“Forty coolies!” was my grandmother’s abbreviated reference to her life in Shanghai a hundred years ago. She and her sister were cared for on an estate in the city’s International Settlement. My grandmother would shake her head as she spoke the words “forty coolies,” spoke them with wonder, not embarrassment. At the turn of the last century, Shanghai was home to many Europeans, expatriates who created their own little Englands and Germanys and Frances and whose households were served by Chinese labor that was unimaginably affordable. To illustrate, my grandmother would tell this story: One day an old groundskeeper fell from the top of the ladder while pruning a tree on the family’s property. As he fell, he grabbed for the ladder and pulled it over with him. The head gardener came running from the greenhouse, picked up the ladder, dusted it off, and left the groundskeeper where he had fallen. When asked by my great-grandfather why he would pick up the ladder and not the man, the head gardener shrugged as if the answer were obvious. “Man old, ladder new,” he said, and he bowed and returned to the greenhouse. In China, life was cheap, and, my grandmother would have added, dirty.
“The filth! The filth!” was the second most frequent of her invocations of the country in which she lived until she was seventeen. In an age without vaccines or antibiotics, where yellow fever and cholera and typhus outbreaks were common, dirt meant danger. From my grandmother’s childhood home, “night soil” was collected by one of the under coolies (out of forty, one was designated for the literal shit work) and carried out to the street in the morning to be collected by an ox-drawn wagon when it passed on the boulevard. These wagons, called kongs, took human excrement to the rice paddies, where it was used as fertilizer, guaranteeing the contamination of waterways and the spread of cholera. My grandmother’s only brother died before his second birthday, and according to family lore, what he died of was dirt. The little boy’s death began before the meningitis subsequent to a teething infection; it began with his very birth in China. Even as the only son of an otherwise Orthodox Jewish family, he died uncircumcised because my grandmother’s mother once saw black crescents of dirt under the Shanghai rabbi’s long fingernails and was so frightened by the sight of them that she decided to wait until she could take her son home to a rabbi in London.
Seventy years later, if you were to put a plate of Chinese food before my grandmother, she would vomit. Traveling with me through New York City’s Chinatown in the back of a taxi, she covered her eyes. And if she didn’t readily offer her hand in greeting to an Asian person, it wasn’t racism or snobbery (not exactly, although my grandmother was an imperious woman who never questioned her right to any of her wealth or possessions), but a fear of contagion that never diminished. Her family bought ivories and porcelains, silk rugs, jade, cloisonné; they decorated their homes in Shanghai, and later in Nice, in London, and in Los Angeles, with these things. But that was the extent of their interaction with China. Much of the food they consumed was imported from England. Even the cows and the chickens were brought to them over the oceans—a long journey for livestock. “Orpingtons,” my grandmother said the chickens were called. She spoke this name with rapture. “White and beautiful!” she said. What she meant, I knew, was white and clean.
Vegetables were grown on the family’s own land and, before they were eaten, scrubbed with carbolic soap, a poisonous antiseptic detergent made from coal tar. Decades later, when washing anything she considered particularly dirty, my grandmother would whisper the words “carbolic soap” to herself and would shake her head with longing. Clearly, nothing could be dependably laundered without it. For me, a child born in Los Angeles in 1961, the words had a quaintly ridiculous ring, and yet one winter, when our children succumbed to a particularly virulent and tenacious stomach virus, I found myself collapsed, despairing, over our washer. If only I had carbolic soap, I knew the germs would perish.
In Shanghai, my grandmother remembered, she once glanced through the open door of a hotel kitchen and saw a Chinese pastry chef patting a pie crust flat on his bare, sweating belly—despite the incontrovertible “fact,” my grandmother assured me, that Chinese people bathed only once a year. Her own ritual of hygiene, to which I listened from outside her tightly closed bathroom door, included such vigorously loud scrubbing and frantic splashing that it sounded as if she were trying to lather up a tiger rather than her own assumably cooperative limbs.
Every day that she lived in China, my grandmother learned that a home was maintained in opposition to the world around it. That was the kind of home she made in Los Angeles; that was the home in which I grew up. When she married another displaced British subject, a man whose mild personality was eclipsed by her fierceness, she made a life with him that confined rather than supported and that invited rebellion from my American-born mother. In an inspired flight of defiance, my mother found my father, who was raised in El Paso, Texas, and who had a Baptist preacher for one grandfather and a Methodist for the other. My parents were as ill suited to each other as might be imagined, and their marriage was short-lived. When it was over, my mother gave me to her mother as the replacement daughter she believed would buy her freedom. At least that was her version of the story. “You were supposed to ransom me,” she explained.
Since the same woman raised us, mine was not the typical Los Angeles childhood any more than my mother’s had been. My grandmother emphatically disapproved of all things American and encouraged me to form myself in contrast to the children around me. American children stayed up too late, talked back, ate what and when they pleased, accompanied their parents to adult social functions, wore vulgar clothing, watched too much television, chewed gum, went to bed with wet hair, slouched at table, slacked off on schoolwork, etc. All of this was the fault of their permissive parents.
What patience my grandmother had was elicited only by surrender. Because she had great reserves of tenderness for orphans and strays, both human and animal, I suspect she loved me all the more for having effected my abandonment. At the time of my birth, my parents were eighteen and had been married for six months. As soon as my mother brought me home from the hospital, my grandmother hired a baby nurse, engaged a diaper service, and launched a campaign to oust my father. My father himself planned to be a preacher, and a preacher, she argued, would never be able to support my mother in the style to which she was accustomed. Furthermore, if they remained together, she’d cut my mother off without a penny.
Having raised a spoiled, dependent daughter, my grandmother knew the threats to frighten her: no pretty clothes or picture hats; no ironed pillow slips; no chaise longue in the shade of the jacaranda; no tray of cool drinks perspiring on the patio. She exhorted my grandfather to forget that he’d once been a poor boy and scripted the farewell speech for him to deliver.
Perhaps it was easier to kick my father out of the garden than out of the house; my grandfather led him outside, among the tangerine and lemon trees. “Go back home,” he told him, and he released my father from the burden of child support, and from the privilege of visiting me.
Even if I didn’t articulate it to myself, I recognized danger at the hands of someone so potentially ruthless as my grandmother. I eavesdropped on my mother’s fights with her mother and, afraid that someday I, too, might fall from grace, I ended by making myself my grandmother’s servant: safe by virtue of being useful. But that was later. First I was her pet, and her audience.
“Tell me a story,” I’d beg. “Please!” The world my grandmother created was so expansive and exotic that as a young child I didn’t, like my mother, feel imprisoned in her home. Nana’s memories of Shanghai were vivid, and her youth had included such adventures as traveling from Harbin, China, to Paris on the Orient Express. She’d married late, at forty-two, in Las Vegas. But I didn’t want to hear about that, the wedding that went off, small and seemingly incidental as compared to the ones that did not.
“Tell me about the dress!”
“What do you want to hear about that for?” my grandmother would say. But her protests were perfunctory. She liked to tell stories of how she had spurned suitors.
“Well,” she relented, smiling, “as you know, the dress was the worst of it.” She always began with her most memorable transgression, the engagement she broke when she didn’t show up at the altar. “The dress and the gifts.” She set the teapot on the table and sat down next to me on the sprung sofa.
If I closed my eyes I could see my grandmother as a young woman, her hair falling dark and heavy down the back of the white gown. I pictured her alone on a wide avenue, triumphant and huge in her wedding dress, as big as a parade float and moving determinedly away from the synagogue that held the expectant groom and congregation.
I can’t remember the would-be husband’s name, but I know all about the gown. It had a six-foot train and was made to order by Lanvin, in Paris. Along with my grandmother’s entire trousseau, it was packed in layers of tissue paper and shipped to Shanghai.
“What happened to it?” I asked.
“They auctioned it off at a benefit for the fever hospital. Or maybe it was smallpox. Something dreadful.” She couldn’t, after all, return a couture wedding dress. “I did keep the underclothes,” she said, sighing with pleasure at the thought of them. The lace on her lingerie was made by nuns. Handwork of virgins, it adorned knickers, brassieres, chemises, and negligees: everything as white as cake icing, ready to be stripped away on the wedding night.
Born in 1899, my grandmother grew up in a society that arranged its marriages. Most young women accepted this as inevitable, but she never made peace with the custom. When she tried to comply, her efforts were short-lived, the results disastrous.
Gifts for weddings that didn’t take place had to be returned, of course, each with a letter of apology. I asked my grandmother what she wrote in those long-ago letters, how she explained that instance of what was, she led me to believe, a habit.
She shrugged. “Sorry, I suppose. I told them I was sorry.”
How many men did my grandmother jilt? Her first engagement was to Lawrence (later Lord) Kadoorie, with whom she had played as a child. Their fathers were business partners, and their families neighbors in Shanghai’s International Settlement. It was assumed my grandmother would marry Lawrence, but she escaped that betrothal before a wedding date could be set.
“You did like him,” I’d prompt.
“Yes,” she conceded.
“So what happened?”
She shrugged and sighed and shook her head. “We went out to dinner and he added up the bill on his sleeve. Lawrence Kadoorie, with all his millions, used a pencil on his shirt cuff to check the addition. He licked its tip and bent his head over his wrist and I thought, Well, I won’t spend my life with a man like that.”
When Lord Kadoorie died a few years ago, his obituary in The New York Times was of a length befitting a billionaire philanthropist, but my grandmother, who knew of the steady rise of his fortunes, never expressed any regret at not being the wife of a man of fabulous, fairy-tale wealth. Unless I asked her to tell the story of the shirt cuff, she spoke of Lawrence only as a boy, and most often her memory returned to one afternoon during the monsoon season, when they had run together over the windy, wet lawns, each pursued by a scolding governess.
I have a photograph of my grandmother at seventeen, the age at which she was promised to Lawrence. She smolders in the portrait. Against her smooth throat lies a string of pearls her father gave her, one that I inherited. My grandmother wore that necklace every day of her life. She took it off to bathe and then put it back on again.
“Why do you wear your pearls to the market?” I asked her once.
“You have to wear pearls every day,” she said. “They have to be against your skin.” She touched them. Now that she was old and thin, they hung lower than they had in the portrait. “If you don’t wear pearls,” she said, “they die. They go gray and dull.”
It sounded fanciful, but maybe my grandmother was right. I haven’t worn the pearls, and recently I discovered that the white luster of a few of the larger ones has vanished. I think, though, that the reason my grandmother guarded the necklace so literally close to her heart was that it was a gift from her father, who loved her extravagantly and whose love she returned in like measure. Was it because she felt no other man lived up to the father she adored that my grandmother didn’t marry until after he died? She thwarted him, though. She rejected every match he made for her, and she did it flagrantly. “Poor Rube,” she’d say. “Poor David.” She’d shake her head, but I could tell that the gesture was one of manufactured sympathy, a tenderness she’d been taught to express.
The year after the wedding dress was sold—its seams perhaps opened and resewn to fit another bride—my grandmother’s father took her to California. He bought her a chestnut horse on whose back she liked to gallop through the orange groves of Pasadena, and he managed to secure an invitation for her to ride that horse in the 1919 Rose Parade. My grandmother reported such indulgences with a relish undiminished by time. Now, years later, I find myself wondering if perhaps my great-grandfather loved his daughter too jealously. Did he offer her husbands he knew she’d refuse?
“I didn’t want a husband, I guess,” she’d say, shrugging.
“But you married Bop,” I said.
“Because I did want a baby.”
In 1942, three years after her father’s death, my grandmother might have been sufficiently modern to consider single motherhood, but she knew that society would still penalize a fatherless child, so she married. She chose her husband for his meekness, and she kept all her inheritance separate from my grandfather’s money.
“I have one piece of advice for you,” she said when I told her of my own marriage plans. We were standing in her kitchen, and she crossed her arms and then backed me into the corner between stove and sink.
“What’s that?” I said.
“Separate bank accounts.”
“Oh come on,” I said.
“Be sensible!” she said. “Not romantic. What if you want to leave him? What if you want to clear out in a hurry?”
In love, some people do tend to leave, while the rest of us get left.
“I guess now it’s four of them,” my daughter said to me after school one day. She fell back on the sofa and sighed gustily. The four were Drew, Jack, Kevin, and Dylan. I chaperoned a play date with Dylan. When Sarah stubbed her toe, he fell on the floor at her feet.
“Please,” he begged, “let me make it better.” He reached for her pant leg, his eyes hot with new love. “I know a secret way.”
“I don’t think so.” Sarah withdrew her foot from his eager hands. She was sitting in the same chair in which my grandmother had first held her.
Nana was ninety-one when my daughter was born. She was crooked and gnarled and irascible, and as she bent whispering over the baby, I saw the dangerous old fairy from childhood tales, the one whom wise parents are careful not to slight. I couldn’t hear what she was saying to her only great-granddaughter, but I know what wish my grandmother would have bestowed, and I know my daughter.
“You’ll break their hearts,” she must have said.
Break their hearts, and avenge her humiliation. More than sixty years had passed, but still, she was stinging. In Nice, France, in 1925, having exhausted her father’s offerings, my grandmother found, or was found by, a prince. Titled and penniless, the handsome White Russian was after her money; of this my great-grandparents were sure. Forbidden to see him, threatened with the same punishment she would use to bully my mother—if she disobeyed, if she married him, she would lose her inheritance—at night my grandmother slipped away from the family villa to meet her Russian lover. The chauffeur tried to blackmail her; the butler lectured her on fallen women; her sister provided the distraction of a different scandal, that of a lesbian affair. My grandmother promised the Russian that she loved him enough to live as a pauper, and he left her. Her parents had been right; that wasn’t what he’d had in mind.
What was his name? What was his name? What was his name? I knew that eventually I would wear her down. She’d tell me if only to get me to stop.
“Michael Evlanoff. I was a fool, and my father was right. He came to this country a few years after I did. Married Elizabeth Arden, and then she divorced him.” My grandmother looked at me across the breakfast table. “That’s all I have to say,” she said, and she laid her knife on the edge of her plate.
Armed with these few facts, after my grandmother’s death, I went to the public library to find out what I could, an obituary, a photograph. I wanted to know what he looked like, this alleged prince who had, unwittingly, changed my mother’s life, and my own.
According to the 1957 edition of Current Biography, on December 30, 1942, Elizabeth Arden married “Russian-born Prince Michael Evlanoff, a naturalized American citizen, from whom she obtained an uncontested divorce in 1944.” The wedding announcement in The New York Times called Evlanoff a “member of a prominent family of the former Russian nobility … son of the late Prince Basil Evlanoff, and the late Princess Evlanoff … of a family dating back to the tartar warlords of the twelfth century.”
“After the Russian Revolution,” the announcement continued, “he made his home in Paris… Recently he had been residing at the Sherry-Netherland.”
There was an obituary as well, from May 9, 1972: “Michael Evlanoff, who wrote a biography of Alfred Nobel, died yesterday in the Florence Nightingale Nursing Home. He was 76 years old. Mr. Evlanoff, descended from Tartar princes, graduated from the Russian Artillery School and served in World War I. His book, ‘Nobel-Prize Donor; Inventor of Dynamite—Advocate of Peace,’ was published in 1944. His marriage in 1942 to Mrs. Elizabeth Graham Lewis, founder of Elizabeth Arden, Inc., the cosmetics company, ended in divorce.”
I found his biography of Alfred Nobel, published by the Blakiston Company and dedicated to “My darling mother and Emmanuel Nobel, who were the guiding stars in my life.” A romantic and melancholy work, characterized by a longing for what has been lost forever, it told me that Evlanoff met Emmanuel Nobel, the nephew of Alfred, in 1919, when both served in the Great War. The two men met in the Caucasus, “that beautiful and precious pearl of Russia.” I paged through the portraits of the Nobels, hoping one of the photographs might include the author, but none did. And, as the dust jacket was missing, I was left with a vague and generic picture of an old man in pajamas, bewildered by my visit to the nursing home in Manhattan.
“Margaret Esme Sassoon Benjamin,” I would repeat her name to him until it produced a response. “You do remember her, don’t you?”
My imagined Prince Evlanoff had a day’s worth of gray stubble on his chin and a handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket of his pajama top. He seemed confused by my interrogation.
Would the real Evlanoff have remembered my grandmother, a woman whom he had not embraced for nearly fifty years? The question depended on how long and how serious their affair had been.
Through connections provided by a cousin in Paris, I wrote to an elderly White Russian, one who had also lived in Nice during the twenties. Did he know anything of a Michael Evlanoff, possibly Ivlanov, when the prince lived in France? I was researching my grandmother’s past, I explained.
The answer, from this gentleman who was a member of the Union of Russian Nobility in Paris, was prompt. No Evlanoff or Ivlanov ever existed in the official records of the Nobility of the Russian Empire; the name was entirely unknown. He was sorry to be the bearer of such news. In Nice, when he was a young student, he had himself had the misfortune of meeting certain Russians who pretended nobility for social or material gain. This pained him, he wrote, and it was a blow to what he called his national pride, but, alas, it was the unpleasant truth, and he was honor bound to tell me so.