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It took her one day in Paris to be invited to use the sumptuous guest room and studio in the house of one of her parents' Paris friends for as long as she'd like to stay. Her first day out shopping she bought a fancy typewriter with a French-English keyboard. She didn't look like a writer, but at twenty-one that's how serious she was.
In the beginning she spent a lot of time answering her mother's letters. Her mother was excited about all the research projects she was given to do. She was in charge of 'rounding out' what was called the Modern Movement Series. The Museum of Modern Art had most of the major representatives of every major and minor movement in the twentieth century, but they were still missing some minor painters, and Edith's mother was seeking available paintings by minor artists of more or less major schools. Edith had never heard of any of the painters her mother was so absorbed in. 'But my own writing felt so minor,' she told me, 'that I had a pathetic sort of sympathy for all these unknowns.'
We must have had similar parents. My mother began developing a keen interest in minor fiction simultaneously with the publication of my first historical novel. Most historical novels are pretty bad, of course, but my mother felt compelled to 'keep up' with my field. I'd never read any historical novels before, but she began her habit of sending me her rare discoveries; it goes on to this day.
When I went home to see my parents shortly after my first book was published, my mother met me at the door in what was to become a ritual for all my publications. She had just finished my book, she told me, wringing my hands; she was surprised at how much it moved her, and (as we tiptoed through the hall) my father was just this minute finishing it. She thought he had liked what he'd read 'so far'. And we would creep through the old house, approaching my father in his den as one might sneak up on an unpredictable beast who was said to be 'just finishing' his raw meat. It wouldn't do to arrive while he was still eating.
We would surround my father's sunken reading chair. Standing behind him, I could tell that he was asleep. He had a way of pinching his Scotch between his thighs when he fell asleep; somehow, he never relaxed his muscles and the drink never spilled. And all around him books would be splayed open, books he was 'just finishing'. There were usually at least two in his lap. One of them would be mine, but it was impossible to tell which book had put him to sleep. I never saw a finished book in his house. He told me once that the endings of all books left him overwhelmingly sad.
He was a historian; he had taught at Harvard for thirty-six years. When I was a student there I made the mistake of taking one of his courses. It was one of those Intellectual Problems courses, of which Harvard was very proud. The problem in this one was deciding whether or not Lenin was necessary to the Russian Revolution. Would it have happened anyway? Would it have happened when it happened? Was Lenin really important? Like most of the Intellectual Problems courses, you weren't really supposed to come up with the answer. About fifteen of us speculated on the question. My father speculated in his lectures, too. In the last class (I called him 'sir'), I asked him if he would just state his own opinion, since he must have one: Was Lenin necessary?
'Of course not,' he said, but he was angry that I had asked; he gave me a C. It was the only C I ever got anywhere. And when I asked him how he felt about my writing - I said I assumed that he thought the historical novel was bad for both history and literature, but in my particular case ... 'Quite,' he said.
My first historical novel was about one year of the great plague as it was decimating France. I focused on one small village, and the book was a terrifyingly accurate, if clinical, account of how all the seventy-six inhabitants of the village eventually died of the Black Death. There were a
lot of gibbet images. 'I like it so far,' my father said. 'I haven't finished it yet, but I think you were wise to select a small village.'
My mother was the fan. She sent me one bad historical novel after another, with a trail of notes saying, 'I think your books are so much better!' And after each of my publications, the ritual would repeat itself. There I would be at the door on Brown Street, Cambridge, the only house I ever grew up in or went back to. At first I was alone, and then with Utch, and then with our children, and my mother would whisper us all inside, saying, 'I just loved it so much, and your father's liking it a great deal. Better than the last, he says. In fact, I think he's just finishing it now ...' And we would creep down the hall, approach the den, see my father sleeping with his Scotch held tight between his thighs. My book, along with all the others, lay culprit around him, possibly responsible for his stupor.
I never saw him finish a Scotch, either. It was my mother, like Edith's mother, who took her work - however minor - seriously.
I think that, as a rule, mothers are more serious than fathers. Once I sat down to dinner, patted Utch on her thigh and topped up my son's half-empty milk glass with wine. 'Have you even looked at your children today?' Utch asked me. 'Shut your eyes and tell me what they're wearing.' But my theory breaks down with Severin Winter. He was the mother in their family.
Not more than a week after Utch had caught me mixing milk with wine, we were in Winter's active kitchen; everyone's children were everywhere, and Severin was making his bouillabaisse for us all. Edith and I were talking at the kitchen table; Utch was tying someone's shoe; and the younger Winter daughter was staring fixedly at her mother's earring. I hadn't heard the child say anything, either, but suddenly Severin turned at the stove and hollered, 'Edith!' She jumped. 'Edith,' he said, 'your daughter, who looks at you all day as if you were a mirror, has asked you the same question four times. Why don't you answer her?' Edith looked at her daughter, surprised to see her sitting there. But Utch knew; she, too, heard everything the children ever said.
Utch said, 'No, Dorabella, it doesn't hurt very much.' Edith still stared at her daughter as if she'd just learned that she'd had a part in the child's lovely flesh.
'Does it hurt to have your ears pierced, Mommy?' Severin boomed from the stove.
And Edith said, 'Yes, a little, Fiordiligi.' Right name, wrong daughter; we all knew; we waited for Edith to catch her own slip, but she didn't.
'That's Dorabella, Edith,' Severin said; Dorabella laughed, and Edith stared at her. And Severin, as if to explain to Utch and me, said, 'It's understandable. About four years ago Fiordiligi asked Edith the same question.'
But suddenly it was very quiet in that energetic kitchen; only the bouillabaisse was speaking. Perhaps to break the tension we always felt when we recognized the peculiar alliances we felt toward each other, Severin said (but what a queer thing to say!), 'Does it hurt to have your tongue nailed to a breadboard?'
We all laughed. Why? I thought about the four of us, but what I remembered was my father's reply to an interviewer from the Times who had asked him to say a few words about some new gesture in American foreign policy, 'with some emphasis on the subtleties we laymen may have missed'.
'It's about as subtle as the Russian revolution,' my father said. No one knew what he meant.
My father's creepy wide-angle lens. I never agreed with him about Lenin. Lenin was necessary. People are necessary. ('How nice for you,' Severin said to me once. 'Edith's a romantic too.') And my mother's terrible books, I sometimes think, were closer to the truth than my father ever came close enough to see. Edith and I were brought up unsure of ourselves as snobs - in love with our mothers' innocence.
In Paris, Edith went out and read everything she could find about all the minor painters mentioned in her mother's letters. There wasn't much to find out about some of them, but she tried. She didn't get much writing done, and just when she mastered enough research to respond knowledgeably to her mother's interests, she was proposed to by the father of the household in which she was a pampered guest. He was always very polite and fatherly to her, and she'd never suspected. One morning he struck his soft-boiled egg too hard; it catapulted out of its eggcup and landed on the Persian rug in the breakfast room. His wife ran to the kitchen to get a sponge. Edith stooped next to his chair and dabbed her napkin into the yolky mess on the rug. He put his hand into her hair and tilted her surprised face up to him. 'I love you, Edith,' he croaked. Then he burst into tears and left the table.
His wife returned with the sponge. 'Oh, did he rush off?' she asked Edith. 'He gets so upset when he makes a mess.'
Edith went to her room and packed. She wondered if she should write her mother and try to explain. She was still wondering what to do when the maid brought the mail to her room. There was a new letter from her mother about minor painters. Could Edith tear herself away from her work in Paris just long enough for a business trip to Vienna? Her mother's boss was interested in rounding out one of the Modern Movement Series. Of course, they had something from the Vienna Secession; they had Gustav Klimt, who (Edith's mother said) did not really belong to Vienna's Late Art Nouveau, since he was really a forerunner to the Expressionists. For Viennese Expressionists, they had Egon Schiele and Kokoschka, and even a Richard Gerstl (a who? Edith thought). 'We do have a dreadful Fritz Wotruba,' Edith's mother wrote, 'but what we want is someone from the thirties whose work is random and imitative and transitional enough to represent it all.'
The painter on whom this dubious distinction was about to fall had been a student of Herbert Boeckl's at the Academy. He had appeared to be 'peaking' at about the time the Nazis marched into Austria in 1938. He was twenty-eight at the time he disappeared. 'All his paintings are still in Vienna,' wrote Edith's mother. 'There are four on loan to the Belvedere, but most of them are in private homes. They are all owned by his only son, who apparently wants to sell as many of them as he can. We only want one - two, at the most. You'll have to get slides made, and you're not to promise anything in the way of a price.'
'Leaving today for Vienna,' Edith wired her mother. 'Delighted to take a break. Perfect timing.'
She flew from Orly to Schwechart. She'd been in Vienna in December three years ago; she'd hated it. It was the most Central European city she'd ever seen, and the cold slush in the streets seemed to belong with the city's squat Baroque heaviness. The buildings, like the men, had seemed to her to have an unhealthy color and ill-cut, elaborate clothes. It was not as friendly as a village, but it had none of the elegance she associated with a city. She felt that the war was just barely over. Throughout the city she kept seeing signs indicating the few kilometers to Budapest; she had not realized she was almost in Hungary. She spent only three days and saw only one opera, Der Rosenkavalier; it bored her, though she thought it shouldn't have, and at the intermission a man made a vulgar pass at her.
But now when her Paris flight landed in Vienna, it was a different season: early spring weather, wet-smelling with a sunny wind and a hard-blue Bellini sky. The buildings, which had all seemed so gray before, now shone in such rich and subtle shades; the fat putti and the statuary everywhere seemed like a stone welcoming party hanging off the buildings. People were out walking; the population seemed to have doubled. Something in the atmosphere was changed, felt chiefly by the sight of baby carriages; the Viennese were feeling fit to reproduce again.
The taxi driver was a woman who knew the English word 'dear'. 'Say to me where you want to be gone, dear,' she said. Edith showed her the addresses in her mother's letter. She wanted a hotel which was near the Belvedere; more important, she wanted to know where the painter's son lived. The son had graduated from an American university a few years ago and had gone back to Vienna because his mother was dying; afterwards he inherited all the father's paintings. He was staying in Vienna just long enough to complete a degree at the university, and he wanted to sell as many of the paintings as he could. He had written a very literate and witty letter to the Museum of Mode
rn Art. He had begun by saying that the people at the Modern had probably never heard of his father, which was forgivable because he wasn't a very important painter and they shouldn't feel they had missed anything. The son was twenty-seven, five years older than Edith. She found out that his address was a two-block walk from the Belvedere.
