Jewish Mothers Never Die: A Novel (2 page)

She was panic-stricken now at the thought of her own premature death and everything she had left undone. So many appointments that week alone. She was far too busy to die!

“Busy with what?” Minnie wanted to know.

“I’m a French professor at the Sorbonne. I have lectures to prepare, exams to correct, students to check up on . . . More importantly, I have a son, Nathan, and he’s all alone now.”

Suddenly powerless before the facts, Rebecca let herself sink into despair: she was dead, it was obvious to her now. At first, she had been relieved that the excruciating pain had gone away, but in retrospect, she regretted having taken the easy way out by letting herself die. She ought to have thought about her son. But there was nothing to be gained by complaining. She was dead and she was afraid, not of having reached the end of her life, but of having left Nathan behind.

Louise tried to console her: it wasn’t her fault she had died. She hadn’t killed herself, after all.

“It was an accident. You couldn’t have prevented it. You have nothing to be angry at yourself for.”

Lost in thought, Rebecca was silent now. This troubled Louise, who took Minnie aside.

“Do you think she has a depressive streak?”

“How would I know? I only met her a few minutes ago, just like you.”

“Do something to cheer her up. It would be a shame if she left. You know how to make people laugh!”

Minnie wasn’t sure she could help this new woman in their midst. She seemed as distant as a statue. What’s more, she looked nothing like them with her slim figure and blonde hair that fell loosely around her shoulders. She was even wearing pants! One thing was sure: she was more stricken than the others who came here; she was worrying far too much about this son of hers.

“What will become of Nathan without me?” wondered Rebecca. “I know him inside and out: his silences, his laughing fits, his pet peeves. I can read all his moods. I know he needs two pillows and that he hates to have the bedcovers on top of him. I know his sleepy morning grin that makes me want to hug him, and the way he tries not to smile when he’s proud of himself. I’m the only one who can stand that loud Indian music he listens to and who compliments him when he tries to dress nicely, even though he wears the same identical white button-down shirts. I always could find a way to cheer him up.”

“He’ll learn to take care of himself, don’t you worry,” said Louise as politely as she could.

“We think we’re indispensable,” Minnie continued firmly. “But I can assure you that your son will manage very well without you. I saw the same thing happen with my own boys . . .”

Rebecca interrupted her.

“We had a fight the last time I saw him. I told him he’d never amount to anything, and he stormed out without a word.”

Louise Cohen was shocked. How could a mother criticize the apple of her eye?

“Just because you never stood up to your Albert didn’t make you a better mother,” Minnie told her. “I yelled at my boys all the time. They thought I was strict, but they obeyed me. And they thanked me later.”

Her remark irritated Rebecca.

“But you didn’t die in the middle of an argument with one of them.”

“No, I have to admit that would be horrible.”

Louise elbowed Minnie. She could be so utterly tactless. This led Minnie to make fun of the “apple of her eye.” After all, Louise had hardly shown much consideration for Rebecca herself.

“Maybe if I tell you what happened you’ll understand,” Rebecca interrupted them. “Nathan’s studying law. Not so long ago, he had to take an exam, but he gave up halfway through. He never said a word to me; it was a colleague who told me the story later. When I confronted him, he told me it was none of my business. He said he hated law, that he was only doing it to make me happy, so I could brag about ‘my son the lawyer.’ He started yelling at me that it was his life and if he felt like failing an exam, that was his business. To think that I had prided myself on the fact that he had been such an easy teenager! ‘My life is already ruined and I’m only eighteen and it’s all your fault, and that's what matters, not some stupid exam,’ he shouted. Now I realize he was right.”

“No, no, no! Absolutely not!” Minnie exclaimed. “You knew what was best for him, and that meant taking the exam. He shouldn’t have argued with you, and you shouldn’t doubt yourself.”

“Are you kidding? I was a monster! I looked at him coldly and said how much he had disappointed me, and refused to utter another word. He slammed the door behind him when he left. The accident happened a few hours later.”

Louise Cohen was horrified by Rebecca’s story. Far worse than her sudden death was the humiliating blow she had dealt her son!

Rebecca continued to talk, oblivious to the disastrous effect she was having on her audience. She felt driven to tell them everything, as if speaking could erase the regrets that were tormenting her.

“I suppose Nathan will feel guilty about my death. He must be telling himself that if he hadn’t been so confrontational, I wouldn’t have lost my temper . . . and that maybe I could have avoided that stupid accident!”

“Really? Could you have avoided it?”

“No.”

Tears filled Rebecca’s eyes. Louise took her by the hand and addressed her in a sympathetic tone of voice, even though she was appalled by the younger woman’s attitude.

“Now, now. Everything will be fine,” she soothed.

Why were these strange women so attentive to her? Rebecca was utterly miserable.

“How do you know? Nathan is an orphan now. I know what he’s going through. When my mother died, I was convinced she was there watching me. I used to ask her advice, I shared everything that was happening in my life. I was ten years old and talking to her was a kind of consolation. My father, on the other hand, never spoke of her. He belonged to that generation that never expressed any emotions—to him, complaining was a criminal offense and talking about oneself indecent. Maybe that’s why I felt abandoned . . .”

“Nathan won’t necessarily have the same reaction as you did,” Louise tried to convince her. “Besides, he’ll go through a lot of different phases, from despair to sadness to an almost serene nostalgia.”

“Albert Cohen never got over your death. In
Book of My Mother
, he begs to see you again, and he does, in his dreams, long after you’re gone. Even when you’re hiding in a tiny village under a false identity, he feels as close to you as when the two of you lived together. He reproaches you for your selfishness in leaving him; he accuses you of not loving him anymore. And if my calculations are correct, Cohen was forty-four years old when you died. He was an adult and already famous! If he was unable to deal with his grief, imagine what a child like Nathan must be feeling!”

Minnie leaned close to Rebecca:

“Well, try thinking about our feelings! It was just as difficult for us to leave our children behind, to let go, and to realize their lives would go on fine without us. The others will tell you the same thing.”

“The others?”

“Oh, you’ll see; we aren’t the only ones here. There are plenty of mothers: Marcel Proust’s, Sigmund Freud’s, Romain Gary’s . . .”

Rebecca let out a relieved burst of laughter. She was a mother, and she was Jewish. Did that automatically make her the Jewish mother of jokes and stories? Was her presence here among so many famous women proof that her son would be famous someday too?

“Are there only Jewish mothers in this place?”

“Not all Jewish mothers are Jewish,” opined Minnie. “Or mothers, either. My husband was a Jewish mother, just like you and me and everyone here. It’s an expression, that’s all: a synonym for being loving, devoted, heroic, possessive, demanding, paranoid, anxious, unbearable, nosy, and always obsessed with one’s children, from their food to their safety.”

“So, you’re all Jewish too?”

“That’s the way it is, don’t blame us,” said Louise.

Minnie Marx was explaining that the concept of the “Jewish mother” was fairly recent. Starting in the early twentieth century, Jewish mothers were thought to be maternal, protective and loving. That was before American novelists like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth transformed them into “Yiddish mamas” better known for their stifling, even pathological fixation on their children.

“Woody Allen helped on that score, too,” Rebecca added.

“Jewish mothers didn’t only live in New York City, you know,” said Louise Cohen. “Albert wrote
Book of My Mother
in 1954, in France.”

Minnie addressed Louise in the gentlest voice she could manage so as not to offend her:

“Jewish mothers have always existed, it’s true: Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, Jochebed, the mother of Moses . . . As a concept, however, it’s an American invention that first became famous in 1964 with Dan Greenberg’s book:
How to Be a Jewish Mother
. That changed everything.”

“Is Woody Allen’s mother here?” asked Rebecca.

“No,” replied Louise.

“You’ve never seen her anywhere?” she insisted.

“Yes, but she didn’t stay with us for very long.”

“Why? I’m a fan of Woody Allen.”

“So am I,” agreed Minnie, but she said nothing more on the subject of this missing mother.

Rebecca made a mental note to pursue the conversation later, at least to get some answers. Their explanations were not especially helpful. For the first time, her mind turned to her funeral. How many times had she wondered what it would be like? She could picture her best friend in tears, her colleagues speaking in hushed tones. The movie of her memorial service passed before her eyes. There were people crying, others who just came to sign the register, too rushed or too harried to take an hour out of their schedules. Family and friends surrounded her son. And even if, when she thought about that moment, she always imagined Nathan’s father, Anthony, racked with grief, she suspected that in reality he wouldn’t come at all. He had left her soon after Nathan’s birth and had never become close to his son. Still, she loved the idea of him in mourning because whenever his name came up, her hands shook, her chin trembled, her voice cracked, her heart raced and her thoughts became a jumbled mess. Eighteen years after they had met, she still had the same romantic feelings for him. She lost herself in thought again, imagining her son standing before the congregation at the synagogue to say a few heartfelt and reassuring words about grief and loss.

She was drawn back to her surroundings by Louise.

“Do you have any photos with you?” she wanted to know.

Rebecca reached automatically for her handbag. Her handbag! She had forgotten its very existence until that moment but, seeing it next to her, she realized that tired leather purse had become more valuable to her than her closest friend. Going through its familiar contents made her feel a little less disoriented. The school photos of Nathan were still there: so many Nathans, from kindergarten to senior year. If boys tend to look alike in school photos, Nathan was no exception: neatly parted hair when he was five, shaggy bangs designed to hide the glasses he hated when he was ten and a tangle of hair and braces when he was fifteen.

“He’s so handsome!” Louise exclaimed when she had looked at them all. “You must have loved him terribly.”

“I adored him! He looks like a Persian miniature with his brown curls and his almond-shaped eyes.”

“With such a blonde mother, he must take after his father,” Louise remarked.

In fact, Nathan resembled Anthony so much that she had often had difficulty disassociating him from her feelings for his father and treating him as his own person. Seeing him always filled her with a mix of happiness and heartache, sending her flying from the most genuine admiration to the sharpest fear that he would never amount to anything.

“Nathan loses his keys all the time, he forgets appointments, he throws his money away—he would never do a thing if I didn’t nag him! His bedroom is such a mess that it’s impossible for him to find anything, even if he wanted to. He’s lost without me. When he was little and he struggled to put on his coat, I did it for him, and I tied his laces too, to spare him the trouble. I even did his homework instead of explaining it to him.”

“You were impatient,” suggested Louise. “You didn’t want to waste time.”

“It’s true. I could never bear delays of any kind. I wanted him to be perfect, but I didn’t bother to show him how. Now I’m afraid I raised a good-for-nothing. How will he ever manage without my help?”

“That’s what every Jewish mother asks herself,” Louise Cohen reassured her.

2

Spoiled Rotten

I was always a child of four to her.

Marcel Proust

And with her hands uplifted and spread out like sunbeams she would bestow on me a priest-like blessing. Then she would give me an almost animal look, vigilant as a lioness, to see if I was still in good health.

Albert Cohen

Louise Cohen was in a mood to chat, so Rebecca decided to indulge her. She wanted some reassurance that she had done a good job raising Nathan and she was curious to find out how the mother of Albert Cohen had made such a talented man of her only son. How had Louise Ferro, the daughter of an Italian lawyer, born in Corfu in 1870, who spoke a Venetian dialect at home, managed to raise a major figure of French literature? Besides the love she clearly bore him, she had no obvious other advantage as far as Rebecca could tell.

“Were you a demanding mother?” Rebecca questioned her. “Did you instill in him a sense of responsibility from a young age?”

“Quite the opposite. I did everything for him. I buttered his toast until he was a teenager. Every single breakfast was an act of love. He was only five when we arrived in Marseille, and I had to leave for work very early in the morning, so I prepared his coffee in a thermos and wrote him a note to button up his coat when it was cold, to wash well, especially behind the ears—it’s so easy to forget—to look both ways before crossing the street. I always did my best to sound cheerful because I thought it must be terribly sad to wake up alone in a silent apartment. Sometimes, I even left a photograph of myself on the table: a mere paper companion, but it was something. He must hold the memory dear since he describes our morning ritual in
Book of My Mother
.”