Jewish Mothers Never Die: A Novel (4 page)

“Could we look at a few of his books?” Rebecca asked.

“You don’t believe me?” Jeanne replied.

Rebecca couldn’t think how to explain her need to verify Jeanne’s claims in the texts. Professional force of habit, she concluded.

“I do believe you,” Rebecca insisted. “I like to read, that’s all.”

So as not to offend Jeanne, she decided to appease her by asking her to tell the different versions of the night kiss.

Thrilled to have found someone who so clearly appreciated her son’s work, she began.

“None of the scenes are quite the same. The most famous passage is in
Swann’s Way
, where he describes the evening when Swann comes to dinner. In
Jean Santeuil,
it’s Professor Surlande, the doctor, who is the guest. In both cases, Marcel knows there is company that evening and that he must stay in his room, but he is terrified by the coming night and he is desperate for some way to call me—I mean, the Narrator’s mother—back to him. Would I come say goodnight, kiss him a last time? The passage revolves around that essential question, and Marcel creates an almost palpable level of suspense.”

“It couldn’t have been easy; he digresses so,” said Louise.

Unperturbed by her sarcasm, Jeanne continued.

“As the mother mounts the stairs, Marcel slips out of his room. Surprised, petrified, she stares at him: what is he doing in the hall? What will her husband do if he discovers them there? She’s afraid he will disapprove of her helping her son back into bed. On the other hand, it would be cruel to leave him trembling there on the threshold.”

She turned to Rebecca.

“Do parents still believe that it’s necessary to treat children harshly to prepare them for adulthood?”

“It’s a subject of debate,” Rebecca offered, putting together a longer answer in her head, about Baby Boomers, pampered children, the flip-flopping of certain psychologists on the question, but Jeanne interrupted her thoughts.

“In
Jean Santeuil
, the Narrator’s mother explains to Surlande that an excess of affection spoils a child; he should be drilled into shape instead. She wants to break her son of his ‘little girl habits’ and so she does not return to his room.”

“Is that what you thought, too?”

“My husband was a great proponent of a ‘manly’ education, but not me. It made me sick to obey Adrien, but sometimes I did. If I could have, I would have slept in my son’s room every night. Marcel wrote that his one consolation was that I would come to kiss him goodnight, but he also describes how painful that moment was for him, because it was too brief; I would have to leave him again. I had no wish to inflict that pain on him.”

“So you tried to reason with him.”

“What else could I do? Marcel knew how much it upset me to be called back to him again and again, and that his fits interfered with the education I was trying to instill in him. Knowing this was not enough to prevent him from doing it, however. Sometimes, out of the blue, his father suggested that I go to him. He describes such a scene in
Swann’s Way
.”

“That’s incredible!” Rebecca burst out. “You were strict when his father would have been lenient because he understood how frightened his child was. You’re the one who comes off as inflexible.”

“How dare you criticize me that way!” Jeanne shot back, furious.

“She’s sensitive,” Louise Cohen whispered.

Feeling guilty now, Rebecca excused herself.

“I’m really not one to judge. Nathan stuck to me like glue. He used to call me all the time. I couldn’t eat lunch without him interrupting, more than once too. My work colleagues would always complain. He’d ask for advice on everything: what to eat for lunch, what time to leave to catch a train. He wouldn’t hesitate to send me a text when I was in the middle of teaching, with the most trivial questions, but they were paralyzing for him. The more ridiculous the question, the more he needed help deciding. And I always answered him.”

Lost in thought about Nathan, Rebecca hadn’t noticed that the others had left. Had she been talking to herself? Where had they disappeared to? She had probably scared them away with her talk of texting. How could she not have heard them leave? Someone had brought in a very elegant porcelain tea service. Who? Did it matter? Alone for the first time, Rebecca let her mind wander. Had she, like Jeanne Proust, raised a son who was unable to live without his mother? Hadn’t she, too, encouraged his dependence? A wave of anxiety washed over her. Hoping for distraction, she walked, reciting poems to herself. Verlaine always soothed her in times of crisis, like a beautiful painting or a magnificent landscape.

She came to a library so enormous she couldn’t help comparing it to Alexandria’s before it went up in flames. There were hundreds of thousands of books, on shelves as far as the eye could see. If she had ever wondered what heaven might be like, she couldn’t have asked for more; this was her kind of paradise. She chose a volume of poetry and began to read, but oddly enough, Verlaine’s verses didn’t move her. She tried Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Baudelaire and even a few of her favorite fables by La Fontaine; they left her absolutely indifferent. Even Eluard had no effect whatsoever. Page after page only bored her to death (She found the expression a strange one in her present context!). The poems she loved best of all seemed dull, insipid even, and far less interesting, certainly, than her own life—which was no more. She was eaten up by the thought that she had failed to raised Nathan properly. No one could accuse her of being careless with his education, but she had gone about it alone: no models, no references. Here, surrounded by these different examples of maternal love, it seemed to her that everything would have been different if she had had a mother. Brooding over the question, she could not bring herself to read. So she was relieved to see Jeanne come in and begin searching for a book . . . by Proust, on one of the shelves.

“I’m disturbing you,” Jeanne excused herself.

“Not at all; I’m not reading. I was thinking about a mother’s role and how complicated it is. I was wondering whether we are the same parents to our children as our parents were to us, or whether the opposite is true, which comes to the same thing. You were talking about your emotional attachment to Marcel, but what kind of a relationship did you have with your mother?”

“I adored her. We were so very close. Everything she knew and loved, she passed on to me: Beethoven, Saint-Simon’s
Memoirs,
Madame de Sévigné’s
Letters,
the basics of piano, as well as Latin, English and German. Culture was of the utmost importance to her, and for me, too. I admit that I did precisely the same thing for Marcel that my mother did for me.”

“Let’s go find the others.”

Jeanne led Rebecca back into the living room. There was no one to be found, but a grey shawl was draped over a sagging armchair, a shoe had been forgotten in the middle of the floor, and a barely-touched box of chocolates lay suggestively open. It was hard not to notice that Rebecca’s new companions didn’t exactly share her maniacal attention to order. The slightest mess was enough to wake her up in the middle of the night; everything had to be in its place by the time she switched off her bedside light. Jeanne, on the other hand, didn’t seem bothered in the least. On the contrary, sitting perfectly erect on a chair, she looked like a duchess as she motioned to Rebecca to make herself comfortable on the sofa. She began to tell the story of her brother, a respected lawyer and a bachelor until the age of forty-four. Their mother never lived to see him marry. Devoted as he was to her, he probably would have never taken a wife if Adèle hadn’t decided one day to breathe her last. She was an exemplary mother who declared her love to her daughter in impassioned letters, rather like Madame de Sévigné. But she could be extremely strict, too. Jeanne had written to Marcel once: “I know one other mother who is nothing compared to her children, who
transfers
herself entirely to them.”

“Madame de Sévigné was so invasive a mother that the poor girl had to run clear to the other side of France to get away from her,” Rebecca observed. “Contrary to what people may think, it was not a happy relationship but an abusive one.”

“She was a Jewish mother and she didn’t even know it,” Louise Cohen put in, as she settled herself next to Rebecca, supporting her back with a cushion.

Rebecca was becoming accustomed to the women’s unexpected comings and goings and didn’t even blink this time. She was on a favorite topic now.

“Madame de Sévigné was demanding, intelligent and always made her presence felt. My own mother was the same,” Jeanne remarked.

“She must have been a terror, just like me; I always did too much for Albert,” Louise Cohen said.

“Mothers are always held accountable for everything that goes wrong,” Jeanne continued. “If we’re absent, it’s scandalous. If we’re too present, it’s unbearable. Yet no one seems to understand that it’s the force of our love that drives us to constantly intervene. Even Marcel struggled with that; he has Madame de Villeparisis chastise Madame de Sévigné for the exaggerated way she worries over her daughter.”

“And you interpret that as a criticism of yourself?” Rebecca asked, horrified by Jeanne’s narcissism. She evidently had read all of Marcel’s books but only with an eye to herself. Was the love Marcel bore her the only interesting part of
Remembrance of Things Past
? Was the reason she turned her gaze so frequently to it so she could find her reflection in its pages?

“You can make fun of me all you want, I couldn’t care in the least,” said Jeanne angrily.

“You aren’t the only overbearing mother,” countered Louise Cohen. “Rebecca, I’m sure you’ve read
Portnoy’s Complaint
, by Philip Roth. I discovered it here in this library and I come back to it again and again.”

“Did you want to talk about Sophie Portnoy? She’s a horribly possessive mother.”

“And so intrusive that her son, Alex, becomes convinced that every one of his teachers is his mother in disguise and that she has superhuman powers because she’s always back in the kitchen when he arrives home from school. Every day, he wonders if he’ll walk in the door and surprise her before she has time to change back into herself. It’s a fantasy he never outgrows; he believes steadfastly in the omnipotence of his mother.”

“Sophie Portnoy is a character in a novel,” Jeanne reminded them, not bothering to hide her disdain.

“Roth must have found inspiration somewhere,” replied Rebecca. “Nothing is complete fiction. Have you ever seen Woody Allen’s movie,
Oedipus Wrecks
? It’s a short film in the
New York Stories
trilogy—Scorsese and Coppola made the other two. Woody Allen has this dream that he’s driving a hearse with his mother in the coffin, but even though she’s dead, she’s still criticizing his driving, complaining that if he doesn’t slow down, she won’t go to the cemetery. So he does, and for the rest of the ride she’s giving him directions how to get there.”

“I’ve never seen it,” said Louise.

Rebecca was surprised to hear herself use her lecture hall voice to explain how Mrs. Millestein watched over her son.

“Her garishly made-up face, lined with wrinkles and crowned by a lavender-colored permanent wave, appears in the clouds. She begins to ask everyone in the street if her son’s behaving himself. She has photos of Sheldon to prove that he was once an adorable little boy. But Sheldon is in his fifties now and can’t hide from her, not even in his own apartment, because she’s peering in at him through the window. He doesn’t have a moment of respite; nothing escapes her. She’s more all-knowing than God.”

“Nettie didn’t like that movie very much; such a caricature of her,” mused Jeanne.

“I can certainly understand her reaction. Where is she? I’d love to meet her.”

“Perhaps she’s still in one of those clouds, watching her son like in the film,” wondered Louise.

“Impossible,” Jeanne replied, exasperated.

“It’s been ages since we’ve seen her,” Louise observed.

“Why did she leave?” Rebecca still wanted to know.

“I think she found our company tiresome. All she ever wanted to talk about was Woody-this, Woody-that—his life, his movies, his childhood, every single stage of his development . . .”

Rebecca had already gotten the feeling Nettie wasn’t the only son-obsessed mother in this heaven. But what if Rebecca was to blame for getting the others started? She had hardly given them much choice with her questions, traumatized as she was by her sudden separation from Nathan. She had to admit she also wanted to feel close to these mothers whose sons where the only men that mattered in their lives. It was so refreshing to hear the stories of famous men told by their mothers.

3

Husbands and Fathers

My husband decides everything: whether to believe in God and who to vote for. I handle the rest: how much we spend, where to go on vacation, where to send the children to school, what we eat. . .

Jewish saying

If my mother had had a husband or a lover, I would not have spent my life dying of thirst beside so many fountains.

Romain Gary

Jeanne Proust had changed into a magnificent black dress with a bustle in back that showed off her slim waist and from which a cascade of silk fell to her ankles.

“How elegant you are!” Rebecca cried, noting also her buttoned boots and the white flower she had slipped into her chignon.

“Marcel could not have agreed less with you. He detested this style of dress. His female characters are always in flowing gowns; Anne Swann and the Duchess of Guermantes wear silk muslin and every kind of gauzy, fluid fabric, in mauve, violet and lavender . . .”

“Did he ever express an opinion about how you dressed?”

“It would have been hard for him, my poor dear; I changed several times a day. My husband couldn’t stand slovenliness.”

“Why is it none of your husbands are with you?” asked Rebecca.

“I don’t know why but I won’t complain; it was difficult enough when we lived together. Adrien intimidated me, and I didn’t dare speak to him. In any case, I rarely saw him, as he was always absorbed by his work. He was chief physician at the Lariboisière Hospital and traveled frequently. When he was home, he often went out without me. We never understood each other, I’m afraid. Even our apartment on the Boulevard Malesherbes, where we lived for over twenty years didn’t suit either of us. I worked hard to make it comfortable but it was too luxurious for Adrien, who hardly spent any time there, and despite all my efforts to refurnish it, I never felt at home in it myself.”