Jewish Mothers Never Die: A Novel (3 page)

“What kind of work did you do?”

“I helped my husband Marco at his shop, 18 rue des Minimes. We lived next door at number 20. I would seize any chance to go see Albert, but it wasn’t easy. I never sat down all day; we sold eggs wholesale, and it was backbreaking work. I had to sort them first by weight, then by the date they were laid, which I had to double check by holding each egg up to the light. Then I packed them in straw-lined crates by the dozen, neatly lined up. Then the crates had to be carried out and sent to the clients. It was exhausting.”

Minnie Marx tripped over her long skirt and nearly fell on all fours in the middle of the crammed sitting room. There were rugs piled on top of each other, chairs, tables covered with curios and boxes, candlesticks and lamps. Had each of these women brought along her most prized possessions?

“Are you alright? Did you hurt yourself?” Rebecca jumped up.

“Minnie tripped on purpose,” observed Louise.

“Why would she do that?”

“To interrupt me, of course.”

Rebecca went to help Minnie, who was cursing under her breath:

“That Louise can be so rude! She thinks she’s the only person who ever had a hard life, and with only one son. You’ve seen for yourself now how selfish she is; she doesn’t even care if I’ve twisted my ankle or broken my wrist.”

Louise Cohen simply ignored her, steering Rebecca away to tell her all about Albert’s childhood.

“Oh, pay me no attention! Really, I’m fine,” called a frustrated Minnie after them.

Rebecca had noticed that each of these women seemed to expect her full attention and she felt like a new toy they were fighting over and would eventually discard when the game no longer amused them. She didn’t know whom to favor. Louise, for her part, seemed determined to choose for her, and continued her story.

“My boy was smart and serious beyond his years. He made me want to cry. He refused to come home to an empty apartment so he would wait for me on the staircase, in the dark. He knew I’d finally come home to make supper. He made up stories while he waited. That’s how he convinced himself that everything he saw around him existed in miniature in his head. If he was at the seashore, he was sure that the Mediterranean was rolling its waves over tiny rocks, with tiny fish and a tiny sun, right in his own head. He created characters for his stories, too. He was always a writer, from his earliest days. Even when we lived in Corfu and he was so small, he saw everything there was to see on that island, that’s why he chose it as the setting for his novels.”

Whenever she spoke of her son, Louise Cohen’s face lit up. Her motherly pride softened her rude and sometimes austere demeanor. Rebecca was fascinated by Corfu and how the family had arrived in Marseille. Besides, she loved nothing better than how childhood stories revealed who a person would become.

Minnie didn’t hesitate to interrupt. She’d heard it all a hundred times before.

“Shall I tell you about Dornum?”

“That obscure German village where you were born is of no interest, Minnie. Corfu, on the other hand, is an island bathed in sunlight and honey. Albert named it Cephalonia for his trilogy about the ‘Valiant,’ where he describes the most beautiful island in the world, fragrant with citrus trees and olive trees. And the sea: ‘like an immense crystal that hardly a wave disturbs.’ He remembers the perfume of jasmine infused with the saltwater smell. His whole universe is pure poetry.”

Louise had Corfu in her blood as she and Albert had lived in harmony with its seasons. They had walked on its beaches, along its fortifications and in its busy streets, “crisscrossed by lines of laundry set to dry in the sun, blue, red, yellow, green . . .” They were inseparable on their island.

“That’s enough; I’m leaving you. This bucolic scene is getting on my nerves,” announced Minnie, getting to her feet.

“Where will she go?” Rebecca asked Louise.

“She’ll be back for dinner, don’t worry.”

Louise Cohen stretched out full length on the couch as her girlhood memories of Corfu came back to her.

“I never dreamed I was living the happiest years of my life. The Mediterranean climate rocked me, bathed me. I didn’t worry about the future. I was just happy having nothing else to do but be a mother. I was so proud of my son: From the day he was born, I was his adoring servant; years later, I would still sometimes get up in the middle of the night to make him marzipan in case he woke up hungry. Albert knew it, too. Didn’t he write: ‘My mother had no
me
: she had a son?’ I was right to go to such lengths to make him happy because he put all those memories—watching me make quince jam or the days he spent home from school sick—into
Book of My Mother
. He cherished every moment we spent together.”

It had never occurred to Rebecca that raising a child could be so simple. She could still remember how she worried incessantly over her baby: was he warm enough? Was he breathing normally? Was he bored? Could such an exceptional baby as hers be satisfied with merely eating and sleeping? She couldn’t stop obsessing over this child who had never asked to be born. She hardly slept. Like Louise, she would go frequently into his room at night—not to admire him but to reassure herself. She would even wake him to make sure he was alright. He became the center of her universe and he would make her pay for it later.

Nathan must have been twelve years old the night he refused to let her go out on a date. She had put on a pretty dress and was ready to leave, but just as she was closing the door behind her, she heard screaming. Was he making a scene or was he truly frightened? She tried reasoning with him; he cried until he nearly choked. She told him she had the right to live her own life, too, sometimes. He replied in all seriousness that she had sacrificed that right when he was born. She laughed, and she stayed home.

A beautiful, tall woman entered noiselessly.

“Jeanne Proust,” Louise murmured. “Just so you know, she’s quite a snob.”

Marcel Proust’s mother was as handsome in person as in her portrait by Anaïs Beauvais: At once forbidding and sensual, with a high forehead, a round face, dark eyes, and a steely gaze that was softened somewhat by a generous chest that a muslin collar only partly concealed. Her gentle voice seemed at odds with the cool elegance she emanated.

“I’ve come to welcome you. I believe you also have a son who is quite dependent on his mother. Nathan, if I’m not mistaken?”

Rebecca blushed like an adolescent. How could she know that? Seeing the younger woman’s embarrassment, Jeanne Proust began to laugh:

“Rest assured; just because we are dead doesn’t mean we can read other people’s thoughts. I was just outside. I overheard your conversation.”

Rebecca felt like a foreigner in a strange land. Intimidated, she wondered if she should shake hands, greet her with a kiss on the cheek, on both cheeks, merely say hello, start a conversation, wait for a verbal cue? She had become accustomed to Louise Cohen and Minnie Marx, so cozily maternal, both of them. Jeanne Proust, on the other hand, was clearly a
grande dame
. Louise broke the uncomfortable silence:

“Jeanne was always worried about Marcel. Much too worried. It made him nervous, the poor child.”

“It was his fragile health, ever since he was born,” retorted Jeanne, exasperated. “That’s why I was on pins and needles every time he became ill: he was such a sickly child. He caught every illness going.”

“You were uneasy long before he was born,” Louise reminded her.

“Why shouldn’t I have been? There was plenty to be anxious about: the war against Prussia, the Commune, the terrible battles, the noise of the bombs and the ruins they left, not to mention the daily hardships we had to endure. I felt frightened and abandoned, far from my parents, despite my frequent visits to them.”

“They lived in Auteuil, am I right?” Rebecca asked. “Like you, wasn’t Marcel very attached to that house?”

Jeanne’s face lit up as she realized Rebecca was a cultivated woman like herself. She would be able to share her most intimate literary moments with her, as well as her boundless admiration for her son’s work.

“Marcel spent many weekends there and came often on vacations,” she was delighted to confirm for her. “He remembered in particular the long, satin curtains in his bedroom that were an empire blue. Also the little sitting room whose shutters were always kept closed to ward off the day’s heat. He wrote about the smell of soap and the ‘garishly bourgeois’ dining room. Marcel loved that house even though he thought it completely tasteless. We had to get rid of it when my uncle died. That was in February, 1897: such a terribly bitter winter that year the great lawn was entirely frozen.”

“It was described in rather more prosaic terms for the purposes of its sale: ‘vast house, 1500 square meters with greenhouses and outbuildings, 121 avenue Mozart, with separate entrance 96 rue La Fontaine,’” recited Rebecca. She was rather proud of herself to have remembered the citation.

If there had been a selection process to remain in Jeanne Proust’s company, Rebecca would have passed with flying colors. So much so that Louise Cohen felt excluded from the conversation and shared her displeasure with the others:

“Apparently you find Marcel Proust much more interesting than Albert Cohen.”

“Not at all.”

“You’re a terrible liar. I’m going to go find Minnie.”

“No! Wait! You were telling me what a mother hen you were to Albert when he was little,” she reminded Louise, hoping to lure her back.

“Oh! That was nothing compared to the bond I had with Marcel,” Jeanne interrupted. “I never dreamed I would be so moved by his birth. We couldn’t have been closer.”

Rebecca turned to Louise to encourage her to join in, but she was already long gone.

“Leave her be,” Jeanne advised. “We’ll see her again later.”

Leading her new friend out of the room, Jeanne Proust wanted to know exactly how familiar Rebecca was with Marcel’s work. Rebecca hesitated before answering, afraid her knowledge would seem insignificant next to Jeanne’s and that she would be asked to leave this strange paradise.

Jeanne had shown her to the winter garden where they settled down in wicker chairs overhung by palm leaves. Everywhere was bougainvillea, oleander, and lemon and orange trees. She was enchanted by it all. Timidly, she framed her answer:

“I have a fair knowledge of his work, but since I arrived here, I think I understand better when your son writes of his separation anxiety. I miss Nathan so much that I can identify with Marcel’s despair when you left Venice: everything lost its glow. The water in the canals was suddenly no more than hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The palaces he had admired so greatly before seemed to him just uninteresting piles of marble. Your leaving distorted his whole vision of the world.”

“For me, too,” said Jeanne Proust. “I was beside myself to think of him all alone. It was around that time that he wrote me these admirable lines: ‘When two people like us are so intimately connected, it makes no difference how close together or far apart we may be; we are ever in close communication and always we remain at each other’s side.’ Isn’t that magnificent?”

“That reminds me of his description of the ‘Young Ladies of the Telephone’ in the
Guermantes Way
, I think. He’s speaking to his grandmother—he in Doncières, she in Paris—when he brings up these ‘Guardian Angels,’ the ‘All Powerful by whose intervention the absent rise up at our side, without our being permitted to set eyes on them.’”

Delighted by this reader emeritus, Jeanne pulled a packet of letters from her pocket and handed them to Rebecca, who began to finger through what was an enormous stack of correspondence. Jeanne had insisted that Marcel write her about every last detail of his life, beginning with simple housekeeping. She wanted to stay informed of all his affairs. What needed to be “washed, wiped, inspected, resoled, labeled, darned, embroidered, mended, from collars to buttonholes?” Jeanne wanted to be part of his intimate rituals: what time did he get up and what time did he wash? Had he worked? How long? Did he go out? With whom? She ended one of her letters with this advice: “Be very careful when you are cooking and heating in the evening, I worry about you every night.”

“‘Be very careful?’ You sound like you’re addressing a child.”

“Marcel was entirely unsuited to practicalities,” Jeanne replied defensively.

“Weren’t you a bit nosy?” Rebecca wondered out loud, still rifling through the letters. “You left nothing to chance. Even when he was fulfilling his military service, you asked him to date each of his letters and to inform you of his schedule, hour by hour. You seem rather obsessed about his use of time. I wonder if that explains why he finally inverted his biological clock to write at night and sleep during the day?”

“I can’t say. We had the same personality, the same jealousy, the same possessiveness and worry. He led a very disordered life but he still needed to kiss me goodnight in order to sleep.”

“It’s not so uncommon as you think,” interrupted Louise Cohen, who had found them again.

“Oh! Louise!” Rebecca was startled by every “apparition” of these silently moving women.

“Albert wrote about my bedtime kisses and stories, too. There’s not a mother in the world who doesn’t kiss her child goodnight,” Louise remarked.

“Well, it was different for me,” Jeanne Proust assured her. “It pained me terribly to leave him. Every night before he fell asleep, while he tossed and turned in his bed, I would wait stock-still in the hallway between our bedrooms, listening to his every breath.”

“‘For a long time I used to go to bed early,’” Rebecca said, reciting from memory the famous first line of
Remembrance of Things Past
. “His night fears must have been very powerful since he begins the novel with them.”

“He described that same scene on five different occasions in his books,” Jeanne revealed proudly.

“The kiss scene is mentioned five times?”

Jeanne was emphatic in her response:

“In each version, Marcel describes the intolerable absence of his mother. She abandons him in his room to a night that seems endless. If she is in the house entertaining guests, he waits in vain for her to return. If she is going out for the evening, she leaves him alone. That she had a life of her own was unbearable.”