Jewish Mothers Never Die: A Novel (10 page)

Jeanne Proust was speaking now of Marcel’s notebook from 1908. In it, he relates the end of his summer holidays that year: Marcel was to stay in Illiers while his mother and Robert were to return to Paris. He was beside himself at the idea of being separated from his mother. Robert, on the other hand, was furious that he had to leave the baby goat he had adopted, and ran off, hoping to delay their departure. Jeanne caught up with him as he was setting off down the railroad tracks. Terrified, she tried to pull him off but he grabbed hold of the tracks. Adrien arrived and slapped the disobedient child. Jeanne, meanwhile, was explaining the situation to Marcel, who understood everything already: his father was upset that she was leaving and if Marcel made a scene about her leaving, too, Adrien would be out of patience with both mother and son. Proust was conscious of the inseparable couple that he formed with his mother; he was nothing at all like his rebellious and immature younger brother.

“Robert must have suspected my feelings for Marcel,” Jeanne admitted. “At lunchtime, he would complain that Marcel was served more chocolate cake, which is the worst sort of injustice to the mind of a hungry boy with a sweet-tooth. But Marcel didn’t just want more cake than his brother; he wanted all the dessert for himself.”

“He wanted to be loved by his mother, more than anyone else; brother, father or anyone.”

“He knew he was,” Jeanne said, overcome by emotion.

“And what did Robert think?”

“Robert’s wedding will give you some idea of what our family was like,” Jeanne began. “The day got off to a bad start: both Marcel and I were ill. It was a nightmare. Like at any wedding, there were two families, but not like you would expect to see. In our case, the only interesting people to watch were the Weils and the Prousts. Why would I have even pretended to care about Robert’s new in-laws, since it was obvious I would never again lay eyes on the Dubois-Amiots? There was Adrien, bursting with pride to see such a handsome and self-assured son of his marrying so well, thanks to himself; Marthe was the daughter of one of his mistresses. It marked a great step up the social ladder, and you could hardly get in the door of Saint Augustine’s Church with all the fashionable people and their elegant hats. With that marriage, Adrien was leaving Illiers, that small town of his childhood, and his parents’ shop where they made wax, chocolate and honey, far behind him, forever. He was thrilled with himself. And then there was me, sickened to death and wounded by this wedding that Adrien and his mistress had concocted. I had had nothing to do with any of it. I managed to be welcoming to his relations and his colleagues from the hospital, but as soon as the ceremony was over, I let it be known that I was too tired to go to the reception hosted by the Dubois-Amiots. No one tried to change my mind; I hadn’t been at the civil ceremony either. I’d been laid up by my rheumatism, but don’t suppose I’d done it on purpose; I was miserable.”

Marcel arrived late. He was wearing a heavy coat layered over another, with a thick scarf around his neck even though it was July. He looked terrible. All the attention paid to his brother had made him feverish; either that or he wanted to show solidarity with his mother. The wedding took place, and it proved that Robert was more a Proust than a Weil.

“I didn’t like my daughter-in-law, Marthe, because she detested Marcel,” Jeanne remembered. “They never fought but her intrusion into our family was enough to set off all kinds of conflicts. Fortunately, Robert never listened to what she had to say and always came to visit Marcel face to face. But he couldn’t stop her from throwing out any letter from Marcel that she happened to find.”

“How do you know that if you were already dead by then?”

“I read it. You know, you can learn a lot here, especially about famous people. What Marthe didn’t realize is that she could have made a tidy sum selling his personal correspondence. Instead, she burned most of it, because she thought everything he wrote was indecent, dubious and shocking. She thought his very existence was shameful.”

Rebecca considered the possibility that Robert’s wife was jealous of Jeanne’s feelings for Marcel. Perhaps Marthe thought that her hatred of the favorite son would be a comfort to her husband, who had been excluded from a similar relationship with his mother.

“I wonder why you read George Sand to Marcel and not Robert at bedtime. I heard somewhere that you skipped over the more troubling pages of
The Country Waif
. Why did you choose a novel about incest for a bedtime read?”

One passage still stood out in Rebecca’s mind. In it, a peasant boy, a bit of a simpleton, is about to be sent to an orphanage by his mother, but he faints and catches the attention of Madeleine, the miller’s wife. She takes pity on him, embracing and kissing him, and offers to raise him herself. She becomes a kindhearted mother to him, but he falls in love with her as he gets older. Why would Jeanne choose to tell the story of their incestuous relationship to her son, especially one as fragile as Marcel?

“The novel describes a surge of tenderness,” Jeanne protested. “I also read him
The Devil’s Pool
. George Sand was one of my favorite authors.”

“Apparently, he only remembered
The Country Waif
; he references it in
Remembrance of Things Past
. It must have troubled him if he was still thinking about it years later.”

“Oh! You find bad intentions in everything!” Jeanne burst out angrily, just as she did every time someone found her at fault.

“Did Minnie Marx have a favorite son?” Rebecca wondered out loud in an attempt to distract Jeanne.

“Her favorite was Chico, her eldest,” Jeanne replied matter-of-factly.

Leonard was his given name but Chico was the stout one of the trio who spoke very fast with an Italian accent and played the piano with a “revolver hand” as if he were shooting the keys.

“Shall we go find his mother?” Jeanne proposed. “Minnie avoids going out and hates the library. That’s just the way she is.”

They spied her ample form and waves of blond hair in the sitting room. She was perched at the piano, singing a music hall number. They waited until she had finished.

“Rebecca would like to know why Chico was your favorite son,” Jeanne declared.

“Why are you all so tactless?” Rebecca exclaimed angrily. “I’ve had enough of your rudeness!”

Minnie merely smiled. Like Jeanne, she was delighted by the chance to discuss her life with a newcomer.

“Chico was the oldest,” she began, looking at Rebecca. “I adored him right from the start and I never stopped. He wasn’t more talented than the others; quite the contrary. He was a compulsive gambler: horses, craps, roulette, poker, bezique, you name it. He had competition at home; my husband and I were both experienced players. But Chico took it to an extreme. He could gamble away ten thousand dollars in a single day. His brothers didn’t let him get into much trouble. They agreed to invest what they made on
A Night in Casablanca
rather than let him throw it away at a poker table. He was able to live comfortably from those earnings for the rest of his life. Journalists would ask him: ‘Chico, how much have you lost gambling?’ And he’d answer: ‘Ask Harpo how much money he’s saved. That’s how much I’ve lost.’ Even when he was little, he would pawn anything he could find, and the house was in such chaos we didn’t notice right away if something was missing. Once we did, we knew where to find it; there was constant traffic between our apartment and the money-lenders.”

“That didn’t bother you?”

“Chico was funny, and I knew his happy-go-lucky personality would be his saving grace. He used to say, on the days he lost at gambling, that he knew he’d win again, and on the days when he won, that he was sure he’d lose again. He always managed. His talent for accents was a survival skill in New York City, you know; he could do Irish, German, Italian . . . He amazed me as a little boy. He was always wonderful, but not in the same way when he got older.”

Jeanne Proust couldn’t help putting her two cents in:

“You must be referring to Marcel’s theory that a person is a series of different and sometimes contradictory selves.”

“If it pleases you to think so, be my guest,” Minnie replied.

Every mention that Jeanne made of Marcel put Minnie on edge.

“Say whatever you like, but my sons were funnier than Marcel, including Zeppo, who wasn’t even a professional comedian.”

“You didn’t know Marcel like I did. You don’t understand his sense of humor, but I do. Whenever I’m bored, I think about the scene in
Sodom and Gomorrah
where the Duc de Guermantes learns, on his way to a party, that his cousin Amanien d’Osmond has died. ‘He’s dead! That can’t be! You’re exaggerating!’ he exclaims. Well, I always chuckle at that scene, like so many others from
Remembrance of Things Past
.”

Minnie leaned towards Rebecca and whispered:

“If Marcel had been my son, he wouldn’t have been so la-di-da.”

“You would have made him into a gambler, is that what you mean?” Jeanne asked drily. She had heard every word.

Four of Minnie’s five sons had been the toast of Broadway. It was her brother, Al Shean, who had become famous on the vaudeville circuit, and convinced her that they had a career ahead of them.

“I always thought Groucho was the oldest.”

“He was the most famous of them all,” Minnie conceded. “But God knows he drove me crazy. He hated gambling, and the rest of the family teased him for his puritanical attitude. Worse, he was serious, with intellectual airs and a misanthropic streak. My third son was completely different. The first two—Leonard, whom you know as Chico, and Adolph, who was Harpo—were handsome and blond. Then Julius was born; he looked like a horribly wrinkled prune with black hair all over the place. Just the sight of him was enough to set you off. Odder yet, he was born angry.”

“Groucho wrote: ‘My mother loved children; she would have given anything if I had been one,’” Rebecca cited from memory.

“I do love children but I always treated mine as if they were adults,” Minnie corrected her. “Why must we glorify and idealize childhood? My own was dreadful. Being a young child is oppressive, physically and mentally. You have to be home on time, you can’t go out without telling an adult, and you have to do what everyone expects of you. Challenging an order or questioning a decision is inconceivable. At home or at school, you have to be like everyone else. It’s suffocating. So I never treated my children like they were children.”

“Do you think Groucho felt unloved?”

“He certainly tried everything in his power to make me like him, poor thing. You’d think he had a sixth sense for knowing what would please me. He could read my moods better than anyone and he was always on the lookout for ways to sweet-talk me. But it never worked. I mistreated Groucho as much as I idolized Chico, who could not have cared less. I had a soft spot for Harpo too, but not in the same way. He was closer to my husband than to me.”

“Harpo, who plays the harp rather than speak. Was he actually dumb?”

“No, but he was touchy. A theater critic once wrote that his high-pitched voice undermined his acts, although he was naturally funny and had an undeniable presence on stage. That was it, though: he vowed to never again speak in public. It only made him funnier.”

“Perhaps it was you who convinced him.”

“I don’t think so. I can’t remember anymore.”

Jeanne Proust’s mood had turned morose, and when she was like that, she had a habit of twisting a lock of hair around her finger.

“It’s not Groucho who suffered the most in your family,” she put in.

Minnie bristled at the remark. She was perfectly capable of putting the blame on herself but she refused to be accused by others.

“If you want me to admit that I sent Gummo off to fight in World War I in Chico’s place, I won’t deny it. I chose him to go because he was the least talented of his brothers for comedy and could add nothing to their act.”

Rebecca’s horror must have shown on her face because Minnie excused herself.

“I did everything I could so my boys wouldn’t be called up. I bought a farm outside Chicago because farmers were excused from the draft, but it didn’t help; Gummo had to go be a hero. I know I was unfair, but he came out of it just fine, and when he returned, he had the perfect pretext for turning his back on the stage, which he hated. Instead, he became an excellent promoter and manager of his brothers.”

“You always find a way to be right,” Jeanne remarked.

“Precisely. And everyone knew it. Family meant everything to me, and I was the one in charge. The boys were successful because they were so closely knit. They were ‘The Marx Brothers’ above all, even if each of them had his own identity: Chico the Italian, Zeppo the ladies’ man, Harpo the silent clown. Groucho was the most famous, as you know, but only because his career spanned more than seventy years. He was a star of music hall and Broadway, movies, radio and television. He wrote seven books, including the hilarious
Memoirs of a Mangy Lover,
a play, two screenplays and almost one hundred articles . . . Still, he wouldn’t have come to much without his brothers. Even when he wrote alone, he used them for material. I’ll give you an example of something he said to justify his refusal to write a humor column: ‘How can anyone do this every day? What is there important enough in the world to fill up this much white space every 24 hours? Why don’t they just leave it blank and say Harpo wrote it?’”

Minnie burst out laughing. She was feeling jovial now. Touching up her red lipstick, she proposed a game of musical chairs. Jeanne Proust and Amalia Freud thought it a splendid idea. Rebecca, on the other hand, detested the game; since there is always one chair less than there are players, someone is always the odd one out. She hesitated. Alive, she would never have accepted, as she was always the loser. However, if such rational and intelligent women as Amalia and Jeanne insisted so much, she could hardly refuse. Minnie gave a new rendition of the vaudeville tune she was singing when they came in. They all laughed like little kids. Dumbfounded, Rebecca watched them run and push each other and throw themselves on the chairs with so much conviction that she forgot to play. She was the only one standing as the older women in their long black dresses guffawed at her.