“You’re asking me?”
She can no longer make it to her bridge games. Her friends offer to drive her, pick her up, to bring lunch, to wheel her, whatever it takes. But Audrey has no zip. Breathing, even with the oxygen, is work. “I’m … miasmic,” she tells me over the phone. This is as close as she comes to complaining. I look up “miasma” in the dictionary. The second definition is most apt: “a noxious atmosphere or influence wreathed in a miasma of cigarette smoke.” I imagine my mother stumbling through fog-filled moors. She remains curled in bed in her white satin gown which is where I find her, newly tiny, folded like a fetus, when I fly down.
I kiss her cheek. “I love you, Mom.”
“I’m … miasmic, darling,” she whispers. She doesn’t open her eyes—too much energy. My mother reaches out her hand for me to hold.
“Can you do the puzzle?” I ask.
“No.”
“Can you read?”
“No.”
“Want me to read to you?”
“No.”
I get in bed next to her and hold her hand. I kiss it. I stay for three days and make her favorite lunch: BLTs on toasted whole wheat with lots of mayo and salt and burnt bacon. She barely touches them. Eggs won’t go down. Even applesauce. Before I fly home, my mother says, “There’s something you can do for me, Patty.”
She wants me take her car to the luggage store and buy her a suitcase. Specifically, she wants the largest version of my suitcase. I’d been telling her for years to get the kind with wheels and dispose of her saggy needlepoint set. Whenever I pick her up at LaGuardia, I have to wrestle her behemoths to the cab. You can’t hoist them off the conveyor belt without saying “Oy.” Mine’s a roller with a collapsible handle, lightweight, waterproof. I’ve got the small and the medium but would never spring for the large.
“Where ya going, Ma?” I ask.
“I’m going to get better and come visit you,” she says.
“I’d love that.”
“I want the large one, darling.” She bobs a finger at the handbag on her chaise. “Take my card out of the wallet.”
I charge the large one on her AmEx. She never uses it. She never comes to New York again. Later on I understand. She wanted me to get her the large one so I would have the full set when she died. Who will want for me like my mother again? The following year, I use all three pieces on a trip to China. A stranger on the tour says to me, “I can tell you’re rich.”
“I am? You can? How?”
“Your luggage matches.”
Audrey would have called that woman “common.” But she would not have minded that her daughter was perceived as rich.
When I’m back in New York, the phone rings: “I told the doctor, ‘I don’t care … if it shortens my life.… You have to give me something.… This is no … quality of life.… I have no…energy.’ ”
The doctor prescribes Viagra. The next day Mom leaves a breathy message on my phone machine:
“I feel wonderful, sweetheart! I just got back from Bloomingdale’s! Doraleen pushed me in the chair!”
For the first time in six weeks, she walks into her office. She catches up on paperwork, ebullient. She leaves the office forgetting she must take a step down to enter her sunken living room. She falls and breaks her pelvis on the white marble floor. This is her fourth major broken bone in three years. It goes through the skin.
Jo speeds to the emergency room. She sits by Audrey’s side for seven hours.
“Go home,” my mother says.
“I’m not going,” my sister says.
“I don’t want you here. Get out, damnit! Get out now! I need you here like a hole in the head! Go!”
An hour later, Audrey tells her nurse: “Kill me. Get a baseball bat and hit me in the head. I mean it. I want you to crush my skull.”
“I can’t, Mrs. Volk,” the nurse says. “It’s against the law.”
“I’m asking you to. Don’t you see? Get a witness. She’ll testify I asked you.”
The following day my mother’s beleaguered heart can’t take it one beat more.
When she was in her fifties, Polly bought eight plots, six of which currently idle at the Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Westchester. Nana’s will stipulates that only family can lie beside her. I suspect she was thinking her children and their spouses would keep her company, along with her widowed sister Gertie and her last living brother, Jerome. She was forward-thinking in many ways, but Polly failed to anticipate the population explosion, recession and cremation craze. My mother has no headstone. She is scattered in the Atlantic at 25˚38.552N by 80˚11.863W, the precise point we scattered Dad five years earlier, almost to the day.
I decant Mom from the plastic bag and tie her ashes, along with one of her pocket mirrors, into a scarf Raymond Nedjar, an old French boyfriend, gave me. It is one of those tourist scarves that have the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame and the Arc de Triomphe on it, places I visited on my first trip to Europe with my mother as tour guide, the trip when I met Raymond in Cannes. Mom was a first-rate travel companion. She could walk all day and wanted to see everything. She knew European history. She was ever-game. We had the best time.
I sew four of my favorite buttons—one that looks like a diamond, her grandmother’s Gripoix, the grape button from her trousseau, a lavender one from her engagement dress—to the corners of the scarf for weight. I tie the corners together, then wrap the scarf in her wedding headpiece. It’s shaped like the top half of a heart, two scallops covered in lace, seed pearls and faux orange blossoms. Mom wore it a bit forward. It tied under her chin with a giant tulle bow, à la Schiaparelli.
I drop the bundle overboard. It does not sink as planned. My mother knocks against the hull. I say goodbye. The captain starts the engine. His girlfriend surprises us by pitching hot-pink rose petals over the side. Mom bobs in a Shocking Pink petal escort. I keep my eye on the flotilla until it sinks or drifts out of sight. I don’t know which. It is one or the other. It is not possible to tell.
I’m not going to tell you what year this was, the year Audrey died. Far be it from me. If I told you the year you might be able to figure out her age and Audrey would say, “That’s none of your business.” There’s enough in this book that violates her confidence already. Audrey’s age, revealing it, for a woman like my innately private mother, my beloved mother, my outrageously beautiful mother—really, don’t you know? That would be the last straw.
Schiap in her cellophane dress. (illustration credit 19.1)
Money-advice note from Mom. (illustration credit 19.2)
Schiaparelli’s final creation. (illustration credit 19.3)
Schiaparelli’s final creation.
Audrey’s headpiece was modeled on a Schiaparelli hat. (illustration credit 19.5)
My mother remained in my corner till the end. (illustration credit 19.6)
chapter twenty
Reflection
No book is the same twice.
No person stays the same between readings of that book.
The book changes because the person changes. The book you’ve just finished reading, this one, whether you liked it or not, has changed you. This book, if you started from page one right now, you’d notice new things because of the accreted fresh experience of having read the book. It would be different to you. It can’t not.
I buy a 1954 copy of Shocking Life on eBay, and fifty-seven years after first reading it, read it again. What I missed when I was ten. I picked and chose, culled what I needed, the rest blurred by. I was on the edge of the lip of the cusp of the brink of puberty then, the age when I was primed to question my mother, to judge her, to stand back enough to see what I didn’t like about her, to weigh the woman she ordained me to be against what I didn’t want to be, what I couldn’t be even if I’d wanted to. Her expectations had so little to do with my natural abilities or interests except for what she called my “strong point,” the ability to draw. No matter how many lessons I took at Claremont Stables or how many classes
at Madame Svoboda’s, I would never master the basics of horsemanship or ballet. And I would never be a great beauty. On the other hand, I would be free to be something else, something that wasn’t a birthright, something I made myself. I wanted to be good at something I earned. Beauty wasn’t earned.
Children have their own logic and it’s airtight. They know so little, what they believe to be true is unchallenged by experience. Intense young readers find the book they need when they need it. In an essay called “Essential Books of One’s Life,” Bruno Bettelheim writes: “Books lie in wait for our readiness.” A book is influential to a child when the child has a “strong personal stake” in it. Cecil’s books were meaningless to me. Puzzling, comic in a “People do that?” kind of way. Titillating with no place for that titillation to go. But with Schiap, I pounced. I needed her to deflate my all-powerful mother and she did. Shocking Life is not a great work of art. But it was the right book at the right time. It armed me to separate. It provided the transformative jolt. Schiap gave me an alternative way to be.
If I hadn’t come across Schiap, chances are I would have found what I needed in another book. I was primed for a shock that could open up the world. It might have been another book my mother read. Or it might have been one we read for school, George Washington Carver by Camilla Wilson. As soon as I finished it, I read it again. George Washington Carver, the man who invented more than three hundred things to do with peanuts: peanut glue, peanut bleach, peanut coffee, peanut milk, peanut rubber, peanut lipstick, peanut ink, peanut shaving cream, peanut linoleum, peanut mayonnaise, peanut polish, paper, plastic, pavement and paint. Did everything have the potential to be something else? I knew it did. Didn’t my sister dab toothpaste on her pimples? Didn’t my paternal grandfather make his name by recycling the detritus from buildings he tore down? Didn’t Picasso make a she-goat out of a basket and a baboon out of a toy car?
George Washington Carver made his own life. If he could, why couldn’t I? A year after reading his biography, I’d be reading The Scarlet Letter, Jane Austen and Jane Eyre. But I already had Schiap. I already had my woman who made her own way.
For many events in life, you’re more prepared than you know you are. How lucky I was to come across Shocking Life when I did. The people who made my two favorite pieces of art were Schiap’s friends. From weekly painting lessons at the Museum of Modern Art, then the Met, then the Albert Pels School of Art on West Seventy-first Street, I was used to looking at pictures. Du champ’s irreverence speaks to young people. The Museum of Modern Art had one of his instruction pieces: To Be Looked At (From the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close To, for Almost an Hour. If you could stay the course, keep your eye glued to the lens in the assemblage for an hour, everything you saw turned upside down. A bicycle wheel impaled on a stool? Would your bike ever look the same? And what kid doesn’t fall for Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory? Go there today and you’ll see a clutch of gaping children holding their mothers’ hands. Seeing what can’t happen rendered in photographic verisimilitude? Time melts? Sand and sea solidify? And here was this woman who was their good friend. Who collaborated with Duchamp and Dalí by making things real that could exist only in a dream: a jacket with drawers for pockets. An evening bag that lights the way. Humans caught in a web.
I did not discuss Shocking Life with my mother but on finishing the book, began to see her differently, comparing the brilliant and opinionated Schiap to the brilliant and opinionated Audrey. My intent was not subversive. I was private and watchful. I needed to plot my own course. Audrey and Schiap had enough in common that I could risk comparisons. Both were educated. Both were working mothers ahead of their time, pre–women’s movement. Both were imposing figures. Both were secretive. Both were hot-tempered and charismatic and crazy about clothes. Their opinions were sought. Reading was vital to them. They were brusque. Both disdained fat people and were moody. Moodiness was their acnestis—the part of an animal’s back the animal can’t scratch. That said, their differences were profound: Audrey loved being a wife. Being Mrs. Volk was her primary identity. Schiap, despite many opportunities, chose not to marry again. Audrey was the hostess in our family restaurant and a whiz at saving money. Schiap, at one time the best-known couturier in the world, made and lost millions, then made them again. Relatives moved into our home to ride out nervous breakdowns. Nurturing was not Schiap’s interest or forte. Audrey was blinkered by convention. Schiap used shock to mask shyness. Beauty was Audrey’s main arena. Schiap was born with a constellation of moles on her face. Instead of hiding them, she designed a Big Dipper brooch with diamonds for stars and flaunted it. That pin alone was revelatory, the idea of extolling what others considered a problem, turning that problem into an asset. I loved that.
Where Audrey baffled, Schiap was clear and direct. Schiap was feminine, yet she was a first-rate athlete, ran a business, competed openly with men. The woman who invented sportswear wouldn’t dream of throwing a race so a boy could win. She was daring. She got ideas and midwifed them to reality. She was alive to newness. She elected her affinities. I felt this in a way I couldn’t put into words at ten.
Audrey’s rules stretched the limit of the bearable. I watched my sister go down again and again. It wound up being good that I had trouble in school. When people expect less of you, you get a shot at doing what you want. Closing the covers of Shocking Life, I looked at Audrey with a fresh eye. There had to be more than one way to be a woman and if there was more than one way, chances were there were many. It was possible: A mother could be wrong about what was best for her child.
Raising me wasn’t easy. I lived in a high-pitched state of excitement over nothing in particular. I was late. I forgot. I “time-traveled” in conversation. People threw up their hands. We choose our influences. Audrey’s disappointments in me stopped being my disappointments in me. Schiap planted the idea that imagination trumped beauty, that being different might be a virtue. When she was my age, Schiap also performed dismally in school, had a gorgeous older sister, was considered exasperating and yet she managed to live a full-blown life, a life of invention and accomplishment. If Schiap, who had so many of the problems I had at ten, could turn out all right, I reasoned I could too.
Rereading Shocking Life, it’s easy to see why it hit so hard. But I’m struck by how differently I see Schiap now. I still admire her and am awed by her work. That hasn’t changed. But how on earth did I miss her profound melancholia? “Many men admire strong women, but they do not love them. Some women have achieved a combination of strength and tenderness, but most of those who have wanted to walk alone have, in the course of the game, lost their happiness.” A woman’s happiness depended on a man? That sailed right over my head. Also missed entirely on first reading: Schiap thought about killing herself. When I was ten, her black spells seemed romantic, exciting, a function of her creativity, like Van Gogh’s—the purview of a genius. It didn’t register that when Schiap was growing up she hid under the table and cried at her own birthday parties. By fifteen, Audrey knew how not to be hurt. She made herself emotionally impregnable. Schiap remained an open wound: “But who can define this kind of sorrow, that invades the soul like lead and bruises the body.” Or “Always in my moments of success I am overcome by a sense of detachment, a feeling of insecurity, a knowledge that so much is futile—and a particular sadness.” And “A malignant force was working against Schiap.… She had always been pursued by jealousy.” Jealous? Schiap? Of whom? All that flew over my ten-year-old head. And so did the fact that Elsa Schiaparelli was a terrible mother. She spent Gogo’s childhood getting rid of her. The newborn was shipped to a nurse in Connecticut while Schiap looked for work in New York. When it was discovered that Gogo had polio, she was sent to a Parisian suburb to live with a doctor who administered painful electrical treatments with a méchante boîte. “I was deeply affected at having to leave her so very young, just at the moment when a child begins like a bud to take the color of the flower, with strangers, knowing that
she would have to go through great pain.” No viable treatments were available in the capital of France? At seven, Gogo departed for boarding schools in Switzerland and, except for vacations, never lived with her mother again. Schiap’s five years with Gogo’s father were a reconciliation to the loss of mattering. She makes clear that no one, even her daughter, could bring up his name. Gogo knew nothing about de Kerlor, not even what he looked like, until she was sixteen and a friend of Schiap’s took her aside and showed her a photo. Particularly terrifying now that I have three grandchildren under the age of one: “Gogo … was an endearing, laughing child, never minding if she were left alone.… It was difficult to take her out as I had no perambulator.” A newborn “never minding if she were left alone”? I glossed right over that. And there was no way of knowing, when I was ten, that two of Schiap’s biographers would reveal she wasn’t the fourteen-year-old wunderkind she claimed to be. When Schiap’s book of erotic poems was published she was, in fact, twenty-one.
I missed that like Audrey, Schiap was supercritical: Meeting Gogo in London for a weekend, “I was quite stupefied by the sight of her.… She stood in front of me like an oaf, a graceless, puffed-up, fat, and very ugly girl.” She complained about Gogo’s “backfish” look, German slang for a teenage girl, an anonymous slab of fish that can be baked or fried. She wasn’t there when Gogo married or gave birth. I didn’t see that fifty-seven years ago. But, writing this now, I can’t help pondering how Schiap’s drive for financial security defined her idea of motherhood. Schiap had known extreme deprivation. Given the socioeconomic climate at the time, could she have achieved what she did and been a decent mother too? Is it fair to judge someone today by a social context acceptable eighty years ago? Is it fair to judge Schiap’s use of endangered animals before they were endangered? Providing well for Gogo outweighed being together. My mother drove me nuts but she was there. She made herself a necessary person. I was a priority and I knew it.
Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me Page 15