Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me Read online

Darling, can’t you see I’m reading?

  —Audrey Volk

  My father’s private library became my haven and my joy. I found, within the pages of rare and priceless books, a dream world of ancient religions and the worship of the arts.

  —Elsa Schiaparelli

  On a fat day he weighs 244. Everyone agrees he is big. When he was little he was big. At six feet one and a half inches, he fills the doorway. You hear him coming. He breaks Thanksgiving turkeys apart with his hands. He flips his 547-pound (wet weight) motorcycle onto its kickstand without rocking it. In his sculpture studio, he bends two-centimeter copper tubing without benefit of tools, pulling his lips back, clenching his teeth until the cords in his neck pop like the roots of a mangrove. And yet my father, Cecil Sussman Volk, proprietor of Morgen’s West, tennis ace, fearsome racquetball opponent and former Southern Conference Wrestling Champion, reads books with the delicacy of a Victorian on a fainting couch. Propped by pillows, legs crossed at the ankle, he reads in bed, sighing, frowning, turning each page with gentle care, as if it were gold leaf. Anticipating the need to turn, sliding his right forefinger beneath the top corner, raising it a bit, then joining that finger through the paper with his thumb, he turns it, whipping his compact head to the next page. Always his pinky is raised.

  Books are everywhere. Many are Modern Library Classics with a running torchbearer embossed on their spines. Many are books Audrey and Cecil read in college: Tristram Shandy, Heart of Darkness, Madame Bovary, A Passage to India, War and Peace, Tender Is the Night, Remembrance of Things Past (volume 1). They’re stored in the living room in mahogany bookcases separated by a fake fireplace. Birch logs glow red in the chinks when a secret switch is flipped.

  This is where Cecil hides his private library, behind the fake logs, the first place a child would look: Tropic of Cancer (“She had shaved it clean … not a speck of hair on it”), Tropic of Capricorn (“She’s America on foot, winged and sexed”), A Stone for Danny Fisher (“I liked you, Danny, that’s why”), 79 Park Avenue (“Mister, some girls are born to be wives—but I was born for THIS!”), Fanny Hill (“… and ascertaining the right opening, soon drove it up to the farthest”). There’s a diet book for men, The Fat Boy’s Book by Elmer Wheeler (“Run and hide from food that’s fried. Cheer the host who serves a roast”), and a book of cartoons, Over Sexteen.

  In the playroom, My Kingdom, the Greatest Room on Earth, in addition to the wood-burning set, chemistry set, perfume-manufacturing kit, stamp album, art supplies and bug collection, there is the child-size house Cecil built, not a dollhouse but an actual child-scale one-room house with a front door and working doorbell, a red roof, real windows, a bed and an electric light. There is The Book of Knowledge, my mother’s since childhood. Each volume is covered in flaking burgundy leather. Picking one up, your fingers turn red as if you’ve been eating pistachios. Finally there are what I think of as my books: the first 103 issues of the Classics Illustrated, great novels told in comic-book form crammed with twisty plots, history and lingo. Sometimes the material is so explosive it can’t be contained. Instead of being split into black boxes, during dramatic peaks a full page is devoted to one frame. Getting home from school, I dive into them like Scrooge McDuck diving into his swimming pool of money. Some days I’m in the mood for The Three Musketeers (“En garde! Thrust home! You’re dead!”). Some days the conniving torment of Pudd’nhead Wilson hits the spot (“De Lord have mercy on me, po’ miserable sinner dat I is!”). Moby-Dick is good for being privy to a man’s world and the lust for revenge. Ahab barks, “Avast, ye landlubber!” and “Stop!” can’t hold a candle. I compare the way Jupiter in “The Gold-Bug” speaks to the way Uncle Tom speaks. “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the dead man’s heart thumping under the floorboards, terrifies. Worst is “The Murders on the Rue Morgue,” a close-up of a crazed orangutan with human blood dripping off his fangs. Poe is read turning certain pages together.

  My favorite Classics Illustrated is No. 42, Swiss Family Robinson. The Robinsons are like Polly Morgen, my New York grandmother. She knows how to “make do” too. When her children wanted candy, Nana caramelized sugar in a cast-iron skillet, poured it on waxed paper, then struck it with a hammer once it cooled. Old newspapers clean glass. She makes cookies out of leftover pie-crust dough and streusel out of leftover cookie. The Robinsons turn oyster shells into soup bowls. They lasso a giant sea turtle to power their raft. Thanks to Swiss Family Robinson, if my plane goes down en route to the Florida grandmother, I’ll be fine on an island.

  My mother doesn’t buy books. She rents them. On Broadway, there’s a bookstore called Womrath’s. Best sellers spin on a metal rack. A new book rents at twenty-five cents for three days. If the book comes back late, each additional day there’s a fifteen-cent penalty. Audrey prefers Womrath’s to the local public library, the Saint Agnes Branch on Amsterdam Avenue. Books are free there, but she’s got something against Amsterdam. “I don’t care for Amsterdam Avenue,” she has said more than once. “Or Columbus, for that matter.” There’s also a problem with the east side of Broadway. “The west side of Broadway is much better. It always has been. Even when I was little.” If Audrey could redesign the Upper West Side of New York, it would go: Riverside Drive, West End Avenue, Central Park West. Those are the acceptable avenues, the avenues that meet desirable avenue criteria.

  Between 3 and 6 p.m. every weekday, home from hostessing at Morgen’s, Audrey reads in bed in her green velvet robe. She reads with her knees bent, the book propped against her thighs. Underneath her robe, she still wears the tube girdle and stockings she’d put on to dress for work. The bent-knee position allows her to “air out.” She does not like to be disturbed when she reads. When interrupted, she makes a chilling gesture. She stabs her finger so hard into the sentence she’s reading, you can hear it. She eyes you over the roof of the book and her look says, This better be more important than what I’m reading.

  Audrey can finish a Womrath’s book in less than three days. Once I can read, I read her books: The Bad Seed, The Good Earth, Hiroshima, The Sea Around Us, Laughing Boy, Travels with My Aunt. Once I’ve got the hang of reading, I’ll read anything. I read the back of the Wheaties box at breakfast, ads on the bus, the NO SPITTING sign in English and Spanish on the subway. In the bathroom, I read what’s written on the toothpaste. At the pedodontist’s, the silver letters CRANE on his overhead lamp. I make words out of CRANE until Dr. Adelston is done: RAN, CAN, CANE, EAR, RACE, AN. CAR! CARE! ARE! ARC! CANER!!!

  My mother’s mother owns one book and says it is the only one she’s ever loved. She keeps it mummified in Saran Wrap, locked in her silver closet. The title is Fanny Kemble. It has 387 pages and was written by Margaret Armstrong in 1938. Nana is convinced I’ll like it. “It’s the story of a beautiful actress from England who lives on a plantation in America, darling,” she says.

  I don’t want to read her book. I don’t want to read my sister’s books either. Jo Ann is in thrall to series books with matching linen bindings: The Bobbsey Twins, Cherry Ames—Student Nurse, Nancy Drew, Honey Bunch. When she isn’t beating me up or reading my diary, she swans around the apartment, clutching the latest one to her chest. I have zero interest in the books my friends are reading too, books about Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale and Madame Curie. I want to read the books my mother reads. I want to know what is in those books that is better than spending time with me.

  When Audrey finishes a Womrath’s book, she leaves it on the bar in the foyer. Her books wait there like invitations: Come. Trust me for a while. Let me take you for a ride. That’s where I find it, the book that arms me to separate. Years later, when I ask friends, “How old were you when you read your transformative book?” they say the same thing. They are prepubescent, ten or eleven. Twelve, the most. The magic age for the book that changes everything. Dr. Martin Bergmann, a psychoanalyst, tells me why this is so. Martin, the author of The Anatomy of Loving and Understanding Dissidence and Controversy, was analyzed by Edith Jacobson who was anal
yzed by Otto Fenichel who was analyzed by Sandor Rado who was analyzed by Karl Abraham who was part of Freud’s Secret Committee. He is ninety-nine and has a busy practice. There’s little about human behavior Dr. Martin Bergmann doesn’t know.

  He sits across from me on a plain wood chair. Two windows six feet tall frame the Central Park Reservoir. Asmalyks and Shekarlus, the kind of rugs Freud had, drape the furniture. Bookshelves tower floor to ceiling. It is a sunny, comfortable, unself-consciously beautiful room.

  “I bet it makes your patients feel better just coming in here,” I say.

  “I know it makes me feel better.”

  He smiles and points to a black leather chair.

  “Martin.” I lean forward. “Do you remember what the first book you read was that changed your view of the world?”

  He thinks. He rests his chin on his fist. Then he brightens: “It was Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset.”

  “What was it about?”

  “It was about a life in Norway. A young girl.”

  “What made it so special?”

  “It opened to me the mystery of what women are like.”

  “How old were you when you read it?”

  “Ten,” Martin says. “No, eleven, I think.”

  So I say, “This is what I want to know, Martin: Why is it every person I ask, ‘How old were you when you read the book that changed you?,’ the answer is always ten or eleven? The answer is always prepuberty.”

  “But you have just answered the question yourself, Patricia.”

  “I have?”

  “The book helps them into puberty. That is the time you begin to wonder whether the world is your family or there is an outside world. That is the age that marks the transition from the restricted world of childhood. Children are looking for an opportunity to know what the world is like and all the anxiety connected to it. It is the burden of every adolescent to worry about how they will fit into the world. Entering puberty, one is ready for a glimpse of the world beyond the home.”

  When Audrey finishes a book before it has to be re-turned, I read it. Some I put back on the bar after a chapter or two. Sometimes I’m puzzled by the book but keep reading anyway. Sometimes I don’t get to the end before the three days are up. But there is one book I have to finish. I must. It can’t go back to Womrath’s before I get to the end. I say I have a sore throat and stay home from school. I hold the book in my hands and I’m shocked. The book that tells me everything I want to know, everything I need to know. This book is about someone who exasperates her mother. A girl who loves to draw. Who daydreams and does poorly in school. She writes poems and hatches plots. She likes being alone. Her older sister is the pretty one. She is loved by her parents but knows she’s thought of as “difficult.” She understands that if you can make someone laugh they can’t stay angry with you. She knows that looking and imagining, that’s where the real excitement is. There is a right way and a wrong way to do everything—how you sit, how you laugh, how you breathe—and she’s not buying it. We have endless unacceptable traits in common, but she turns out okay. She does things my mother disdains, yet when she grows up she’s a success. Which means I could do what my mother doesn’t approve of and still be all right. The author is famous, but she’s enough like my mother that she’s familiar: She loves clothes. She works. She’s a perfectionist. She’s a terrible driver. She loves to walk. She loves to read. She’s smart. She wishes she could sing. She doesn’t mind being stared at and surrounds herself with people awed by her. She believes in doing what my mother calls “good works.” She has a hair-trigger temper. She’s opinionated and its handmaiden, bossy.

  There’s something else. Something more important, a magical thing that instantly frees: The woman who wrote the book calls herself “I,” as if she is writing the book about herself, which, since it’s an autobiography, she is. But then, in the next paragraph, she’ll switch from “I” to calling herself “She.” She calls herself “She” as if she is observing herself like a different person. At first this confuses. Then it makes sense: There is more than one way to see yourself. You can see yourself flat out and direct as “I.” Or you can hover and look down at yourself from above, as if you are someone else. You can see yourself like your grandmother sees you or your mother. Or a teacher or a boy. Or a stranger. You can see yourself as if you’ve never met you before. “I” can also be “She.” I’m ten and don’t know the word “objectivity.” I decide to call seeing yourself outside of yourself “The From Above.” Using The From Above, you can see yourself from a distance. “I” becomes “She.” The author uses The From Above when she brags, has something to confess or is miserable. I experiment with The From Above:

  She was sure Eddie Fisher would love her if only they could meet.

  She decided to glue the man’s windshield wipers down because he stole her father’s parking space.

  Her mother still loved her even though she got a 20 on the math test.

  Whoever you were, you were a different person to each person who knew you. How you saw yourself was a choice. The From Above let you see yourself through the eyes of anyone. You could see yourself a new way.

  What do you do when you’re little and know you can’t be like your mother? I adore and am proud of my mother, but what she wants from me is blind adherence to the mystifying virtue of “seemly” behavior. Why must I sit with my ankles crossed? Why does she pinch my cheeks with rouge on her fingertips as I leave the apartment? Why are her parting words “Don’t be loud!”? In a race with a boy, I have to let him win? Why does she care so much about how I look? When I get home from a party, her first question is: “Were you the prettiest girl there?” Is there a way to answer that doesn’t make you cringe?

  You don’t agree with what your mother thinks is important. You don’t want to care what she thinks. At the very least, you’d rather care less. Your older sister tries to be like her. You watch. Over and over your sister fails.

  You want to be you, whatever that is, not your mother’s idea of you. You don’t know what it takes, how much of it is luck. You suspect you’re going to be all right in the world. You hope you are. You yearn for a signal. You’re ripe for it. Sometimes it comes from a teacher. Or a relative. It could be a situation that shows you something about yourself you didn’t know. Sometimes it’s a book.

  There is a coincidence. I have no idea what it means: My mother wears “Shocking” perfume by Elsa Schiaparelli. And the book that defuses her, the book that transforms me, is Shocking Life by Elsa Schiaparelli.

  The From Above

  Top row: Nana Polly and Poppy Herman, Uncle Bob and Aunt Barbara, “Aunt” Ruth. Center row: Eddie Fisher, “Aunt” Dorothy, “Aunt” Honey, Granny Ethel and Grandpa Jake. Bottom row: Jo Ann, Dad, Mattie, Mom, “Aunt” Horty. (illustration credit 2.1)

  The Schiaparelli logo, a woman made entirely of hearts, bore a startling resemblance to the logo on many of my parents’ books. This had to mean something. (illustration credit 2.2)

  (illustration credit 2.4)

  A map of the Upper West Side, minus Broadway, Columbus and Amsterdam. (illustration credit 2.5)

  chapter three

  A Ring and a Mink

  You only get to make a first impression once.

  —Audrey Volk

  I remember, when I was so small I could hardly read, seeing a drawing … of two men bathing on a solitary beach. They started to talk, got along splendidly, and after sunning themselves for a long time went behind different rocks to dress. One came out all smartness with a dangling lorgnette and a silver stick; the other in rags. Stupefied, they looked at each other, and with a cold nod each turned and went his separate way. They had nothing more to say to each other.

  —Elsa Schiaparelli

  We are in a restaurant. Two tables away, a man laughs. Audrey’s swizzle stick stops.

  “Born in Russia,” she says. “Lives in Queens. Father a tailor.”

  All this from a laugh. From observing his clot
hes, his manner, and above all that merciless dead giveaway, his dentistry.

  “You don’t know that, Ma.”

  “Are you contradicting me?”

  If she can tell everything about him, can he tell everything about us? Can anybody know about you from looking at you? Are we only as good as other people think we are? Is that why, when conversation flags in a restaurant, Audrey asks me to count so people at other tables will think we’re engaged in lively repartee?

  Audrey: “One, two, three!”

  Me: “Four, five, six.”

  Audrey: “Seven. Eight. Nine!”

  Me: “Ten! Ten! Ten!!!!”

  Why does she care if strangers imagine we’re living it up?

  The first time you question your mother, you begin to suspect she could be fallible. I can’t be like her. I don’t want to be like her. Much of what she thinks is important, I don’t. There has to be more than one way to be a woman. And if there is more than one way, chances are there are many.

  I do like that my mother doesn’t show off. Audrey is not materialistic. She has complete disdain for anyone wearing what she calls “Notice me!” clothes. But to go out in the world, to navigate the universe in a successful manner, to be recognized as a person of substance and treated as such, to be perceived as someone to be reckoned with, to optimize her chances in life, a woman needs a ring and a mink. All of Audrey’s friends have a ring and a mink. Lunching at Schrafft’s, they look like the Ring and Mink Club. Both grandmothers have a ring and a mink. The aunts too, though some rings are fake and some minks have mileage. Even so, all women in our family greet the day in a ring and a mink, properly geared for the vagaries of life.

  Audrey’s diamond is emerald-cut with two baguettes set in platinum. On the inside, it is hand-engraved with the day of her engagement and “CSV-AEM” in script. Like her beauty, the ring is classic. I love its icy punctuation of her manicured hand. Once a month my sister and I watch as she lovingly bathes it in hot water, Ivory and ammonia.