My Nine Lives (5 page)

Instead of going to my parents, I had come straight to her from the airport. I felt it would be easier to tell her about what I saw as the dead end of my youthful life—I had abandoned both my Buddhist studies and my marriage—and it was a relief to unburden myself to her. She listened to me in silence, which was really quite uncharacteristic of her. There were other changes: the floor had been swept, there were no dishes in the sink. After I had finished telling her whatever I had to tell, she murmured to me and stroked my hair. How right I had been to come to her first, I felt; I knew I could not expect the same understanding from my parents, whose lives had been so calm, stable, and fulfilled.

My parents' building and all its neighbors stood the way they had through all the past decades, as stately as the
mansions that they had themselves displaced. The doormen were the same I had known throughout my childhood; so was the elevator man who took me up to where Leonora was waiting for me in the doorway. She held me to her bosom where I remembered to avoid the sharp edges of her diamond brooch. “But now it's my turn!” Rudy clamored, caring nothing about having his good suit crumpled as I pressed myself against him, inhaling his after-shave and breath-freshener.

But “No not here, darling,” Leonora said when I started to go into my room. My father cleared his throat—always a sign of embarrassment with him. But Leonora exuded a triumphant confidence: “Because of the piano,” she said, ushering me into the guest bedroom, which was considerably smaller than mine. I didn't understand her: the piano had always been in the drawing room and was still there. “The other piano,” she said.
“His.”
She spoke as if we had already had a long conversation on the subject. But we had not, and it took me some time to realize that this other piano was Yakuv's new one that Rudy had bought for him.

Again skipping intermediate explanations—“It's so noisy at Kitty's,” Leonora said. “Could someone tell me why she has to live in a warehouse? He needs peace and quiet; naturally—an artist.”

So there
had
been changes, and principally, I noticed, in Leonora. Her coiled hair was newly touched with blonde; her cheeks had those two spots of excitement I knew from her dinner parties. She kept taking deep breaths as if to contain some elation inside her.

Rudy took me for a walk in Central Park. As usual on his walks, my father wore a three-piece herringbone suit, a Homburg hat, and carried a rolled umbrella like an Englishman. From time to time he pointed this umbrella in
the direction of a tree, an ornamental bridge, ducks on a pond: “Beautiful,” he breathed, loving Nature in its formal aspect. Around us towered the hotels and apartment blocks of Central Park South and West, which he also loved—for the same decorative solidity that had formed the background of his Berlin youth and his courtship of my mother.

“It's a privilege for us to give him what he has never had. A quiet orderly home, meals on time—yes yes, this sounds very—what do you call it? Stuffy?
Square?
But even artists,” he smiled, “have to eat and sleep.”

“What about Kitty?” I said.

“Kitty. Exactly. They're too much alike, you see; artistic temperaments. Sometimes he needs—they both need—a rest from the storm and stress. Nothing has changed. Leonora and I are what we have always been.”

“Mother looks wonderful.”

“You know how she has always adored music above everything.” Then he exclaimed: “Dear heaven, who says we're not sensible grown-up people! We've learned how to behave. You're still a child, lambkin.” He squeezed my arm, in token of my misery and failure. “One day you too will learn that everything turns out the way it has to, for good; for our good.” He pointed his umbrella—at the sky this time, inviting me to look upward with him toward the immense perfection that was always with us, encompassing our small mismanaged lives.

A week or two after my arrival, Yakuv returned from his tour.
He
had not changed. He at once went into what used to be my bedroom—without apology, probably he didn't realize that it had been mine, or simply took it for granted that it was now his. He greeted me with a comradely clap on the shoulder, not as if I had been away for several years but as if I had showed up as usual for my weekly lesson. Leonora followed him into the room; she had to unpack his
bag, she said, because if she didn't it would stand there for weeks. But this was said with a smile, not in the reproachful way she used for Kitty's and my untidiness. After a while, during which Rudy went for another of his walks, she emerged with an armful of Yakuv's laundry. Soon came the sound of his piano, and every day after that it seemed to fill, to appropriate the apartment. If I moved around or shut a door a little too loudly, she or Rudy, or both, laid a finger on their lips.

Leonora did everything possible to create the best conditions for his work. She arranged his schedule with his agent, whom he often fired so that she had to find a new one; and since it infuriated him to have anyone disarrange his music sheets, she cleaned his room herself. Otherwise he was calm, immersed in his work. He rarely asked for anything and good-naturedly accepted even what he didn't want—Leonora once gave him a dark blue velvet smoking jacket, and though he mildly protested (“So now I must look like a monkey”), he let her coax him into it. He also smoked the better brand of cigars she bought him to replace the little black ones he was used to. He had personal habits but was not entrenched in them, and if it made no difference to him, he gladly obliged her in everything.

That was during the day. But during the evening meal, he would push his plate back and without waiting for the rest of us to finish—he still ate in the same rapid, ravenous way—he went out, banging the front door behind him. He never said that he was going, or where; he was not expected to, and anyway, we knew. But there were times when he did not return for several days, and while I had no idea what transpired between him and Kitty during those days, I was very much aware of the effect his absence had on Leonora. She behaved like a sick person. She stayed in her bedroom with
the curtains drawn, and “Leave me alone,” was all she ever said to Rudy's and my efforts to rally her. It was not until Yakuv returned that she got up, bathed and dressed and tried to return to her normal self. But this was not possible for her; she appeared to have suffered a collapse—even physically she had lost weight and her splendid breasts sagged within her large bra. I don't think Yakuv noticed any of this; anyway, it did not affect him since in his presence she made a brave attempt to pull herself together and go about her household duties as usual, especially her duties to him. She would not have known how to stage the sort of confrontations that he was used to with Kitty; and since these were lacking, he probably assumed that everything was fine with Leonora—that is, insofar as he thought of her at all.

Rudy wanted to take her on a Mediterranean cruise. A few years earlier they had enjoyed sailing around the Greek Islands, but now Leonora was reluctant to leave. She said she couldn't; Lina was too old and cranky to look after the house properly, everything would be topsy-turvy. I could hear my parents arguing in their bedroom at night, Rudy as usual calm and reasonable, but she not at all her usual self. In the mornings Rudy would emerge alone from their bedroom, and he and I would discuss ways of persuading her. We laid stress on her health—“Look at you,” I said, making her stand before her bedroom mirror.

She drew her hand down her cheek: “You think I look terrible?”

“You'll see how well you'll look after a change—young all over again. Young and beautiful.”

“Really?” She continued dubiously to regard herself in the mirror.

It was only when I promised to take over all her responsibilities that she began to accept the idea of Rudy's cruise. But first she had to train me in the arts that she herself had learned from her mother and grandmother; and it was only when she was satisfied that I knew how to take care of all Yakuv's needs that she finally agreed to leave. Rudy was overjoyed; he whispered promises of another honeymoon. He packed their suitcases in his expert way but humbly unpacked them again when she, who also prided herself on her packing, pointed out how much better it could be done.

It was only when he saw these suitcases standing in the hall on the day before departure that Yakuv realized what was going on. His reaction was unexpected: he took the cigar out of his mouth and said, “Why didn't anyone tell me?” When Leonora began to speak, he waved his hands and stalked off into his room. We waited for the piano to start up but nothing happened; only silence, disapproval seeped from that room and filled the apartment and Leonora's heart so that she whispered, “We can't go.”

I had never seen my father so angry. “But this is too much! Now we have reached the limit!” Leonora and I gazed in astonishment, but he went on, “Who is this man, what does he think?” Then—“Tomorrow he leaves! No today! Now! Hop!” He made straight for Yakuv's door, and had already seized the handle when Leonora grasped his arm. They tussled—yes, my parents physically tussled with each other, a sight I never thought to see. She pleaded, he insisted, she used little endearments (in German) until he turned from the door. His thinning grey hair was ruffled, another unprecedented sight in my serene and serenely elegant father. In response to Leonora's imploring looks, I joined in her pleas to postpone this expulsion, at least until they returned from
their trip. “Our second honeymoon,” Leonora pleaded, until at last, still red and ruffled, he agreed.

But later that night he came to my room. He told me that by the time they returned from their cruise, Yakuv would have to be out, pronto, bag and baggage, and it was up to me to see that this was done. His mouth thin and determined—“Bag and baggage,” he repeated, and then, in another splutter of anger: “Ridiculous. Unheard of.”

They were to be away for six weeks and during that time I had to get Yakuv to pack up and leave. But he gave me no opportunity to talk to him. He stayed in his room, and all day the apartment resounded with music of storm and stress. Only sometimes he rushed out to walk in the Park; once I followed him, but there too it was impossible to talk to him. Hunched in an old black coat that was too long for him, he appeared sunk in his thoughts. His hands were in his pockets and he only took them out to gesticulate in furious argument with whatever was going on under his broad-brimmed hat.

I had to turn to Kitty for help. The change in Kitty was as marked as it was in Leonora, but in the opposite direction. It was Kitty who looked calm, and though no longer young, she now appeared younger than before. Instead of her long skirts and dangling loops of jewelry, she wore a flowered artist's smock that made her look as wholesome as a kindergarten teacher. Her eyes had lost their inward brooding look and were clear and intent on the proof-sheets she was holding up to the light. She made me admire them with her—they were all of pretty little girls posed on her tree-stumps—and she only put them down when I told her of the task my father had imposed on me.

She laughed in surprise: “I thought Rudy was so proud of keeping his own little Paderewski.”

“He thinks Leonora is getting too nervous.”

Now she really laughed out loud: Leonora nervous! It was the word—together with neurasthenic, or later, neurotic—that had always been applied to Kitty herself.

“And Yakuv too,” I ventured.

She put down her proof-sheets: “Oh yes. He's in one of his moods. The other night I was busy in my dark room and that made him so mad he stamped and roared and tore down the pictures I'd pinned up. He said he couldn't stand the way I live. Well, nothing new—I've heard it a thousand times before . . . But Leonora? Are you telling me he misses Leonora?”

It was then that she offered to tell Yakuv to get out of our apartment. I was glad to be relieved of this task and to have time to go about my own business. After all, I still had a divorce to take care of, as well as deciding whether to go back to college or to find a job. And what about all those existential questions that had so troubled me? I needed to become involved again with my own concerns rather than those of my parents and my aunt. I decided that, as soon as Rudy and Leonora returned, I would look for a place of my own. Picking up some old connections and making new ones, I was out and about a lot and continued to see nothing of Yakuv. I'm afraid I neglected most of what Leonora had left me to do for him, but he didn't complain and perhaps didn't notice. Whenever I was home I heard him playing a lot of loud music. I assumed he was preparing for his next tour and hoped that he would have left on it before my parents returned. He showed no intention of moving out but presumably he would as soon as Kitty had talked to him. Meanwhile he continued to thump away behind his closed door; he seemed to be there all the time now, even at night.

Then late one evening Kitty herself showed up. It was
pouring with rain, but it turned out she had walked all the way from downtown. When I tried to make her take off her wet clothes, she waved me away—her attention was only on the sounds from Yakuv's room. “So he's still here,” she said, partly in anger, partly in relief.

It may have been because she was so drenched, with her hair wild and dangling as it used to be (though dyed a more violent shade of red), that she had reverted to the Kitty I used to know. And her mood too was charged in the old way. She told me how she had tried to call Yakuv all day and every day, though she knew he hardly used the telephone and certainly never answered it. The last time she had seen him was when she had told him of Rudy's ultimatum. Without a word and waving his hands in the air, he had rushed out of her loft and had not returned. She had begun to fear that he had packed up and left our apartment in offended pride, abandoning not only my parents but Kitty too. Tormented by this thought—that he had taken himself out of our lives for ever—she had come running through the dark and the rain: only to hear his piano as usual in the room he had been told to vacate.