Jewish Mothers Never Die: A Novel (23 page)

Rebecca was dumbfounded by the comparison of coitus and writing, walking and the mother.

“Freud was always writing, wasn’t he? Countless notes, biographies, pieces of his autobiography, conference papers, lectures, prefaces, translations, essays, some twenty thousand letters. And he spent all his free time walking! He must have had quite an Oedipal complex!”

“So, why didn’t he come to my funeral?”

“How do you know?” Rebecca asked, astonished.

“His biographers were very thorough, you know. They say that he sent my granddaughter Anna in his place, since he was too busy to pay me his last respects. Did I mean nothing to him?”

“No, of course not. He must have been afraid, not of you, but of himself: afraid to discover his own shame and guilt, terrified to realize how much he loved you and why he treated you so badly. Don’t forget that he calls the death of a mother a ‘crucial event.’”

“Maybe. Although he wrote that he considered his father’s death the most important thing that ever happened to him. He always defended Jacob, but he would have been happy if I’d disappeared from his life.”

Rebecca, who had by now integrated the customs of this unusual paradise, brought in a tray of hot chocolate with bread and jam and placed it on the coffee table. Amalia thanked her and began to serve herself hungrily. After she’d eaten everything on her plate, she was calm when she spoke again:

“It was my fault. As dictators, we were equals, but he went too far, and whereas he was respected as the patriarch of the family, I was dismissed as an ogress.”

“Do you have an example?”

Amalia closed her eyes, thinking, then began to talk.

“Sigi was just horrible to Esti, his daughter-in-law, his son Martin’s wife. He wouldn’t let her choose her children’s names, nor would he allow her to bring in her own pediatrician, whom she had loved as a child, for her own children. Sigi disapproved of him and there was nothing to be done to persuade him otherwise.”

“She wasn’t allowed to name her own children?”

Rebecca didn’t dare imagine what her reaction might have been if her father had insisted on naming Nathan; she would have felt stripped of her role as a mother. But Amalia was fuming again:

“I didn’t have any choice either when Sigismund was born, since Jacob’s father had passed away a few months earlier and it seemed normal to name our son after him. It was later that he chose to call himself Sigmund. Nevertheless, Sigi insisted that his grandson be named Anton, after Anton von Freund, a Hungarian benefactor who had given a considerable sum of money for the construction of a psychoanalytic institute in Budapest . . . . Esti and Martin finally gave in. Sigmund’s tyrannical ways went uncontested. His second grandchild, a girl, was named Miriam Sophie, Sophie being the name of his own daughter who had died in 1919 and the only name he would consider.”

“Was he like that with all his children?”

“He was less dictatorial with his youngest son, little Ernst. The girls, of course, were treated differently: he insisted on supervising everything they did and he forbade them to work. Anna, his youngest, was the only one who stood up to him.”

“How could you have been considered more formidable than him?”

“I was, nevertheless. My granddaughter, Judith Heller, said I was authoritarian, imperious and always in a foul mood. My grandson, Martin, said he would never forget my severity and my lack of empathy. He was referring to my supposed impassivity when my granddaughter, Mausi, committed suicide at twenty-three years old. She was beautiful, stunning, and she wanted to study medicine like her uncle Sigmund. In reality, she was depressed, something nobody saw, neither Sigi nor Anna, her cousin, though they were close. We couldn’t have been more traumatized by her death. A year later, her brother drowned in the lake. He was nineteen. I was petrified by so many horrible events in such rapid succession, I didn’t know what to do, or how to help Rosa, my daughter, who had just lost her two children. So I did nothing. I know she never forgave me. The worst criticism came from Dolfi, my youngest daughter, who lived with me until I died and blamed me for all her problems, including her spinsterhood. Everyone thought I was an insensitive monster but I kept my grieving to myself.”

Jeanne approached the table, her eyes reddened by the tears she had struggled to blink back listening to Amalia. She poured herself a cup of hot chocolate, as if it might bolster her.

“Marcel dreamed of killing me, too,” she stammered. “I never dared mention it.”

She began pacing about the room, too agitated to keep still.

“How can that be?” Rebecca asked, startled. “After everything he said about you, everything he wrote about his extraordinary love for you!”

Jeanne Proust sighed:

“My little wolf came to the defense of a matricide case, he who could never do without me! Fortunately, I was already here when I read the article about this incredible story. I knew her well, Henri Van Blarenberghe’s mother. She was a tall, tight-lipped, unattractive woman, who kept to herself. She was dedicated to her only son, but she never revealed anything, and talked only about superficial topics, such as fashion, the cost of living, or politics, seen from her limited perspective.”

“Was she the murdered woman?”

“Indeed, may she rest in peace.”

“Why did Marcel write an article about the murder?”

“Marcel was always so polite. When Henri’s father died, he sent his friend his condolences, writing how distressed Adrien and I would have been for his loss had we still been alive. A few days later, Henri’s response arrived, declaring his filial piety and describing how relieved he was to have his mother at his side in his time of mourning. Marcel relates all this in his article.”

“There was no reason to suspect that Henri was in conflict with his mother or that he wanted to see her dead?”

“Nothing at all. Just as Marcel was preparing to write him back, he read in the newspaper that shortly after his father’s funeral, Henri Van Blarenberghe killed his mother and then himself with a knife.”

“Marcel must have been shocked that one of his friends could commit such a crime. So wasn’t it normal that he would express his reactions in an article? He certainly didn’t approve of the murder.”

“That’s true, but he never condemns the crime. What bothers me is that Marcel writes so coolly about such an atrocity, as if he had no relationship to the people involved. He quotes what were reported to be
Mrs. Van Blarenberghe’s last words, as her son was stabbing her to death: ‘What have you done to me! What have you done to me!’ Then he launches into an erudite analysis of the crime, comparing Henri first to Oedipus who pricks out his eyes with pins after learning of his mother’s suicide, and then to King Lear embracing Cordelia’s dead body.”

“Marcel says that all sons are criminals. They ‘kill all those who love us by the worries we give them.’”

Jeanne was too upset to listen anymore.

Rebecca brought in on a pretty platter of fresh pastries she had picked out to please Jeanne; having lived her life surrounded by lovely things, nothing saddened her more than sloppiness.

“If I were you, I would have been more upset by his short story,
A Young Girl’s Confession
,” Rebecca remarked.

“Why? It’s the story of a young woman who is kissed by a common Casanova the day before her wedding. It’s entirely made-up,” Jeanne said.

Rebecca didn’t want to disabuse her, but she felt sure the idea must have come from Proust’s life. Even though the story is told from the girl’s point of view, you’d have to be a dim-wit not to realize Marcel was the subject. The mother in that story also resembles the mothers in
Jean Santeuil
and
Remembrance of Things Past;
a loving worrier who is stingy with displays of affection. She nevertheless showers the girl with attention on her brief visits in order to “mitigate” her “excessive susceptibility.” That sounded just like Jeanne: ambivalent and awkward, genuinely admiring at times yet more often critical. Marcel writes in
A Young Girl’s Confession
that nothing bothered the girl’s mother more than her “lack of will,” exactly as it was for Jeanne with Marcel. He also has his protagonist say: “The realization of my fine projects for work, for calm and reflection preoccupied my mother and me above everything else, because we felt . . . that it would be nothing more than the image, projected into life, of that will created by myself within myself which my mother had conceived and nurtured.” The relationship between Jeanne and Marcel is summed up in that sentence: their peculiar symbiosis and pathological identification with each other, their way of living vicariously through the other.

But Jeanne could not be swayed.

“You’re talking nonsense! The mother falls from the balcony where she has been spying on the girl and her lover, and is killed. That seems quite unnecessary considering that the girl, who was twenty, knew what she was doing!”

Rebecca kept her thoughts to herself, namely how that scene seemed a precursor to the episode in
Remembrance of Things Past
where the narrator watches through a window while Mademoiselle Vinteuil and her girlfriend deface the portrait of Mademoiselle Vinteuil’s father. What struck Rebecca more, however, was that, in the short story, the mother dies from the shock of seeing something she shouldn’t have, “from my shining eyes to my blazing cheeks, proclaimed a sensual, stupid brutal joy.” Proust has the girl say again: “I thought then of the horror of anyone who, having observed me a little while ago kissing my mother with such melancholy tenderness, should see me thus transformed into a beast.” Wasn’t Marcel writing about himself? Surely, if he had revealed his homosexuality to his mother, it would have killed her. And that, precisely, was the subject of
A Young Girl’s Confession
.

To lighten the somber mood in the living room, Rebecca proposed they watch Woody Allen’s short film,
Oedipus Wrecks
.

“It’s incredibly funny: the protagonist admits to his therapist that he would do anything to get rid of his overbearing mother and even wishes her dead. His tone of voice is so offhand and casual, though, that you can’t help laughing.”

“I don’t believe it,” Jeanne declared.

“I’ll just tell you how the movie begins,” Rebecca said, hoping to convince them.

Sheldon, a dutiful son, takes his mother to a magic show. The magician invites her on stage, has her step into a box, and then makes her disappear. No one is more surprised than the magician, because nothing like this has ever happened in his act. Sheldon goes home alone, rejoicing; his mother has vanished and he had nothing to do with it. He hardly has time to get used to the idea, however, when his mother appears in the sky over Manhattan. Now she can watch his every move and scold him for acting like a little boy. She makes him feel guilty too: how could he be so ungrateful after everything she had sacrificed for him, her adored son?

“Wonderful! Let’s all watch!” Amalia said, getting to her feet.

They gathered in a fully equipped multimedia room; there was a big screen, an impressive video library, all kinds of musical instruments and a stage worthy of a theater. Minnie, who frequently came here to watch and re-watch her sons’ movies and television shows, was playing the harp when Rebecca, Amalia and Jeanne walked in without knocking, waking Mina, who had been napping in a row of seats, and disturbing Louise Cohen, who had been deep in a book by Philip Roth.

“We’re going to watch
Oedipus Wrecks
,” Rebecca announced. “Do you want to join us?”

Mina loved the movie; it reminded her of what Romain had said about her:

“I was trying to get rid of her, after all, of her overpowering love, of her overwhelming emotional pressure on me.” She wasn’t the least ashamed of her role as his overbearing, emotionally exhausting mother.

“You were his conscience, his
dybbuk
, his guardian angel,” Rebecca observed.

“Exactly!” cried Mina, thrilled by the comparison.

Louise Cohen put her book down, the better to torture herself with the memory of Albert.

“Of all our sons, Albert was the most ungrateful. It’s true he never tried to kill me, but he certainly mistreated me.”

“Then, what do you make of
Book of My Mother
?” Rebecca asked, surprised. “It’s thrilled generations of readers.”

Rebecca couldn’t understand how the most admirable of them all, the one who was the most loved, who inspired Albert Cohen to praise his mother’s incomparable love, how could she have doubted her son’s feelings for her?

“But don’t you see that Albert’s only talking about himself?” Louise replied. “The reason he wrote the
Book of My Mother
was not to glorify me, as you appear to think. No! He writes to absolve himself of his guilt. He knew he wasn’t the best son and he also knew he should have come to visit me in Paris more often; he could have come any time by train from Geneva. He was too busy, though, poor boy, and it exhausted him to have to bear my adoring gaze as I begged him for a few moments of his attention. One evening, he lost his temper with me because I phoned up a countess who had invited him to dinner, to ask if my son, Albert, was still at her house. It was so late; I had started to worry. He could have had an accident. He was mortified by my intruding, with my foreign accent, and he let me know it! I was so humiliated. I begged his forgiveness, which made Albert think I felt guilty for what I had done. But I couldn’t bring myself to face my shame. When did he become so selfish that he preferred the company of perfect strangers over that of his own mother? Was that insensitive snob my Albert? I was so horrified that I burst out sobbing uncontrollably. I couldn’t understand how things had gotten so bad between my little prince and me.”

“How could you think that of his book? He worshipped you,” Rebecca said. She had never gotten over his story of mythical filial love.

Unconvinced, Louise continued to provide her version of events:

“I think that the only thing that interested Albert was his writing. I was just material for his character, and a pathetic character at that: he describes me as having ‘a rather large nose’ and ‘slightly swollen ankles’ and he wrote that I was ‘a bit ridiculous’ as I ‘lumbered along with one arm outstretched to steady my walk.’ I can recite for you some other things he called me: ‘a wicked fairy,’ ‘not very clever,’ ‘carefree,’ ‘awkward,’ ‘clumsy,’ ‘simple.’ He even goes so far as to say I was a ‘a poor, put-upon saint’ who was ‘born to be swindled’ and ‘a little unhinged by . . . distress.’ But no matter how much I studied my reflection in the mirror to try to find that person he describes, I didn’t see the least resemblance.”