be moving to?” “UN Plaza, Forty-ninth Street and the river, a few floors b
elow Si Newhouse,” he said. “He’s made a point of saying there’d be a room for us there.” I couldn’t repress a smile. Alex had done all he could, at every moment of his career, to cozy up to power. As Anna Wintour put it, “Alex was very much Si’s courtier.” His life was falling into place again.

  A few weeks after I returned from France, Alex suggested we make a visit together to the apartment he had bought on the East River, which wouldn’t be ready to move into for another few months. As soon as I entered the building’s lobby, a ponderous Mussolinian space, I knew that Alex’s first bachelor dwelling in a half century, as the family had always speculated, would be icily anonymous. His future quarters were perched directly over the East River. There was a large master bedroom for Alex, and two smaller rooms for Melinda and for us. The glaring light pouring through the large, bare windows, the constant screech and roar of sirens and motorcars rising from the FDR Drive below, let me know that these rooms could never be infused with even a flicker of my mother’s cushy, serene gemütlichkeit. In fact, not until I walked into the ersatz glamour of that flat and was overtaken by its great chilliness did I totally realize that my mother was dead.