After Auschwitz: A Love Story (14 page)

When Hannah and I came to visit she would always be wearing something Matisse-like, decorative. We always brought a catalogue from a recent exhibit—she particularly enjoyed the one on ephemera; which I think was at the Museo de Roma. She liked the idea that artists spent weeks constructing these floats or castles only to blow them up in a day's festivities. But mostly I think she liked it that for a little while, Lucian's flood of reminiscences would stop and she could hear about something that interested her.

As he got older and sicker, he seemed more desperate to pass on his memories. He showed us the whitewashed pueblo with red flowers in front where he lived with his common-law wife and her children. His other family, as he called it. The Mexican woman, short with a wide open face and her children holding on to her apron. Gabriella didn't seem to mind. And then they would joke about their two analysts, telling them they were suited to each other.

“The best boyfriend she's had yet,” Lucian said and they laughed and we all felt young for a moment.

Did I tell you that already? Yes, I think so. And then he'd tell us how when he came back to California he had to produce movies under an assumed name. A friend of his, a woman, had written a very good book,
Reds on the Blacklist
or was it
The Red and the Blacklist
? It can't matter much. All about how difficult it was to get reestablished when the witch hunt had died down.

He told us a lot of other things too. A lot about his best friend George Oppen, who had been in Mexico with him and had introduced him to Gabriella—but I don't remember much of that. I'm not even sure about his introducing Lucian to Gabriella. I'd met George when I was visiting some film friends in California. George was still a believer in Comrade Mao, and that fascinated me. He was also a friend of that lunatic anti-Semite Ezra Pound.

I had the feeling during those years that I should have had a communist period as repentance for being born privileged and wealthy. George was born privileged too, of course. His family owned half the big movie palaces in San Francisco. After he was expelled from college for staying out all night with his girlfriend, (later his wife), Mary, his parents tried to keep them close by giving him a movie palace and by dressing Mary and covering her with jewels. I sometimes think of George and Mary as another version—a version in a different universe—of me and Hannah, one rich and one poor. But of course, being from a dirt poor Jewish family in Romania and being from a Midwestern farm aren't at all the same, especially when one of them, having dropped out of school, got an education riding around France in a horse-drawn wagon supported by a trust fund and the other got her education in Auschwitz!

But honestly, what most interested me about George was the fact that six members of his immediate family had committed suicide—his mother, his sister, his aunt. I don't remember the others. He wrote me once that Mary saved him from his Byzantine family. I thought of doing a film about
him but kept putting it off, doing my social comedies instead. It probably wouldn't have done well here—a Jewish American poet who celebrates everyday things.
Materials
was the name of the book that won the Pulitzer Prize. He wrote most of it in Mexico before he came back. He'd had a dream about things rusting and realized it was his mind that was rusting. He had a way of moving between his mind and things, reconsidering and changing his impressions. It's awful for anyone to have the memory battery run down, but especially for him, left only with the things themselves.

I compare myself to him, both of us getting lost on streets we know, forgetting the face of someone we know. No, it's too depressing.

Let's see, what have I forgotten lately?

Yesterday I forgot to tell Hannah her niece Sarah called while she was out. She was just going to be out a few minutes and I was sure I'd remember it. What else? Well, I forgot my doctor's appointment. I also forgot that I was supposed to get my hair cut. Hannah did it for me. No need to go out, really. And I like her fussing over me. Just now she came into my study and casually riffled through my last few pages. Not something she usually does.

“I hope you're not thinking of publishing this,” she said.

“No, I'm just thinking of getting things down, unloading my brain before it signs off.”

“But when you write those things about Lucian, can you imagine Gabriella reading about your seeing his urine bag?”

“She can barely read the headlines with a magnifier.”

“That's an exaggeration. And these days things can get on a blog or a tweet and go all around the globe in a second. Someone might call her up.”

“Stop already. It's very unlikely that anyone will read this. I'm not Proust.”

She laughs. “She might think I was egging you on because of that quarrel I had with Lucian.”

“That was twenty years ago. You should have made it up long ago. You both cared for each other and he loved you. He was upset about your talking to, who was it?”

“His niece.”

“That got him into trouble with his family.” Honestly I couldn't remember what had been so important. But I knew that Hannah couldn't keep a secret. All secrets were on the same plane with her. They had to be poured into someone's ear like the poison in
Hamlet.
Maybe the habit of witnessing simply took over. I would have liked to see her run for mayor of Rome, running against corruption. Her friend Rina was a Roman senator. I remember one day I had lunch with Rina—a beautiful woman, by the way—and she introduced me to another senator, saying here is the only one who knows the difference between
cultura
and
spazzatura.
Culture and Garbage! She was some woman, that Rina! Her husband was a big publisher—I think Mondadori.

I was curious about why she lived separately. She cupped her breasts and laughed. “He wants my milk. I need my milk for myself.”

Her voice was like a lioness purring. Another day, I accompanied her to the palace. She'd been invited to dinner with the president and was bringing him her book. Like a real tourist, I took her picture with one of those handsome guards. Maybe I'm the only person who knows those things. Plump little moments to swell out a future biography. A researcher will be happy to find them. She did win the
Strega,
after all, and her memoir of the war years is brilliant.

Hannah is tapping her foot impatiently. “We weren't talking about my quarrel with Lucian. We were talking about your airing your negative thoughts. And in any case, I couldn't make up with Lucian because he and she joked to people about you and Claudia—
La Dentista,
Gabriella called her, and people would laugh. Listen,
Caro,
I don't want to go on with this. Erminia is coming soon and I have to go to the market.”

“Vai con calma. Non ti preoccipi.”

After she goes, I think about what she said. I suppose I should suppress some of this. But not now. Some of what I am saying is libelous, no doubt. If I remember correctly libel is anything that gives a negative picture. Truth is no defense. I like the sound of that and roll it on my tongue. Truth is no defense.

Yesterday or maybe just some hours ago—time has gotten a funny way of compressing itself—I found an old shoe box in the storage space next to the couch in the entry to our apartment. Erminia uses the space to store the ironing board and we used to put our suitcases there between trips. I don't suppose we'll be going anywhere soon. But in all the jumble of things I found a box of my mother's old letters from friends. I leafed through and read a couple.

They seemed to be from younger friends, mostly artists or writers she had invited to dinner, who had told her their problems. Reading them, I feel as if she were still alive. Her friends obviously don't realize how troubled she is. They ask her what to do about getting a gallery, finding a publisher, dealing with a difficult child. I have a vague memory of people at her funeral talking about how wise she was, implying that we, the children—the comments were mostly addressed to my older brother—must be suffering from having lost such a mother.

The thing is, children miss their mothers terribly even if they are monsters, even if they beat them black and blue, tie them to the bedpost, starve them. Even if the children could run away, they don't. My mother wasn't like that, of course. If anything she left me alone too much. I had the idea that she hired a nanny when I was born. It would have been an English Nanny because she wanted us to be bilingual. And after that, she paid us no attention. But now I think that is wrong. It's nice to know your memory can deceive you.

Did you know, by the way, that Maurice Sendak, the great writer of children's books, said he never wanted to have children
because it was too much trouble? That's how I thought my mother felt. But yesterday—since I saw the sunrise in my window mirror, I know it's a new day—I found a little leather notebook with “Baby's Sayings and Doings” engraved on it in gold. And there it was with my name inside and the date of my birth, 1922, and my weight, five pounds. I hadn't known that I was so small. It must have worried mother because she notes my weight week after week. She had a delicate script and used brown ink. She wrote in straight lines, ignoring the broader spaces provided by the notebook. It could almost be a work of art. Her words sculpt my living body. By nine weeks I weigh nine pounds. By three months I am twelve pounds. The jottings continue until I am five, long past the time when she might have been anxious about my weight, You see, don't you, that this means she cared about me. Ruling off the tiny pages and writing in her careful artist's script.

Did I tell you she was a painter? Never a very successful one, but a painter nonetheless. And now I have established that she cared. A little further on, she records my feeding schedule, seven feedings a day. She didn't nurse me—I know that. She told me she couldn't because my father thought nursing caused breast cancer.

I was standing up in my playpen at twelve months, waving goodbye, saying Mama, Nana, Dada. By then I was eating a variety of things, including custard and mashed vegetables. Wouldn't you say that shows …? Or maybe if you were unbiased it wouldn't show anything. By fourteen months I'm walking and listening to music. I like
Au claire de la Lune
and Italian and American nursery songs. When my nurse sings them, I bounce up and down rhythmically. Ah, so already I am a little artist, or perhaps a musician. My mother notes that her friend Margaret came over one day and played on the piano—it must have been the grand piano at Todi. She told my mother that I listened and tried to sing. Also for the first time I played with a little boy, Pietro.

And at around fifteen months I submitted to toilet training. That would be young, I think, by today's standards and of course I don't remember it. Then comes something I do remember: my first accident. I fell into a cactus plant and she had to pick out the spines one by one. When I think of it I see an enormous jade-green cactus, or maybe a garden of them, and me dressed only in my diaper, coming nearer and nearer. Mother used to remind me how long it took to pluck out the spines with a tweezer and how miserable I was.

But most of her observations in the baby book were positive or neutral. I liked to look people over before making friends, and so mother directs visitors to play with my panda or a toy until I come over. That usually happens sooner rather than later, for I am very
inquisitive.
That is underlined in red. And then there is a tiny portrait of a baby's head surrounded by a wreath of flowers. Could you guess that such a mother would later kill herself? Doesn't she sound both caring and sane, or have I missed something? I read a little more. The pediatrician pronounces me anemic, prescribes iron, beef juice, liver. My mother is upset to think that this could happen; she had felt sure, she says, that I was getting every care and was “perfectly normal.” Well, maybe she's a little controlling, anxious, but still, I am fascinated by her looking at me, watching me. She faithfully records my first cold, my response to commands, my trying and not succeeding to eat with a spoon, how she lets me push the food around. I like this young mother. She notices everything. True, she is on the alert for signs of talent. But so are a lot of mothers. She is enchanted by my reactions to sophisticated music. I love jazz and Mozart or Schoenberg. I now like to look at picture books. Mother records my increasing vocabulary, also my sunbaths with an ultraviolet lamp. Oh, that's not a good one; I guess I'm a candidate for melanoma.

By sixteen months I look at myself in the mirror, then look at my mother, bemused. Already a young Derrida, or was
it Lacan with all the mirror business? There is one note that makes me slightly uncomfortable. She says I follow her from room to room. Where was my nanny? Maybe on her day off. I sense there is something else going on. But what? The surprise of finding this little diary is wearing off. I am almost finished. Tired.

Then on the next page I see that she takes a two-week vacation and says I am almost hysterical when she gets back. After that, Mother says she is feeding me herself and she continues to let me play with the food, something my new German Nanny, no doubt obsessed with cleanliness, didn't permit. Even if Mother does this to compensate for finding me undone by her absence, her doing it is the important thing. So it isn't true, the story I told myself for years, that she saw me only before I went to sleep. She couldn't have observed all these things if she'd just looked in on me once a day. No, she seems to have been truly engrossed in my progress.

But still something seems to me to be glossed over. When she mentions that I am less hysterical when the second nanny is fired than when the first was, suddenly I remember. The first one was fired after she let me fall on my head, going headfirst down a slide. Mother used to tell me about it. It must have been traumatic. I know she told me that I had to stay in bed so long that I forgot how to walk. Could she have been censoring her journal? I don't want to think that. And she does note my hysteria after she goes away for a two week vacation. Did I say that already? I'd love to know what she means by “hysterical” exactly. She only notes that I forgot my toilet training and was off my feed. Whatever my infant state, it seemed to her that I made less fuss the second time she changed my caretaker. A Freudian might say this set up lifelong problems with separation, perhaps later making Hannah suffer what I'd suffered. That's the kind of thing they like to speculate about. But I'm tired now. I go out on the terrace to lie down in the sun.