Art of a Jewish Woman (22 page)

I especially liked watching suave, impeccably dressed Alex Kaplan and listening to him making a point about a new psychoanalytic theory in his silken New York-accented voice. Bud Levy, the neurologist, Felice’s best friend from the hospital staff, stood out because he was so portly and had a misshapen shoulder from losing a lung and part of a scapula to tuberculosis in his youth. He was a bon vivant with a keen mind. I recall him standing in our living room one day looking out at the fields, then turning to my mother to say, “You know, kid, you know when
not
to say no.” I pondered what he meant, what he was referring to for a long time without ever quite understanding his statement.

Rumpled artists came with their paint-stained hands to admire their paintings in Felice’s collection as well as the other art work. Their talk about the play of light on the paintings and on the clouds and fields outside the floor-to-ceiling glass doors was like a living course on the vocabulary of art.

If Felice saw me, she’d swoop down on me exuberantly, and lead me in to say hello to the guests, then embarrass me by telling them a vastly embellished story about something I’d accomplished. I was never quite sure whether the point was to genuinely congratulate me or use me as a trophy son to show herself off. After the introduction I might linger for a few minutes to listen some more. I got my first lessons in politics, art, architecture, and psychoanalysis this way. And like my mother eavesdropping on her mother Bela and her male callers a generation earlier in Szczuczyn, I vaguely wondered if something was going on that my father wouldn’t like.

My voyeurism included glimpsing my mother in her bikini—the only grownup I had ever seen wearing one in St. Louis in those days—tucked into a corner of the garden reading and working on her tan. She favored a reclining chair, her book was usually in her hands, sunglasses (or a mask if she was sleeping) protected her eyes, her body was covered in suntan oil, and her top was arranged so only the tips of her breasts were covered.

My covert observations reached their apogee one summer night during junior high school when I was supposed to be spending the night at a friend’s house. Something must have changed my plans, and I came home around 11 p.m. and heard noises coming from the swimming pool. From behind a bush I saw my parents and my mother’s circle of psychoanalyst and academic friends and their wives swimming nude or in their underwear. On the one hand I was shocked. On the other hand it was a hugely satisfying experience in adolescent demystification: intellectual people, authority figures, respected men and women, fathers and mothers must have sexual urges like I was beginning to feel, and if they had them, mine must be okay.

Besides her male callers, Felice was a mentor to a score of young women. They too came to the house because her wide interests (soon to include collecting the paintings of the most famous avant-garde artists of the time), foreign background, multiple languages, and outspokenness made her an exotic model for them. Her couturier clothes with folkloric embellishments added to her colorfulness. She in turn delighted in their admiration and relished advising them. Some of the friendships she formed with her young women lasted for years. Long after they had moved away, married and had families of their own, they returned to St. Louis to spend time with Felice. Aside from her young women devotees, Felice was a man’s woman. She talked directly with men, without mincing words, man-to-man so to speak. Yet at the same time she knew how to flirt, how to draw a man to her by cupping her hand around his when she asked for a light for her cigarette, or by laughing gaily and bringing a man to her side with her arm around his waist when she wanted his attention.

Felice’s Dreams

Beauty did not save Felice nor did reading about psychoanalysis. Turning outward to art, aesthetics, and her ravishing new home could not save her from her inner demons. Beauty could not hold the wolves at bay. It didn’t keep away the image of her family starving in Szczuczyn during her last visit or the visions of her mother walking into a gas chamber and her brother swinging from the beam of a bridge with a noose around his neck. Her physical beauty, the adulation she was receiving, her embrace of aesthetics as an antidote to life’s ugliness could not save her from her inner terror. In the 1950s she started having awful nightmares.

The timing probably had something to do with my brother and me growing more independent from her. We didn’t need her very much, and when she was not needed she became more at loose ends, unable to stave off unhappiness. At night, if I was sleeping lightly, I could hear her pacing. If I got up to go to the bathroom in the wee hours of the morning, she might be reading in the study, or my father might be sleeping in the study and my mother reading in the bedroom. Sometimes I found her in the living room curled in one of the big seashell-like chairs surrounded by darkness with one little light on over a book. By the time the rest of us got up, Felice had found sleep and was nowhere to be seen. On weekend mornings she might emerge toward noon.

She was too frightened to sleep at night because the Nazis might get her. My father convinced her to consult with a psychiatrist, but this had an inherent problem. “I knew them all, they were my friends,” my mother told me. “What good was that? They would say to me, ‘Felice, you are my friend, how can I treat you?’ Or, ‘Felice, you are too smart for me, you will debate with me, and we will never get to what is troubling you’.”

Alex Kaplan referred her to a psychoanalyst in Chicago. She flew there on Monday mornings, had a visit with him the same day, spent the rest of the afternoon at the Chicago Art Institute or walking along Michigan Avenue and the lakefront, stayed the night at the gracious Drake Hotel, had another therapy session on Tuesday morning, and flew home in time for dinner. At first she said she liked her doctor and he was helping her, then her reports changed.

“He wears galoshes in his office when it is slushy outside,” she complained. “He doesn’t take the rubbers off his shoes. It is not the way a man who respects himself should behave. It says something about the inner man. He should be concerned about his appearance.”

Edward said, “But he has a fine reputation.”

“The way he cares about himself says something about his mind.”

A few weeks later over dinner, Felice announced, “I’m not going back to Chicago anymore.”

“Why not?” we asked.

“The man is out of his mind. Do you know what he said to me? ‘Mrs. Massie, I have been waiting all my life for a patient like you. You are incredibly intelligent and beautiful. You are not like the boring businessmen from The Loop and housewives from the suburbs. You bring something new and fresh and beautiful into my office. May I call you Felice?’ I think he is falling in love with me.”

Edward was laughing. “I guess you are not going back there again.”

My mother seemed cured after a few months. She was not pacing the halls any longer at night and was getting up in the morning, laying out our Cheerios and Wheaties and milk, and cooking us bacon and eggs on Saturday.

When she was 85, in the course of narrating her memoirs for the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project, Felice spoke about that time of nightmares and insomnia in her 40s. They interviewed her for six hours, and only in the final hour did she depart from the storyline of her great good fortune and picaresque adventures to talk about the sadness in her life. She told the interviewer, “After we settled in our new home, my husband told me I needed a psychiatrist. I got so angry with him. I was happy. No one could deny it. A family picture shows me with a cigarette in my hand and my husband, so handsome in Forest Park near the hospital, him in his doctor’s whites, with a toddler all dressed up on his lap, and the other one, the older boy, close beside me. That one never let me out of his sight. He’s a child psychiatrist now. He writes about mother-infant attachment. The younger one is a cardiologist like his father.

“By day I was happy. Every night was my other daytime; in my sleep was my other life. I was starving in my dreams. There was no food. And in my sleep, I had umbilical pains from hunger. The horror and the hunger were not my reality. The news about the Holocaust had come in, and it was if a bomb had befallen me. I read the Memory Books when they were published in Israel. The nightmares began. One lasted two, three years, I think. The same one. Every night, while my sons were sleeping peacefully, I was starving. I had read in the Memory Book that in Auschwitz the poor people had nothing to eat. What can I tell you? It was a reality which wasn’t mine, but it became mine. Long corridors of marble, bone gray light, light colored shiny huge endless corridors. I was running with all my strength. Behind me were Nazi soldiers running after me. Every night I woke with a scream, dodging the running Nazis.

“My husband had to wake me. He put a hand on me: wake up, you’re screaming. You are having a nightmare. I resented being wakened. I had to live that nightmare to the very end. In the morning, I would look at myself in the mirror and look around my house with its fields of wild flowers and its beautiful paintings. I had to re-situate myself to know the reality of the night from my daytime environment. And of course after an hour I would get up and go exercise. I would go down for a swim, forty laps was my goal, cool off, laugh at myself, and do my duty for the rest of the day: laugh and play with my sons, walk the dog, talk with my friends when they visited or by phone, and party on the weekends. This was my American life in St. Louis. This is why I do not consider myself a Survivor. In my dreams the Nazis would chase me again through the cold, long corridors. They were after me. I ran, ran, ran, dodged them and then I screamed and I was out. I was never caught by one of them.”

She told the interviewer what she couldn’t speak about with me in my childhood or with her granddaughter. “After the Holocaust my anxiety took the form of talking in my sleep. I would declaim Cicero and Virgil. I had so many years of it, and in my dream it was before an exam. I was frightened: I will flunk the exam. My husband would wake me up, saying ‘now you’re talking in a language I don’t understand. Wake up!’ I told him, ‘Listen to me. I’m reciting Latin in my sleep. This is Virgil, this is the
Aeneid
’.”

O socii (neque enim ignari sumus ante malorum),

O passi graviora…O comrades, we have been through evil

Together before this; we have been through worse,

Scylla, Charybdis, and the Cyclops’ dwelling.

The sounding rocks. This, too, the gods will end.

Call the nerve back; dismiss the fear, the sadness….
²²

Even though I didn’t know the details of the Holocaust growing up, I felt them instinctively, that is to say I knew bodily that my mother and her family
had been through evil
, as the
Aeneid
declaimed. It was contagious, and it infected me. I did not sleep peacefully when I was small. Like she said, I didn’t want to let her out of my sight. I was worried about her and worried about what would happen to me if something happened to her.

During the day, on the street in front of our first house on Westminster Place, I would play cowboy and Indian war games with my friends. Twice a week we’d walk to the park to meet my father on break from his hospital duties. The sun shined on our faces. My brother was in a stroller. I’d get on my mother’s shoulders, and we’d pick blackberries from bushes spilling over the brick walls. She said this is what she had done with her girlfriends in her childhood in Szczuczyn.

My mother would laugh and pop a blackberry into my mouth and my brother’s and two or three into her own and fill a little sack for my father. By the time we reached the picnic tables and my father arrived, our lips were berry dark. This was a daytime reality, but at night I, like my mother, ran in fear from the Nazis.

When I was in junior high school and in the first year of high school, while Felice couldn’t sleep for fear of her terrible nightmares and thought I was sound asleep, I was afraid that the house would explode. Sleepless, I listened for the furnace to turn on and off. Every time that I heard the blowers click on, I was obsessed with the thought that somebody in the family had accidentally pushed the thermostat way up and the furnace would continue heating until it exploded, destroying us all. When I heard the blowers stop, I relaxed a little, but just when I started to fall asleep they’d click on again and the cycle would start over.

My parents set up an appointment for me to consult with Alex Kaplan, who greeted me in his office like we were old friends, which we were. His children were my sometime buddies. I explained the problem to Alex, who listened thoughtfully, undoubtedly linking my fears with Felice’s long before I could make the connection. He said, “Why don’t you take charge of setting the furnace temperature yourself before you go to sleep? I’m sure your parents will let you. And if you worry in the night that you set it wrong, just get up and check it to be sure.”

Alex’s treatment worked. Even then, however, I wondered why he didn’t want to go deeper. After all, by then I had read Felice’s copy of Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams
when I had to miss school for three weeks because of a mild case of pneumonia, and I knew that there must be an unconscious reason for my fear. I figured it must have to do with sex, because most of Freud’s interpretations led there, and I had begun having wet dreams. These were mysterious explosions. I was too timid to mention them to Alex, though he probably knew my adolescent sexual fantasies—conscious and unconscious—were involved in my symptom. It was not just my mother’s insomnia that was disturbing my sleep. But why go for the unconscious, he must have reasoned, if his little intervention worked?

When Felice finally opened up to her interviewers from the Bay Area Oral Holocaust Project in the final hour about the impact the Holocaust had on her personally, she included me. She said, “Henry was my first child. He had to absorb nights and days of crying when he was an infant—not his crying, but my own. He was a good baby. As he began to talk, he kept on asking me every half hour, ‘Am I a good boy, Mama?’ He saw his mother in tears almost constantly and he didn’t know the cause of my misery. He took it upon himself. He’d drive me crazy with his, ‘Am I a good boy, Mama?’ He didn’t know what was hurting me. How could I even begin to explain it—a war and worse—to a baby?