I HAD NEVER HEARD OF Buerger’s disease until the day my aunt called me in New York and told me that my mother was in the hospital. Also known as thromboangiitis obliterans, it is a recurring inflammation of the small and medium veins and arteries of the hands and feet. There is no known cure. As the disease progresses, the circulation of blood in the extremities is so restricted that gangrene sets in and amputation is necessary. The disease is strongly associated with smoking.
My mother had already had two heart attacks, the second far more severe than the first, and although she had tried to stop smoking, she never completely succeeded. And even if she had been able to pack it up, how can you erase the damage caused by fifty years of relentless addiction to cigarettes? By the time I arrived in London the doctors were discussing just how much of her right foot, and possibly leg, would have to be amputated.
Brave she had always been. She mocked the hell that came her way, refused to cave in to self-pity; she didn’t believe in asking for help or showing weakness. Wit was her weapon of choice against fear—that’s how she had behaved all through her life. And now, face-to-face with true horror, why should she have changed? Just before the operation she wrote to her old friend Claus von Bülow:
They, the ultimate THEY, are coming shortly to do whatever it is they are going to do and so just in case I pull an involuntary Oates on the expedition, I wanted to thank a few—you in particular—for noble and kind behavior. It was so good of you to make the boring trip [to the hospital] so often, and it was much appreciated. I suspect they’re going to go for that particularly skinny easy-chop area just below the knee—I don’t think there’s a hope of saving my poor little foot that has been with me since I was a baby … they haven’t said any of this, mind you, but they have shifty eyes when they speak and they say guarded things.
Still in the hospital after the amputation, she called another old friend, the art dealer Gene Thaw, in New York, and said, laughing, “Next week I’m getting fitted for a parrot.” But the jolly old wooden leg would take much longer to fit, and in the meantime she was sent home in a wheelchair to a house that was nothing but stairs. Nick was living in the basement flat in York Street, and without him I don’t know how she could ever have managed at all. Friends rallied—most especially Claus—and her sister, Beegoonie, who had nursed her through her last heart attack, was nearby and ready to help with anything, anytime. But she was still alone. Even in the days when she’d had two legs she hadn’t been any good at it, she hated it, it had never been her thing, and now it must have been torture.
Back in New York I called constantly, full of anxiety and guilt at being unable to do anything useful, but she would tell me, as she had so often when I was a child, that there was absolutely nothing to worry about, it was all going to be fine, and not to be such a silly girl. One day she even made me laugh out loud describing her attempt to clean the cat’s litter tray while sitting in a wheelchair. Leaning forward, ready with her scooper, she had toppled right over and, arms and leg flailing about, had landed in the shit. “Jesus, can you believe it? I’m still picking bits of that awful gravel out of my hair!”
Of all her friends Claus was the most constant and the only one, in the end, who knew how to lift her up and trick her into forgetting, for a while at least, what had happened to her life. They had met in New York in the early eighties with their mutual friends, Clare and Gene Thaw, at a time when Claus was trapped inside his own living hell. Convicted in 1982 of the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny, he had appealed, but it wasn’t until 1985, at his second trial, that he was found not guilty of all charges. Perhaps, at the beginning of their friendship, she had been the one who knew how to make him laugh, lift his spirits, and give him some respite from the nightmare. She had always had sympathy for, and a desire to help, anybody in serious trouble, and, Christ knows, a thirty-year prison sentence must qualify as pretty serious trouble. Thirsty wasps, abandoned dogs, starving birds, and any human being unjustly convicted of a crime were all equally in need of support, sustenance, and love.
Clever, kind, and funny were the qualities that she had always looked for in men, and Claus delivered all three in abundance. He used to write her long letters and silly postcards; he took her to parties even when she pretended she didn’t want to go; brought picnics to her house when she was stuck in her wheelchair; and never stopped calling even when she was too depressed to call him back.
In July 1984, when he was in the middle of his appeal and a virtual prisoner in New York, she had written to him from La Migoua. Here’s his reply:
What a lovely letter. First the element of surprise. The envelope, embossed with the impressive logo of the Hotel Francuski U1. Pijarski 13, Krakow, naturally led me to believe that this was just another letter from my fans behind the iron curtain, who sympathize with me as a martyr of the capitalist judicial system.
I am of course all for the imaginative employment of surplus stationery. One lady, I knew, salvaged enough writing paper from one weekend at Blenheim, to carry on an upwardly mobile social career for decades. On my last visit to Istanbul I could not resist replenishing my supply of paper and envelopes from the Kunt Palace Hotel, although I was in fact staying at the Hilton.… However, as I am still without a passport you must not expect any sympathy from me regarding the hardships you have encountered abroad.
Veuillez agréer, chère milady, mes baisers les plus lascifs.
Claus
Around about the time my mother left New York and went back to Freddie, Claus too decided to move to London. I imagine that he was fed up with his unwanted celebrity, bored with being constantly stared at, tired of reading about himself in the papers, and most important, he wanted to be close to his daughter, Cosima, who lived in England. My mother was delighted, and even though they were now in the same city and saw each other all the time, the letters flew back and forth between York Street and his flat in Kensington. In 1995 my mother’s campaign to persuade the Westminster Council to put up a plaque on her house in commemoration of Freddie had finally succeeded, and she wrote to Claus inviting him to come to its unveiling, inauguration, opening, or whatever it is you do with plaques. She was planning to give a small party.
It will be a motley lot—but that you must forgive, because there is no one in the world better than you at dealing with a roomful of ill-assorted Vanilla Allsorts. It’s outrageous that I lean on you so heavily and ruthlessly but … well what the hell, you are Curiously Strong. Like the mints.
Obviously the Internationale always makes me tearful and maudlin but a greater truth is that I love you dearly and count you as a treasured friend, a most treasured friend. Trouble with the truth is that truth sees the light of day so rarely it can’t help looking all bleary-eyed, schlurring ish schyllables and sounding drunk.… But that dushent make it not the truth.
THE THING ABOUT prosthetic legs is they never fit properly, they are too heavy, they hurt, they cause suppurating blisters that take a long time to heal, and it is impossible to walk normally with them. The thing about amputated legs is that the stump is constantly shrinking, hence the difficult fit, but far, far worse is the excruciating not-in-the-least “phantom” pain that no drug can control. And if you were used to having the kind of legs that men lusted after and other women envied, why not add that to this witches’ brew, and let’s not forget—how could you—that your suffering was entirely your own fault. Your leg wasn’t blown off defeating Hitler on Omaha Beach, nothing as splendid as that, it was destroyed, along with your heart, by a million deeply inhaled cigarettes. But none of this is of the slightest interest to anybody else, in fact it was so dull and depressing that there is absolutely no point in discussing it. Which is why my mother never did.
The little brother whom she had always protected and looked out for in that madhouse they had both grown up in was now a gentleman in his sixties, and it was payback time. Woody loved his older sister, and for the next ten years he and his wife, Mary, would fly in from Boston, pick my mother up in London, and take her to France for the summer. Savagely independent, she found it hard to admit that it was the tough older sister/mother who needed looking after now, but without Nick, Woody, and Mary she could never have continued going to La Migoua for as long as she did. I could come for only a couple of weeks, her sister was often there, friends dropped in and out, but as her health slid downhill, she couldn’t be left alone in the house, not even for a single night.
In addition to the leg and the problems with her heart, my mother’s narcolepsy became more serious as she got older. She would fall asleep quite suddenly, not just after dinner and a few glasses of wine, but in the middle of a sentence, or walking down the street. Woody and I worried about her driving; sometimes he would pretend he couldn’t find the keys—as if that was going to stop her—and the ghastly day came one summer in France when I refused to allow the children to go in the car with her on some expedition. Cruel and heartless, I know, and of course she was upset, but she must have understood, because after that she never insisted upon driving again. For her to have abdicated so easily was the saddest part of the whole episode. Why hadn’t there been more of a fight? What had happened to her wonderful, sometimes terrifying, combative spirit? It was as if her character was slowly, subtly changing. There were fewer outbursts of the Jesus H. Christ variety, she allowed us to take over more of the running of the house, the vulnerability that had been so carefully concealed her entire life was exposed for all to see. I wanted my old mother back.
“He’s a good-looking little bugger, I’ll give him that” had been her first reaction to Alexander. And not just good-looking, he also shared his grandmother’s dedication to anarchy. When he was about six he decided to embellish the admittedly boring pale yellow walls in the living room—“Tinkerbell’s piss” was how my mother had described the color—with a daring abstract design executed in a medley of colored crayons. I attacked his artwork with chemical sprays, scrubbed away with Brillo pads and brushes, and having failed to erase it, turned to him in exasperation, “Now, why did you do that?” Surely the explanation was self-evident, his expression suggested: “Iss my essitement.” But of course! What a fool I was. Had I forgotten that there is nothing more exciting than behaving badly, taking a risk, breaking the rules, doing something you know you should never have done? His granny understood completely.
WHEN I FELL IN LOVE with Peter, he was making a documentary for the BBC about the Cathars, based on a book called Montaillou, by the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Lying in bed in our hotel room in Paris, in preparation for our dinner with the très charmant et séduisant professeur, I read the story of this small mountain village in Languedoc and its brave inhabitants who had dared to defy the church, and made Peter promise to take me there one day. Twenty-five years later, the editor of Condé Nast Traveler got lucky with the story—thirteenth-century heretics, Crusades, massacres, the smell of flesh roasting at the stake, the readers will love it—and, leaving the children behind at La Migoua, clutching a copy of Montaillou and both Michelins, red and green, we headed due west toward Albi.
Accustomed to the stupefying beauty of cathedrals like Chartres and Rouen, with their jewel-tinted rose windows, gargoyles, and doorways carved with such elegant precision that they seemed more like lace than stone, I was affronted by the sheer brutality of this building. Buttresses that looked like the cylinders of a loaded gun punctuated the monolithic redbrick walls, fortified watchtowers kept guard, its windows were nothing more than sinister, elongated slits. Architecture as intimidation. It evoked the harsh, triumphalist style favored by the Soviets, or a medieval version of something Albert Speer might have conjured up for his demanding boss. But the most astonishing thing about this deeply disturbing edifice was that it wasn’t a fortress or a prison, it was the Cathédrale de Sainte-Cécile in Albi.
Now why would the church want to go and build something like that? “Well, you have to remember that construction began in 1282, only forty years after the Cathars were finally defeated at Montségur,” Peter paused to order a plate of saucissons, cornichons, and two glasses of wine, “and the bishop of Albi clearly felt that the cathedral had to assert the church’s absolute victory over the heretics.”
Looking back at this grim monument to orthodoxy I could see that the bishop had won the architectural war, but I also knew that seven hundred years later the heresy and the people who died for it had not been forgotten.
“Absolutely. We are still fascinated by them, how else to explain the fact that this book was a huge best seller? Here’s what Ladurie says: ‘Today Catharism is no more than a dead star whose cold but fascinating light reaches us now after an eclipse of more than half a millennium.’ ”
I turned to face the sun and closed my eyes as Peter read me choice extracts about the local priest, Pierre Clergue, a secret Cathar, who appeared to have had a distinctly modern view of sex and sin: “One woman’s just like another. The sin is the same, whether she is married or not. Which is as much as to say that there is no sin about it at all.”
“A lady who sleeps with a true love is purified of all sins. With Pierre Clergue, I liked it. And so it could not displease God. It was not a sin,” was how Grazide Rives justified her affair. The châtelaine of Montaillou, Beatrice de Planissoles, took a more practical view: “What if I do become pregnant by you? I shall be ashamed and lost.” Pas de problème, Pierre assured her. “I have a certain herb. If a man wears it when he mingles his body with that of a woman, he cannot engender, nor she conceive.”
It sounded remarkably similar to my own home life. I took another sip of wine and went on listening, still mesmerized after all these years by the same voice that had seduced Maureen, the receptionist at Weidenfeld’s.
WHEN WE GOT BACK TO La Migoua, Peter returned to New York, but I stayed on, with the children, for a few more days. It was getting harder, and more painful for my mother to walk, but she loved seeing her old friends, so Nick and I organized a small dinner at the house. Madame la Princesse, Sylvia, came minus Prince Azamat, who had disappeared long ago to Nassau with an aging blond heiress, Francette and the pungent Éloi, of course, and Bill Deakin, minus bossy Pussy, who had died earlier in the year. Unable to drive—maybe like Freddie, he never could—Bill was brought over from Le Castellet by Alain, who deposited him on our terrace sans culottes, or at least with his trousers down around his knees. Bill couldn’t have cared less, but Alain, embarrassed on his client’s behalf, yanked them up as best he could before helping Bill over to the table.
After a couple of whiskeys Bill was chattering away about his adventures with Tito in Yugoslavia during the war (“He spoke remarkably good English and he loved girls, so we didn’t have a bad time at all”); Francette described her first meeting with Freddie in Paris around about the same time, causing my mother to shut them both up. “Jesus, while you guys were cavorting with fun-loving partisans and that old fart Duff Cooper at the British Embassy, I was freezing my ass off on a parade ground in Canada. Nobody ever said life was fair!”
I caught Nick’s eye across the table; we both smiled—this was just how we had hoped the evening would turn out.
Alain came back at ten to get Bill, who managed to make it to the taxi without losing his pants, but about half an hour later I got a frantic call. “I’ve just left Monsieur Deakin at his house, and he says he has lost his teeth, he wonders if perhaps you have them?” Not about my person, but they could be lurking somewhere on the shipwrecked table. Please tell Monsieur Deakin I will do my best to find them. After I’d hung up the telephone, I went outside where my mother was sitting in the dark. “Bill’s lost his teeth.” “Yeah, and I’ve lost my leg.” I froze. Had she really said that? “It was hurting, so I took it off and now I can’t find it.” I got down on my hands and knees. “Well, it can’t have gone far,” and retrieved it from its hiding place beneath her chair.
“I really think she was trying to kill us.” I had heard the story before and knew the attempted murderer’s name. Sand dunes, an endless wide beach, sun sparkling on giant waves rolling in from the Atlantic, the woman in the black bathing suit waded into the water and beckoned for her two small children to follow. A powerful swimmer, she plowed through the waves, never once looking back as the children, struggling to keep up, were knocked over and dragged down into the churning ocean. My mother was three, her older brother, Jackie, almost five. She didn’t tell the story often, in fact she usually avoided talking about her mother at all, but that night, more than seventy years later, sitting in the dark with her missing leg, the memory haunted her. “When I was about ten, she said she despised me.” There was no way I could contradict or even soften these memories when all I had ever heard about my grandmother just confirmed the damage she had inflicted upon her daughter.
Alain arrived the next morning to take us to the airport—he always had a little packet of Kleenex on hand for my tears—and this time what I feared most came true. That was our last summer together in the house.
EACH MORNING Alexander would walk the two blocks to school with his dad, identifying the make of every single parked car along the way. After he had been dropped off at 8:45, Peter would buy The Times, cross Sixth Avenue, and head for the diner on the corner of Eleventh Street. By the time he heard the first plane roar down the avenue and saw it hit its target, nobody was reading the newspaper anymore. I turned on the television the minute he called, and at 9:03 the word “crash” was replaced by “attack” and I was running toward the school. “Give blood now! We need blood. Now!” Doctors and nurses stood on the steps of St. Vincent’s Hospital, screaming, but how could I stop? I needed to get Alexander safely—as if anywhere was safe—home.
The children had been told about the “accident,” and as soon as we got back Alexander sat down at the dining room table with a glass of milk, cookies, a piece of paper, and some crayons, and drew me a picture of a jaunty toy plane heading straight for the two Dunhill lighters. “That’s lovely, darling, thank you,” I said, attaching it to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a strawberry. The only way Peter could reach Rebecca, whose school was way up in the nineties on the East Side, was on foot. He gallantly set out as soon as the second plane hit, stopping along the way for necessary news updates and refreshments, and seven or eight hours later, stunned and exhausted, they finally arrived home.
Laura Bush, that sensible mother and librarian, advised us to keep our children from watching the death images repeated on an endless loop, but did she seriously expect we would be able to turn our televisions off? In any case, beyond producing his drawing, Alexander didn’t seem to be particularly interested in the “accident,” and soon disappeared upstairs to play in his room, while I went on watching. Loath to admit that such a boring woman could be right about anything, I didn’t bother to think what effect the horror might have on an adult, never mind our sensitive children. It wasn’t good, it was driving me to madness, I needed to go out and do something normal and comforting and primal—like buying food.
She sat alone beside me, shrunken, gray-haired, silent—no, after shopping, I hadn’t been able to keep away from the TV suspended above the bar, or from the bottles lined up behind it—and I offered to buy her a drink.
“Ach, you are too kind, and it’s my birthday, you know!” she replied a little too cheerfully, in a heavy German accent. Drowning in unfocused compassion, consumed with a desire to help all mankind in our terrible hour of shared tragedy, I bought her another, and listened while she talked about herself, telling me the story of her difficult life, in perhaps greater detail than was strictly necessary—or becoming, on this of all days. By the time I got up to leave I had invited her to a birthday dinner—“I’ll bake a cake!”—the next night. “Please say you will come. My husband is half German; he will be so happy to meet you.”
Peter was not happy at all.
“Christ, what have you done now? What on earth makes you think I would want to have dinner with some drunken old German bag you picked up in a bar?”
“Shut up. It was her birthday yesterday. And anyway, there’s the doorbell.”
“Ach, I see you have cats. So much better than children.” She appeared not to have noticed Rebecca and Alexander sitting on the sofa. “I tell you I have had so many abortions I can’t even remember the number now.”
Well, never mind about that, I’ll be in the kitchen, while you two have a nice chat in German, I said with a bright smile. Peter glared at me.
When I set down the osso buco and risotto at the center of the table, they were babbling away happily in her native tongue: “I was just asking your husband when I would get my television reception back. Ever since those towers fell down, my set is kaput. I can watch nothing, absolutely nothing.”
She must have been starving and was busy sucking the marrow out of the veal bones before I had even sat down. And yes, she would like some more, danke schön. Alexander and Rebecca fled upstairs, not even the promise of cake and ice cream could keep them sitting with us for another minute. Her eyes darted around in search of more food, and grabbing a piece of bread, she buttered it and with her mouth half full, said she had one more question for Peter: “You and I are both Germans”—he nodded warily—“you know what the British did to Dresden, you know how many civilians burned in that holocaust, you know how many Germans died in the war, so please tell me this—why are Americans making all this Sturm und Drang about two towers?”
Hard to say. Strange country. Not accustomed to being attacked. Maybe it’s time I helped you fall down the stairs, you Kraut Witch.
“Promise me you will never have that cunt in this house ever again.”
I promised.
MONTHS BEFORE, my father had invited me to lunch on September 13 at his club on the Upper East Side. He and Melissa would be arriving on the QEII that morning, and they were planning to spend a few days in New York before proceeding to Washington. What a civilized itinerary, how nice to travel that way, it sounded positively Whartonesque in its stately Old World decorum.
“Just calling to confirm our lunch! We’ve had a helluva time, the ship couldn’t dock in New York.” No, I didn’t imagine it could. “So we’re in Boston and are catching the train. See you there at one!”
Walking along Sixty-sixth Street you would never have known that anything had happened. No trace of trauma, no smell, no ash, nothing but stolid robber-baron mansions, emaciated ladies with tightly drawn faces and champagne-colored hair walking midget dogs, and there, standing in the doorway of the Lotos Club, a tall, handsome man holding out his arms to me. We went downstairs to the Grill Room, sat at our table, and as the waiter handed me a menu, my father said, “So how was your summer in the south of France?”
I looked at him in disbelief. My what?
“Never mind the summer. There’s only one thing we are talking about in New York right now.”
My dear, sweet, kind father hadn’t wanted to upset his daughter. If you steered clear of unpleasant subjects, refused to acknowledge horror, maybe it would just go away. It worked for him, but I fear it is one of his many talents I have failed to inherit.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t think you would want to discuss it.”
Immediately regretting my rudeness, I told him about Montaillou, lied and said my mother had never been better, and when Melissa joined us we moved on to the only subject the world was talking about.
“WHY THE HELL did those people jump?”
The telephones were finally working again and this was the first time I had been able to get through to London.
“Mum, you can’t say that. How about we play our favorite game, ‘Which Would You Rather?’ and you choose between being burned alive or jumping?”
Maybe you had to have been in New York on that day to understand. Or maybe both my parents were totally insane in their very different ways.
Over the next couple of years my mother spent more and more time shuttling between her house and Saint Mary’s Hospital in Paddington. In June 2003 she was back there with fluid in her lungs, nothing serious; the doctors said she would be able to leave just as soon as they had put in a stent to prop up yet another one of her collapsing arteries. Nick visited every day, Rebecca came from Oxford, Claus brought her a huge bag of cherries and watched as she bombarded the fire-breathing head nurse with their stones—surely an excellent sign. She told me not to be ridiculous when I suggested flying over from New York. But what if she was just trying to calm me down? I checked with my aunt and Nick, who backed her up—the doctors said she was in no danger—why didn’t I wait until she was out of the hospital?
She died—under general anesthetic, she felt no pain, she knew nothing, or so the doctors told me, and Christ do I need to believe them—on the operating table the next day.
Although there was no escaping the Golders Green funeral pyre, none of us wanted anything more to do with Stalinist meeting halls, and her memorial service took place in the journalists’ church, Saint Bride’s, on Fleet Street. George Melly did his best Bessie Smith impersonation, we sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Susan Crosland remembered the days when they were young, pretty American journalists who ended up marrying two of the most interesting men in London (Tony Crosland had been the foreign secretary in Harold Wilson’s government), and I talked about having a mother who was more fun than anybody else on earth. How could I resist telling the story about our double date at that hotel in Oxford with Hylan and Martin? Here’s what Paul Johnson wrote the next week in The Spectator.
Atheists’ funerals always pose a problem. Where are we speeding them off to? Oblivion? Annihilation? It’s all very well calling them a “celebration.” But death, whatever else it is, is not an event to be celebrated. I was thinking about this when I attended the service for Dee Wells in St Bride’s. I suppose she was an atheist: anyone who married Freddie Ayer not once but twice must have been.
Dee was the wittiest woman I ever met … the service had magnificent music, but I could not hear one word of any of the encomiums, save a brief tribute from the ravishing Susan Crosland, and a superb Dee joke told by her delicious daughter, Gully, whom I used to know as Little Miss Naughty when she was a teenager.…”
The two lovers, Martin and Hylan, were there; my old nanny, Cele, was there; Robert, the man with the convoluted eyebrows whom she was going to marry before she fell for that “menace,” Freddie, was there; my godmother from Burma, Sue, was there, and my father, without whom I could not have survived that day, was there. Peter, Rebecca, Nick, and Alexander formed a protective cocoon around me, and I was really doing quite well, or at least I thought I was, until somebody—who I can’t even recall—said, quite innocently, “I expect you will be going to the house in France this summer.” Do you not understand? That house is my mother, I have never been there without her, not once, and now that she is dead, how could you possibly imagine I would ever want to go back?