Jewish Mothers Never Die: A Novel (5 page)

Rebecca supposed it had been an arranged marriage, in keeping with the times. Jeanne Proust was telling her, in fact, that she had refused several suitors and that she was already twenty-one years old when she married Adrien Proust, a famous doctor and fifteen years her senior. He had first set his sights on joining the seminary, so he had never sought a wife before he met her. The son of a modest Catholic grocer, he was brilliant and hard-working. His parents were not happy to see him marry a Jew, no matter how rich she was. But Adrien was ambitious. He married Jeanne for her money and her contacts. Jeanne’s father, on the other hand, the powerful and respected Nathé Weil, had chosen a young man who suited his ambitions: a Catholic, with a promising career, who would open more doors of Parisian society for his daughter, as many upper middle class Jewish families aspired to do. As for Jeanne’s mother, she thought her future son-in-law was a handsome man. Did Jeanne have any say in the matter? Describing the parents of Jean Santeuil, Proust wrote that a marriage of love was pure vice. Love followed marriage, and not vice versa; it was a commonly held opinion. “No woman ever stopped loving her husband any more than she would have stopped loving her mother,” Proust had written.

“It would have pleased me if Adrien had tried to close the distance that I had created between us,” Jeanne was saying. “But he never did. It wasn’t a question of religion; we were divided both by culture and personality. We weren’t married in the Church and I never converted, but since I was an agnostic and he was an atheist, religion was never a source of conflict. On the other hand, he thought it was a waste of time to read anything but newspapers and on the rare occasions he forced himself to accompany me to a concert, he invariably fell asleep. Museums were even worse; he had no patience for art whatsoever. I wasn’t offended. He was my intellectual superior but we did not share the same tastes. So I instilled in Marcel all the culture that Adrien lacked.”

She fell silent, her gaze locked on something only she could see. A memory of Marcel, doubtless.

“Didn’t you have anything in common with your husband? What did you talk about?” Rebecca wanted to know.

“The children, of course, and household affairs. We had a large domestic staff to oversee, because we hosted parties so frequently; I loved being the mistress of the house! I was always available when he came home from the office or his travels. We had been married little more than a year when Marcel was born, as I told you. His birth changed everything.”

“You mean you chose to be Marcel’s mother rather than Adrian’s wife.”

“Chose? I’m not sure about that. Marcel was so fragile and in such distress that he needed me far more than my husband. I often wondered if Adrien was unfaithful because I spent too much time with Marcel or because he wasn’t satisfied with me.”

Rebecca was at pains to understand how Jeanne could speak so objectively of her husband’s extramarital affairs. Had she never been possessive or jealous? How could she tolerate his adultery? Were appearances more important than anything else in Jeanne Proust’s day?

“Having a mistress in full view of society was proof that the country doctor had established himself in high society,” Jeanne explained with the same serenity. “It was thanks to me that he became an elegant Parisian.”

Rebecca could think of nothing to say in reply.

“Does that shock you?”

The voice that had calmly asked the question was one Rebecca had never heard before. She turned around to discover a slim, willowy figure—Amalia Freud. Once again, Rebecca felt the shock of meeting a new woman here. She looked her over carefully; under a thick crown of black braids she had a ravishing, perfectly oval face and a curious gaze that held Rebecca with an embarrassing intensity. She was wearing a long dress in black taffeta covered by a white guipure. It seemed to Rebecca that such a display of elegance had to be a joke of some kind.

She was about to say something when the others broke in: it was time for lunch and everyone was dying of hunger!

“But it’s not ready!” Amalia Freud protested.

She turned to Rebecca and began to describe what marriage was like in the late 19th century: a social and religious institution that guaranteed the development of families. Love had nothing to do with it.

“Marcel got one thing right at least.”

“One thing, really?” shot back Jeanne.

Amalia didn’t bother responding. Each was the other’s equal: beautiful and cultivated, they were both heavyweights.

“As Jacob’s third wife, I can tell you he had great success with women,” Amalia Freud continued. “There’s nothing to wonder about there: he looked just like Sigmund. With his almond-shaped eyes and his piercing look, he had such charm, such charisma, and he knew how to use them with women. But as for caring whether or not he was unfaithful to me, it would have been a waste of time! I could have done nothing about it so I didn’t even ask myself the question.”

Amalia Freud was born Amalia Nathanson in 1835 in Brody, a small town in the northeast of Galicia, near the Russian border. She was very close to her parents, who moved the family next to Odessa, and then to Vienna. Middle class, her father earned a good living as a salesman, just like her four brothers, the two oldest of whom lived in Odessa also. Julius was born two years after Amalia but died of tuberculosis when he was twenty. The third child of the family became a lawyer in Krakow. Even as a girl, Amalia had a strong personality. Why did such a pretty, radiant, cultivated and confident seventeen year old marry Jacob Freud, a man twenty years her senior, who had two sons from a first marriage and who had just lost his second wife? His position as a wool merchant could not have swept her off her feet.

“We were married on July 29, 1855, in Vienna, and I was happy that day.”

“But why did you marry him?” Rebecca insisted.

“In the early years of our marriage, I was impressed by this jovial and amusing man.”

“And you had eight children.”

“I certainly wasn’t going to shirk my conjugal duties.”

“And you didn’t love him?”

No one had seen the tiny Louise Cohen enter the room. She elbowed Rebecca so sharply the younger woman only barely suppressed a cry of pain.

“Stop interrogating her,” she whispered.

Why was Louise so careful about Amalia’s feelings when she wasn’t the least bit bothered by Rebecca’s questions? Amalia answered her: the fact that she didn’t love her husband made no difference.

“It took me some time to admit it: I had so many other worries. Jacob was a terrible businessman and we kept moving house, under the pretense that business would be better elsewhere, but it never was. He was used to living off other people’s generosity. My parents tried to help us, then his own sons, when they moved to England.”

“Did you blame him for your poverty?” said Rebecca.

“We lived in the poorest neighborhood of Vienna where the main wave of immigrants had settled: Bohemians, Moravians, Hungarians, Ruthenians and Croatians. With so much immigration, Vienna was a cosmopolitan city that spoke many languages and it was the most Jewish city after Warsaw, but also the most expensive. My own family lived in the same apartment throughout my childhood, but as a married woman, I never stopped moving. First we went to Jacob’s parents, but that became unbearable with three children. Then we went to shared housing, where we had to trace a line around our private space in the common room. As difficult as that was, it was better than having to live off his family. With Jacob, I discovered a level of subsistence I could never have imagined. And I was terrified of dying. In 1897, for every thousand residents in Vienna, seventy died of tuberculosis. My brother died of it, but I survived. To answer you frankly, no, I didn’t blame Jacob for our poverty, only his lack of will. None of his plans ever materialized but he never stopped believing in them; even after he stopped working as a wool merchant he continued to pass himself off as one because he could never admit to himself that he was only a clerk to immigrants. We lived perpetually on the edge of ruin. The worst was in 1865: Josef, Jacob’s brother, was arrested for possession of counterfeit bank bills. Just imagine my shame! It was in the newspapers of course, and living as we did in the Jewish quarter where everyone knew each other, we were the object of remarks, from sympathy to scorn to insult.”

“Lunch is served!” Minnie Marx’s voice boomed over Amalia’s last words. Minnie took food very seriously and she began urging everyone into the heavy, wood-paneled dining room, whose gloomy dark green curtains had seen better days. It reminded Rebecca of one of those overstuffed 19th century houses such as Vuillard painted. The women took their accustomed places around the table, with Rebecca seated between Minnie Marx and Amalia Freud, who continued her story.

“You can look it up if you like, Rebecca. It’s in the report the police submitted to the Foreign Ministry on October 16, 1865: ‘On 20 June of the present year, the Israelite Josef Freud was apprehended as he was preparing to sell a large quantity of counterfeited bank bills, precisely 359 forged bills of fifty rubles each.’ The worst was that Jacob’s adult sons were accused as well: ‘The veritable source of the counterfeit bills is in England.’ My stepsons were living in Manchester at the time. In one of these letters, it says they had ‘as much money as the sand on the seashore’ and that ‘as intelligent, sensible and prudent as they are, it won’t be long before they make a fortune.’”

“It wasn’t Jacob’s fault,” Rebecca comforted her. “He must have been as upset as you were.”

“Of course, but instead of fighting the accusations and trying to help his sons, he just moaned and groaned. Almost overnight his hair turned grey. Luckily, the police report confirmed his sons’ innocence.”

The women were now passing a platter of veal stew with rice. Rebecca hardly noticed, so fascinated was she by the story of the Freud brothers. She returned to her line of questioning.

“Were your stepsons involved with Josef? Were they guilty of any wrongdoing?”

“Jacob suspected they must have been. They were originally from Tysmenitz; perhaps they had stayed in touch with some Polish insurgents who were fighting for autonomy in that part of the former Polish kingdom that was occupied by Russia in those days. That would be one thing, but counterfeiting money is entirely something else. In any case, there was no proof and they were never implicated. But Josef and his accomplice were sentenced to ten years in prison.”

“I imagine Jacob was a good father, judging from the respect Freud always showed him.”

“It’s true that Jacob appears more often in his books than I do, his own mother. I never understood why Jacob was so tough on the children and such an absent father, but Sigi adored him just the same. He always made excuses for his incompetence. As soon as Sigi figured out that Jacob couldn’t afford to pay for his studies, he learned to take care of himself and never complained. Joseph Breuer used to lend him money for his day-to-day needs, what’s more, he opened his home to him as if he were his own son and introduced him to his many clients, including the famous Anna O., who gave him the idea of the cathartic method. Sigi was good at finding surrogate fathers and he never asked himself why.”

Fascinated by Amalia, Rebecca hardly touched her plate, but she wasn’t really hungry. Minnie Marx stuffed her face just like the permanently starved Harpo, who never stopped taking small mouthfuls and signaled each new bite with a tap on his plate. Louise ate slowly. As for Amalia Freud, as soon as she stopped speaking, she threw herself upon her food as if she didn’t know where her next meal would come from.

“Did your other children get much attention from your husband?” Rebecca asked Amalia Freud.

“He was a wonderful father to our five daughters. But he was feeling old by the time Alexander was born, ten years after Sigi.”

“Did you fight?”

“Rarely. It wasn’t Jacob’s fault he exasperated me. I avoided him as much as I could and that was quite a feat in those tiny apartments we lived in. I had a very rich interior life and I spent all my love on Sigi.”

“You stayed in a marriage with a man you didn’t love for forty years?”

“Fortunately, Jacob died when I was sixty. It felt like my life had finally begun. My marriage had only been an interruption. You can’t imagine the pleasure of no longer having a husband: I woke up every morning with a smile on my face, stretching out in the bed that at last I had all to myself.”

It suddenly occurred to Rebecca that perhaps she had been wrong to regret her life as a single mother. She had never wanted to fall madly in love. In fact, her responsibilities toward Nathan were sufficient for her to rule out anything that crazy. But she had longed for a man in her bed. She had been seduced by colleagues over the years, and had even made a habit of seeking out the foreign ones, not only because she thought any accent was sexy, but also because the affair could only last as long as his one-year visa. Frenchmen, on the other hand, were off limits; they never failed to fall hopelessly in love and she hated ending a relationship. Her ideal man was gentle, willing and part-time. But an ideal man was too hard to find, she told herself, and decided to stay single.

She was so deep in thought that she didn't notice when a wrinkled, grey-haired woman sat down next to her and extended a firm handshake.

“I’m Roman Gary’s mother,” the woman introduced herself.

Rebecca thought it an odd introduction; had she no other identity than that of a mother? She looked over the famous Mina. The heroine of
Promise at Dawn
was a tired old woman. In fact, she looked as if she had spent her entire life in a labor camp or on a chain gang. Rebecca searched her professional memory for anything she’d ever learned about Roman Gary’s mother. The name Owczynska floated back to her. Mina’s maiden name, she concluded, wondering why it was always the most insignificant details that stuck with her. Mina was also very beautiful, however, and a bit wild: a passionate romantic who loved the theater and dreamed of adventure.

“I left home when I was sixteen,” Mina was saying. “Before my parents could marry me off. I wanted to fall in love. I was a rebel, always up in arms about something and ready to take any risk to get away. You’d understand if you’d known what life was like in Swieciany, a little village of woodcutters in what was still Russia then. I came from a family of Orthodox Jews who were grocers and grain merchants and weavers, traditional occupations for us. It was a close-knit community; everyone knew each other’s business. Nothing and no one could have kept me there.”