DESPITE ALL HER PROTESTATIONS about never having liked babies and her insistence that she would never, ever answer to “Granny,” my mother couldn’t fool me—she had fallen in love with the critter. In France that summer, when money had been especially tight, she wrote to Hylan, “I just bought the prettiest little dress for Gully’s little chimp … a ridiculous thing I know, but irresistible. And only 70 francs at the big Flea Market in Le Beausset.”
One of my mother’s more incomprehensible prejudices was her preference for girls over boys. It was totally irrational and she never attempted to explain it, but then again she was never big on explanations when it came to her behavior. Qui s’explique, s’accuse—“Whoever explains himself, accuses himself”—was her motto, and luckily Rebecca and I had had the good sense to be born female. Nick and my son, Alexander, had been less prescient. At any rate there was no keeping her away from this baby girl. Rebecca was dressed up like a pretty dolly in her broderie anglaise christening dress—without any thought of her actually entering a church—toys and more practical garments would be dropped off regularly, and if I needed any shopping done, she would rush off to Balducci’s, returning with wicked indulgences like blinis, red caviar, and sour cream, and we would sit around the kitchen table, sipping ice-cold vodka, pretending we were on a red leather banquette at the Russian Tea Room.
A couple of months after Rebecca’s birth, Peter’s mother, Katherine, whom I had fallen for shortly after I fell for her son, arrived from London to meet her new granddaughter. The two grannies could not have been less alike. My mother-in-law was no pushover, but she certainly didn’t believe in rocking boats until they capsized. She preferred gentle persuasion to confrontation. Dignified, discreet, a listener rather than a talker, she was without a single malicious bone in her tall elegant body. A great beauty, a wife, hostess, and mother who had abandoned her hopes of becoming an actress when she had left Vienna in 1937, to move to London, she had never worked a day in her life. Still, they did have a few traits in common: extreme generosity, intelligence, a natural gift for captivating men, and their love for Rebecca. What more admirable qualities could you wish for in any grandmother?
By the time Katherine returned to London, it had been decided. My mother had offered us the house in France for ten days the following summer so Peter could take a well-deserved vacation there with the ladies in his life—his mother, his wife, and his daughter.
“Are you absolutely sure she won’t be there?”
“Don’t be silly. Weren’t you listening? She didn’t invite us to stay—she’s generously lending us her house. There’s a big difference.”
“Damn right. There’s a huge difference, which is why I think you should check up on her understanding of that word ‘lend.’ ”
“Oh do shut up, you’re being ridiculous.”
“Okay. But you will check, won’t you?”
“Yes, yes, I’ll check.”
And he actually believed I was going to call her and make sure that La Migoua would be delivered to us without its sitting tenant? Of course I wasn’t. There was no way I could have done that. Much too terrifying, and rather impolite when you came to think of it, so in my desire to please—and placate—both my husband and my mother, I did nothing. We had all heard her say “lend” quite clearly, so that must be what she was going to do.
Peter was not being churlish. From the beginning, he had always been unfailingly polite and friendly to my mother, but sadly, since he had yet to turn himself into a mulatto Rothschild, the ground still had not been broken on that multimillion-dollar complex for stray cats, and the Nobel committee’s invitation must have got lost in the mail, his mother-in-law remained immune to his charms. Not overtly hostile (although one Christmas she did call him a prick, to which he replied, rather wittily I thought, “Surely, you mean a brick?”) but he got the message, and quite naturally, she never changed her mind. I tried to console Peter by pointing out that her brother-in-law, John, was given the same treatment—“Christ, that fucking fool is building a boat in his backyard, can you believe it?”—but it still hurt. Dear sweet John had the distinction of holding the world record for the number of times (twice) he had been thrown out of La Migoua. Other less tolerant guests tended not to return after their first hasty departure. The boat, by the way, was a thing of great beauty, created entirely with his own hands, that grew bigger and bigger, blocking all light from the living room, until one day it was all grown up and ready to leave home. The problem, which I am sure John had taken into account when he started on this ambitious project, was that the garden was entirely surrounded by a solid wall of extremely tall brick houses. The only solution was to summon a gigantic crane—so heavy that it destroyed the underground sewage pipes running along the street outside—which heaved the boat up over the roof, drove it off to Southampton, where it slipped into the icy water, and repaid its creator with many years of innocent pleasure.
JUST BECAUSE MY MOTHER had decided she’d had quite enough of Freddie certainly didn’t mean that I had. He was as much a part of my life as my real father, and not only did we love each other, but we truly enjoyed each other’s company, to the point that she would sometimes say, in mock exasperation, “You two are just the same. Identical cool, nitpicky, logical minds, both Scorpios—all you ever think about is sex and death.”
Which wasn’t entirely true because neither of us had much interest in the second topic. Still, she was right; we were alike in many ways and the divorce didn’t change a thing. In some odd way it may even have brought us closer together, since Freddie felt that I was one of the few people who could begin to understand what had gone on in their marriage.
Both nonstop talkers, with similar interests and intellects, Freddie and Peter took to each other instantly, and I loved listening to them yacking away, happy that at least part of my family appreciated the man I had married. Drawn together by me, they also had another lady in common, and as poor Freddie became more and more distressed about my mother’s behavior over the divorce, he confided in Peter, knowing they were both up against the same frightening force of nature: “I don’t mind telling you, Peter, that she doesn’t much like me, and she doesn’t like you at all.”
True enough, but at least Peter didn’t have to worry about my mother’s letting her lawyers loose on him.
Just as it is impossible to know what really goes on inside other people’s marriages, so it is probably a mistake to get involved in the minutiae of their divorces, especially when they are your parents. So what follows is Freddie’s story. My mother never talked to me about it in any detail.
In early 1982 Peter received a letter from Freddie that began “I am sorry to foist my troubles on you and I leave it to your discretion how far you involve Gully, but Dee’s behavior is reducing me to despair.… She is employing a sharp lawyer who will obtain a settlement which will be ruinous to me.… In the meantime she wants no further communication between us.”
You have to wonder why Freddie didn’t go shopping for an even sharper lawyer for himself, but he wasn’t an American. He was a man of habit who would never have thought of leaving good old Gerard Shuffle, who had been at Christ Church with him, had shuffled his first divorce through the courts, and was a fellow member of the Garrick Club.
He then moves on to his real concern, his son, Nick, about whom he wrote at the end of his autobiography, “My love for this child has been the dominating factor in my life.” Freddie adored Nick, far more than any of his other children, and I think the certainty of his father’s love gave Nick a bit of extra strength when it came to coping with his more mercurial mother.
“My immediate worry is Nick. There is little doubt that Dee will try to turn him against me and I should be wretched if she succeeded.”
Well, he needn’t have worried. Our mother didn’t try to turn her son against him, and Nick’s loyalty to his father never faltered. He looked after Freddie toward the end of his life, he slept in his room in the hospital, and was there holding his hand when he died. My brother—who looks like Kafka’s sexier and far more handsome younger brother—was lucky enough to inherit his father’s gentleness and his mother’s wit, which, combined with both his parents’ mental acuity and their effortless ability to charm the opposite sex, has kept him supplied with a succession of dazzling ladies over the years. An enviable quality that always made his dear old Dad beam with parental pride and admiration.
In the next part of the letter Freddie turns to the vexed subject of Hylan. “I should never have accepted the humiliating conditions under which I lived in Regents Park Terrace.… I was allowed into my own house only for short periods on sufferance.” (It’s quite true that Hylan moved into the house every Tuesday the minute he set off for Oxford, and was still there, on one or two unfortunate occasions, when Freddie returned on Friday.)
“And I should never have allowed her to walk off with so much spoil—but there comes a point at which the worm turns.” (Apparently my mother was claiming more than half the sale of the house in London, La Migoua, and whatever furniture and pictures she chose to take to New York. He had also agreed to pay her three hundred pounds per month.)
Which brings us to the subject of money. Actually money and Hylan combined, which was twice as vexing. At this point Freddie’s brilliant analytical mind seems to have deserted him completely, and he came up with this ludicrous non sequitur as the only possible explanation for his wife’s desire to bring about his financial downfall: “Either Hylan is a pauper, or he proposes to leave her.”
Sadly, in the end, both propositions turned out to be true. So much for Freddie’s logic.
BY THE TIME WE SET OFF with Peter’s mother for our family holiday at La Migoua, Freddie had married Vanessa and they were living in a house just off Baker Street, where I visited them on the way to France. Immediately I sensed something was horribly wrong. Vanessa was upstairs in bed, Freddie was visibly agitated, swinging his silver chain around, and although he didn’t quite say so, I knew she must be dangerously sick. The curtains were drawn, and Vanessa lay motionless in bed, her face as pale as the sheet covering her body, scarcely whispering as I leaned over to kiss her cheek. I recognized the perfume she had worn that day fifteen years before, when I’d seen her by the porter’s lodge in New College, looking like Nefertiti in a little girl’s party dress, and had directed her toward Freddie’s rooms: Fidji by Guy Laroche. What useless, inconsequential rubbish clutters up one’s head, even at life’s most awful moments; but it was her scent, she never wore anything else, and there beside the bed was a child’s drawing of the bottle, with “You are my Fidji Mummy” written across the top in uncertain capital letters. She was only forty-eight.
I somehow knew my mother would be standing by the front door, underneath the lime tree, ready to welcome her guests into her cool kitchen, where a jug of homemade lemonade stood on the marble table, surrounded by mismatched glasses from the flea market in Le Beausset. Oh God, why hadn’t I screwed up my courage and had the conversation that I lied to Peter about, every time he’d asked me if I was quite sure she understood the meaning of the word “lend”? His calm smiling mother was cradling Rebecca in her arms and, looking across the table, I had this feeling—idiot that I was—that the two of them would make everything come right in the end.
“But you promised me that we would be alone.”
Peter wasn’t so much angry—that would come later—as aggrieved that things had turned out exactly as he had predicted. After working like a dog all year in New York, he just wanted a peaceful, relaxing week in Provence—was that too much to ask? Maybe if he calmed down it might be more likely to happen. Maybe I could persuade my mother to stay with some friends for a few days. Maybe we could all just get along and pretend everything was fine. Maybe Vanessa wasn’t dying.
That evening Freddie called our neighbor Francette (we still didn’t have a telephone) and told her Vanessa had been diagnosed with liver cancer; she was in the hospital and the doctors said it would move very quickly now.
Rebecca lay asleep in her basket beside my chair, the warm night breeze rustled the leaves in the lime tree, a flickering candle shone through the bottle of rosé on the table turning it into pink stained glass, the platter of grilled mackerel (the same fish I was cooking the night I had discovered the love letter she had written Freddie lying on top of the garbage) was passed around the table.
I wish I could say things calmed down, but they didn’t. In fact they got much worse. Peter was still upset, and my mother was even more upset after I suggested she might like to stay with her friend Sylvia for a couple of nights; I slapped Nick on the face when he made it clear he wasn’t grief stricken over Vanessa (admittedly she had never been particularly nice to him, but she was dying); Katherine wasn’t feeling well (she too would be dead from cancer before the end of the year); and I was mostly in tears. Rebecca was the only one of us who laughed and burped and giggled her way through that nightmare summer.
The day after Peter drove his mother back to London, Freddie called again. It was over. The woman who had stolen her husband and destroyed her marriage was dead. Did that make my mother the victor? I wonder if that’s how it works. She was left standing on the battlefield, or rather stomping around her kitchen shouting at Francette’s dog, while her opponent was being carried off in preparation for her burial—surely that must count for something? And yet, if the battle had been about possessing Freddie’s heart and mind—which presumably it had—then Vanessa had triumphed long ago, and her victory over my mother was total and irrevocable.
“Tired and emotional” is an English euphemism—made up by Private Eye—for being drunk, but my mother and I started arguing at breakfast, so how could those nice, innocent bottles lined up on the sideboard have been to blame? Emotional I certainly was, and after the week that had just passed, utterly exhausted too. How it began hardly matters, but what fueled it was my dismay at her reaction to Vanessa’s death—the same hysterical impulse that had made me slap Nick. The absence of feeling, the refusal to even fake some empathy, the inability to utter the customary soothing platitudes—and I was demanding that from a person who had spent a lifetime scorning, and attacking anything she judged to be dull, hypocritical, predictable, and worst of all, conventional? Shows you how far gone I was.
I suddenly needed my daddy. The gentle, happy, smiling man who had stood up—“Oh Jesus, he’s going to make a speech”—and said all the usual cheerful boring things that a father should say at his daughter’s wedding. It had always been my plan to take Rebecca to see him that summer, and after lunch I went down to the travel agent in the village and booked us onto the night train from Toulon to Geneva, leaving at eleven that evening.
WHEN THEY HAD DECIDED to get married in Paris in 1949, my mother and father both secretly knew they had not made the wisest choice of partner, and as their friends had predicted, they were divorced within five years. The next time around their judgment had improved dramatically, and a few years later they both presented me with a perfectly chosen set of extra parents. Freddie was easy—we were already old friends by the time my mother married him—but what about this hussy in Washington, who had come out of nowhere to seduce my father away from me? I felt rather the same way about her as my mother had felt about Vanessa. A spoiled only child, I was not accustomed to sharing my toys.
The hussy was called Melissa. Tall, blond, and beautiful, she possessed some special witchy magic that, over one summer in Georgetown, transformed a disagreeable and extremely jealous nine-year-old into an adoring stepdaughter. She gave me a baby alligator, no bigger than a lizard, who liked to lounge around in the sun being fed steak tartare; she curled my eyelashes, put up my hair, painted a new face on top of my old one, hung pearls from my ears, dressed me up like a grand duchess, and took a picture that I still have. She picked leaves from the fig tree that the two Eves wore instead of bikinis as they sunbathed in the backyard, and she took me to a silly movie that we both agreed my father would hate, so we left him behind at home. I trusted her completely.
Twenty-five years later Melissa was working for the UN in Geneva, and my father was slowly restoring the old stone manor house they lived in at the edge of a village just over the border in France. She had become an ambassador, and while she was at the office my father went around banging nails into things, Rebecca splashed about naked in an old stone trough in the courtyard, and every day at one o’clock sharp he would put down his tools, which was the signal for us to get into the car and go out to lunch. We always went to the same place. Grass grew down the middle of the dirt road, oak trees joined together overhead, creating a cool green tunnel that we drove through, up and up, ears popping, until we reached the top, where a vast sunlit meadow suddenly opened up ahead of us.
A few wooden tables were set up under the apple trees—no chairs, just wobbly benches, and no kitchen—just a tiny cuckoo-clock chalet where apple-cheeked Madame stood in front of her stove, melting butter in a frying pan until it bubbled and frothed—omelette aux fines herbes was the only dish on the menu. Behind her, homemade fruit pies—apricot, cherry, plum—were lined up, cooling complacently on the shelf. Outside, Rebecca took a twirl on the swing, watched over by her handsome grandfather, while a ridiculously appealing puppy tumbled around in the daisy-strewn grass. “À table, à table,” I called out, clapping my hands. An earthenware jug full of wildflowers stood in the middle of the table along with a bottle of red wine, a platter of saucissons, cornichons, and a loaf of pain de campagne. Madame’s glistening omelette, scattered with fresh herbs, and a bowl of mesclun followed and after that we shared one of the complacent fruit pies. The whole thing was too good to be true—a cliché out of some ad campaign dreamed up by the local tourist board.
It was past three when we gathered ourselves together, said Merci beaucoup and Au revoir and À demain to Madame, and started back to the car. I turned around for one last look, and there at the edge of the woods, two sleek girls on two sleek horses were cantering across the meadow, hoping they were not too late for Madame’s famous omelette aux fines herbes.