Suddenly she rushed in there. I was surprised and apprehensive: even when they had still been living together in the brownstone, Kitty had rarely dared to enter his room while he was playing. If she did, there would be a fearful explosion, with objects flying down the stairs until Kitty herself came running down them, declaring, ‘He’s a madman, just a crazy, crazy person,’ and Yakuv would appear at the top of the stairs, shouting the same thing about her. But now there was no explosion. The playing stopped abruptly. All I heard was her voice and nothing from him at all. I went to bed, expecting them to do the same. And why not? Two people who had been living together, on and off, for over twenty years.
Later that night they woke me up. They sat on either side of my bed; they appeared exhausted, not as after a fight but after long futile talk. It was almost dawn and it may have been the frail light that made them look drained.
‘He claims he can’t live without her . . . He used to laugh at her!’ She turned on him: ‘Now what’s happened? Because it’s you she cooks for now, all her potato dishes, is that what you can’t do without?’
He shook his head, helplessly. He didn’t have his glasses on and looked as I remembered seeing him in bed with Kitty: mild, melancholy, his grey eyes dim as the dawn light.
‘My aunts always told me, “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach”. I thought they only meant people like my fat uncles. I didn’t know artists were included. If that’s what you are!’ she cried. ‘You thump your piano loud enough: what’s all that about? Passion for food, or for the housewife who cooks it?’
He remained silent – he who was always so flip, so quick with his sarcastic replies. He stretched across me to touch her: ‘Kitty,’ he said, his voice as sad as his eyes.
‘Let me be!’ she cried, but obviously this was the last thing she wanted.
My parents returned two weeks earlier than expected. Their second honeymoon had not been a success. They had sailed through the classical world, and for him it had been an enchanted return to civilization: his civilization, of order, calm and balance. But she, who had upheld this rule of life with him, had seen it crumble away. She wept, she suffered. He held her in his arms, which he couldn’t get entirely around her, she was so much larger than he. While promising nothing, he began to consider means of adjusting to their new situation.
It was amazing how well he managed to restore the harmony of our household. His relief at finding Yakuv still installed in the apartment was almost as great as hers. Her husband’s forbearance evoked Leonora’s gratitude – and maybe Yakuv’s too, though he probably took his own rights for granted. Soon Leonora was herself again. She sang as she moved around her furniture with the feather duster that was her sceptre. Practical, punctual, perfect, her figure restored to full bloom, she dispensed food and comfort in return for the love of men.
Yakuv continued to practise behind his closed door, emerging only for meals. His music no longer stormed in rage but was as calm as could be expected of him. My father too was calm – that was his nature – but now with some hidden sorrow that made me postpone my plan of finding my own place. Sometimes I joined him on his walks, or we played chess, a game he loved though he always lost. That didn’t matter to him; he was a bad player but an excellent loser.
Kitty changed – or rather, changed back again. Instead of the simple flowered smock, she reverted to her flamboyant dresses, looped with large, noisy pieces of costume jewellery. Several times she came storming into the apartment, probably after walking all the way from downtown, as she had done on that rainy night, and as on that night, ready to burst into the room from where the piano rang out. But each time she was prevented by Leonora who stood in front of the door, her arms spread across it. Then Rudy intervened; he took his sister-in-law’s hand and spoke to her soothingly. Kitty let herself be led away meekly, saying only, ‘Do you know how long he hasn’t come to me?’ Then I realized that Yakuv had been spending not only all his days but many of his nights in our apartment.
It might be thought that their rivalry would turn the sisters into enemies, but this was not at all what happened. Instead they drew closer together in an intimacy that excluded even Rudy and me. They met several times a week, not in our apartment where they could not be alone, nor in Kitty’s loft – Leonora refusing to venture into that part of town, which seemed wild, dark and suspect to her. Their favourite rendezvous was the Palm Court of a large hotel, probably similar to the sort of place they had frequented in their youth, with gilt-framed mirrors, a string orchestra and ladies and gentlemen (some of them lovers) seated on plush sofas enjoying their afternoon coffee and cake. Here Leonora and Kitty exchanged their intimate secrets, just as they had done when they were young. At that time Leonora had confided the tender ins and outs of Rudy’s courtship, Kitty had analysed the characters of her lovers whom it had amused her to keep dangling on a string. Now the confidences they shared were about the same man. They would also have spoken – this was their style – of Life in general, of Love. Sometimes they may have glanced at their reflections in the hotel mirror, pleased at what they saw: though older now, they were still the same handsome sisters, Leonora in her elegant two-piece with the diamond brooch in the lapel, Kitty still bohemian under a pile of bright red hair.
A decade passed in this way within my family. Meanwhile, I came and went; I saw that the situation was not going to change in a hurry, nor was there anything I could do about it. Rudy encouraged me to leave, even though I was the only one to whom he occasionally showed something of his own feelings instead of pretending he didn’t have any. I went back to college to finish my degree, I read a lot, I began to write. I had one or two stories published in little magazines, and these made my father so proud that he bought up copies to give to everyone he knew.
Yakuv also came and went. He was often on tour, for his reputation was now established and he had engagements all over the country. It did not improve his temper – on the contrary, he became more difficult. He was still firing his agents so that Leonora had to find new ones and also secretaries to attend him on his tours. Usually these secretaries returned without him; either he had fired them or they couldn’t stand him another day. He would cable urgently for a replacement, but by then everyone had heard about him and no one was willing to go. He blamed us for this failure – what could he do, he said, if we sent him nothing but blockheads and idiots, and meanwhile how was he to manage, again he had missed a plane and left the suitcase with his tails in a hotel? Twice Leonora went herself to take care of him, but when they came back, they were not on speaking terms and Rudy had to make peace between them. Leonora refused to undertake another tour with him; and after a barrage of urgent messages from Kansas City, Kitty was dispatched to him – with misgivings that turned out to be justified, for he sent her back within a week.
Sometimes I suspected that his tantrums were not entirely genuine. I have seen him turn away, suppressing a smile – exactly as he had done in earlier years after some wild fight with Kitty. The music we heard him play after one of these upheavals was invariably tranquil, romantic, filling everyone with good feelings. With me, too, his manner had never changed from the time I was a child and he my teacher. He gave me books he thought I ought to read, and when he wanted to relax, he called me to play some game with him – dominoes usually, to my relief, never chess at which I suspected him to be a master. When he wanted to be affectionate, he still pinched my cheek; and when he was angry with me, it was not as with the others but as with a child, wagging his finger in my face. This made me laugh, and then he laughed too. Eventually it happened that when he was in one of his moods, Leonora and Kitty would send me to calm him down. It was as though I were free of the web that entangled them – by this I suppose I mean their intense sexual involvement with him. I felt nothing like that; how could I? For me he was just an elderly little man, almost a dwarf with a huge head and a mass of grey hair. His teeth were reduced to little stumps stained brown with tobacco.
When another crisis arose with another secretary fired in mid-tour, it was natural for someone – was it Leonora, was it Kitty? – to suggest that I should take my turn with the job at which they had already failed. It was my father who objected; he said he had higher expectations for me, and hoped I had for myself too, than to be handmaid and servant to Yakuv on his travels. Leonora and Kitty reared up as one person – it was strange how united they were nowadays; they said it would be a rich experience for me as well as a privilege to be in close contact with an artist like Yakuv. Rudy made a face as though saying – perhaps he actually did say – hadn’t we had enough of this privilege over the past ten years? But he gave me money for the trip and told me to wire for more when I needed it, especially if I needed it for my ticket home.
Almost the first thing Yakuv said to me was, ‘You’ll need some money.’ This was in a cab on our way from the airport – unexpectedly, he had been standing there waiting for me. He put his hand in his pocket and drew out a fistful of notes: ‘Is this enough?’ He put his hand in his other pocket and drew out some more. From then on it was the way we carried out all our financial transactions: he didn’t pay me a salary but just offered me everything in his pockets to pick out as much as I needed. This was not very much, since my hotel room and plane tickets and cab rides were all included in his, paid for by the sponsors. I lasted longer than anyone else had done, traveling with him from one city to another. We always checked into the same kind of hotel, I in a small single room and he in a suite that had often to be changed, due to his complaints about noise and other inconveniences. During the day, if I didn’t go to his rehearsals, I stayed in the hotel by myself; I wasn’t interested in the cities we were in – they were all the same, with the same sort of museums built in the early 1900s by local millionaires to house their art collections. At night I attended his performances in a concert hall donated by a later set of millionaires; I was very proud of him, his playing and the effect it had on his audience. He was not only a superb pianist, he looked the part too as he lunged up and down the keyboard, his coat-tails hanging over the piano stool, a wild-haired artist, profoundly foreign, an East European import from an earlier era. Afterwards there was always a reception and dinner for him; surrounded by rich and wrinkled women, his eyes would rove around the room, and when he found me, he shrugged and grimaced from behind their jewelled backs.
Leonora had given me careful instructions about his routine, what to do with his clothes, when he would need the first cup of black coffee that he drank throughout the day. Of course, like everyone else, I got things wrong and he flew into a rage, but always one that was tempered to me – that is, to the child I was for him. And with me he got over it more quickly than with the others, and also pitched in to help, so that somehow we muddled through together. Whenever there were a couple of hours to spare in the afternoons, we would go to a local cinema; he liked only gangster or cowboy movies, and since the same programme was always playing in the different cities we visited, we saw each one several times. At night I sat up with him in his suite, waiting for the pills without which he couldn’t sleep to take effect. He read aloud to me – Pushkin in Russian, Miłosz in Polish; I didn’t understand but liked to listen to him in these languages that seemed more natural to him than the English he spoke in his sharp Slavic accent. During the time I spent alone in the hotel, I continued with my own writing; it was the first time that I attempted poetry, maybe because he liked it better than prose. He encouraged me to read it to him, listening carefully, asking questions, sometimes making a suggestion that often turned out to be right.
He asked about the years I had spent on my own travels. He was particularly interested in my Buddhist period. He himself was of course a complete agnostic; that was the way he had grown up among those whose mission it had been to overthrow everything. I said that had been my mission too, to overthrow the nihilism they had left us with. ‘But a nun,’ he said, smiling. Although I had long ago given up that ambition, I defended myself. I said that having started on a path, I wanted to follow it as far as it would take me – I had more to say but stopped when I saw the way he was looking at me. His lips were twitching. I didn’t really expect him to take me seriously; it wasn’t only that I was so many years younger than he; I suspected that he took none of us seriously. He even seemed to have the right to be amused by us, as though he were a much wiser person. I don’t know whether this impression derived from the fact that he was a great artist, or from the mixture of the Talmud and Marxist idealism that I thought of as his background.
Since it seemed to take longer and longer for his sleeping pills to have effect, our conversations became more protracted. He wanted to know about my marriage, a subject that I disliked talking about except to say that it had been a mistake. He drew me out about the nineteen-year-old boy who had been the mistake. I admitted that what had attracted me to him was his frailty, which I had interpreted as vulnerability (later he turned out to be hard as nails). It had started when we had bathed together in the Ganges and I saw his frail shoulder blades – it was the first time I had seen him without his robe. ‘His robe?’ Yakuv asked; so then I had to admit that he too had been in the religious life and had been planning to become a monk. I glanced at Yakuv, and yes, his lips were now twitching so much that he could not prevent himself from laughing out loud. I laughed too, maybe ruefully, and he pinched my cheek in his usual way. Only it wasn’t as usual, and that was the first time I stayed with him all night. Although for the rest of the tour we still took separate rooms, we usually stayed in his, except when he was very tired after a concert and then he said I had better sleep in my own little nun’s bed. But mostly he wasn’t tired at all but with plenty of energy left in his short and muscular body. His chest and back and shoulders were covered in grey fur; only his pubic hair had remained pitch black.
He gave me no indication of what to tell or not to tell at home, but it turned out to be easier than expected. Leonora and Kitty were astonished at the way I had stuck it out with him. All their questions were to do with the practical side of my duties – how I had managed to make him catch planes on time and tidy him up for his performances. I gladly supplied them with answers, adding an amusing anecdote or two which made them clap their hands in joyful recognition. They had been there before me. Soon everything settled down. Yakuv and I continued to play dominoes, Leonora fulfilled his daily needs, and he had another home in Kitty’s loft where he kept his furniture and his other piano. Kitty visited us often and she and Leonora met to exchange confidences in their favourite Palm Court rendezvous. They still did not invite me to join them, considering me too young and immature to understand.
However, I understood more than I had done. For instance, I realized that when Yakuv was shut away in his room and there was only the sound of his piano, he was not as oblivious of us as I had always thought. Somehow he was as tied to us as we were to him. My mother and aunt never realized that I too was now part of the web that bound them. They took it for granted – and it was a relief to them – that I would accompany him on all his tours. In New York, there was no sign of what went on between us on these tours. Only occasionally, during meals, he slipped off one of the velvet slippers my mother had bought for him and placed his feet on mine under the table. While he was doing this, he kept on eating as usual with his head lowered over the plate, shovelling food into his mouth with tremendous speed.
I was never sure – I’m still not sure – about my father. It was impossible to tell if he suspected anything: he was so disciplined, so used to accommodating himself to difficult situations and handling them not for his own satisfaction but for those he loved. Every time I packed my suitcase to go on tour with Yakuv, Rudy came into my room. I said, ‘It’s all right: I like it.’ He continued to watch me in silence while I happily flung clothes into my suitcase. At last he said, ‘And your writing?’ He sounded so disappointed that I tried to think of something to make him feel better. I said I was conti
nuing my attempts at writing, and in fact, inspired by Yakuv’s performances, I had begun to write poetry. I knew that for my father poetry and music were the pinnacle of human achievement, so perhaps he really was consoled and not only pretending to be so.
Yakuv outlived Rudy by many years; he also outlived Leonora and Kitty. He became a wizened little old man, more temperamental than ever, his hair, now completely white, standing up as he ran his hands through it in fury. He continued his tours till the end and became more and more famous, people lining up not only to hear but also to see him leaping around like a little devil on his piano stool. He made many recordings and was particularly admired for his blend of intellectual rigour and sensual passion. When he died, he left his royalties to me, as well as quite a lot of other business to take care of. Of course I have all his recordings and often listen to them, so he is always with me. I no longer write poetry but have returned to prose and have published several novels and collections of stories. These are mostly about the relations between men and women, which appears to have been the subject that has impressed itself most deeply on my heart and mind. I keep coming back to it, trying again and again to render my mother’s and my aunt’s experience, as I observed it, and my own. This account is one more such attempt.
A Choice of Heritage
During the latter half of the last century – maybe since the end of the 1939 war – nothing became more common than what are called mixed marriages. I suppose they are caused by everyone moving more freely around the world, as refugees or emigrants or just out of restless curiosity. Anyway, the result has been at least two generations of people in whom several kinds of heritage are combined: prompting the questions ‘Who am I? Where do I belong?’ that have been the basis of so much self-analysis, almost self-laceration. But I must admit that, although my ancestry is not only mixed but also uncertain, I have never been troubled by such doubts.
At the End of the Century Page 30