Jewish Mothers Never Die: A Novel (20 page)

“Isn’t that the very definition of love?” Pauline asked. “Isn’t it true that we fall in love with the idea of someone we don’t even know? Marcel thought so, didn’t he, Jeanne?”

Jeanne Proust grumbled an inaudible response, not having the appetite for discussing her son’s love life. It was the first time she ever avoided a discussion about Marcel. She preferred to hear more about Eva, whom she disapproved of already.

“You don’t even know her last name. She’s probably a social climber, ambitious and egotistical. Wouldn’t Nathan be better off with a more sensual, full-figured woman?”

“Why are you so pessimistic? If he loves her, it’s because she’s his type. I prefer to think they share a genuine affinity and that they complement, each other and respect each other.”

Rebecca’s optimism on this subject at least was unshakeable. Although she had despaired over his idleness by comparison with the other mothers’ famous sons, she had learned from the interminable discussions to have faith in his abilities. Now she was convinced that he would be happy and that his wife would love him . . .

“So, you believe in fairytales?” Pauline Einstein asked her, incredulous.

“What makes you so sure of yourself?” Jeanne asked almost at the same time.

A memory flashed before Rebecca. One evening, she found Nathan in his room, seated at his desk, legs stretched out, arms thrown back over his head. He was laughing, smiling, joking: Just happy. His deep voice had thrilled her more than the gentlest words whispered after lovemaking. She was speechless with admiration, looking at him.

“Nevertheless,” Pauline insisted. “You can’t be happy he’s dating a
goy
!”

“He wouldn’t be the only one,” Louise Cohen answered. “Albert had a weak spot for them too. It’s not for nothing that his hero, Solal, tries to seduce every Adrienne, Aude and Ariane he meets, each as magnificent as the next: Elegant, cultivated and refined. Jewish women, on the other hand, are always described as ugly and fat.”

Louise Cohen was making a habit of bringing up Philip Roth any chance she had; she recognized in him Albert’s own preoccupations with women and Judaism.

“Portnoy slept compulsively with wasps, as a way of conquering America, a little like a man living abroad will prefer to have a mistress who speaks the local language rather than study it in a book.”

“It’s a crime not to respect one’s origins,” Pauline Einstein said angrily. “Our people’s survival is at stake.”

Rather than respond to Pauline and defend Nathan, Rebecca decided to find out more about Albert Cohen’s adventures in love.

The air was cooler than they expected when they went into the garden. It was laid out in a square surrounded by crenellated walls, and all four seasons were represented: to the north were hardy shrubs and grasses, to the south there was a profusion of fruit trees, to the east, the ground was covered with autumn leaves, to the west, there were spring roses. In the middle was a labyrinth made of plants and flowers, herbs and greenery. It reminded Rebecca of the
Roman de la Rose
, where the rose symbolizes the poet’s beloved, whose affections he must earn by completing an arduous apprenticeship in the ways of love.

There were cushions scattered on the freshly cut lawn. Rebecca sat among the others in a circle.

“We can’t choose who our sons are going to fall in love with,” Rebecca began. “There are limits to what a mother can do. On this subject at least.”

“Albert did as he pleased,” Louise Cohen replied. “His first wife, Elisabeth Brocher, was the daughter of a Protestant pastor. She died of lymphoma. We enjoyed each other, but I tried to stay out of her affairs, even when she lived with me. I never spoke of Albert with her. It seemed improper.”

“How many times did he marry?”

“Three. After Elisabeth, there was Marianne Gross, then Bella Berkovitch. She was the only one of his wives who was Jewish. He married her after I died, and he found happiness, finally, with her. He said in the last interview he ever gave: ‘I’m eighty-five years old and I’m going to die one of these days. But I’m happy to love my wife in my old age and to be loved by her in my old age, and this love that is given and received is all that matters to me.’ He loved Bella, and he dedicated
Belle du Seigneur
to her.”

In the great romances of the Middle Ages, the courtly lover is set the task of winning his lady through a display of his virtues, of which love is the most supreme. Once smitten, a knight and his lady never worried about what their parents would think!

You never heard what Lancelot’s mother thought about Guenièvre his beloved!

Mina admitted she had tried to influence Romain’s choice of women. She believed he had found the perfect one: Ilona, whom he wrote about in
Promise at Dawn
.

“We understood each other. We were from the same part of the world. Well, not far, at least. She was Hungarian, Jewish, cultivated, comfortably well-off. Four years older than Romain, he was head over heels and infinitely more besotted than she was. So just before she was to go home to her parents for Christmas, he asked her to marry him. She never returned. Worse still, he lost all trace of her, until 1960, when he found out she had gone mad and had been interned in a psychiatric hospital all those years.”

“He was lucky she left him,” Rebecca said.

“Maybe so, but he became a womanizer from that day on.”

“Isn’t that what you loved about him, that he was a lady killer?”

“Obviously. Having many women is the mark of a successful man. Romain himself wrote that it goes hand in hand with ‘official honors, decorations, uniforms, champagne, embassy receptions . . .’ He was right of course.”

“My boys had more lovers than I could count, Chico in particular,” Minnie Marx interjected. “I didn’t have anything to do with it: just by smiling, the girls swooned. He was a compulsive ladies’ man, and it made Groucho jealous.”

“He must have been the shy type.”

“The title of Groucho’s autobiography gives you an idea of how he thought about himself:
Memoirs of a Mangy Lover.
I don’t think he was ever happy in love, but it wasn’t for fault of trying: he married three times.”

“What were his wives like?”

“I never criticized them, but I preferred to see them as little as possible.”

“Divide and conquer: was that the strategy for both of you?” Rebecca dared to ask Mina and Minnie. “That way, you never lose your son to another woman; you’re still the only woman who really matters to him.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Mina replied with complete insincerity.

“Nor do I,” Minnie declared. “All I ever wanted from my sons were grandchildren.”

“Typical. So you were just like Alex Portnoy’s parents?”

Rebecca, too, was finding Philip Roth’s book to be a useful reference. Unable to get out from under his parents’ watchful eye, trapped between his hysterical, castrating mother on the one hand and his repressed and literally blocked up father, Roth’s young protagonist waits for the chance to leave his neurotic family behind and see the world, or another part of it than New Jersey, where everyone looks like everyone else. He goes in search of non-Jewish women and non-kosher food, masturbates every chance he gets and struggles to find his much sought for freedom. One of his family’s chief complaints is his single status. How selfish not to want to make such wonderful parents happy by getting married and giving them grandchildren! Hadn’t they done everything for him? Why didn’t he have his sights on a serious young lady? That’s what his father always wants to know. After all, he wouldn’t live forever . . . and he’d like to get to know his grandchildren before it’s too late.

“Did you lay a guilt trip like that on your sons, too?”

“Maybe,” Minnie laughed. “If I did, though, my attempts were never as cliched as that.”

What could be more egocentric than wanting grandchildren and to care about passing on a family name? It would be even worse if they couldn’t stand their daughters-in-law, those unbearable rivals for their sons’ attention . . .

“It must have been difficult for you to imagine them happy with their wives and far from your grasp,” Rebecca ventured.

“Not in the least!” Mina exclaimed. “We were irreplaceable!”

There is no substitute for a mother, and certainly not a mother such as these; Rebecca ought to have known that. Grumbling and grouching about the cramps in their legs from sitting cross-legged in the grass, they got to their feet. Why were they talking about their children leaving the nest, anyway? Any subject was better than that. They found a new spot to rest themselves, under an arbor in the summer quadrant of the garden. A bower of roses provided shade from the sun and was reflected in turn by a pool of water lilies that looked straight out of a Monet painting.

“Our sons never really went away,” Minnie began.

“How could they? Only a mother can know her son’s every desire,” Mina commented. “She’s the only one who can interpret his moods and support him, whatever state he is in. She loves him unconditionally. What’s wrong with that?”

“It makes bad habits,” Rebecca answered, recalling Gary. “He makes it clear that his mother’s love ruined his romantic relationships: ‘You believe that you have it in you to be loved, that it is your due, that it will always be there around you, that it can always be found again, that the world owes it to you, and you keep looking, thirsting, summoning.’ But it’s impossible. ‘You spend your days waiting for something you have already had and will never have again.’”

“Is that a criticism, do you think?” Mina asked, worried all of a sudden.

“What’s wrong with you?” Jeanne Proust cried. “Could you have acted any differently? You were in an impossible situation, which you met heroically. Were you supposed to stop yourself from loving your son, on top of everything else? Would he have been happier if you had?”

“I don’t know,” Mina said soberly.

“This is ridiculous, in any case,” Jeanne said with an offended air. “How could we ever stop loving our sons?”

Mina was wearing a stunned look; the idea that she might have been a harmful influence on her son was utterly shocking.

“Don’t believe for a minute that you sabotaged his love life,” Rebecca told her, in all sincerity. “He adored you; you were the center of his attention. He fulfilled your wish for him to become a writer and an ambassador; he longed for your approval. In
Lady L
, when the protagonist is admiring the luxurious apartment where he is living, he says: ‘If my mother could see me now!’ That says it all.”

“If you had been alive when he married Lesley, would you have approved of her?” Jeanne wanted to know.

“Romain fell in love with her independence, her sophistication and her haughty manner. She was forty years old; he was only thirty. But their marriage was ill-fated because it rested on a misunderstanding; she was fascinated by Russia and he was fascinated by France. Both of them were in love with a country that only existed in their imaginations, but it was a different country for each of them. Lesley’s Russia was a place of dangerous passions, romantic peasants, sad music, dark tapestries, tragic literature and noble barons. It was nothing like the Russia that Romain fled; the pogroms and poverty he knew were hardly romantic. She thought she was marrying a Russian, but Romain wanted nothing more than to be French. His France was like a heroic, elegant, proud, and beautiful woman. It intimidated an Englishwoman like Lesley. Once she realized that, she became little more than a substitute mother, though not as firm as I was. She educated him, taught him good manners so he could mingle in her world of high society, but she should never have given him so much freedom.”

“Maybe it was her own freedom that concerned her. She was hardly going to become a housewife at forty.”

“She certainly never expected him to have so many mistresses.”

“Since she had her own lovers, why did they separate? They led an exciting life between London, Paris, Sofia and Los Angeles.”

“Jean Seberg broke that all up. Romain left the ‘mother’ for the ‘daughter.’”

It was growing darker as the sun set in the sky, but the garden began to glow as lanterns and projectors threw their light upon thickets and climbing ivy and statues.

“Wasn’t Albert Cohen’s first love also an older woman, like Romain’s?”

“Amélie Costa was twenty-six, eleven years older than Albert,” Louise Cohen confirmed. “She was a lovely singer who knew how to take care of him. Albert was young and proud to have won her; he liked to show her off to his friends when she picked him up from school in a horse-drawn carriage.”

“I thought she was a Hungarian countess?” Rebecca said.

“Oh no! You must be thinking of Béla Fornszek. That was a more serious relationship, and she was older than him too. She was thirty-five when she fell in love with Albert, who was only twenty at the time. He was more like a son than a lover to her and that’s how she treated him. She helped him publish his first essays and she introduced him to influential people.”

“Just like Romain and Lesley!” Mina was thrilled with the similarity.

Louise began to pace up and down, lost in thought. She had something to say but she was mulling it over. Minnie, Mina, Rebecca, Amalia and Jeanne exchanged silent glances, waiting for her to speak. Louise Cohen sighed deeply.

“If our sons—all of them—were attracted to older women, isn’t it our fault? Either they loved us too much or too little; that’s what I was wondering. You couldn’t say they lacked maternal love!”

“Certainly not!” Mina exclaimed with a tremor in her voice.

Rebecca didn’t dare speak, lest she be banned forever from their company. Her theory (she always had one) was that these women never allowed their sons the freedom they needed to become adults. Instead, they were forever seeking their mothers’ loving glances: that mirror that always told them they were wonderful. An older woman who was protective, asexual and faithful could give them that. Nothing like the overtly carnal monsters that sickened Solal, who was happy to have an excuse to avoid their company. But illness was only a respite. As soon as he was better, “the life of love” would start again and “the priestess of the swelling jaw muscles would oust the loving mother. Farewell herbal infusions, goodbye lovely poultices!’”