Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me

by Patricia Volk

  When I leave my job to write full-time, Audrey decides she’d like to be a writer too. A spiral-bound journal becomes her constant companion. She takes adult-education classes in nonfiction at the local high school. She joins a group led by a woman who teaches in her home. Audrey hurls herself into her craft. She glows with it. One of her essays knocks the class out. Everyone agrees how good it is. Lucille, the harshest critic, takes Audrey aside and says, “I was moved by your piece.” The essay is about Audrey’s early adventures sneaking into second acts with Naomi and the time they slipped backstage and met Burgess Meredith.

  “I think this is publishable,” the teacher says.

  Thrilled and encouraged, Audrey submits her essay to Playbill. Our family is in a state of happy agitation. Audrey is poised to become a professional essayist. We wait for her to receive her first acceptance letter. My mother, a published author. When people ask her what she does, she’ll be able to say, “I’m a writer.” We imagine all the theatergoers who will read her brilliant piece before the curtain goes up. Every person for one month who sees a Broadway show will know Audrey Volk is a writer. Perhaps there will be a little biography at the bottom of the article: Audrey Volk, hostess of Morgen’s West, has been attending theater since the age of 6. Or: Audrey Morgen Volk was born in New York and is a full-time writer.

  A week goes by. Then two. The class presses Audrey to call Playbill. She leaves a message. Two more weeks go by. She calls again. Lucille urges her to say, “I’m going to have to withdraw the piece for consideration if I don’t hear back from you.” Everyone in class is astonished by how rude Playbill is. Someone suggests she ignore the rule about only submitting a piece to one publication at a time. Audrey calls again and leaves another message. This one reminds Playbill that she went to the trouble of including an SASE with her submission. A week later, a letter arrives. The house organ of New York’s theater world would prefer not to encourage second-acters.

  When Audrey and Cecil begin contemplating a move to Florida, my mother is terrified that, without her lifelong friends, her work, without Broadway, museums and the opera, she’ll feel marginalized. She does not want a shrink-wrapped life of club committees and canasta. Two years prior to departure, she makes a life-changing decision. She embarks on the time-honored adventure people take when they want to change their lives: She goes back to school in earnest and prepares herself for a new career. This time Audrey decides to try her older daughter’s profession. She hires a tutor to help her study for the GREs. Her scores are good enough for her to get into graduate school. She chooses Hofstra College because they give her the most credits for life experience. Before leaving New York, Audrey earns her graduate degree in family counseling and social work. My sister, a practicing therapist, refers to Audrey’s M.S.W. as “The License to Kill.”

  The first place she interviews in Florida, Audrey’s hired. She joins a private practice where she will see clients who can’t afford the more established therapists. She’ll earn 50 percent of the fee per session—the rest goes to the group—but she’ll have supervision, on-the-job training. Audrey dives into her work. She loves learning. She takes copious notes on clients and turns her new library into an office. She gets a computer and a printer and has her first big patient success with a florist. He works for the shop that supplies the centerpieces for Mar-a-Lago, the Marjorie Merriweather Post estate then owned by Donald Trump. The young man is being kept by an older man. He is miserable but can’t afford to live on his own.

  “What makes you happy?” Audrey asks him.

  “Arranging flowers.”

  “Are you good at it?”

  “Very.”

  “The next time you go to Mar-a-Lago, why don’t you ask Ivana Trump if you could have a chance to do a party for her? Tell her you’ll do her flowers free the first time.”

  The patient follows Audrey’s instructions. Ivana is delighted by his work. He is hired. He becomes a huge success in Palm Beach and gets his own apartment.

  “Do you like being a therapist?” I ask my mother.

  She thinks before answering. “I don’t like treating the sociopaths,” she says.

  “Who do you like to treat?”

  “I always thought my patients would be women my age who were having a little trouble with their husbands.”

  Purely out of curiosity I ask her: “Did you ever think of divorcing Dad?”

  My mother answers with great care: “I may have thought of leaving him once, getting away for a while. But I never considered divorcing him. That would be out of the question.”

  I think of Audrey and Cecil as Harlequin shrimp. A vulnerable breed, they depend on each other, hunting together and mating for life.

  When we’re alone, I ask Cecil if he ever thought of divorcing Audrey.

  “Never!” he says, puzzled I could ask such a thing.

  It’s comforting to read that at La Scuola di Signorina Arnoletto, Elsa spends most of her time like I do in school: staring out the window. My view is light shifting on the gray façade of 465 West End Avenue. Elsa gazes at the voluptuous bronze naiads on Rutelli’s Fontana dell’Acqua Marcia in the Piazza delle Terme.

  Freud called daydreaming infantile and neurotic. (He created a brand-new science and he didn’t daydream?) However, researchers have discovered that tuning out can be useful. According to recent experiments reported by John Tierney in The New York Times, daydreaming “fosters creativity and helps you solve problems.” But in school it hardly helps. Schiap and I do miserably. Math, in particular, is torture. We suffer from numbing dyscalculia, the inability to solve even the most basic math problems. It’s a form of brain dysfunction, not affecting general intelligence, that afflicts 7 percent of the population. I listen to the teacher, I write things down, I try, but it slips away like the dregs of a dream. The high point of my school day is racing home for lunch and watching Love of Life and Search for Tomorrow while eating a spectacular sandwich made by Mattie: ham on rye with mayo and mustard and a crunchy chiffonade of iceberg lettuce, or gooey chopped egg, still warm, with burnt bacon and Russian dressing on toast.

  Elsa has to eat the school lunch, and it’s nothing like the Roman food Rosa the cook makes at the Palazzo Corsini. At school she’s forced to down watery yellow soup. She begs her mother to call and complain. The signora shakes her head. The food can’t possibly be as bad as her melodramatic daughter says it is.

  “Per favore, Papa,” she pleads with her father to intervene. But the Schiaparellis are indivisible. Like Audrey and Cecil, they’re a united front.

  Celestino adores both of his daughters but worries less about Beatrice. Beatrice is devout, quiet and beautiful and will have many suitors to choose from. It is Elsa, headstrong and volatile, moody and questioning, Elsa, who will never be beautiful, who must understand that she has a say in her fate. The child is clever, even if she does not do well in school. That evening, before dinner, Celestino takes his disappointed daughter by the hand. They go for a walk. They climb a hill. When they reach the top, there is a church. On the roof of the church, there is a campanile. Standing beneath the bell, they catch their breath. After resting a bit, Celestino leans over the parapet.

  “Look,” he calls to his daughter, pointing to the square below. Twisting streets radiate out from the piazza like tentacles.

  “Do you see, carissima,” Celestino says, “there is more than one way to the square. Life is like that, Elsa. If you can’t reach your destination by one road, try another.”

  The next day at school, while no one is watching, Elsa pours the thin soup into a jar. Back home, as she does every day, she sneaks into the kitchen to play with the servants and nibble their rough bread. Then she starts to work on Rosa. She pleads, she begs. Finally, she persuades the cook to serve the school soup to her mother at dinner.

  Seated around the family table in the Palazzo Corsini, beneath the frescoed ceiling, surrounded by ancient tapestries, the first course arrives. Maria-Luisa dips her spoon into her soup. Sh
e brings it to her lips. Her eyes widen.

  “Has the cook gone mad?”

  Elsa confesses. She is not punished. From that day on every morning Rosa packs two baskets of food, one for Elsa, one for Beatrice, to take to school. There is always more than one way to the center of the square.

  The schooling of a Roman girl of privilege does not include college. In a few years, Elsa will sneak into the University of Rome and study philosophy. She will fall in love with Spinoza. For the rest of her life she’ll continue to study. She reads in her library on the rue de Berri, surrounded by books—books on the floor, books on chairs, books piled up to the ceiling. Trussed in her turban, wearing satin evening pajamas and gold platform sandals, curled on a velvet bergère, she reads long into the night, slowly turning pages and sipping the drink she invented, Pink Vodka.

  And all three of us, my mother, Schiaparelli and I, wind up loving school once we’re older, once we don’t have to cope with geometry and memorize dates. It turns out we are all excellent students, just as long we can study what we want.

  First P.S. 9 report card. I learned to read but could only write mirror-writing. (illustration credit 12.2)

  “There is always more than one way to the center of the square.”

  For a class assignment, Audrey writes about the meaning of green velvet in her life.

  chapter thirteen

  Sex

  Men want what they can’t have.

  —Audrey Volk

  By keeping men off, you keep them.

  —Elsa Schiaparelli

  In August Moon, waiting for our moo goo gai pan, Audrey’s on her second Side Car. I take a chance:

  “Ma, did you and Dad, you know, before you got married?”

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  “Well then, did you pet?”

  “ Really, Patty!”

  She explains that a woman must play hard to get:

  “If you act like you’re interested in a boy, he’ll lose interest in you. If you give a boy what he wants, why on earth would he marry you? Once a boy is sure of you, the tables will turn and he’ll take you for granted.”

  Sex before marriage is nonnegotiable. A boy won’t marry a girl he thinks is “easy” or “fast.” Why should he if he can get what he wants without a ring? Desirability is in inverse ratio to accessibility. A bad reputation follows you all your life. Audrey explains the pathology of gender: “Men only want one thing.”

  She reinforces the value of a good reputation with the chilling story of Hot Pants:

  A freshman at West Virginia University went out on a blind date. She was wearing her new cashmere sweater. The boy was extremely attentive and she’d never felt prettier in her life. He took her to a lovely place for dinner, but on the way back to her sorority house, he pulled off the road. They kissed. When he tried to touch the front of her sweater, she resisted. He kissed her again. This time he put his hand on her back. The next thing she knew, her brassiere had popped open. The following day, word was out. He’d told everybody. By the end of the week she was known all over campus as “Hot Pants.” She had to transfer. After college, she got a job in publicity at a venerable publishing house, married a junior editor, and followed him out to California when he got an offer from a major movie studio. There, one evening at a cocktail party, he called her over.

  “Renée,” he said. “I want you to meet Sid Axelrod. He went to West Virginia too!”

  Renée extended her hand. Sid’s eyes widened. He turned to Renée’s husband and said, “I didn’t know you married Hot Pants!”

  What this means to me, a ten-year-old’s translation, is: It is never okay to have sex before you get married. Never. On the other hand, I came to believe it might be okay to fool around a little bit, to experiment, but not on the first date, and only if you’re in love. Given that constraint, when is a healthy girl not in love?

  I need to know about sex. Too much is mysterious. Profoundly compelling is my grandmother’s Capodimonte lamp. Polly keeps it by the couch in her living room. As family dinners wind down, I disappear from the table with dessert and eat it in privacy by the lamp. The base of the lamp is covered by bulging naked people who are at a party or in a parade or, because they look so sad, on their way to a human sacrifice. Goat-legged satyrs hoist the central figure on their shoulders. This person has a mustache and a full beard as well as a woman’s breasts. Is it a man or a woman? Could you be both? If so, could you have children?

  Jo leads me into Audrey’s bathroom. She opens a drawer and removes a plastic compact. She flips it open.

  I’m looking at a beige rubber yarmulke.

  “What’s that?”

  “Mom’s diaphragm,” she says and tells me what it’s for. “When I’m mad at her, I take a pin and stab holes in it. She can’t see them but they’re there.”

  “You want her to have more kids?”

  “Sure. She hates them.”

  Most nights, we take baths. But on Saturdays, until my sister turns thirteen, Audrey sets up showers with Cecil. Me, Jo, Dad, the three of us. These showers are exercises in suppressed giggling and trying not be caught staring at Cecil’s long purple penis. It dangles there, pointy with a ridge, looking like a map of Manhattan. His scrotum is Queens. I live on my father’s penis. West Eighty-third Street is halfway up the shaft. When Audrey is in her seventies, I ask:

  “How come you made us take showers with Dad?”

  “I was very modest,” she says. “I wanted you to be comfortable with the human body but knew I couldn’t do it myself.”

  He calls her “E.” She calls him “O.” On their matching dressers, they leave notes for each other signed “E” and “O.” They refuse to tell us what “E” and “O” stand for. They laugh when we ask, and trade smiles. Are “E” and “O” the noises they make when they make love?

  Mom: E! E! E!

  Dad: O! O! O!

  Are they shorthand for “Oh my God!” and “Eureka!”?

  Does “O” stand for “Orgasm” and “E” for “Ecstasy”?

  In their eighties, they still won’t tell.

  They die without telling.

  After her husband runs off with Isadora Duncan, Schiap takes a lover, a young married opera singer named Mario. Captivated by an English dandy, she opens a boutique at 36 Upper Grosvenor Street to please him. She sails on a yacht to Scandinavia with “my beau Peter.” Back in Paris, she is on the verge of marrying the Spanish consul. “In a frolicking mood,” Schiap rents a yacht and invites four men to spend the summer sailing with her. On the Rayatea, she does something uncharacteristic: “I let myself go completely.” When I read this I think it means she didn’t set her hair. Still, I am convinced she enjoys the company of men in a way Audrey would not approve of. I wonder if, since she’d been married and divorced, different rules apply. I sense I’m going to have to make my own way. There is a photo of Schiap sitting on the floor of her living room, next to one of her porcelain leopards. She is looking into the eyes of Adrian Désiré Étienne, the painter and illustrator known as Drian. A look passes between them I know from the movies. I am convinced that look means only one thing.

  Sometimes Schiap fails me. In my teens, I can’t always count on her. When a boy drives me to a remote spot, turns off the engine and says, “Put out or get out,” am I supposed to stumble through dark woods to find my way home? When I dance with a boy who holds me so close I can’t breathe, am I supposed to not act on that? Sex is always there, rumbling—like indigestion that turns out to be a heart attack. The little things that say: Not my type. The bigger things that warn you: Stay away. And then the boys with roses in their cheeks, busted noses, hair that curls into a “C” in that smooth spot behind their ears. Boys in engineer boots and torso T-shirts or white Lacostes a size too tight. Boys with inverted spines and, above the waistband of their swim trunks, dimples scooped out on either side, like bookends for the base of the spine. Boys clean or fragrant, boys with hairless backs and ears furled like dried apri
cots. Their rolling topography and sublime urgent otherness. How willing boys were to make you happy! Boys with long straight toes, boys and their astonishing gravity-defying difference that never loses its power, magic made possible by you. What they want from you is bad for you. But it’s what you want too. Sometimes Schiap is no help at all.

  (illustration credit 13.1)

  Schiap in hostess pajamas, gold wedgies and her favorite emerald necklace, at home with the painter Drian. She commissioned the folding screen from Bébé Bérard. (illustration credit 13.2)

  Morning note “E” left “O.” “O” dated it for his files. (illustration credit 13.3)

  The compelling Capodimonte lamp. (illustration credit 13.4)

  chapter fourteen

  Choosing a Husband

  She knew she would not marry again. Her marriage had struck her like a blow on the head wiping out any desire to make a second attempt.

  —Elsa Schiaparelli

  I took one look at your father and he was a goner.

  —Audrey Volk

  Dick Adelman is a neighborhood boy, a senior at Columbia Prep. Audrey is fourteen when she falls in love with him. There’s a three-year difference in age, but Polly couldn’t care less. Audrey is a mature fourteen and the Adelmans are a fine family. Mr. Adelman is a “professional man,” a lawyer. And wasn’t Polly a married lady by seventeen? Dick Adelman is smart, good-looking and “carries himself well.” He’s the kind of young man mothers call “husband material.” Herman Morgen confers his version of high praise: “The Adelman boy has a good handshake.”

  Saturday evenings, Audrey and Dick go to parties or the movies or Dick picks up tickets for a Broadway show. Then Polly and Herman grant Audrey permission to take Dick to one of the restaurants for dessert. They double-date with Dick’s parents at the Stork Club. He escorts Audrey to his senior prom. During the summer, the Adelmans drive the young couple to their cabana on Long Beach. And then it’s September and Dick leaves for Harvard. They promise to write. Sure enough, the first week Audrey gets a short, newsy letter signed “Love, Dick.” She waits two days, then writes back and signs hers “Fondly, Audrey.” And then there are no letters. Nothing. An agonizing month crawls by. Finally in late October, Audrey spots his blue envelope in the mail. Dick explains that he has fallen in love, it’s the real thing, with a Radcliffe girl. “I hope we’ll still be pals, Audrey,” he writes. “I think you’re swell.”