Family and Friends

H
ERE IS SOFKA
, in a wedding photograph; at least, I assume it is a wedding, although the bride and groom are absent. Sofka stands straight and stern, her shoulders braced, her head erect in the manner of two generations earlier. She wears a beautiful beaded dress and an egret feather in her hair. It must have been attached to a hat but the hat is hidden by her coiffure, which is in itself hat-shaped. Behind her stand her two daughters, beautiful also, but looking curiously tubercular; perhaps those wide-eyed pleading smiles add to this impression. The daughters are in white, with ribbons in their long hair, which I know to have been red. Sofka’s eldest son, her pride and joy, smiles easily, already a lazy conqueror. In his white tie and tails he has the air of an orchestral conductor. He stands between the two girls, an escort rather than a brother, as he was to prove on so many occasions. The sickly and favoured younger son is nowhere in sight, unless he proves to be one of those touching and doomed-looking children seated cross-legged in the front row, the girls, with hair of unimaginable length, clutching posies of flowers, the boys in long trousers and jackets of a satiny-looking material, gazing soulfully at the photographer. Yes, Alfred must be the one on the right. All around them are lesser members of the cast, relations by marriage: a stout and equally beaded
woman, several jovial men, a youngish woman with a cascading jabot of lace and an expression of dedicated purpose, and, on the extreme left, edging her way into the centre, a pretty girl with a face like a bird. None of these people seems to have as much right to be in the picture as Sofka does. It is as if she has given birth to the entire brood, but having done so, thinks little of them. This I know to be the case. She gazes out of the photograph, beyond the solicitations of the photographer, her eyes remote and unsmiling, as if contemplating some unique destiny. Compared with her timeless expression, her daughters’ pleading smiles already foretell their future. And those favoured sons, who clearly have their mother’s blessing, there is something there too that courts disaster. Handsome Frederick, in his white tie and tails, with his orchestral conductor’s panache: is there not perhaps something too easy about him, pliable, compliant, weak? Able to engage his mother’s collusion in many an amorous escapade, but finally dishonourable, disappointing? Does Sofka already know this? And little Alfred, seated cross-legged between the children who must be sisters and with one of whom he will shortly fall in love, do those eyes, heavy and solemn, shadowed with the strain of behaving well, bear in them the portent of a life spent obeying orders, working hard, being a credit, being a consolation, being a balm for his mother’s hurt, a companion in her isolation? For her husband, their father, is absent, gone before, dead, mildly disgraced. Gambling, they say. In any event, he was an older man, scarcely compatible, out of reach to his young children, amused by his young wife but easily bored by her inflexible dignity. Out of it in every sense.

And now I see that it is in fact a wedding photograph. The bride and groom were there all the time, in the centre, as they should be. A good-looking couple. But lifeless,
figures from stock. Above the bridegroom’s shoulder, standing on something, perhaps, Sofka gazes ahead, with her family’s future before her. No one to touch her. As it proved.

I have no doubt that once the photograph was taken, and the wedding group dispersed, the festivities took their normal course. I have no doubt that great quantities of delicious food – things in aspic, things in baskets of spun sugar – were consumed, and that the music struck up and the bride and bridegroom danced, oblivious of their guests, and that the elders gathered in groups on their gilt chairs while the children, flushed with too many sweetmeats and the lure of the polished parquet floor, ventured forth until restrained by nurses or grandmothers. I have no doubt that as the evening wore on the cigar-scented reminiscences induced many an indulgent nod, a nostalgic smile never to be recovered in the harder commerce of daily life. I have no doubt that those anonymous and jovial men (husbands, of course) relaxed into the sweetness of this precarious harmony, having found at last what married life had seemed to promise them, and their golden smiles, their passive decent good natures, the sudden look of worldliness their faces assumed as their lips closed voluptuously round the fine Romeo y Julietas and they lifted their heads a little to expel the bluish smoke reminded their wives – censorious women, with higher standards – why they had married them. Sofka would be at the centre of this group, of any group. Handsome Frederick would be dancing, sweeping some girl off her feet, making suggestions which she would not dare take seriously, and perhaps neither would he, with his mother watching him. Later, perhaps, or so the girls would like to think. Little Alfred would manfully trundle his cousin round the floor, looking to his mother for approval, and in so doing lose both her approval and his
own heart. The girls, Mireille and Babette (Mimi and Betty), would stay with their mother, waiting for her permission to dance. But the young men, faced with the prospect of negotiating for that permission, would not insist, and the girls would not dance much. Sofka gave out that the girls were delicate. And indeed they looked it.

I find it entirely appropriate and indeed characteristic that Sofka should have named her sons after kings and emperors and her daughters as if they were characters in a musical comedy. Thus were their roles designated for them. The boys were to conquer, and the girls to flirt. If this implies something unfinished, as if the process were omnivorous but static, that too would be characteristic. Sofka sees her children’s futures as being implicit in their names, and she has given much thought to the matter; indeed, one wonders whether she thinks about anything else. Her sons, handsome, with the legendary but short-lived handsomeness of those men who die young, are to establish themselves on the ruins of their father’s fortune; they are to divide the world and conquer it between them. No matter that Frederick plays the violin so well, and that Alfred is so fond of reading; these accomplishments are for the drawing-room and the study and not for the world. In due course they will lay aside the violin and the books, brace their shoulders, face up to their responsibilities (to Sofka and the girls) and revitalize those factories which have been idle too long. Imperceptibly, they will become tycoons, captains of industry, as their father had been before them. That their father’s little weakness – the one he confessed to, that is – might be hereditary Sofka would regard as ridiculous. She repels the thought before it is even formulated. In any event, the boys are so little their father’s children; they are, by definition, hers alone. Has she not brought them up single-handed? And are
they not a credit to her dedicated mothering? Frederick might break hearts, and he will have her permission to do so. There is nothing the virtuous Sofka admires so much as a man with a bad reputation. Alfred will be encouraged to follow his brother’s example; he is too serious by nature and by inclination. See how he clasps his little cousin round her unindented waist and turns his face back to his mother to solicit her smile. And the little cousin already annoyed that his attention should be diverted from her. Better that Alfred should shrug his shoulders and pass on, saving himself, saving them all, from hurt. And he will be even more handsome than his brother when he grows older; he has a soulful poet’s face, the ancient eyes of a child prodigy. Alfred is her hope and her investment; he is her second chance. For if Frederick breaks too many hearts to devote much time to the business, that is to say were his career as a boulevardier to interfere with his attendance at the factory, then sad little Alfred, whom Sofka knows to be as serious, as inflexible of purpose as she herself, can be relied upon to assume all the burdens that might otherwise have been shared. With Alfred’s help, Sofka knows, she will once again come into her kingdom.