The Romanian

Lupescu: the woman who thought love could rule the world. If there’s anything more improbable than the union of a Jewish intellectual from New York and a Romanian street hustler, it has to be the shocking liaison between Prince Carol—a member of the royal Hohenzollerns and the future king of Romania—and Lupescu, a Jewish shopkeeper’s daughter with a promiscuous past.

Maybe it’s grandiose of me to inject a relationship that changed the political destiny of a country into my own abject narrative. But sitting in my mother’s well-appointed living room as I wait for her gay home health aide to arrange a week’s worth of pills, it occurs to me that history follows a trail of sputtering desire, often calling on a delusional pair of lovers to generate the sparks. Its greatest dupes are those who think this time will be different; but if it weren’t for us, the world would suffer from a dismal lack of stories.

I can picture Lupescu in 1925, in Bucharest, mincing toward a military parade ground in a black crêpe Chanel dress with a shockingly green waistband and knife-pleated skirt. She has put all her bets on an impossible prize, a romance with royalty. Prince Carol will be at the parade ground. She’s determined that he’ll notice her.

Today Lupescu could easily be mistaken for any high-end Parisian drag queen; but in 1925, her Cupid’s-bow mouth, pancake-white face and flaming red hair were a repository for male fantasy. No matter that the black crêpe Chanel was last year’s Paris fashion—all she could muster from her small nest egg as the ex-wife of a petty officer. Libido is no impotent tool. It zooms past every limitation.

Lupescu was, according to the history books, a poisonous femme fatale, one of bohemia’s grasping opportunists. Born in the Moldovan town of Herţa to a father whom writers portray with the clichéd, hook-nosed images of the Jew, she decided early in life that the only barrier to identity was a lack of imagination. For this I’m rather fond of her. Like me, she actually believed that identity could be transformed—or at least defined—by the power of love. Incredibly, she accomplished her fantastic goals, going from demimonde flirt to the most powerful woman in Romania.

As always, my own fatal lady has put on makeup in my honor. In an exhausted, powdered face discolored by a poor heart and many medications, her vivid blue eyes scrutinize me hawkishly. She’s trying to pinpoint any flaws in my grooming or the dark circles under my eyes as proof of her position that it’s time to forget about that Romanian boy and stay home. From the kitchen wafts a mixture of odors of the welcome feast she’s been preparing: a large pot roast, potato pancakes, a marble layer cake and other high-calorie treats. Alert to any foolish waste of money, she inspects the gift for her that I’ve unrolled on the floor: a brown-and-white-striped woolen blanket with its long, matted sheep’s wool and fragments of twigs from the fields. I’m rather proud of the import, having smuggled it past U.S. Customs. At any rate, discussing it provides a welcome distraction from one of the reasons for my visit. Mom’s ninety-two-year-old sister, my aunt Lil, is in intensive care. Mom’s curtness about Lil’s illness is a cover for her distress. It lurks behind her few words on the subject in a kind of agony. Strangely, grief comes out as anger in her case; sensing her raw nerves, I’m walking on tiptoe.

Blanket rolled and plastic-bagged, Mom announces the task we’re to complete. She wants me to help her go through all the family scrapbooks and put them in order under her command. It’s a daunting task. Aside from the seven albums of photos documenting family life from the ’30s through the ’90s, there are twelve scrapbooks containing curling news clippings that my father fastidiously collected whenever he or my mother made the papers. Hundreds are about her, starting with her promotion to head of Syracuse University’s research library in the early ’30s and running through the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s as she climbed the ranks as a Democratic politician and community activist.

We stack the albums on the kitchen table, and I open the one on top, leaf through the brownish crumbling pages. Mom’s trajectory is a mini-version of Queen Marie’s—from innocent country girl to power-wielding politician. It starts with the minor PTA presidencies of a bored housewife, then gradually blossoms into all-consuming directorships in the state Democratic Party and the National Council of Jewish Women. There are exhausting campaigns for board of education or state assembly and a short stint as the county’s election commissioner, followed by directorship of the Jewish Community Center. By the 1970s appears a long bio in Who’s Who of American Women; and as with Queen Marie, the images of her harden with age and accomplishment. She goes from a beaming, busty white-gloved fifties housewife holding a plate of cookies at a bake sale into an authoritative, overweight matron at an election headquarters, with a sober steel trap of an expression.

I can’t help thinking of Lupescu’s very different journey. The pictures in biographies show the expensively gowned self-styled Madame Pompadour rapidly mutating into an overweight, middle-aged harpy with the squinting eyes of a bookkeeper, the king’s chief advisor and dominatrix. Yet as her torso swells, she never abandons her designer gowns and rather vulgar glamour, often photographed at casinos or in the back of limousines.

Essentially, my mother’s roots and hers don’t differ by much. Neither does their need for power and influence. Lupescu, however, had a taste for adventure and luxury, and played with fire at a time when her life was constantly in jeopardy. Mom’s greatest needs were for security and respectability. She always played by the rules.

Tanklike images of Mom in seal coat and lampshade hats begin to dominate by the early ‘60s, when she’d reached her heaviest weight and my father had made enough money to dress her in furs. There’s something implacable, forbidding and all-knowing about her during this stage, a painful contrast to the frail image across from me now with shriveled arms and stooped back. I look up at her with a pleading expression of exhaustion, hoping that she’ll say we can put off the rest of this task until tomorrow. But Mom’s not the type to let a job overwhelm her. A running joke between my brother and me is that she’ll jump out of the coffin to dig her own plot at the graveyard, just to demonstrate how it should be done.

Near the end of one album, a clipping startles me. Five very handsome teenaged hoodlums with Elvis haircuts, one of whom has the dazed look of a blond Billy Budd, are being booked at the police station for sixteen shocking thefts in one night. The article says that my dad, their court-appointed lawyer, later got them off the hook by pointing out a loophole in their arrest.

The article brings up the subject of my deceased father again, a self-made lawyer who worked well with clients who were criminals because he’d come close to that life himself. During a dismal, violent upbringing in Buffalo, he was expelled so many times from high school that he didn’t graduate until he was twenty-one. His nose was broken twice in fights or boxing matches; and even well into his seventies, he never lost his rough-and-ready style. Valentino-swarthy with a brooding, sensitive face, he could have attracted me when he was young, but by the time I was born he was in his mid-forties, his plush lips pursed by responsibility, his wild eyes tamed by Mom into a staid, capable, care-ridden stare.

As I’ve already mentioned, he was Mom’s only defiant gesture. Her parents thought he was a ruffian and a no-account. Far below her respectable exterior, she has to be hiding libidinal tastes similar to my own. This isn’t, of course, any reflection on her judgment. Despite her family’s opposition, the marriage was an ideal one for more than fifty years. Dad was successfully rehabilitated, instead of dragging her backward into a morass of poverty and crime. When it comes to my bad-boy attachments, I can’t say the same. Romulus, Mom divines, is a loser, unlikely ever to leave the elements in which he flounders or add any income to mine. I’m only thankful she has the bowdlerized version of his identity. Otherwise she’d cut me out of her will.

To tell the truth, Mom’s middle-class respectability irks me. Why can’t she understand that the con artist doesn’t always come from a street milieu? As trenchant example, the very mayor of Syracuse who named a building after her in the 1970s was subsequently fingered and sent to jail for graft. As a newly self-proclaimed expert on the Hohenzollerns, I can tell her that kings, queens and princes can be more devious than any hustler from the streets. Their betrayals and subterfuges are no less slimy, just more epic because of their positions.

It’s becoming more and more obvious that History, that whore, provides a favored backdrop for my infatuation with a street hustler. I may be draining my bank account for a shady junior pimp who spends my money on a string of girlfriends, but Carol II—a king, for God’s sake—threw away his future for a sauntering tart.

Slipping discreetly toward my open suitcase, I remove one of the fifteen bottles of codeine I smuggled in with the Romanian blanket. I’ve been swallowing the pills since my arrival to assuage the anxiety about this trip. Although my pupils may be pinpoints, Mom’s eyes aren’t good enough to see. I can’t imagine another way of dealing with Aunt Lil’s illness or Mom’s bad mood; and I know I must keep my own problems undercover. How to explain to my mother that I’ve left Romulus just a few days after being confronted with my female rival? The understanding is that he’s gone back to Sibiu to wait for me, and Elena must be working her strategies at this very moment. No matter that we parted in friendship and warmth. History has shown me the wily ways of the courtesan, as well as that figure’s untenable position, her or his lack of choices.

IN THE TWENTIES AND THIRTIES, scandal sheets poured a kaleidoscope of fancy about the seductress Lupescu into the minds of readers. It’s almost as if the Jewess born to very little future had been asked to oversee the dreams and fears of an entire nation. Her father’s name was Wolff, a sure sign of his ethnicity; but he married a good-looking Viennese who’d already renounced her Judaism for the Roman Catholic faith. Before the wedding, he was baptized as an Orthodox Christian, ostensibly to satisfy her. It was shortly after this that he Latinized “Wolff” into “Lupescu,” a reference to the same mammal.

Jews weren’t allowed to own businesses in Romania in those days. Nor could they attend the same schools as non-Jewish Romanians. But her father’s new identity allowed Elena Lupescu to get an education at the respectable but mediocre Pitar Moş convent in Bucharest. Years later, it was magically transformed into the high-class convent of Notre Dame de Sion, and a story was embroidered about Lupescu as a little girl meeting teenaged Prince Carol, when her mother took her to have tea with the poet queen Carmen Sylva. Historians are quick to deflate the fantasy by saying that Lupescu never met the queen in her entire life. Still, it’s hard for me to let go of the sunburst of red-gold hair on the terrace of the royal country house in Sinaia. It outshines reality and makes it seem sham, like a world devoid of fantasies about Romulus.

Meeting the queen is one of the many stories told by the poor, disenfranchised Elena Lupescu in flight from a second-class identity. Just as Coco Chanel reworked her biography to hide her beginnings as a convent orphan, Lupescu allegedly went to absurd lengths to construct a respectable, aristocratic past. Her biographers mock her for changing her writing from the artless, even hand of a schoolgirl to the sweeping, pointed script she’d seen in the writing of royalty. But such scholars are only betraying their own snobbery and pretentious outrage at the usurped legitimacy of the ruling class.

With a cloth, I wipe each album carefully, while Mom irritatedly points out specks or spots I’ve missed. In my hands is the record of her struggles from Yiddish-speaking immigrant in a provincial upstate village to the Syracuse Post-Standard’s “All-Time Woman of Achievement.” She is, in a sense, another answer to Lupescu’s dilemma of disenfranchisement—living proof that discipline, patience and drudgery can bring at least a few of the social awards Lupescu desperately desired. But Mom’s stolid march toward social acceptance provides little food for fancy and consequently has very little to do with my story. It could never be thought of as fiction.

Albums finally dusted, loose clippings reglued, I follow Mom’s meticulous directions for putting them away. So detailed are they that it begins to feel as if she’s seeking to control my body systems. She tells me when to lift an album, when to put it down and how to center it on the shelf. I start believing that she’s hoping to decide when I inhale or exhale, even the changing circumference of my pupil dilation. Riding with me to the shopping mall an hour later, she insists on even more stringent control. I’ve known the route since childhood but still must drive as her robot. Like a drill sergeant, Mom calls out signs and lights, announces precisely how many feet from a turn to signal and stops short of putting her own foot on the brake. When I explode uncontrollably, she looks at me with false white-gloved astonishment, claiming innocence as to what could possibly have caused my bullish, tasteless behavior.

It’s dawned on me slowly that all this insanity is merely the result of oedipal tension, which has increased tellingly since the death of my father. Something about my body unlocks impulses that frighten and annoy Mom. I know it’s true, because our closeness flourishes on the telephone without a hitch; it’s only when we’re in the same room that she becomes irritated and resorts to obsessive critiques. “Why do you walk like that?” she might say, in imitation of Romulus. “There’s a strange spot on your forehead. I sure hope it’s nothing serious.” “You never used to have jowls. It must be the drinking.” Or, “That shirt makes you look even fatter. Why don’t you go and change.”

As I dart into traffic at Mom’s myopic order, nearly causing an accident, I consider the fact that an analogous reaction occurs whenever Romulus and I have close physical contact. It’s been stupid of me never to acknowledge the incestuous parameters of a relationship with someone young enough to be my son. There’s no problem during genital contact, but what is that strange fidgeting on his part before we go to sleep? What is the sense of embarrassment he projects when we’re seated side by side at the movies? Certainly, it has some parallel to what happens between Mom and me, a squeamish sense of being trapped in an uncomfortable intergenerational physical intimacy, saddled with the body of the one from whom one expects protection. A fear that such intimacy threatens to breach taboos about desire. I’d almost call it a kind of incestuous repulsion.

While Mom’s directions continue to reduce the world to her miniature golf course, I retreat into thoughts about Lupescu’s strategies for distancing herself from her own oedipal dilemmas. Unlike me, she devised a drastic escape from the magnetic pull of family romance. She reinvented her past, thereby shedding the mantle of generation. “Dad? Oh, he was interested in chemistry,” she’d tell the few aristocratic visitors whom she could get to curtsy or kiss her hand after she became the consort of the prince about to become king. It was a revision of her father’s ownership of a small notions shop in the city of Iaşi. This in itself was a miracle, since Jews normally couldn’t own businesses. In fact, by the middle of World War I, few people of any kind were able to make a living in Iaşi. A large percentage were dying of infection or starvation.

The grotesque deprivations of life in wartime only exacerbated Lupescu’s taste for glamour. I can understand this principle completely: the worse the conditions, the more urgent the need for fantasy. Disadvantaged people penalized by normal rules often flourish in chaos. I like to think of her trudging through the frozen streets in the winter of 1916-1917, the coldest in half a century, past houses stripped bare by renegade soldiers or emptied by robbers. She must have passed some of the thousands of war refugees swarming the streets, many half dead from typhoid or smallpox, others clattering by as corpses in horse-drawn carts.

Within this setting of want, the fledgling temptress managed to hook a lieutenant in Prince Carol’s regiment named Tîmpeanu. The name was close enough to the Romanian word tîmpit, or “idiot,” to lead to jokes among the soldiers about his stupidity in marrying her. The relationship was, as predicted, short-lived because of Lupescu’s promiscuity. A few years after the war ended, the gay divorcée moved to Bucharest.

MOM HOBBLES through a shop at the mall, instructing me to hold up bargain dresses for her perusal. She scowls at the prices, standing straighter than usual in the face of curious onlookers. They’re surprised to see such a decrepit lady on the loose and in control of her own life. If such judges of others—including the historians who sort out villains and heroes—could live one day in the life of the people they portrayed, I bet they’d rearrange their score sheets. They might even find a way to reinterpret Lupescu as something other than a poisonous femme fatale or Jewish scourge.

It was the street life of Calea Victoriei and Bulevardul Kiseleff in Bucharest that finally granted Lupescu’s desire to escape the stigma of Jewishness. Among the promenading dandies and ostentatious women, she was able to walk right past the locus of her most visceral fantasy, the palace. Or she hung from a balcony overlooking the street in an apartment that belonged to three former school chums and coyly called down to the young cruisers below, sifting through the crowd of eligible men for one who might have a distant connection to the prince.

By 1925, gossip had it that Carol was already tired of his three-year marriage to Princess Helen of Greece. The whole affair had been arranged by Missy as a way of making Carol forget about Zizi Lambrino. Publicly, Missy patted herself on the back for having turned her son’s life around. “I fought a mighty battle for you to put you back on the straight road,” she loftily admonished in a letter that has become a public document. “Now it lies before you to walk straight upon it.”

The marriage that Missy had brokered between her son and Princess Helen was also supposed to strengthen the royal network that controlled the Balkans. Unfortunately, the two young people couldn’t have been more ill-matched. Within a year of the wedding, Helen loudly declared herself appalled by Carol’s pop taste, his poorly cut uniforms and his lack of interest in interior decorating. His table manners were a source of constant irritation as well; but he countered all her criticisms with the remark that he found her refinements deadly boring. In fact, even Missy mocked the princess’s regal propriety and coolness, her perfect hairdos and overly cultured conversation. It was common knowledge that after the birth of their son, the married couple had begun to sleep separately.

Marie’s affair with Ştirbey had never stopped piquing Carol’s resentment, but there were other reasons for his increasing rage against his mother and her consort. The fact that Ştirbey and the other Liberals in the government dictated policy with the help of Missy infuriated him. All of it smelled of corruption and went against his youthful fantasies of populism and democracy, instilled in him by his homosexual tutor Mohrlen.

The time would come, however, when Carol would far outdo both his mother’s infidelities and her reliance on camarillas. If what happens next titillates me, it’s probably because I know how much my infatuation with Romulus irks my mother. Like Carol’s, it’s a descent from her notion of respectability, despite the chances she took in marrying my problem-ridden father.

BACK AT THE HOUSE, I help Mom try on the royal-blue budget dress she purchased. It brings out her intense blue eyes, still sparkling with their enormous energy. An argument follows over my suggestion that we now have cocktails. Mom finally agrees to a small glass of wine. I pour a larger one for myself and surreptitiously use it to swallow another two tablets of codeine.

The wine soothes Mom’s concealed worries about her sister. Her attempts to control my every move vanish. A sweet Mom takes the fore, eagerly asking me about my trip to Maramureş, the houses, peasants and animals I saw. Astonishingly, admiration for my love of adventure and travel are beginning to leak slyly from her often critical features. A strange absorption floods her face like a remembrance. She left her Russian shtetl at two, so she can’t be reacting to memories; but my descriptions must still strike her as familiar, like something hidden in a collective unconscious imported from rural Russia.

She listens with rapt curiosity to my tale of driving through the storm and encountering the dead body on the road, and marvels at my courage in facing the slippery peaks of the Carpathians. It’s no use reminding her that she’s just subjected our two-mile suburban drive to minuscule, fearful scrutiny. Between us, the tale of Maramureş takes on heroic proportions and puts me in a time warp. Mom and I travel back to those preadolescent days when she delighted at my high marks or gave a sympathetic ear to childish anecdotes. Near the end of the story, we’re sitting on the couch with my arm clasping her close enough for me to smell the 1920s perfume she discreetly put on in my honor. Mitsouko, by Guerlain.

Our relationship seems to function on weirdly autonomous levels. Mom’s love floats out of reach repeatedly, replaced by resentment and criticism. Or is it fear of the intimacy and the physical feelings it inspires? But when her love returns, it has an overwhelming sweetness. If only I could find the place where she stores this raptness; with a snap of my fingers I’d make it manifest always.

Magic substances seem to accomplish something similar after dinner as I wash dishes. Stimulating my endorphins, the codeine accompanies a review of how far I’ve come with Romulus. During our first times together in Budapest, he’d leave his passport near the bed whenever he went out, assuming I needed proof he was coming back. But at least friendship and familiarity between us have long ago stopped that behavior. I wonder if he leaves his passport on the table for Elena when he goes out, say, to buy a liter of beer. Maybe not. Then she’d know what day I returned. He’d excuse himself to buy a pack of cigarettes and take the passport with him.

I also wonder what Romulus would make of the other Elena—Lupescu—given what he confessed to me one day near the end of our second stay at the Gellért in Budapest. I’d asked him somewhat fearfully whether he was having a good time. He answered that no amount of luxury could erase the fact that he had no future in Hungary. He could never be happy in such a hostile country. Then how did Lupescu carve out such a sparkling future in a country that resented and held back her people? Could it be that he lacks Lupescu’s relentless drive? Or perhaps he’s too genuine a person and would find her creative subterfuges distasteful.

IN 1925, under the flickering projection of the silent film Die Nibelungen, Lupescu’s face in its layers of powder and paint looked like a Kabuki mask. It was positioned directly across from Crown Prince Carol, who’d attended the film with his family. The event was a fund-raiser for the Carol I Foundation, meant to support Romania’s college students. Apparently, that overly made-up face stoked his heart to the point that he decided to meet her.

The chance for the two actually to speak seems to have been arranged by a notorious womanizer named Tăutu, who lived in a leopardskin-strewn house in Bucharest and may have been an ardent admirer of Lupescu’s Austrian, possibly promiscuous mother. When Carol asked to be hooked up with the hot red-head Lupescu, Tăutu threw a party to which both were invited. Yet when Tăutu realized that the prince was seriously interested, he freaked out. He knew Lupescu was playing for keeps when the enamored Carol offered to drive her home and she simpered, “But what would the neighbors think?” So at the next party, Tăutu tried to soil her reputation by faking an affair with her, calling her a slut and throwing a nightgown in her face. The plan backfired when the quick-thinking Lupescu innocently asked if there might be any gentleman in the room who could protect a lady’s honor. Carol stepped forward, and the two were never separated again.

Accomplishing a real defamation of Lupescu required greater leaps of the imagination. At the beginning of the affair, she and Carol never appeared in public together. Even afterward, she kept in the background and lived a life of near isolation. The legitimate members of the nobility had abandoned the court to avoid her, and she feared the public because of several threats to her life. She spent most of her time during Carol’s reign traveling from her small house on Aleea Vulpache to the palace late at night, where she may have entered through an underground passageway and never got the chance to meet Queen Marie.

All this was happening as Fascism took flower in Romania and as Lupescu’s lover, now the king, began making more and more concessions to it. It’s no wonder that such a mystery figure as Lupescu became a canvas for projections of Fascistic fear. If she’d been more visible, demonizing her might have proved more difficult. But for the Romanian public of the time, she was the living embodiment of Jewishness, sexuality and government intrigue. It was a common rumor that she influenced the king not only in his personal life but in affairs of state as well. No matter how indirect this interference might have been, people were eager to see it as conspiratorial and manipulative, adjectives that the people of one of the most plot-ridden countries in the world associated with Jews. She was hated not just by the Gentiles of Romania, but also by the Jews of the country, most of whom thought of her as an embarrassingly bad example. Politicians tiptoed around her or schemed against her, and the aristocracy snubbed her as an arriviste. The Iron Guard, Romania’s Fascists, tried to convince the world she was a supernatural Jewish demon. But no critic has come up with any hard proof of her being an éminence grise. The historian Paul D. Quinlan doesn’t think she even really was. According to him, Lupescu’s most important role consisted in providing home-cooked mamaliga, telling dirty jokes she’d learned from the barracks in Iaşi, playing cards, entertaining commoners and offering regular nooky.

Even so, most later historians were no kinder to the sensual Jewess than her contemporaries were; under a more objective guise, they perpetrated, in my opinion, myths forged by the Fascists. Alice-Leone Moats, her supposed intimate friend, went so far as to accuse her of single-handedly keeping Romania “in a constant state of turmoil for nearly fifteen years.” Though her lover the king has recently been forgiven for his capitulation to the Nazis, Lupescu remains a stain of ill repute in almost every history book, and her remains were recently removed from the tomb she once shared with the king and reburied in a commoner’s grave.

MOM GETS READY TO READ about Lupescu in bed, and I spread out at the foot to keep her company, unwilling to let go while she’s in such a loving mood. Off go the shoes from her swollen, once hardworking feet, and on goes the pale turquoise budget nightgown I’ve seen her put on for close to twenty-five years. With a hand knobby from arthritis she sweetly pats my back. Love, I’ve decided, flows unpredictably, ignoring arguments and the lessons of historians.

What fascinates me most about the tales of Lupescu is their marriage of evil and love. What were the feelings of the Jewess behind the king in the 1930s, as her lover issued one anti-Semitic edict after another? My own experience has shown me the possibility, if not the thrill, in loving someone whose actions should be condemned. After all, my mother and most of my friends consider Romulus dangerous, a destructive leech; and I can’t come up with convincing opposing arguments.

It’s not merely a question of love going on at the same time as contradictory resentment and disapproval, but it has something to do with the different levels our emotions inhabit, our efficiency at quarantining our sense of morality from passions that release our endorphins. The schizoid, unexplainable switches between Mom and me are proof, I suppose. It’s as if everything has its separate chamber: outrage, desire, tenderness and fear. But in Lupescu’s obsessive alliance, I see an even more fascinating feature: the notion that even in the most repugnant conditions, love is the sought-after paradise; it just has to be right.