Jewish Mothers Never Die: A Novel (6 page)

“Where did you go?”

“Moscow. I joined a group of itinerant actors who traveled all over Russia. We played in castles and barns and village squares. For the first time in my life, I felt free. I had so many roles. There was Maria Antonovna, the abandoned daughter of the Mayor in Gogol’s
The Government Inspector
, and Ekaterina, in
The Storm
by Ostrovsky; she leaves her disappointing husband the first chance she has to run off with a certain Boris, but he turns out to be no great catch either and she ends up committing suicide. I only played strong women, and with great passion. I was excessively happy, I sang, I danced, I lived. And then, one day, I had to go back . . . to get married. My first husband was detestable.”

A wracking cough broke off her story. She looked exhausted. Jeanne Proust poured her a glass of water and signaled to Rebecca that she needed help with the dessert. In the kitchen, they found a platter already laden with fruits of all kinds of seasons and regions: papayas, litchi, mangoes, grapes, oranges, pears, cherries, peaches . . .

“Where did all this fruit come from? Who does the cooking?” wondered Rebecca out loud.

“Don’t bother with such trivial matters,” Jeanne ordered her in reply. “I had to warn you not to be taken in by Mina’s stories. A great actress! She was in a troupe of pure amateurs.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that she lived an exciting life.” Rebecca knew only that Mina had remarried when she was thirty-three, to Arieh Leib Kacew, who was four years her junior. She didn’t know how they had met. Was this second marriage arranged by her parents? Was Arieh madly in love with Mina? Did he brave a scandal by marrying an older woman, a divorcée? However their relationship had begun, Rebecca wanted to believe that Arieh loved her and that he tried to make her happy. No easy task with such an adventuress whose thirst for fame and freedom was probably insatiable. It was hard to imagine her and her outsized ego living in her father-in-law’s house, as Jewish tradition dictated, in the decrepit Jewish quarter of Vilnius with its pogroms and hardships. The Kacew were a lower-middle-class Russian family of furriers. Those couldn’t have been happy years for Mina. Her life changed on May 21, 1914, however, when her son Roman Kacew was born. He would become Romain Gary, and nothing would ever be the same again.

Back in the dining room, Mina was eating cherries rather mechanically, but the color was coming back into her cheeks.

“Gary hardly mentions his father,” Rebecca remarked. “Did he live with you?”

“Why do you bring him up? Romain is a far more interesting topic of conversation.”

For a moment, she continued to pop cherry after cherry into her mouth. She couldn’t stand silence, however, and since no one else seemed willing to keep the conversation going, she decided to answer Rebecca.

“Well, if you must know, Arieh was called up into the army during World War I. Romain was four when he came home, but he left us again for a much younger woman who bore him two children ten years later. I was hurt, humiliated. But, I think . . . When I look back at it all now, I think that was exactly what I wanted. Exactly! I think I wanted to be left alone with my little boy. Romain filled me with joy. So many times I would ask him to turn his head toward the light so I could drink in his magnificent blue eyes. That was all I needed to feel happy.”

“So, Romain took the place of your husband.”

“You could say that. I did everything in my power for him, just like a wife hoping to further her husband’s career. I’ll tell you a story so you can see exactly what I mean. One day, it occurred to me that, without any means to pay for lessons, my adored son would never learn to play tennis, so I went to the imperial park of Nice and marched right out onto the courts to explain that with just a little training, my son would become a champion. He had to get in free!”

“He must have been a real natural talent.” Rebecca concluded.

“Not at all. He was a clumsy player at best. He’d never done more than hit a few balls. But I could never admit that; no one would have taken me seriously. The club manager tried to reason with me to lower my voice, especially since King Gustave of Sweden was there at that moment. The poor man: he obviously didn’t know me. I went right up to the king, who was taking his tea on the lawn. I remember he was an older man, very elegant in his straw hat, sitting under a white parasol. I told him how wonderful my Romain was: The future French champion, and he was only fourteen! The king wasn’t the least bit surprised to hear it and he invited my son to show him what he could do with his trainer. The rest of the story is less glorious. All I can say is that Romain did his best. He describes how humiliating the experience was in
Promise at Dawn
: ‘I jumped, dived, bounced, pirouetted, ran, fell, bounced up again, flew through the air [. . .] but the most I can say is that I did, just once, touch the ball.’ No matter: The King of Sweden was so impressed by his courage that he paid Romain’s fees. We never set foot there again but I had done what I set out to do.”

“You always believed in miracles,” said Louise Cohen.

“I did just the same for my own boys,” agreed Minnie Marx. “Did I tell you how I managed to get reimbursed for Harpo’s harp at twice the price I paid for it?”

“Minnie, you’ve told that story a hundred times already,” said Louise wearily.

“There was a train accident, and I was threatening the conductor that I would send for the insurance agent,” Minnie began anyway.

“Minnie, it’s my turn. I was in the middle of telling the story of my life.”

“Or maybe Romain’s?” Rebecca suggested.

“What’s the difference? I lived with him.”

“If you were exactly the same, how did you manage to raise him?” Rebecca asked.

“He owed me his respect, and I insisted that he always come to my defense,” Mina explained by way of an answer. “Any time I felt insulted, I ordered him to slap the person who had wronged me. I knew I could count on him; he even went in my place to see the shopkeepers when they were looking to be paid. I was often in debt, with no means to pay anyone back. But I had nothing to worry about: Romain protected me as well as any man.

“He was your Prince Charming. Is that why you never remarried?”

“Twice is plenty. Of course, I didn’t lack for offers.”

This reminded Mina of the story of Zaremba. He was a painter staying at the Mermonts’ boarding house who was so impressed by Mina’s adoration of her son that he asked to marry her, hoping she would love him just as unconditionally.

“Zaremba asked Romain for my hand in marriage, and he accepted. My son wanted me to marry him. He thought my devotion to his education was ruining my life. How could he think such a thing? Romain was my greatest success! Thanks to him, my life was worth something: He became famous! I always knew he would, even when he was a child. Our cleaning lady, Mariette, knew it too. At first she thought I sang his praises because he was my son but then she started to wonder. Maybe there was something special about him after all?”

“What did you tell the painter who was in love with you?”

“I sent him back to Poland, and that was my last and final suitor.”

“Come with me, Rebecca. I’d like to get an apple,” Jeanne Proust interrupted.

Minnie held one out to her, but Jeanne, who was already on her feet, brushed her aside and motioned to Rebecca to follow her. As soon as they were in the kitchen, she exploded in anger: Mina was an utter liar, all her stories came from Gary’s novels, Zaremba was a character in
Promise at Dawn
, and he was modeled on Philippe Maliavien, a Russian painter who lived in a castle outside Nice. Even the name Zaremba was stolen from an 18th century Lithuanian myth. Gary couldn’t stand to see his mother old and sick so he made up the story. How could she tell such whoppers?

“Whatever truth there is, it certainly demonstrates the kind of relationship she had with her son.”

“Why are you defending her? What do you know about it?”

“Nothing, but it reminds me of something I went through.”

“Oh! In that case, tell me everything. I adore a love story.”

Rebecca had fallen for a Russian literature professor. Unlike her other foreign lovers, he had no plans to return to his native country and she had gotten in over her head. For one thing, he looked like the hero of a Russian novel: Alexis Vronski, Nicolas Rostov, Youri Jivago . . . He was going to move in with her and Nathan, and the night of the move, she and the professor were going out for a celebratory dinner. Nathan must have been ten years old at the time and she was giving him a few instructions. She wrote down her cell-phone number, reminded him to brush his teeth and told him he could watch some television, a huge concession for her. She must have told him fifty times how much she loved him. Nevertheless, by the time she got home, Nathan was passed out. At the hospital, they told her he had drunk himself into a coma. Had he tried to commit suicide? In any case, that was the end of her Russian love affair.

“You never saw him again?”

“Not after the hospital, no.”

“And Nathan, what did he say afterwards?”

“Nothing, ever. He was ashamed, the poor darling, but it was me who was guilty.”

“Don’t you think you’re jumping to conclusions?” Jeanne prompted her gently. “Isn’t it possible that Nathan just made a mistake, that he took advantage of being alone in the house to drink for the first time? Many children who are smothered with attention act out in these ways.”

Rebecca blanched: The idea had never occurred to her.

“Was I a fool? It took me a long time to get over him. I cried all the time and I became even stricter with Nathan, without even realizing it. I was obviously angry at him. Did I make a terrible mistake?”

“There’s no point in crying over spilled milk,” Jeanne said. “What’s done is done.”

Jeanne was tired. She had no patience for other peoples’ troubles, and Mina had gotten on her nerves.

“You don’t have to go back into the dining room, Rebecca.”

“What if Mina is expecting us?”

Jeanne just shrugged her shoulders and went her way.

In fact, everyone had gotten up from the table, so Rebecca went looking for Mina. Instead she came across Louise Cohen, who was riding on a breeze of jasmine in a Mediterranean garden, stretched out in a hammock suspended between two olive trees. Rebecca followed her lead and lay down in a chaise longue, watching the birds flit back and forth as a lone cloud asserted itself against the cobalt sky.

Blushing slightly and looking a little tipsy, Louise broke into the story of her love life.

“I loved my husband and my son both. I was eighteen when I married Marco. I had only admiration for him. I remember, it was December 25, 1875. We were in Corfu, and the sky was a deep sea blue. I didn’t love him at first but I agreed to marry him. Ten months later, Albert Abraham Caliman was born. I lived for the next six years with my in-laws. Marco’s father was president of the Hebrew community. He was always good to me, better than to Marco with whom he fought constantly. They worked together at the family soap factory and they never agreed on anything. Abraham wasn’t an easy man and he refused to listen to his son’s advice on how to modernize the business and diversify their soaps, with perfumes and new shapes. He would fly into a rage and call him an idiot. He didn’t see that the economic crisis was going to change everything in Corfu and stir up anti-Semitism. For him, Marco was always wrong. He crushed Marco, who never got over it.”

“Albert wrote about his father’s severity and how you both were afraid of him.”

“Marco followed his father’s example: authoritarian and violent. He was the same father to Albert as his father was to him, and I spent my time protecting my darling from him.”

“Were you frightened of Marco, too?”

“That’s what Albert thought. He says so in
Book of My Mother
.”

“But what did you think?” Rebecca insisted.

“I hated it when he drank but I always managed to calm him down or reason with him. I would cajole or flatter him; it soothed him. Never underestimate the power of a woman.”

“You were the stronger one.”

“But I could never let him know that. He would have been furious. My main concern was Albert, so I did what I had to so he would leave us in peace. I had the same intense relationship with Albert as Jeanne Proust and Mina Kacew had with their sons.”

It occurred to Rebecca that Louise Cohen’s proclaimed love for her brutal husband was a facade; she was an abusive mother, just like the others, who kept her husband away from her child. He was no more involved in his son’s upbringing than Adrien Proust and Arieh Kacew had been with theirs.

“Tell me, Louise: did Marco’s violence influence Albert’s theory of the ridiculous male?”

“I’ve wondered about that, too,” Louise confessed timidly. “He wrote with disdain about those men who are so enamored of their strength but who never impress anyone other than a few ‘prehistoric’ women who will unconditionally follow their ‘Neanderthal men.’ He could never forgive the women who loved those baboons. I think he looked down on me too for loving Marco.”

Mina appeared in the garden, wearing a light dress, her hair tinted that shade of mauve so characteristic of elderly ladies who try to hide their grey hair.

“Romain Gary also exalted femininity, its gentleness and compassion and non-violence, as a strength of civilization.”

“He was copying Albert!”

“Dear Louise, I don’t mean to nitpick but let me remind you that
Promise at Dawn
came out in 1960, whereas your son wrote
Belle du Seigneu
r
in 1968.”

“They were both machos, you know. They denigrated women at the same time they put them on a pedestal. They loved them and seduced them again and again. They couldn’t live without women. But they only chose who adored them and showed them off. And these women had to hide their own intelligence, shrewdness and above all their critical powers. Romain and Albert were too fragile for any of that.”

“I was just wondering why we always sought out the company of men,” said Louise. “We’ve been here for years and none of us misses them at all.”