Them

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  Throughout the summer months the apartment was being repainted, the entire family was trying to resume the semblance of a normal routine. Chauffeured by his favorite Condé Nast driver, a gracious elderly Algerian named Frenchy, Alex traveled to Hillside on Fridays in the company of Yuri and Melinda. He had not been in a restaurant for the past years of Mother’s seclusion—“I’ve forgotten how to read a menu,” he said wistfully upon his first outing—and as a distraction we took him and his entourage to sample local Connecticut bistros on Saturdays. On Sundays, I’d often spend a few hours at the Hillside pool to observe his household and make sure that it was running well. I’d see him pacing up and down the cement rim of the pool, up and down, hands behind his back, face bent down and brooding—it was his way of keeping to that walking regimen the doctor had prescribed to maintain his cardiovascular health.

  While observing Alex’s new life, I often thought back to the after-Tatiana scenario that I had envisioned for Alex ever since I’d realized that Mother would be the first to go. I’d imagined him becoming a near-recluse, making Hillside his primary residence, going to New York two or three times each month to see doctors and a few select friends, finding his principal solace in being able to paint full-time, as he’d always said he’d wanted to do…. I would have visited him daily, brought him his meals, or would have prepared delicate French dishes for him at my home, offering all the Cordelia-like solace and dedication I could summon…how benign he would have become, how gratefully he would have smiled at us daily across the dining-room table…. In retrospect, I find it amazing, grotesque, that an intelligent sixty-year-old woman could harbor fantasies about a parent that turned out to be so far-fetched, so distant from the reality at hand. In point of fact, Alex, now unable to spend a minute alone, was more surrounded than ever by a regiment of acolytes and sycophants.

  On a mid-August weekend, in that very span of weeks Alex was supposed to move to his new flat, he was plagued with a new rash of cardiac problems. Melinda had first taken him to our local Connecticut hospital, had found it inadequate, and within a few hours had him flown by helicopter to our old family hangout, New York Hospital, where he underwent an angioplasty. Cleve and I were in Cooperstown, New York, for an overnight stay and had left our phone numbers with Alex and Melinda. Having heard the news by phoning Connecticut, I rushed back to New York City to see him at the hospital and found him to be plaintive, accusatory. “I couldn’t find you. Where were you?” he asked with bitterness in his voice.

  “I left our numbers with you and Melinda, hour by hour,” I said.

  “I guess she must have lost them,” he mumbled. He went on to grouch about his Connecticut house. It reminded him too much of Mother, he complained—the evenings were unbearable, everything there carried a memory of her. He couldn’t wait to move into the new New York flat, and he went on to talk about its decor. At one point, he said, he’d had fantasies of blowing up an Irving Penn picture of Mother to fit the gigantic wall in the entrance hall, but then he’d decided it should have just one of his paintings on it. It was so hard to sort out which objects of memory to keep and which to cast out—wasn’t it a sacrilege to retain her picture everywhere? And yet wasn’t it also a sacrilege to cast out too much? (In view of his future demeanor, I was to particularly remember that comment.) “Well, you should sell Hillside as fast as you can if you feel uncomfortable there,” I said, as I left him to go back to Seventieth Street. “It’ll be a great relief,” he said, having most probably made up his mind on the issue already but looking relieved that I agreed.

  I came home to Seventieth Street. It was to be my last night at our old home, which over the past weeks had become gradually denuded. Alex had sold almost all of its furniture, including the pieces that had been in my mother and father’s prewar Paris apartment. All the beloved art I’d grown up with—the Giacometti, Braque, Picasso, and Chagall drawings, some of which were signed to Mother—had also been taken off the walls. Alex was giving most of it to various museums throughout the country to offset the taxes he would have to pay on the sale of Seventieth Street. To allay my sadness at having to say good-bye to the house, I’d made a date for dinner with my son Thaddeus, who was almost as attached to the site as I was. We hugged and kissed the familiar white door as we parted, crying our hearts out at the memories it summoned. Although there was thrilling family news that week—Thaddeus had announced his engagement to a remarkable young woman—it was an evening on which I was relieved not to be alone.

  After my son left, I stayed up late on my makeshift folding bed in the old library, watching the Soviet Union dissolve on television. A special feature came over the air shortly after midnight that particularly caught my attention: there was talk about Leningrad soon being renamed St. Petersburg. I thought back to Mother’s refusal to ever say the word “Leningrad.” The seventy-year-old Soviet appellation was an anathema to her, and for decades, ever since her arrival in Paris in the 1920s, she had referred to the city of her birth as “Petersburg,” had continued to say “Petersburg” to scores of learned gentlemen at dinner parties on both continents who thought she’d gone into early dotage, had adamantly stood her ground—and voilà! Just a few months after her death she was again about to be proved right.

  Alex’s cardiac condition having greatly deteriorated after he moved into his new flat, Dr. Rosenfeld decided to take a gamble and ordered bypass surgery. Given the poor condition of Alex’s heart muscles, it was a huge risk—Rosenfeld even had to sign a document stating that he alone was responsible for the decision to do surgery. But the amazing patient came through with flying colors. There was an interesting moment the evening after the operation, when Cleve, Melinda, and I went to see Alex in the intensive-care unit. Cleve and I briefly held his hand, watched his eyes blink in what might have been recognition, and then it was Melinda’s turn. She proceeded to throw herself on him with a tenderness that bordered on the hysterical, adjusting the angle of his breathing tube, resettling his pillow, asserting that the hospital nurses had done it all wrong, stroking his face as she repeated the phrase, “This is my baby, this is my very own.” Aha, I thought at that moment, but the suspicion flitted away on the wings of what I deemed to be the impossible.

  That fall, Cleve and I resumed our one-night-a-week routine at Alex’s new apartment, visiting with him for a half hour before we went out to dinner with friends, occasionally staying on to have lunch or dinner. His career at Condé Nast, up to now so obsessively pursued, had vastly receded before the far more urgent goal of preserving his health. “After Tatiana’s death,” Anna Wintour comments, “he perhaps breezed in for a few hours once or twice a week. He’d become a bit of a hypochondriac, concerned with his health and his new home life.”

  Yet even though I observed how blissfully Alex was wallowing in Melinda’s doting care, there were three principal reasons why I never imagined that a romance between them might be brewing: because I’d always thought of Alex as a deeply asexual man; because of the extent of his ambition and snobbism and because like the rest of the world, I still held to the Pollyanna view of Alex’s passionate devotion to Mother. “He’ll never recover from the loss of Tatiana” was the commonly held judgment, and notwithstanding my glimpses into the darker aspects of my parents’ relationship I’d bought it lock, stock, and barrel. This illusion suffered its first erosion in November, when I received a semihysterical phone call from Lance Houston, the young houseman who had been hired the previous year to replace José and who had followed Alex to UN Plaza. “I’m calling to say that I may have to leave this service,” Lance said in an anguished tone. “It’s becoming unbearable here, that nurse has alienated us all—she’s making believe she’s already the new Mrs. Liberman.” I thanked him for the call, told him there was little I could do about Alex’s household, and asked him to stay in touch. The guy’s paranoid, I thought to myself as I hung up…. But then I had a flashback to that scene in the recovery room.

  And from Lance’s call on, evidence accu
mulated. There were Yuri’s reports, offered on the plane ride to Thaddeus’s Texas wedding in early 1992. (Alex was increasingly impatient with Yuri, leading us to wonder what led him to keep him in his pay, and had happily gotten rid of him for three days by buying his plane ticket.) Alex was now totally under Melinda’s sway, Yuri related, constantly adjusting his opinions to hers, and the two were now holding hands and calling each other “Babycakes.”

  But nothing was truly clear until the Labor Day weekend of September 1992, which Cleve and I were spending at the beachfront Long Island estate Alex had rented for the summer. The previous day, Melinda had arranged an extravagant party for his eightieth birthday: there were Filipino belly dancers gyrating to live bands, a dozen roast suckling pigs, fountains spouting champagne, planes scribbling “Happy Birthday Alex” in the sky. (“Mother could never have done this,” Alex quipped to me during an interlude. “Can’t you just hear her saying, ‘quelle vulgarité, tout ce que je déteste’?”) The following afternoon, when we were alone on the terrace, he ventured into a soliloquy, which cannily began with a diatribe against Yuri. All Soviets are exploitative hustlers, he said, polluted by the evil regime that ruled them for seventy years—Yuri was no exception, he was talking about having his boyfriend join him in the States, wouldn’t that be a nightmare? So he would soon pay Yuri to return to Russia, give him three months’ salary to return to his damn Moscow. “I feel I must do everything very fast because I’m not going to live much longer,” he continued, changing tack with the agility of the nimblest sailor. “I can’t stand solitude, I go crazy when I’m alone, I need a female presence, I’m completely alone…you live far away, you have your life—what can I do? Melinda is my savior, she’s the only thing I’ve got. I can’t stand being alone, I’m afraid, I can’t stand being without a female presence,” he repeated. “Perhaps in a few years I’ll marry her…. It’s so wonderful to experience skin contact again,” he added in a whisper, looking at me meaningfully.

  Alex’s portrait of his third wife, Melinda Pechangco, 1992.

  Oh, the poor darling, I said to myself, remembering only too well how cold my mother could be at times. Good-bye, Yuri, I also thought, finally realizing why Alex had shrewdly kept him on all these months—as a chaperone, to maintain appearances and keep his relationship with Melinda more respectable! As we parted to change for dinner, Alex’s voice grew harsh again. “I feel that Cleve is hostile to the idea of my marrying Melinda,” he added, referring to a mention he had made concerning remarriage some months earlier, less than a year after Mother’s death. For the sake of our sons, who had doted on their grandmother, Cleve, whose sense of family was absolute, indeed had then told Alex that it might be “a terrible idea” for Alex to remarry so fast. Alex had never tolerated criticism; since Mother’s death, he was increasingly given to nursing grievances; and even though he’d long repeated that his son-in-law was his “best friend in the world,” Cleve’s forthrightness, to my sorrow, created a barrier between my family and Alex that lasted for the rest of the time he had left to live.

  But at least he had given us a little time to adjust to the idea. Two months later, in November 1992, Cleve and I were in Paris, staying with our close friend Ethel de Croisset, who had also been one of my parents’ dearest friends in Europe. It was a Sunday night, and we had just started a cold supper upon returning from Chartres. The phone rang—it was Alex; Cleve took the call. Ethel’s phone was one of those Parisian gadgets that broadcasts both ends of the conversation, so we were all three privy to the exchange. Alex was calling to say that he and Melinda were getting married three weeks hence, on December 2, but that he was asking only the Newhouses and Dodie Kazanjian and her husband to be present—Si and Dodie were to be his witnesses.

  “If you’re asking your boss and your biographer to your wedding, it would be nice to have your family there as well,” Cleve said.

  “I have no family,” Alex said. “You’re creating difficulties, I can’t stand such difficulties.”

  “You’re the one creating difficulties, and since you have no family, good-bye, Alex,” Cleve replied. And he hung up, bursting into virulent army-sergeant talk—goddamn son of a bitch, I never want to see him again!

  Five minutes later, the phone rang once more. “This new Alex is too appalling,” said Ethel, still fuming, irate. “This is not a man I ever knew.”

  I still sat in the dining room, weeping my heart out. “Make up with him, please,” I sobbed out to Cleve as he went to the phone. “Please, for Tatiana’s sake.”

  “Cleve, dear,” we heard Alex saying this time, “of course you and Francine and the boys must be at the wedding. You know I love you very much.”

  “Alex, dear, we love you, too—that’s why these things happen,” Cleve replied. By the following morning, I was looking on the incident with cynical bemusement: Alex had only wanted his boss and his biographer. Power and publicity—those were the two motivations that had inspired much of his life.

  And so they were married in a chamber of City Hall by Judge Pierre Leval, the son of Beatrice and Fernand Leval—that very couple to whom the Libermans had fled on that summer evening in 1941 when Gitta Sereny broke the news to me about my father’s death. I stared at Melinda’s canary-yellow suit, her little diamonded hand, and thought wonders would never cease. Since Alex had been denied his original wish of limiting the event to his boss and his biographer, he made a party of it. We were twenty or so—several beautifully dressed women from Condé Nast were in attendance. Immediately after the brief ceremony, a wedding lunch was held at a chic Italian restaurant in the West Village. And a few weeks later, there came a coolly cordial phone call from Alex asking Cleve and me to sign papers that would exempt us from being executors of his will, a duty he had asked us to assume thirty-five years earlier, shortly after our marriage. The phone call came from Miami, where he had just bought a duplex overlooking the Bay of Biscayne. His trustees, he told us in passing, were now to be Paul Scherer, a Condé Nast executive, Melinda and Dodie Kazanjian, who got along famously and had become close friends. In effect, he had fired his original family—an activity he had trained for well at Condé Nast—and hired a new one, including a symbolic daughter whose style was comically opposite to Mother’s and mine.

  Going into “the Libermans’” living rooms at 870 UN Plaza or at their Miami flat, one entered spaces as starkly white as Seventieth Street but made far more glacial and blinding by the harsh glare that poured in from the huge, uncurtained windows; by the white plastic upholstery that covered all the furniture; by the absence of any paintings on the wall beyond Alex’s latest creations—the large, gaudy 1980s canvases that continued, with somewhat diminished energy, the Expressionist style he’d been working in for the past two decades. In both apartments, the rooms’ bleak modernist whiteness was curiously at odds with the dainty accoutrements that were the hostess’s personal touches: finicky antimacassars and lace doilies placed on the dining-room chairs, fussy pink porcelain vases, and, in New York, a massive crystal chandelier hung over the dining-room table (at the sight of which I heard Mother’s voice emit the same kind of censure Alex had conjured at his birthday party, “Tout ce que je déteste”).

  Annie Leibovitz’s photo of Alex and Melinda at home in Miami, published by Alex in the November 1993 issue of Vanity Fair.

  There was a distinctly Oceanic, faintly corrupt aura about both the Libermans’ flats—one could have been in the homes of shady diamond dealers in Singapore or in Jakarta. These new quarters were inevitably accompanied by an abundance of habits very new to Alex’s life. In Florida, he spent most of his leisure time accompanying Melinda to shopping malls or lounging in a white plastic recliner as he watched game shows and QVC. “I love Miami. I love shopping malls. We’re happy just sitting on the terrace and seeing no one,” he’d exult when I’d call him in Florida. “He was watching all that junky television,” Charlie Churchward recalls. “When a few of us would fly down to visit him, he’d say, ‘There’s thi
s marvelous new television show, we should do a piece on it!’ We’d look at each other as if he’d lost it.”

  And although Alex had never much liked children, the couple was now blessed with an abundance of visiting Filipino babies. As one of eight siblings, of whom only she had remained childless, Melinda had several nieces and nephews to whom she was devoted and who had children of their own. Their young offspring were all taught to salute “Uncle Alex” with a salaam, touching their heads to his knees, in Filipino custom. It was indeed an improbable vision: the once-dapper Alex—maestro of decorum, paragon of impeccable British public-school manners—become a T-shirted patriarch, smiling with embarrassment as Filipino toddlers were thrust onto his lap. There might have been dynastic concerns: As my son Thaddeus began to have children of his own, Melinda placed a baby carriage in the entrance hall of her New York apartment, a permanent reminder to Alex that it was all those little nieces and nephews of hers who were now his family, his babies. (They were to be well remembered in his will.) “Survival was his Jewish mode,” Isadore Rosenfeld comments today about the new family life Alex took on with Melinda. “However hard it might have been to adapt to all those barefoot children, he never said a critical word about Melinda, the way he had never said a critical word about Tatiana.”

  Alex’s vastly extended new family was further expanded by those of Melinda’s friends from nursing school who were living in Miami or New York. In New York, there was Jannett, a lusciously beautiful single woman who had been several classes below Melinda. In Miami, there was Joy, married to a German car dealer named Hans, who was inseparable from the Libermans until some falling out estranged her from them. (Elaborating on the details of a visit to Miami, so Oscar de la Renta reported, Anna Wintour delighted many New York friends by reporting that the Libermans saw mostly garage mechanics.) On their days off, these ladies—all as impassively smiling as Melinda—came to the Libermans’to play long games of mah-jongg with their hostess. And on such occasions, the flat’s silence was broken only by the sharp clink of the tiles and the cracking of innumerable amounts of pistachio nuts. Meanwhile, Alex, lounging on his terrace, would look at whatever Condé Nast fashion magazines had come in the mail that week or even glance at The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books. As I watched him loll about the house on my few visits to Miami, he kept reminding me of the Russian fictional character Oblomov, who as he grows older regresses into infancy, becoming increasingly indolent and immobile as he is absorbed into his housekeeper’s womblike, all-invasive care. “It’s paradise here, paradise, these Filipino ladies are so beautiful!” he exclaimed in the first few years of his Miami life. “I want to learn Filipino, I’m thinking of going to live there…. I want to look Filipino. I’m thinking of having my eyes slit so I can look Filipino!”