Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me

by Patricia Volk

  Her heart is broken. She’d imagined herself as Audrey Morgen Adelman. She’d sketched pictures of her wedding dress and pieced together what their children would look like—Dick’s blue eyes, her straight nose—and how she would decorate their apartment. The monogram on her towels would have been perfectly symmetrical, “AMA,” gray against daffodil.

  The first time my heart breaks, she consoles me: “If you find something repulsive about someone and focus on it,” she says, “you can minimize the pain. You can make the person who hurt you intolerable. Try it, darling. It works.”

  She explains how she got over Dick. “I focused on his back,” she says. “I’d seen him in a bathing suit at the beach. He had severe acne all over his back. I’d put it out of my mind. Now I welcomed it. He had craters, darling. They were horrible. I concentrated on them. Soon, whenever I thought about Dick, all I could see was his fulminating back.” She shivers a bit. “That’s what popped into my mind first.”

  Audrey has a friend upstairs in the building. Harriet Volk has an older brother at West Virginia University. Audrey fixes her brother, Bobby, up with Harriet. When Harriet’s brother, Cecil, comes home for Christmas break, Audrey says, “Wouldn’t it be fun if we all went out together?”

  The four of them drive up the Hudson and dance to Benny Goodman’s orchestra at the Glen Island Casino in New Rochelle. By the time Audrey gets home, she’s in love.

  The next day she calls Harriet and says: “In five minutes tell your brother to look out his window.” Audrey rides her bike on the sidewalk under Apartment 4A. “Hey, Audrey!” Cecil calls, leaning out on the sill. “What are you doing tonight?” A year later, when she graduates high school, Audrey follows him to West Virginia. They marry when, at twenty, he graduates.

  AUDREY’S ADVICE FOR CATCHING AND KEEPING A MAN

  1. Never write anything to a boy you wouldn’t want published on the front page of The New York Times.

  2. Don’t be loud.

  3. Never trust anyone, male or female, who says “Trust me.”

  4. Never let a man see waste in your kitchen sink drain.

  5. Always leave some food on your plate.

  6. Never tell a girlfriend when you like a certain boy.

  7. Never call a boy.

  8. Never open a car door yourself or offer to split the check. If you expect to be treated like a lady, you will be.

  9. Never do anything with a boy you’d be embarrassed to have him tell his friends.

  10. Never criticize a gift, even if you loathe it.

  The center of Audrey’s life is not her children. And it’s hardly her work in the restaurant. Cecil is the axis she spins on, Cecil and the position in the world being married to him affords. Being married to Cecil Sussman Volk is the bottomless blank check that enables Audrey to leave women who married less handsome, less manly, less good-on-the-dance-floor, less successful, less smart, less funny, less courtly and devoted men flailing in her wake. Cecil, the care and feeding of him, the loving and ongoing perfecting of him and the earnest burnishing of their lives together, the hallowedness of their union, is her lifework. Were I to believe my mother, the chance for a decent future hinged on marriage, which hinged on how I looked. The sad truth was, I looked like my father. He was handsome but he was a man. I had broken my nose and was a “mouth breather.” As if that weren’t bad enough, I went from being “blessed with naturally curly hair” to “frizzball” overnight. Lip exercises prescribed by the dentist were imposed to improve “lip rhythm.” Something was wrong with my lips. I had no idea what. But ten times a day, I had to tuck them in and hold them tight for ten seconds ten times. My posture stank. I forgot to suck my stomach in. There was no end to what was wrong with me. Like Schiap’s family, the older sister was the beauty. In fact that was Audrey’s nickname for Jo: “Beauty.” It was incumbent on me to develop other attributes.

  Young Elsa rarely smiles but boys are drawn to her. She’s clever and opinionated. Girls in turn-of-the-century Rome are expected to be demure. She isn’t. To the dismay of her parents, she exhibits an independent streak.

  On a trip to Hammamet with her father, she refuses the courtship of a Tunisian mogul. She ignores the mooning attention of a Russian prince. She falls madly in love with a young painter who introduces her to the pleasures of port. Celestino does a bit of investigating. He discovers his daughter’s seducer is engaged to someone else.

  She’s devastated but not for long. “I was soon in love again. My youth, my ardor, and a tremendous need of affection made my heart beat passionately for a very young, laughing boy, a real child of the South. Intelligent and warm, he used to come specially for the day from Naples to see me.”

  But her parents don’t like Pino either. Whatever they have in mind for their daughter, it is not a povero di Napoli. She is forbidden to see Pino again.

  What to do with this willful, impulsive, unattractive girl, twenty-two and on the verge of being an old maid? A friend of Maria-Luisa’s has a job for her in England. She will help run an orphanage in Kent and learn English while she’s at it. In 1914, Elsa crosses the English Channel. She is immediately charmed by English tea, English courtesy, English trains and, even though she doesn’t understand a word, Gilbert and Sullivan. She travels to London every chance she gets. She visits all the museums, and one foggy evening, on a whim, she buys a ticket to a lecture given by Count Wilhelm de Wendt de Kerlor. He is going to speak about theosophy and “the powers of the soul over the body.” Elsa is spellbound. At the end of the lecture, the hall empties. She remains in her seat. She can’t move. By sunrise, they’re engaged.

  For the third time, her parents do not approve. She marries de Kerlor anyway. Five unhappy years later, the count and countess sail for New York. Elsa experiences a burst of contact with the new: verticality, steel and glass, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Flatiron Building and neon. She falls in love with the plenty of Woolworth’s and the optical magic of barbershop poles. American women are free. They swim, they smoke, they work. In Italy, only the children of the very wealthy are educated, but here the daughter of a poor immigrant can go to school and become somebody.

  De Kerlor wanders the streets. No one in America seems interested in his brand of theosophy. He is “a drifting cloud in the sky” until he finds what he is looking for. Isadora Duncan, in front of Elsa, takes off all her clothes and dances for them. Reading this, I try to imagine: Where were they? Where did this private performance take place? A hotel room? Backstage? I can’t picture it—a married couple sitting side by side, watching a woman strip?

  “From now on,” Schiap wrote in Shocking Life, “her life would become a series of friendships, sometimes tender, sometimes detached, witty and sharp and short … but no man could ever get hold of her completely.… She never found the man she needed.”

  My lips lacked rhythm.

  Count Wilhelm de Wendt de Kerlor, the year he married Elsa Schiaparelli. (illustration credit 14.3)

  Cecil Volk the day he married Audrey Morgen (left to right: Speed Vogel, Sid Marcus, Hilly Dubrow, Dad, Joe Vogel, Robert Morgen).

  chapter fifteen

  Being a Mother

  There are two conflicting theories about bringing up children. You can send them to a good school, and keep them there … or you can do just the opposite, let them feel the pulse of the world.… I believe in the second theory.

  —Elsa Schiaparelli

  Because I said so.

  —Audrey Volk

  There’s not a shred of doubt in Audrey’s mind: Siblings get along better if they don’t compete. She observes her girls then assigns them different areas of expertise. This technique, according to trusted authorities, minimizes sibling rivalry. Audrey cobbles her child-rearing guidelines from Dr. Haim Ginott, Dr. Arnold Gesell, Dr. Benjamin Spock and B. F. Skinner. Thanks to The Child from Birth to Ten, Infant and Child in the Culture Today, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care and The Behavior of Organisms, my sister is The Pianist, I am The Artist. My sister
is The Dancer, I am The Singer. My sister is The Athlete, I am The Reader.

  Since my sister is The Dancer, Cecil asks her to dance first. She whirls with abandon like a doll strapped to his feet. Then it’s the nondancer’s turn:

  “Straighten your back!”

  “Don’t look down!”

  “Wait for my signals!”

  “That was my foot, Patricia Gay!”

  “Follow!”

  Follow? All those mysterious cues, your right palm cupped in his left, his right hand in the small of your back, subtle incomprehensible pressures on those places, the divining of intent—which cue takes precedence?—the humiliating breakdown of communication and failure of intuition. Follow?

  Despite Audrey’s research, my sister and I fight daily when we come home from school for lunch. Primarily we use spit, fingernails and shoes. Audrey’s punishments descend swiftly or not at all. I begin to understand that if a crime is committed and she doesn’t notice or looks the other way, there will be no future retribution. I’m in the clear, that’s the end of it. There is comfort in this. I trust it. And there is comfort in knowing that punishments are predictable:

  CRIME: Using bad language, saying “lousy” or “Shut up!”

  PUNISHMENT: Escorted to the bathroom. Mouth washed with Ivory.

  CRIME: Using a tone of voice that makes Audrey say, “I don’t like your tone of voice.”

  PUNISHMENT: A grievous, twisty pinch. (Also deployed for staring.)

  CRIME: Backtalk, aka sass.

  PUNISHMENT: A hairbrush spanking over Audrey’s knees, and once a smack in the face so hard it led to a root canal.

  It has not escaped my notice that when my sister is punished she begs for forgiveness. I observe that when that happens Audrey ups the ante. So I roll along and it’s beyond okay. Example: Exile for various infractions doesn’t feel like a punishment because there are things to do in my room, things most happily done alone: Spy out the window at the lady across the way, tend my tropical fish, write in my diary, draw. I can lick the Tootsie Roll I hide in my shoe bag. This is a scientific experiment. If I lick it once a day, can I make it last a year? I can lie in bed and stare at the world map on the wall and squeeze the continents together until Newfoundland noses into the Bay of Biscay and Lisbon slips into Washington, D.C., and the Kamchatka Peninsula shoves the Shumagin Islands against the Yukon and soon the world is a perfect waterless ball bobbing in blue. There are things to check and things to do. Room jail? Fine! I’ll read!

  Impulse control doesn’t run in our family. Like Schiap, Audrey blows her stack. Suppressing rage? That doesn’t occur to anyone. It would require skills uncultivated and not particularly valued. Anger is treated with awe and respect. You better back off. Rage is power. You don’t see it coming. It makes me think of snow. You’re playing outside and a bit of something small drifts down. One speck. A piece of leaf? Ash? Dust? What could it be? Then you’re in a white whirl.

  It’s hard to trust a mother who has a temper. When she threatens to send me to an orphanage for some infraction, I go to my room and dutifully pack my overnight case. I sit on my bed and wait in my coat. If my mother doesn’t want me, I don’t want her. After a while I hang up my coat and unpack my bag.

  The polio epidemic terrifies New York. It is particularly contagious during the summer. You can get it from swimming in a pool. In the Adirondacks, you swim in a lake. Audrey sends me to sleep-away camp when I am five. Until this moment, I have not taken care of myself in any way. Mattie cuts my meat and brushes my teeth. She dresses me in the morning and bathes me at night. Camp is one mystery after another. In my cubby there is a comb and a see-through tube of Prell, green shampoo with a lazy silver bubble. I stare at these objects and decide the empty spaces in the comb are supposed to be filled with the Prell. I decide Prell is what keeps hair down. Every morning I fill each slot, run the comb through my hair and head for breakfast.

  A ritual starts that first summer. I am allowed to go to Levy Bros. on Broadway between Eighty-third and Eighty-fourth Street and pick out a camp toy. From that first summer on, I pick the same one, a doctor kit. Doctor kits come in black plastic doctor bags with twin handles. Sometimes they come in tin valises with hospital cartoons on the sides, but I don’t like those. Regardless of the kit exterior, the inside is fitted with a stethoscope, a microscope, tongue depressors, Band-Aids, a plastic hypodermic needle and a bottle of sugar pills. Disposable cardboard cutouts hold them in place. The summer I turn seven, the good kit comes with bad pills—little white beads. The bad kit has good pills that look like real pills in different colors. My favorite thing to do at camp is hold clinic during free time. Girls line up hoping for a candy pill and I get to examine them and make my diagnosis. I have tremendous power giving out those pills to pill hopefuls. Standing in Levy Bros., I switch the pills. I take the good pills out of the bad kit and put them in the good kit. Then I shove the bad pills from the good kit into the bad kit. Once I have the pills I want, I snap both kits closed and join my mother at the cash register.

  Did she see me switch the pills? Did she open the kit later and notice the pill bottle didn’t fit properly in the cardboard cutout? That evening she tells me that the Levy Bros. detective saw me switch the pills. That Levy Bros. would be sending the police up to camp to arrest me. They had my fingerprints on the other bottle. All the police had to do was match them to my real fingerprints when they got to camp. An open-and-shut case.

  And yet: In the second grade, I’m called to the assistant principal’s office. Every day for two weeks, Mr. Bloch subjects me to Rorschachs, word associations, mazes, a half-hour of tests a day. The Bureau of Child Guidance has asked Miss Mauk, principal of P.S. 9, for the names of children, one from each grade, who seem particularly well adjusted. My mother and I are chosen to participate in a series of personality tests designed to compare the response patterns of well-adjusted children to those of their mothers.

  Parents can’t be friends. It’s not a level playing field. But at some point, with any luck, you enjoy their company in an easy way. Nobody needs the upper hand. I have this with Cecil, working alongside him in his studio, welding and soldering, making repairs. Drawing and painting. On his motorcycle, we pursue a favorite activity—the quest for clams—steamers, stuffed, fried, chowderized, chewy cherrystones or pearly littlenecks, Clams Casino, Clams Oreganata, Clams Posillipo, bellies and strips, spaghetti con vongole— clams in any form. Once in a while, lying next to Audrey in her king-size bed, staring at her ceiling, holding hands, we have stretches like this too. I can ask her anything and she’ll tell me. Always I am courteous. Deference is nonnegotiable. “Tone of voice” ranks uppermost on Audrey’s List of Requisite Behavior. And much of Requisite Behavior has to do with her definition of “respect.” Which makes it all the more puzzling why Audrey treats her own mother a way she wouldn’t in a million years tolerate. This is the central mystery of childhood: Why am I expected to treat my mother with deference, yet it is all right for my mother to reduce her own mother to tears? She rages at Polly. She bullies her. She’s outright mean, and it kills us. We adore our grandmother. We are Nana’s bubbalabens, her zezakeppelehs, her laben- on-the-keppelehs. We are her zezakinders, the loves of her life. Each time Polly gets one of her four granddaughters alone she says, “You’re my favorite!” We compare notes and laugh, each granddaughter certain she’s the one.

  “For God’s sake!” Audrey screams. “Call Ethel!” “Why are you bothering me, Mother?” “How dare you call me again!” Her voice is a machete. She makes “Mother” sound like a curse. My sister holds me. We cry. If Mattie is around, she studies her shoes, pretending she doesn’t hear. When it’s really bad, she folds us into her apron. “Don’t you know I’m busy?” Audrey shouts into the phone. “I don’t have time for this garbage. Call Ida!” And the worst: “What? You’re calling me again? Is that you again, Mother?”(SLAM.)

  She spits the words. Her voice curdles steel. Our beloved grandmother can do no right. Nana r
eturns from her first trip to Europe with a breathtaking present for Audrey. She has cradled it in her lap from Paris through Switzerland to Venice, Florence and Rome. She has protected it on planes, trains and gondolas. Audrey glares at the frosted crystal Vase Bacchantes from Lalique.

  “What do I want a vase with naked ladies on it for, Mother? Really.”

  She fills it with water for the dog to drink. When the dog gets hit by a car, she puts it under the piano to humidify the case.

  I ask my sister the therapist why she thinks our mother was so cruel to hers:

  “Mom was a bitch,” Jo says. “She used her ability to hurt people to empower herself instead of using her intelli gence. Nana was weak. She was cruel to Nana because she could be.”

  The last of that generation, Aunt Barbara, lives in Arizona now.

  “Why was Mom so cruel to Nana?” I ask.

  Aunt Barbara doesn’t respond. She’s weighing fidelity to her dead sister-in-law against her niece’s need to understand.