“Loulou, des fois tu exagères”—Loulou, sometimes you really are over the top—she said with tremendous sadness.
In the final weeks of the year, as the weather grew milder, going to school felt as it had at the beginning—serene, otherworldly. Sometimes we would have classes on the grass in Prospect Park. I had once again this sense of being in an idyllic, shielded environment, protected from the rest of the world.
That sense of calm was shattered when news broke of the shootings at Kent State University. National Guardsmen had fired on students who were protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, killing four and wounding several others and sparking nationwide protests. Most schools in New York closed for a day as a gesture of mourning. When Berkeley remained open, the students declared a strike and refused to attend classes.
Mrs. Miller was upset, but what could she do?
Senior girls sought and received permission to wear black armbands at graduation in solidarity with the fallen of Kent State.
As if mirroring the general mood, I felt angry and rebellious, too, and wanting to protest—but to protest what?
I had recently picked up an American expression: thanks for nothing. I would use it mostly on my friends, jokingly, of course, but with a slight edge. “Well, thanks for nothing,” I’d exclaim, feeling very American as I walked away from them.
We had a French exam, and several of us were upset with the teacher. But of all the students, I was the one who felt a need to convey my displeasure. I scribbled “Thanks for nothing” at the bottom of the exam paper. I was very pleased with myself. I put this teacher in her place, I thought.
Edith was asked to come in, of course. The school was crisp and to the point: Berkeley was not renewing my scholarship.
My mother was devastated, but when she gave me the news, I felt curiously detached. It was a terrible setback, of course, but I refused to see it that way. I’d already decided I was ready to move on.
Fine, I’ll attend New Utrecht, I told Mom coolly.
“Tu retournes a une école publique—quelle horreur,” she said; A public school again—how awful. She looked more despairing than I had ever seen her.
It had taken Edith five years to get me into an elite private school only to see me lose it in the space of ten months. What was it about me and my siblings, she cried, that we always squandered opportunities? Was there a curse on our family?
She was almost talking to herself now, bemoaning how God had given her children “toutes les grandes qualités,” all the assets needed to prosper and do well on this earth—intellect, beauty, charm, personality.
For all the good it had done any of us.
Look at Suzette, she said, with the rage that flared up whenever she discussed my older sister, frittering her life away in odd jobs from Queens to Miami, no family, no husband, no children, no home, building nothing, achieving nothing. And now me, losing Berkeley, forced to attend cette sale New Utrecht, this awful New Utrecht.
I listened, impassive, to her outburst. Then I tried with all the calm I could muster to say that her illusions about private schools were only that, illusions. After a year in Berkeley, I wasn’t sure there were that many differences between American children, no matter their social and economic backgrounds.
The changes the late 1960s had wrought had seeped everywhere into the culture. Those idealized young girls of my mother’s imagination—les jeunes filles rangées—the proper, demure girls of the navy blue blazers with gold buttons and pleated skirts who had haunted my childhood didn’t exist. Once upon a time perhaps, in Cairo or Paris, I would have met these delicate, refined creatures, but they weren’t to be found in New York City at the dawn of the 1970s.
I didn’t address my mother’s larger fear—that each of us carried a self-destructive gene deep within us, that we were beset by demons and destined to trip ourselves up, and that calamity always lurked around the corner.
This was a recurrent theme for Mom, especially when she was in one of her dark moods. I had grown up hearing about the Curse of Alexandra, my wondrous and tragic grandmother. In recent years, my mother spoke of my sister as if she, too, were cursed—plagued by bad luck.
It was troubling to find myself included in that pantheon of star-crossed family members. Truth was that I didn’t really know why I was leaving Berkeley, and why—or how—I had self-destructed.
After the school year ended, Wendy Gold and I made plans to get together. On a sun-drenched day, we walked through the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and explored the lush plants and flowers and talked and talked.
I felt so sad; it was dawning on me I probably wouldn’t see Wendy again.
I arranged to transfer to New Utrecht High in the fall even as my mother carried on with her work at Grand Army Plaza. She was facing a major change of her own, one that she dreaded: The library announced that the Catalog Department was going to be moved to its own building many blocks away. The department would be lodged in a windowless, converted garage on Montgomery Street, a bleak area of warehouses and abandoned factories.
In 1970, the Brooklyn Public Library gave Edith her own cubbyhole with her nameplate. She had reinvented herself as a professional woman a quarter century after leaving her teaching post in Cairo.
But once ensconced on Montgomery Street, Mom and her colleagues discovered some redeeming features to the move. There was more space; they weren’t all cramped together the way they’d been at Grand Army Plaza. And come lunch, they could wander over to the Botanic Gardens, which were literally around the corner, and dine outdoors while enjoying the wonderful greenery. Occasionally, Mom would buy a small plant for a dollar or two and bring it home because even a potted lily on the windowsill ça nous aidera a reconstruire le foyer—would help in rebuilding the hearth.
One day, my mother learned that she was being given her own office. It was very small, a cubbyhole really, but it came with a nameplate that said “Mrs. E. Lagnado.” It may as well have been a corner office with a view—she was so thrilled with her new status.
Ed Kozdrajski, the young cataloger Mom found so charming and unassuming, came to work with a sleek camera he had purchased; photography was his latest hobby and he asked Edith if he could take some shots of her. She was delighted to oblige. In one photograph, she sits regally at her desk, her head held high, her back ramrod straight. In another, she stands beaming in front of her nameplate.
Ed’s images captured what my mother herself couldn’t put into words—that once again her world seemed filled with possibilities. She felt as if she had been given a new life; she experienced that same sense of buoyancy and soaring optimism as that day when Madame Cattaui Pasha had handed her the key to the pasha’s library.
BOOK THREE
Cities of Refuge
MONTREAL, POUGHKEEPSIE, AND THE UPPER WEST SIDE: 1973–1975
· 14 ·
The Shrine on the Mountain
Edith had never flown before, yet here we were at La-Guardia getting ready to board a flight to Montreal. Mom was very anxious, but I knew somehow that it had nothing to do with the prospect of getting on a plane for the first time.
It was July 1973, and I had graduated from high school only a few weeks earlier, finishing with top honors and offers to attend a string of prestigious colleges, from Vassar to Cornell, Mount Holyoke and Barnard. New Utrecht had turned out to be surprisingly supportive, and I’d found teachers I loved and who nurtured me. Craig Jones, a novelist who taught English, offered me one-on-one study sessions on Flannery O’Connor. Jeanette Stern, who insisted on being called “Mrs. Stern” though the age of Ms. was upon us, was so passionate about Tennessee Williams she had us reenact scenes from A Streetcar Named Desire in our Bensonhurst classroom, and made me passionate about him, too. Yet true to the family dictum about the mauvais oeil shadowing us at every turn, a period that should have been joyful, when I was set to reap the rewards of years of hard work, turned into a nightmare.
It all happened literally overnight.
That same week Mom skipped work and took me to Maimonides, the local community hospital where we always went in an emergency, and where the shattering diagnosis was finally made. After admitting me, the doctors concluded I had contracted Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer of the lymph nodes that tended to strike teenagers. My cancer was advanced, they said, and needed to be treated aggressively.
The news of my illness left us reeling. Neither Mom nor I could quite understand what had happened, or why it had happened. “On t’a donné le mauvais oeil,” she’d say; someone gave you the evil eye. At the hospital one night, she stayed by my bedside stroking my hair and speaking to me in Arabic, only Arabic, which was very unusual for her. She had reverted to the language of her youth, the language of her Cairo alleyway. “Loulou, ya helwa,” she kept saying; Loulou, my pretty one. But her words made me even sadder. I felt a thousand miles away from pretty; I felt a thousand miles away from helwa.
My brother Isaac heard that Memorial Sloan-Kettering in Manhattan specialized in treating Hodgkin’s. My family decided it made sense for me to go there though it was a long commute, and the cancer center itself lacked the homey feeling of Maimonides so that I felt lost and scared there.
The last several months had been spent undergoing tests and more tests, until the Memorial doctors finally settled on a radical course—ordering me to submit to months and months of radiation therapy, every day except weekends. I had a team of doctors led by an oncologist named Burton Lee. Dr. Lee was a portrait of WASP imperiousness and utterly intimidating—and I adored him.
One day in his office, Mom had pleaded with him to take over my care. “Madam, my fees would drive you mad,” he’d said, but then, watching her slump over, he’d added soothingly, as if reconsidering, “Madam, I will save your child.” Ever since then my mother had walked around the house in a daze, repeating Dr. Lee’s words like a mantra: “Madam, I will save your child,” even as I’d wondered, is that what it had come to? Did I really need saving?
Now, I was getting a break for one precious week. The doctors had practically ordered us to leave New York, telling Mom that a getaway was essential if I was to cope with the rest of the grueling therapy regimen. They wanted me to rest while they assessed how well the radiation was working—if it was even working.
Edith and I were mostly hoping to forget the last few months. We were both still in shock. I was thinner than ever, and Mom seemed so exhausted. She’d run off to the library in the morning, then come home in the afternoon only to race out with me to my radiation sessions at Memorial. After more prodding from my siblings and the doctors, she agreed with the need for a vacation.
But a vacation where?
We hadn’t gone on holiday since Egypt. We were never able to afford a family getaway after Cairo, and, besides, what was the point? My siblings were grown and dispersed and on their own. Occasionally, Dad would splurge and the three of us would go on a Circle Line tour along the Hudson River. They were oddly idyllic, these cruises—I’d make believe we were on a luxury ship that docked in distant shores, though the farthest we ever got was West Point. I found the glimpses of the cadets in uniform thrilling.
Paris was a logical choice but completely beyond our means. We had no experience jetting off to Bermuda or the Caribbean as other patients we met at Memorial were doing. Atlantic City was too close and had become shabby and derelict.
Montreal was my brother César’s idea. He had gone there one summer and found it congenial and delightfully French. Suzette offered to buy us two round-trip plane tickets, and suddenly we were making plans and Mom was asking the library for a week off, though I could tell she had a heavy heart.
I was traveling in style. I wore a red sweater with a plunging neckline my sister had bought me when she came to visit, and a blue miniskirt with accordion pleats and beige leather sandals with high wedge heels. Suzette now lived in California—Miami had proved to be as disappointing as Queens and Brooklyn—so coming to see us was harder than ever.
For months, her input on my illness had consisted of emotional phone calls to Mom and letters to various members of the family urging them to get second, third, fourth, and fifth opinions, pleading with my mother to take me to Stanford or the Mayo Clinic. Now that I was in the throes of treatment, she was determined at minimum that we take this holiday and insisted on buying us the tickets and accompanying us to the airport.
In a photo taken at LaGuardia prior to boarding, I sit with my legs crossed, smiling. I look confident, jaunty, even oddly healthy.
I was none of the above. I had become a master of disguise. Some of my hair had fallen out but I hid this artfully, as I did the tattoos and red and blue ink diagrams that doctors had etched on my chest and stomach and back as they charted the course of my treatment, pinpointing with lines and arrows where the rays should be directed. I couldn’t bear to look at myself and took pains to camouflage as much as I could. I wanted to wear what other women my age had on, but I was terrified that someone would spot the strange zigzags and lines and dots along my chest and my back and wonder what on earth was wrong with me.
Loulou and Edith at LaGuardia airport, summer 1973, about to take off for Montreal on a doctor-mandated vacation.
We were supposed to be away for a full week yet we hadn’t made any arrangements, not even a hotel reservation. And we didn’t know a soul in Canada, although Mom did have the phone numbers of some old friends from Egypt, the Haboucha brothers, Victor and George and Haim. We had last seen them more than a decade earlier in Cairo, when they still ran the little synagogue, “le Kottab” (the Schoolhouse), my dad favored around the corner from our house. They had led the prayers there every Saturday morning, formidable and resplendent in their white sharkskin suits. In the strange existential lottery that determined where we would go after Egypt, and that dispatched some of us to Brooklyn and others to Adelaide and others still to Rio and Johannesburg and London, the game of chance that ripped families apart by forcing them to resettle on opposite ends of the earth, the Haboucha brothers and their wives and children had all ended up near one another in Montreal.
Victor and his wife had assured Mom by mail that hotels were plentiful.
“Saint Catherine,” the Habouchas advised. “You must find Saint Catherine.”
Outside the airport at the taxi stand, we told the driver, “Sainte Catherine, s’il vous plaît.”
He nodded as if he needed to know nothing more to take us to the holy woman—the patron saint of Alexandria—herself. We arrived at a bustling street with a vast array of restaurants and boutiques. On a quiet corner was a careworn Victorian-style bed-and-breakfast that our driver recommended as he helped us with our luggage. The innkeeper offered us a suite at a rate we were surprised we could afford. It was a dingy old pension, but our rooms seemed palatial with their tall ceilings, large wooden armoire, and even a four-poster bed I immediately claimed as my own.
Edith suddenly seemed more energized—more confident—than I had ever seen her in New York. As we unpacked I saw the blue-checkered three-piece suit that Suzette had bought her for the trip. It came with a jacket, a skirt, a belt, and a pair of matching flared trousers with cuffs.
My mother had never worn pants—not once in her life—but as we changed to go out, I begged her to try them. She slipped on the pants good-naturedly, belted them, and—voilà. There she was transformed from a shy immigrant woman into a stylish, Americanized
modern woman.
We wandered down Saint Catherine Street in a strange state of exuberance we hadn’t felt in months. It was as if from the moment we had landed we’d found a vestige of our old optimism—a sense of hope again. The streets were vast and orderly and impossibly clean. I ran in and out of every stylish clothing shop along Saint Catherine with a newfound energy and vigor. Together, Edith and I peeked into the cafés and patisseries that were everywhere around us. Everyone spoke French and that in itself was comforting, as if we were back in Paris or Cairo again. But it was a French I had trouble grasping. My mother, on the other hand, seemed perfectly at ease with the dialect. She’d stop to chat with perfect strangers and ask them for advice or directions: They seemed delighted to oblige.
We had an unspoken agreement—not to bring up my illness. We were pretending to be carefree tourists on holiday, taking in some sights, having fun, and seeking a respite from the scorching heat of New York. And that worked to a degree. Montreal was such a delightful city, it was easy to lose yourself; or perhaps we were simply relieved to be so far away from Memorial Sloan-Kettering that we could put it out of our minds.
But then I’d remember some of the doctors’ dark warnings and feel melancholy all over again. While there had been significant breakthroughs with Hodgkin’s—even talk of a cure—my physicians warned of the consequences of the treatment. There will be sequelae, they said again and again, referring to the various ailments and complications that could befall me either as a result of my weakened immune system or the radiation itself. I could count on relatively minor setbacks, like getting more cavities, as well as being at risk for developing another cancer—breast cancer or even leukemia.
One of the worst “sequelaes” had already come to pass. Once I started treatment, almost immediately I lost the ability to have children, a fact that was so secretly shattering to me I told none of my friends and couldn’t even talk about it while alone with Mom on this trip. Even if I miraculously overcame Hodgkin’s, my future seemed filled with dark and terrifying possibilities.
The Arrogant Years Page 20