Jewish Mothers Never Die: A Novel (17 page)

“Was she the one who played the harp?” Rebecca asked.

“Oh yes, and she took it very seriously, I can assure you, just like food. It’s her fault I never learned how to cook: She wanted to control everything.”

The food neuroses Minnie had to face in her mother’s house put Louise in mind of a Philip Roth book she loved (she had become a big fan of his). In the beginning of
Goodbye Columbus,
Aunt Gladys tortures her nephew at dinner: Why doesn’t he want any bread? She brought it to the table just for him! He stuffs himself with bread to make her happy but she keeps at him. Isn’t the meat any good? He assures her it is. Then why does he only eat bread and potatoes? Is he trying to hurt her feelings? What a waste if she has to have to throw out all that good meat! Every uneaten carrot and pea is proof of his ill will. Neil Klugman has no choice but to clean his plate; she could have kept him there for hours.

Minnie didn’t know the book; in fact, she hardly ever read. She neither had the leisure nor the inclination. She was just too busy to live vicariously through other people. No sooner did she open a newspaper than she fell asleep; it didn’t matter where she was, at home or on a train. After missing her stop on more than one occasion, she vowed to never again bother: watching the scenery go by was much more edifying than some journalist’s opinion about things that didn’t matter. The only books of any use were cook books, which she collected for her husband.

Louise Cohen opened the cupboards one by one, hoping to find inspiration. What could she make? She no longer knew what she liked to eat; she had always cooked for Albert alone, treating him to the richest, most intricate dishes she could dream of. Since he was borderline anorexic, getting him to eat was a full-time job.

Rebecca observed that meals figured prominently in Cohen’s novels.

“There’s his famously bulimic character, Nailcruncher; his name alone says everything about the ogre he is: he refused to get out of his mother's womb. ‘I’m not one to leave a dining room by choice, you know. They had to pull me out of there with pliers,’” Louise quoted from memory. “That’s a good one, isn’t it?”

“Well, you can laugh all you want about your plate-pushing mothers,” Mina interrupted, exacerbated by the stereotype. “It’s easy when you’re not starving. Romain was touched by the sacrifices I made for him. He understood that every steak I served him was a victory over adversity. My day was never wasted if Romain ate his fill. Once, he walked in on me in the kitchen, licking the sauce right out of the pan where I’d sautéed his meat. I’d always pretended to be a vegetarian. He realized I’d been depriving myself for him. He ran out, ashamed, and he put the story in
Promise at Dawn
.”

Louise was lovingly preparing a batch of meatballs while Mina tackled a recipe of that most mythical of Jewish dishes: Gefilte fish. They were putting heart and soul into the job, obviously relieved by having something practical to do. They were the only ones who could find their way around a kitchen, although Jeanne Proust wanted them to know she was highly skilled at drawing up balanced menus. Rebecca, for her part, had always been afraid of food, which was synonymous in her mind with calories—and extra pounds.

“I was convinced I was fat,” Rebecca admitted.

“You?”

The other women burst out laughing; by the standards of their day, Rebecca was scrawny.

“Albert was forever telling me how fat I was,” Louise remarked, her hands deep in a bowl. “But knowing that I loved to eat, he encouraged me anyway; my unfulfilled desires would make me gain weight, too, he said. That was kind of cruel, don’t you think?”

“The subject never came up in our house,” Jeanne countered. “Hygiene alone mattered; it was a new concept, and Adrien’s speciality, after all. We had to wash our hands before and after every meal. If Robert put up a fight, he’d get a spanking.”

“My mother was convinced that what we ate had a direct influence on our health,” Amalia Freud told them. “We were a big family, and my brothers devoured everything they could get their hands on. That we had enough to eat was important to my mother but not the main thing: we had to eat healthy.”

“Kosher food is very good for you,” Louise reminded them.

Rebecca didn’t dare join in the conversation. She was fascinated by what they had to say about the rituals around food, which sounded much more complicated than putting ingredients together.

Mina suddenly let out a cry of indignation:

“Sugar! You can’t put sugar in that!”

She repeated her exclamation, wide-eyed, to the entire group:

“She can’t put sugar in the meatballs!”

Mina hadn’t let on but she had been carefully watching Louise at work: ground beef, chopped onions, raw eggs, salt and . . . sugar. She stopped her with a hand on her arm.

“Russians put pepper in, but never sugar! It’s heresy!”

“According to you! Everyone knows that Russian and Lithuanian Jews are uncivilized!” Louise retorted.

“You can keep your Sephardic meatballs to yourself!”

Jeanne jumped into the fray to stave off a fight:

“Some cooks even add powdered almonds. Why don’t you each make your own version and we’ll decide which is better?

“You’re a competitor, Jeanne, and you’re always looking for a match off,” Minnie answered her. “You know just as well as I do that taste is hardly objective. Everyone will vote for what they know because we prefer the familiar: We’re always looking for our childhood in what we eat. Do you know the joke about the new bride who’s driven nuts because everything she cooks her husband criticizes? She tries everything, looks all over town for the best ingredients, pores over every recipe she can find, but nothing helps. One day when she’s utterly exhausted by her efforts, she leaves the sauerkraut on the stove too long and burns the whole thing. ‘Finally! It’s exactly like my mother used to make!’ her husband exclaims.”

“Isn’t that the idea of Proust’s Madeleine?”

“Marcel was surprised how that little cake could bring back the memory of his Aunt Léonie and, by extension, his childhood at Illiers,” Jeanne agreed.

“Oh! Could you find the passage for me?” Rebecca asked her. “It’s been so long since I’ve read it.”

Jeanne handed Rebecca the precious volume that she always carried with her, and she read out loud: “‘But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still alone, more fragile but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.’”

“Isn’t that magnificently written?” she asked with tears in her eyes.

Everyone agreed, even Minnie, who had to admit that reading Proust out loud made it all.
Remembrance of things past
an easier pill to swallow.

“Marcel was a finicky eater and ate like a bird,” Rebecca recalled. “Céleste Albaret, his chambermaid, said that he never took more than a coffee and a croissant when he woke in the middle of the afternoon.”

“Oh, how I tried to get him to eat correctly and have regular mealtimes!” Jeanne protested.

“What’s interesting is that, once you passed away, he sometimes bought a filet of sole or a sorbet to bring back the memory of taste he had loved in his childhood. Was it for his novel or for himself? I always wondered.”

“Both, perhaps.”

Rebecca was lost in thought. People’s relationship to food is never simple; it’s less about what we eat than what food means to us. The foundations are laid in childhood, beginning with our favorite tastes and our revulsions. It’s also a means of transgression or disobedience that can take on tyrannical proportions. Nothing breaks a mother’s heart more than when her child refuses to eat a meal she has lovingly prepared. Nathan was very fussy about never letting food touch on his plate: he found it disgusting. Meat and vegetables had to be kept separate, and he even went so far as to change plates while he was eating.

Louise Cohen was reminded of a scene in
Portnoy’s Complaint
:

“There’s the time where Alex is ready to break every Jewish law to escape from his controlling family: he devours a lobster while fantasizing about a
shikse,
a Gentile temptress. Neither one is the least bit kosher!”

When the meatballs were ready, it was time for the mothers to vote on which batch was better, but having devoured them both in two minutes flat, they were no closer to deciding. Minnie finally ventured that, if she absolutely had to choose—and who said she had to, anyway?—she preferred the salty version: in other words, Mina’s recipe.

Horribly offended, Louise Cohen jumped up and, without a word, locked herself in the bathroom.

Jeanne and Mina pounded on the door, begging her to come out. There was no response. Minnie tried clumsily to patch up the situation. Really, Louise’s recipe was every bit as good as Mina’s, and Albert would have been so proud of her.

“Leave her alone,” Jeanne ordered, finally. “She’s following her son’s example. He writes in
O Humans, My Brothers
, that he would have given anything for the restroom attendant at the train station to leave him in peace to do what he had come to do there. But the woman was indignant: how long could it possibly take, she wanted to know. Would he be finished today or tomorrow? Did he think he was in church?”

The door finally opened and Louise appeared, laughing heartily.

“I had forgotten that scene in the restroom! That reminds me again of Sophie Portnoy, who follows her son right to the bathroom where he’s trying to masturbate. He shouts at her that he’s sick just as he is overcome by a wave of the most exalted feeling of freedom. She begs him to let her in, but he doesn’t answer. She tries a more specific line of questioning: had he eaten french fries or—horror of horrors—a hamburger? She uses the same tone of voice as if she would speak of Hitler. She forbids him to flush the toilet so she can scrutinize the contents and she makes him promise never to eat out again, doing her best to pour on guilt. His father, constipated, is the next one to seek peace and quiet in the solitude of the bathroom but Sophie is hysterical and she berates him.”

“We could probably write an entire treatise on ‘bathrooms in literature,’” Rebecca suggested.

She turned to Jeanne: hadn’t Proust described the “little room that smelled of iris” in
Swann’s Way
as a good place to masturbate? To get any privacy, Marcel had to hide in the wild-currant bushes.

“You were always watching over his every move,” Rebecca reproached Jeanne.

“Don’t pretend you didn’t behave exactly the same way with Nathan.”

“Certainly not. I never paid attention to how much time he spent in the bathroom, nor did I insist, when he traveled, that he write me daily to describe every detail. He could never have written, as Marcel did to you: ‘My exquisite little Mother, let me tell you first of all that my stomach is splendid.’”

“You can’t know how it was. My son was ill, and we wrote each other even when we lived under the same roof.”

“It sounds to me like you were an authoritarian and a possessive tyrant.”

“Of course, that’s what you’d like to think. In fact, it was just the opposite: Marcel exhausted me. He would throw jealous fits. Take, for example, one of his famous letters, where he beseeches me not to wait up for him to come home from his dinner party, at the same time telling me how delighted he will be to kiss me goodnight. But then he adds: ‘Don’t come for me. Alas! I saw how you ran toward my aunt with a warmth that you’ve never felt for me.’”

“Nathan never needed me that way, thank God. On the contrary, he hated having to depend on me and was always trying to assert his independence.”

“I suppose he was never sick, like my poor darling?”

10

Sick and Tired

I always thought that as long as man is mortal, he will never be relaxed.

Woody Allen

“In
Remembrance of Things Past
,” Jeanne began, “Marcel describes his first and most terrifying asthma attack, which struck him in the Bois de Boulogne. He was ten years old and he would never forget it. I can still see him gasping for air, suffocating, waving his arms, wracked by convulsions. His father and the Professor Duplay were both there too, but neither could do a thing for him. Can you imagine what my little wolf must have been going through? He was about to die right in front of his father and his friend the surgeon? As for me, it was agonizing to discover that, far from being the all-powerful mother I had believed myself to be—I had always managed to calm his night terrors—I could lose him! It seemed like hours before he began to cough again, finally breathing and getting his color back. From then on, we lived in fear of another attack that could strike anywhere, anytime.”

“Yet, his father always denied he suffered from asthma. Proust wrote: ‘Papa tells everyone that there is nothing wrong with me and that my asthma is a pure figment of my imagination.’”

“There were plenty of theories about what was wrong with him. Some said he was exaggerating, that it was psychological and that I was the problem, which is completely absurd! Marcel continued to have attacks after my death. His illness consumed his entire body. Sometimes, he had difficulty recovering from his attacks, which left him trembling, sweating and out of breath. You have to remember that it was the asthma that killed him at fifty-one.”

“So he didn’t die of complications of pneumonia?”

“His lungs were worn out from the asthma.”

As both the wife and the mother of doctors, Jeanne considered herself to be one too, as if she had soaked up their knowledge by osmosis. As soon as any conversation turned to illness, she adopted an authoritarian air, the better to impose her analysis. Rebecca wasn’t ready to give up yet, however:

“I’m not inventing his reputation as a hypochondriac! Didn’t he write you in black and white: ‘I prefer to suffer from attacks and to have your favor than to have neither attacks nor your favor?’ As if he could order his body to do as he pleased!”