Jewish Mothers Never Die: A Novel (12 page)

“It worked like a charm,” Mina agreed.

Seeing Rebecca’s doubtful look, she added:

“I assure you, it’s true. I already told you about that Mr. Piekielny . . . He would look with awe at Romain as if he had already reached the summit of glory. I’m sure he was just like me, Mr. Piekielny; he believed in miracles. Here was this poor little Jewish boy in France with a mother who was going to make him become someone, and so he had to succeed, just because she believed in him. I think the sheer force of my conviction kept Mr. Piekielny going for a while longer. He wanted to believe in the dream like I did. Romain worked tirelessly to prove me right.”

“Do you really think he told the Queen of England that ‘Mr. Piekielny lived at number sixteen, rue Grande-Pohulanka, in Wilno,’ like he wrote in his novel?”

“He certainly did,” Mina replied. “But this lovely man never knew it. He had already died in a gas chamber.”

“Such a sinister conversation at the breakfast hour!” Minnie Marx exclaimed, bursting suddenly into the room.

“Don’t sit down,” Amalia warned her.

“And why not?”

“We’re not spending the day here.”

“And why not?” a laughing Minnie wanted to know again.

She turned to Rebecca and began addressing her as if there was no one else in the room.

“You did the right thing, choosing your son’s profession. There’s no telling what children might come up with on their own.”

“I completely agree with you,” Mina seconded. “Rebecca was not firm enough with the boy.”

“All I wanted was for him to be happy,” Rebecca explained.

“You see? You cared more about his happiness than his career.”

“Obviously.”

“It’s not as easy as it seems. When you’re young and idealistic, you can let yourself be carried away by the dream of a job that doesn’t pay, and then regret it later. Being successful professionally is always one less thing to worry about. And it’s something to make you proud, even happy, if that matters. I had such difficulty finding something that Romain was good at. We tried everything. I shouted to the rooftops that my son would be a prize-winning jockey, but he had no talent at all for it. It was the same with fencing and pistol shooting, which was a shame: I could just see him in the dress uniform of the Republican Guard! I taught him Latin, German, and French, of course, the Fox-Trot, the Shimmy . . . There was nothing I didn’t try. Every failure was like a stab in the heart, but my greatest disappointment came with music: A disaster! His teacher finally told me, as sweetly as possible, that I was throwing my money out the window on violin lessons for him. My theory is that he couldn’t stand the screeches. As if my son was the first mediocre pupil he ever had. He didn’t get it. I would have paid him double if he could only teach my Romouchka to play well! But there was nothing to be done: I had to let it go.”

Rebecca was mentally tallying everything at which Nathan had failed: music, fencing, soccer, chess . . . Images began to haunt her, like when she used to wake up at 5 a.m., seized by a panic attack. How did these mothers do it? How did they make their sons so famous? Was it enough to just decide they would be? Mina never gave up until she found the one thing Romain was good at and then, when he began writing, she still wasn’t satisfied: he had to be an ambassador, too.

“What drove you like that?” she asked Mina. “Were you a fan of Claudel? He was a writer, a diplomat and a member of the Académie Française.”

“Oh, he did get into the Académie after all?”

“In 1946.”

“I was dead already. No, it was Chateaubriand I found the most exciting.”

Mina, like the actress she had once been, declared:

“He lived through eighty years of French history and politics, traveled around the world, and he still managed to find time to reflect and to write. He even said this: ‘I would like to have never been born or be forgotten forever.’ I so wished my son would have lived that maxim. What good is it to live if not to become famous?”

“Such pressure!”

“Yes, but I knew Romain could do it, and he didn’t let me down.”

Minnie Marx, who until now had been absorbed by her eggs and sausages, turned to Rebecca while continuing to chew:

“It’s better to make decisions for your children. There’s always a job you would cringe to see them do.”

Mina interrupted her:

“I was afraid Romain would want to become a painter. His teacher announced to me with great pride that he had talent, but I made him swear to never say so to Romain. As soon as he would start to draw, I would take away his brushes and pens.”

“Why did you pay for lessons in that case?”

“Certainly not with the idea that he would mistake an elegant hobby for a profession. All painters end up penniless and mad.”

Mina was categorical: A life of misery was the fate of every artist. She wanted her son to be famous and feted in his own lifetime. So she encouraged him to be a writer, and whatever he wrote she thought it was marvelous.

Minnie asked Rebecca if her greatest fear was that her son would become a pilot.

“I thought it was an unwise choice for someone so easily distracted. But what would have made me the angriest, would be if he had chosen to become a sociologist.”

“What do you have against sociology?”

Rebecca didn’t know, but she had always thought it to be a pedantic and meaningless way to earn a living.

“Was there a particular sociologist you didn’t care for?” Minnie offered.

“Did you know many?” Mina wanted to know.

“No, I didn’t. It was just one of those preconceived notions.”

This line of questioning exasperated Rebecca. She had singled out that one profession on a whim, but the other women wanted to treat her comment as a serious opinion and debate its pros and cons!

“My greatest fear was that one of my boys would act in porn films,” Minnie said.

“Did you have a reason for thinking they might?”

“Not at all; why do you ask? Groucho wanted to become a doctor.”

“And you wouldn’t let him?” Rebecca asked with a barely stifled cry of anger.

“Of course not. Why should he waste years studying when the theater was beckoning?”

“You must be the only Jewish mother in the world who stopped a son of hers from becoming a doctor! Do you know the one about the mother whose son is invited to a party?”

“No,” Mina and Minnie responded in unison.

“She has two sons, five and seven years old. So she asks: ‘Which one is the invitation for? The doctor or the lawyer?’”

“What’s so funny about that?” Minna asked. “Doctors have the worst job in the world: they have to spend their days listening to people complain about their aches and pains and the never-ending litany of ailments of hypochondriacs. But actors just have to walk around in a tuxedo and a top hat to earn enough money to throw fistfuls of it at the urchins in the street, like my brother Al did.”

“Was it your brother who suggested your sons go into show business?”

“I had to force the hand of destiny,” Mina recalled, stretching. “They were going to pot . . . Chico was gambling in a dive on 99th Street. Harpo had just said goodbye to his career as a bellboy. Groucho was acting part-time, and Gummo was still trying to convince his teacher that Paris was the capital of Greenland. The best way to be in the spotlight was to get hired together. I cooked up a little number and named us ‘The Three Nightinglales.’ Everything changed from that day.”

“What did your children say? They agreed to that?”

Minnie looked squarely at Rebecca, flabbergasted:

“Did I give them a choice? I knew exactly what I was doing. I became their impresario, as I’ve already mentioned. Harpo tried to put up a fight, protesting that he couldn’t sing. I told him to keep his mouth open and pretend. No one was the wiser.”

Rebecca imagined a plump, young Minnie besieging every theater agent in town, negotiating contracts and accompanying her new act from city to city before settling in Chicago, second only to New York for vaudeville. She didn’t hesitate to rename herself Minnie Palmer, thinking it was sexier and better for business. Nothing could stop her.

“When I found out that the smaller vaudeville troupes were paid by the number of members in the company, I persuaded my sister Hannah to perform with us, so we could be paid three hundred dollars instead of two hundred.”

“What if none of you had been talented? I suppose that wouldn’t have bothered you?” Mina asked with a touch of malice.

“Certainly not.”

At forty-four and forty-two the sisters dressed up as schoolgirls and took off their glasses. When they sat on the same chair, it collapsed under their weight. And that was the end of their show business debut.

“We had to rename ourselves ‘The Four Nightingales.’”

Rebecca was thrilled by Minnie’s energy and confidence.

“How did the Marx brothers get their start? Beyond the name, which might have been a problem, did you envisage specific roles for your sons?”

“Except for Harpo, they all had nice singing voices until they reached puberty, and then I had to develop their act,” Minnie remembered, as if it was still 1918 and she was looking for ideas. “Groucho pretended he was a German actor, and Chico debuted his famous Italian accent, which he had copied from his barber. He only had to imitate him and people burst into laughter. It amused him, so he continued the act in the theaters and then in film.”

“Did you write the shows?”

Minnie sighed. Was she offended? There was no way of knowing, since she abruptly left her plate half-finished and began pacing up and down the room, breathing like a bull.

“Yes,” she said.

Coming from a chatterbox like Minnie, it was a short “yes.” Rebecca couldn’t resist the temptation to ask again, prompting her to finally admit that the only time she had been absent from the troupe, they had had their biggest success ever.

“They were in Ann Arbor, Michigan,” she began. “I had told them to end with a song. ‘If they whistle at you as you’re leaving the stage, you’re done,’ I told them. But they didn’t agree with me; they wanted to end on a comic note. We left it there because I had to go find a tenor: ours had flown the coop, but his operetta solo was the highlight of the act. ‘Schooldays,’ it was called. Worse, he had left with the only tuxedo we owned. It’s true that it did belong to him . . . Groucho decided to take matters into his own hands by proposing to sing Verdi’s hit,
La Donna è Mobile
. I told them, ‘That’s all well and good, but what about the tuxedo?’ I was serious; it gave the act a touch of class. Chico found the solution: he told me to fire the pianist and, with the money saved, to rent a tux. I thought it was all settled when I left.

“Groucho kicked off the act as the tenor but suddenly stopped. ‘I don’t like your key, Giuseppe,’ Chico told him, then sang the same piece in A minor. ‘That’s worse!’ Groucho yelled at him. That’s all they needed to raise havoc: Harpo ran back on stage, threw Chico off his stool and started playing. Since he didn’t miss a beat, Groucho kept singing
La Donna è Mobile
, in Italian.

“That’s when they went crazy: Chico on the piano stool, Harpo on his shoulders and Groucho who could just reach the keys by wrapping his arms around Chico from behind, and singing all the while. Eventually, they all fell over. They were called back seven times for a bow. For the first time, the Marx Brothers were in all the papers.”

“What was your reaction?”

“Well, I never found a tenor, so I came back empty-handed. Then when I read the review, it was like a punch in the chest, all the more so because they did their number in the second act, which was supposed to be the musical half of the show. By nature I’m pretty stubborn and I never admit I’m wrong. I began whistling
La Donna è Mobile
to myself, wondering what I could possibly say to them. Then I found it: ‘You know, I always told you that comedy was our forte,’” I said.

She laughed heartily.

“They would never have amounted to anything without me. Never.”

Jeanne Proust came in, looking surprised. “I wasn’t expecting to find you still here. I finished eating hours ago.”

“Today, Minnie isn’t going anywhere,” Mina remarked dryly.

That was good news to Jeanne Proust. She could eat breakfast all day if it was to talk about her Marcel! She knew she had a sympathetic listener in Rebecca.

“Did you let Marcel decide what he wanted to do with his life?” Rebecca asked her.

“Do you remember what Madame Santeuil says to her son? She tells him he’s free to choose as long as he becomes a judge, a lawyer or a diplomat.”

“That’s fiction,” Rebecca reminded her. “What about you? Did you worry about that kind of thing too?”

“Adrien wanted Marcel to have a serious occupation so he found him work at the Mazarine Library. I was the one who made it possible for Marcel to dedicate himself to writing, and I convinced Adrien that our son should no longer waste his time in an unpaid, meaningless position. He needed regular hours but not an office.”

“You got him started by forcing him to translate Ruskin.”

“He didn’t have a gift for English so I translated it and he rewrote it in good French.”

“I don’t mean to question the scope of your influence,” Rebecca began. “But don’t you think he would have become a writer anyway, with or without you?”

Jeanne threw Rebecca a look of pure hatred. If she could have made her disappear, she would not have hesitated. She began to shake, her chignon came undone and she turned red in the face.

“I did everything in my power to help him, to wrest him out of his intellectual stupor. I watched over him, I taught him how to apply himself, to be disciplined. Write on his own? You must be joking!”

Rebecca had finally had enough of these conceited mothers who considered themselves indispensable to their children’s success. She shouted back at Jeanne:

“But he waited for you to die so he could write
Remembrance of Things Past
!”

Jeanne jumped, her inflamed cheeks now pale. She took a moment to calm herself. Mina patted her forehead with a damp napkin, while Minnie poured her a glass of water. Amalia, who had come back in time to witness the scene, suggested she needed something stronger and handed her a glass of straight scotch.