Jewish Mothers Never Die: A Novel (21 page)

“Freud never fell for an older woman,” Rebecca observed.

“That’s what you think!” Amalia shot back. “When Sigi was only sixteen, we sent him to rest in Freiberg, where he was born, but there he fell in love with Gisela Fluss’s mother, though he never admitted it. He wanted a mother figure, just like Albert Cohen and Romain Gary.”

“But was she ever his lover?”

“It doesn’t matter if she was,” Pauline replied. “The main thing is that he hid his feelings for Eleanor, all the while pretending he was in love with her daughter, who was sixteen, like him. Eleanor was an intellectual and my complete opposite. I was just a housewife and he was ashamed of me. I realized that.”

“Why are you so critical of yourself? Sigmund admired you and recognized your power. He tells the story of how, when he was six years old, you explained to him, rubbing your palms together as if you were making knödels so that the dry skin of your hands flaked off, that man came from the dust of the earth and would return to that state. It was a lesson he never forgot.”

“Perhaps, but I don’t think I was the mother he would have liked me to be. He was always falling under the influence of women who were all very different from me.”

“Marcel never replaced me, though he wasn’t as complicated as Sigmund.”

“More introverted, though,” Amalia retorted.

“Are you insinuating something about his homosexuality?” Jeanne asked, feeling vulnerable again.

“No, I was referring to his shyness and his oversensitiveness. His sexual preferences are common knowledge; you shouldn’t take offense.”

“That’s not what pains me, but rather the fact that my little wolf was never happy in love. Marcel knew he would have to leave me if he were ever in love. But that meant risking rejection, and that was impossible for him; it was too frightening. He preferred to stay close to me. He even says in his famous questionnaire that the worst thing that could have happened to him would have been not knowing me.”

Amalia Freud was disgusted by Jeanne’s contrived concern:

“You made it impossible for Marcel to live apart from you. He was incapable of a romantic relationship because of that. He didn’t dare risk your displeasure by showing that he could be anyone other than the person you wanted him to be.”

“I can’t understand a single word of your nonsense,” Jeanne shot back, furious. “I don’t care if you think I was a bad mother; you wouldn’t be the only one here. But if you’re implying that I was responsible for his homosexuality, say it outright. The ‘race of aunts’ he writes about stretches far and wide. And I’m not referring only to Marcel’s fiction, with Vaugoubert, Jupien and Morel, the Prince of Foix, everyone who gravitates around Charlus, Nissim Bernard, the Prince of Guermantes, Saint-Loup . . . He also explores lesbianism at length: Albertine and the girls at Balbec. And how can a mother be held accountable if her child is a homosexual? It’s not her fault.”

“It seems to me you hide behind what he wrote, and yet you were constantly watching over him, never leaving him any freedom.”

“He had me; what else did he need?”

Pauline Einstein was listening from a distant corner of the garden. After having been alone for so long, she shunned group gatherings. Rebecca went to keep her company.

“Albert didn’t have as many problems as the others, and it wasn’t just because he was absorbed by his mathematical equations,” she said. “He knew how lucky he was and never subscribed to the negative perception of love that our friends’ sons over there shared.”

Seeing Rebecca’s astonishment, she explained:

“Proust and Cohen were as tortured by love as by their own pessimism. They believed no more in love than in marriage or even friendship for that matter.”

Rebecca recalled certain passages in
Remembrance of Things Past
, where love is a form of torture, swinging wildly between extremes of frustration and suffering. The examples are as numerous as they are unfortunate. Swann is consumed by jealousy over Odette, and he speaks of his love as of an illness that must be cured, before admitting finally that he threw his life away for a girl who wasn’t even his type. He changed his tastes, his friends, his habits, for her: was it worth it? Saint-Loup lies to Gilberte, though he loves her, and the Narrator loses his head trying to keep Albertine to himself. The only happy lovers are the Marquess de Villeparisis and the Marquis de Norpois, but he has much less to say about them. “I must choose, either to cease from suffering, or to cease from loving,” Proust writes.

One by one, the others joined them. A candlelit table awaited the assembled party for dinner. The mood was romantic, as if a love potion had been diffused in the air. Louise Cohen wanted to discuss
Belle du Seigneur,
and no one saw any reason to stop her.

“Just like his author, Solal tried to keep the flame of passion alive. True love, the kind that grows and lasts, is a contradiction in terms. My son said so: ‘Their words of love had become good manners, a polite ritual, gliding over the linoleum of habit.’ He calls Adrien Deume the ‘stomach-churner’ in
Belle du Seigneur
. He didn’t have very high-flown ideas about love, you’re right about that, Pauline.”

“I don’t agree,” Jeanne said. “He was skeptical about marriage but he enjoys describing the blazing passion that consumes Solal and Ariane.”

“It all finishes badly for them in the end, since they commit a double suicide,” Louise remembered regretfully. “The ‘sublime delirium’ they feel in the beginning becomes a ‘prison of love.’ Their first meetings, the desire, the waiting, the exaltation: none of that lasts. Solal reveals to Ariane his ten-step plan to seduce her, and still she falls in love with him, just as he had predicted and planned. It’s a disaster: he has to keep it exciting, make her jealous, invent problems so as not to succumb to his boredom.”

“Cohen describes love marvelously, and no one can deny it,” Jeanne countered with immense conviction.

For the first time, Jeanne was taking the side of someone other than Marcel. Did she have a romantic streak, Rebecca wondered? She had held love up as the most sublime sentiment, her voice filling with emotion, and in her agitation, she creased and re-creased the folds in her dress.

“You describe Cohen as a cynic when, in fact, he was an idealist. I was deeply moved by the beginning of
Belle du Seigneur
. I’ve read it a dozen times, and it’s still the most beautiful declaration of love I know. He has won his beloved Ariane and he wants to live a love that is pure and unique and absolute. So he disguises himself as an old, poor, ugly and toothless Jew and he demands her to love him. He believes in her, he does everything in his power to convince himself she will be different from other women. He carries off the subterfuge admirably and he believes for a moment that she loves him too because she says she will kiss him, but she throws a glass at him instead.”

“Yes, and he is disappointed to learn that two teeth are all that stand between him and the great love he idealizes,” Rebecca agreed. “It seems absurd but it’s true. Should that be so surprising? I wonder. We love our children unconditionally, but we choose our men. Love doesn’t fall from the sky, no matter what Anna Karenina says to justify her affair with Vronsky. She insists her love is God-given, that they were meant for each other, that it was her destiny to cheat on her husband. Albert Cohen, on the other hand, knows that if Vronsky had been ugly or a man of lesser rank, she would have never looked his way. Anna Karenina is no different than most women, Ariane included: only the strong and handsome will do, not the toothless old men.”

Louise Cohen was mesmerized by the vigor of their discussion and the conviction with which each of them argued her point. She followed the exchange of volleys between Jeanne and Rebecca as if she were watching a tennis match. Minnie cut their debate short:

“Groucho was a realist; he held no illusions about love. One of his favorite stories goes like this: a woman tells him she loves him, so he asks her if she would feel the same if he were poor, to which she replies, ‘I would, but I wouldn’t tell you.’”

In the heat of their conversation, they emptied glass after glass drinking too much.

“Look at Woody Allen’s movies,” Rebecca said. “They always rest on a communication problem between two lovers. Everything is complicated: boredom, sex, self-esteem. By definition, a relationship is unhappy and deceitful.”

There is a scene in
Annie Hall
where Alvy and Annie have just returned to Annie’s apartment after a tennis match and are standing on the balcony. Subtitles appear, revealing what they are thinking,
as opposed to what they are saying. Alvy is talking about all the photos on the walls of the apartment but he can’t stop wondering what Annie looks like naked. Annie is telling him about her photography classes but is ashamed to hear herself talk: An imbecile capable of only the most banal statements, she thinks. Alvy’s not listening to a word, though, because he has already fallen for her. Being in love means never having to listen to each other!

“Do you know that Woody Allen joke?” Minnie Marx asked. “A man walks into a psychiatrist’s office and says, ‘Doctor, my brother is crazy; he thinks he’s a chicken.’ The doctor says, ‘Well, why don’t you get him institutionalized?’ ‘I would,’ the brother says. ‘But I need the eggs.’ Woody tells the joke to describe relationships: ‘They’re irrational and crazy and absurd, but we keep going through it because most of us need the eggs.’”

Rebecca was daydreaming. Even if she never met Nettie, she would always have the same image of Woody Allen: funny and pessimistic at the same time. Her opinion of Freud, Einstein, Proust and the others had evolved, however, since she met their mother.

Louise Cohen continued to drink, but the alcohol wasn’t improving her mood.

“Woody Allen and Marcel Proust are pessimists, but Albert was the most unhappy person who ever lived. He was bored his entire life. Can you imagine what it’s like to need to invent stories for your wife just to create some kind of excitement? Like Sheherazade, he knew that his life was nothing if it weren’t for the tales he told. So he imagined
Solal
for Yvonne Imer and
Belle du Seigneur
for Bella, but it all started with his first wife, Elisabeth. He insisted on the seriousness of their relationship; he was her lord and she must worship him. And since he would not tolerate any fun and games from her, she stopped talking. There was nothing left for him but to take over the conversation.”

“She let that happen?” Rebecca asked.

“Let me read you one of her letters; she describes the awe in which she held him: ‘My master and my friend, have you really chosen me to be recreated in your image? The honor is too great, too strong for my humble self.’ She admired him unconditionally. But she could hardly do otherwise: he forbade her to have any interests that might distract her from him. Their sex life suffered, too. He says through Solal that he was ‘tired of the voracious lips and tongue of women’ and he laments about the ‘peculiar suction that glues male and female together.’ Can you write such a thing if you’ve never felt that way?”

“You’re tough on Albert. Was he really as egomaniacal as all that?”

“He was obsessed by the horrors of conjugal life, the toothbrushes, the flushing toilets,” Jeanne continued. “He wasn’t the only one who detested all that.”

“He would never have had such thoughts if he had loved his wife,” Louise replied. “As for me, I can still remember how happy it made me to lie alongside my husband’s warm body and to feel our chests rising and falling in unison. Nothing was ever as soothing to me.”

“Yes, well, a hot water bottle does the trick just as well,” Jeanne.

Louise Cohen was changing physically before their eyes. The more she talked about her son, the more deepened the lines on her face. Dark circles appeared, and her complexion became mottled.

“Albert Cohen was incapable of love,” she declared. “One of his mistresses, Jane Fillion, said, ‘Albert Cohen never loved anyone except Albert Cohen. But he loved that man with all his heart.’ He wasn’t capable of any sacrifice or compromise for the simple reason that no one else existed for him. His second wife said as much: ‘He denies you even the right to be a human being.’ She wore herself out submitting to his demands and then left him, finally. The people he loved had no actual substance. Like Solal says, they were ‘dream figures’ only.”

“In fact,” Rebecca began, following a new idea that had just come to her, “
Belle du Seigneur
’s title is saying that the woman loved is both beautiful and belongs to her master. She has neither identity nor substance.”

“It’s my fault that Albert was impossible to live with,” Louise lamented. “I never taught him how to get along with people. For me, he was such a priceless treasure that I used to move out of his way to leave him all the room he needed.”

Jeanne was compulsively tidying up the remaining bottles on the table. Rebecca was helping her, but her mind was running over their conversation and the questions it had raised. To what extent were these mothers responsible for how their sons turned out? Why were they all unhappy lovers? What could explain Cohen’s tyranny, Proust’s solitude, Romain Gary’s suffering, and Woody Allen’s complexes? They all needed to be loved and reassured. They sought an image of themselves so they would not suffer. The only relationship they could tolerate was one that excluded the other, in a fusional love.

Amalia Freud poured herself a shot of whiskey.

“Sigi demanded constant proof of Martha’s love for him, which he always doubted, because he was wildly jealous. He was extremely fond of his wife and believed her to be more powerful than she probably was. How could he compare her to Melusine, a female spirit with total power over
her husband? Was it because he feared she would turn him into a weak human being? Sigmund never failed to tyrannize her and, when he felt she had regained the upper hand, he no longer paid any attention to her. He made her life hell because she had to agree with him on everything. Even her own family had to be sacrificed in her all-consuming devotion to him. He didn’t just want her to criticize her mother and her brother but to stop loving them entirely. If she didn’t share absolutely everything with him, she no longer deserved to be his wife. I found a letter Sigi wrote to Martha during their engagement: ‘Nothing pleased me before I met you, and now that you are mine, in principle at least, my only purpose in life is to possess you completely. If I fail to do this, I hold my life to be of no value.’ In the guise of a love letter, he wrote only about himself. It’s a shame he never made the effort to see Martha as she really was: devoted, spirited, organized and loving. He didn’t know her at all.”