Authors: Roberta Latow
‘I thought you knew?’
‘You silly girl. How would I have known? You were so hot. You wanted it so much. I had no idea.’
‘Does it matter?’ Mimi asked, sensing there was something wrong, tears welling up in her eyes.
He was about to tell her that it did. But he didn’t have the heart. He was panicked because he realized that she loved him and that was why she had given herself to him. He did in some strange way love her, but he knew that was sexually and nothing more. He kissed her and told her, ‘This is sex,
Mimi, not love, on my part anyway. Don’t get lost in this. If you do I will hurt you and I don’t want to do that.’
But he did. In three weeks he was bored with her. If life had been unkind to Mimi, then certainly people had not been. Until now, she had known incredible kindness and caring from strangers, and here was a man she loved as deeply as she loved her father, the only man she ever wanted, to whom she hoped to be woman, lover and friend for the rest of her life. That was what she felt. It was what she told him.
He was appalled. It put him off her instantly. He told her, ‘We’re not having sex any more. You’re a baby in bed. The passion is there, so is the desire for sex, cock. And you do like your orgasms, kid. But you don’t know how to have fun with sex. You take it, this little fling, too seriously. And, Mimi, you make me think you did me the greatest favour in the world when you handed me your virginity. It isn’t a big deal, Mimi. Not what I was after. I like women who know their way around in bed. You give off that sensual perfume as if you do. You’re a great cock teaser, and when you grow up you’ll be a great lay. And another reason we won’t have sex again, Mimi – you equate sex with husband. Go find somebody who wants to play serious sex instead of fun and games.’
Mimi did what most girls her age do when in love with love, have had a taste of great sex, and want more of it with the wrong lover. She called him incessantly. She chased after Greg Slater and made herself miserable. She stopped only when she had a phone-call from his best friend Bill who said, ‘Greg gave me your phone number. He says he’s not seeing you any more and he doesn’t mind if you and I pick up where he left off. He says you’ve got a hungry cunt. Mimi, come to my place. I’ll feed it, I’ll make us some supper, and you can eat me for dessert.’ A chuckle suggested he relished his own wit.
She felt humiliated, slammed the telephone down on him
and rushed to her bathroom. There she was sick, and ended up on the floor next to the loo, weeping. How could Greg hand her over to another man? He had talked about her sexuality! Her own most private and personal thing. She had meant it to be for him alone. Such betrayal. She fell out of love instantly. But the damage had been done. She remained flirtatious, indulged herself in heavy petting with her dates, but was celibate for years. Until a Yale boy came along when she was twenty-one. Then that fizzled out, and she met Jay.
Mimi had been thinking about Greg Slater, and that first time she had had sexual intercourse. What a great lover he was. Often, even after all these years, she tended to think about the sex with him – more of that than what a shit he had been to a young, impressionable girl. She imagined that most women never forget their first sexual experience. Mimi seemed unable ever to erase important points in the past out of her life.
There was another thing Mimi was never quite able to put behind her: The poverty-stricken years in Chicopee Falls, having been a displaced child fending for herself, the lies she had had to live in order to survive. Those aspects of her life she hid as best she could from the outside world. But within they gnawed at her. To some extent they governed everything she did, everything she was, even now as an adult.
There was something deep-rooted in her: a fear of having to live again those dreadful years in the Blocks. It drove her to work in some little way, every day. Even when, long ago, she and Sophia arrived in New York, and money was made available to them from the bank, Mimi could never quite believe that it would continue. It and her experience of working as a scullery-maid instilled in her some sort of a work ethic, and a desire for money, a sense of commerce. ‘Just in case.’
Mimi took to commerce, and sometimes thought of the
fruit pedlar. He had been her first exposure to commerce at work. As a child she had been fascinated by it. She got a lift, a charge of excitement, from making a deal for a Paul Klee or Henry Moore for a collector, a John Marin for a small museum in some mid-west city. Ridiculously, but with great pride, she compared herself to Joe Pauley selling six boxes of corn to Ida Hall in Otis on that day he had taken her to Beechtrees. For Mimi he would always be her saviour, her hero.
Now, in the sixties, as an adult and a married woman, she had the enviable reputation of being a chic and successful lady in business.
The family could not understand where Mimi got her sense of commerce. While still a child she learned to appreciate art through Kurt Valentine, an old friend of her father before the war, and a remarkable dealer in modern art, and through Barbara and her husband Brandon. When, in the early fifties, the death of Kurt Valentine left a space for the special sort of dealer that he was, it entered her mind to emulate him in some small way by dealing in certain works by appointment only. Years passed before that was to happen, but finally it did and she made inroads into the art world. She sold works of art from a small suite of offices on the tenth floor of a building on East Fifty-Seventh Street, between Madison and Park Avenue. Unpretentious, not at all glamorous. Just a name, ‘M. Stefanik, Limited’, in black letters on a frosted glass door.
She was the only one of the family who loved the hustle and the bustle of commerce that keeps New York running. Her second venture happened when she was out of college, but it too had begun in her childhood, with Mr Spider. He was an aged, sick, fey in the extreme hat-maker, whose fame had died out in the twenties, killed off by alcoholism. When he first saw Mimi there had been something about her that revived him, at least his spirit, enough to make her a hat, and afterwards another, and then one for Sophia. He was
the neighbour across the hall in the building on Central Park West. One of her first friends when she knew hardly anyone in the city. He taught her to make hats. And then, in the 1960s, people like Barbara Vreeland, the fashion guru, said, ‘Mimi has the best hat-sense in Manhattan.’ Mimi’s atelier was the most exclusive for ladies’ headwear in the city. She had working for her a rather amazing collection of elegant and for the most part chic Hungarian and Czech middle-aged, once wealthy refugees who now lived in genteel poverty and produced hats for the New York and Paris couture houses.
This then was Mimi’s life. Or one might say the many lives that, rolled up, made Mimi Steindler. She knew better than anyone who she was and what she was. That she was a happy lady, living a great Manhattan existence. But she often had to ask herself why she had a distinct feeling that her life had not yet begun?
It felt so good, it always felt so good, sex in the early morning with her husband. That was one of the things about Jay: he made women feel good. He didn’t even have to fuck them. Just ‘Hello’ and they felt good. He had about him all the qualities a woman looks for in a man. He was big in mind and body, and had that certain kind of New York Jewish handsomeness that Harvard had polished and Brooks Brothers had dressed. Jay had the basic Jewish New York intellectual aplomb that women love. He had that Jewish self-confidence that comes from mother-love, family support, higher education, creative thinking and a solid home. Women looked at Jay and saw a handsome, sensual man of intelligence, wealth, success, who knew how to make them feel good. That was the thing about Jay – no matter who he spoke to, who he bedded, who he made a deal with, they always felt he had come down from a plinth just to make them feel good.
And what was so remarkable about him was that it was true. He was way above most people, he was like a rabbi
who wasn’t religious, a professor who didn’t teach, a male chauvinist who conceded women’s rights. He knew how to give people what they wanted, how to make them feel whole and successful, but most important satisfied with themselves. He supplied people with what they needed to reap benefits. He was not a greedy man.
Jay divorced his second wife to marry Mimi. It had been a friendly divorce. Most people stayed friendly with Jay. This ex-wife, tipsy once at a dinner party, had taken Mimi to one side and said, ‘In time you’ll learn that you’re marrying the best man you could wish for. Jay is lovely, you can almost forgive him anything. But remember, young thing, with him it’s always the same – everyone always comes out a winner. He wouldn’t have it any other way. With Jay, you can always be sure of having an orgasm, but by that time he’s already had two, one above in his head, and one down below. That’s the thing about the nicest bastard in New York City: Jay always gets twice as much as he gives, and you never know about it.’
Mimi was, for some strange reason, remembering ex-wife number two’s words this morning, with his kisses, his hands caressing her body. They lay jack-knifed, she on her side, as slowly and methodically he fucked her. Jay had technique and stamina, the love of cunt. It felt so good the way he used his penis inside her. He knew how to find her more sensitive erotic places, and had an uncanny sense of knowing when he had hit the spot that gave her the most pleasure. Jay knew how to taunt her with his prowess, pulling out slowly and entering with long, luxurious fucks that drew from her whispers of pleasure, commands for more. He knew how to pace himself, quickening his rhythm always at just the right moment so they could come together.
Mimi’s orgasms with her husband were always long and languorous. It was like sliding into submission by going down an easy slope. She closed her eyes and dozed while
lying in his arms. Sex was never over with Jay, never finished, it just sort of dissipated. One minute he was still there inside her, even though no longer erect, next he had just slipped away. Then the soft white paper tissues. Married for ten years, and for ten years of orgasms, she had always meant to tell him how much she resented his use of Kleenex, but somehow she couldn’t. It was such a little thing, the Kleenex and orgasm, but it did niggle away at their sexual life together.
Jay brought Mimi a cup of tea. They always had morning tea together, but never breakfast. Mimi had breakfast every morning with Sophia and her father in the family town house around the corner. Jay was a creature of habit, not unlike herself. After tea in bed with his wife, the next stop was always the wing chair near the fireplace, where he would read for an hour, then dress and dash for his first meeting over breakfast at the Pierre.
Sophia and Mimi’s habit of rising at five in the morning and having breakfast together had not been broken. Jay used to tease Mimi by telling people they had been married ten years but she had never left home.
It had been years, yet there was hardly a time when Mimi approached the Stefanik house just off Fifth Avenue as she did this morning that she didn’t feel her life was something like a fairy tale. Was it all real? One pinch and she might wake up.
She had been very much in love with Jay when she married him. There was just one drawback: she had to leave home and the family. Looking at the house today, for some reason, she was feeling more strongly than usual the urge to have remained in her father’s house. Mimi was very happy and comfortable in the home Jay and she had put together, but it was something apart. She looked over the black iron railings down into the stairwell to the lower level. The lights were on and Sophia was at the stove. These two hours, from seven to nine every morning, were usually the happiest of Mimi’s day. They were the foundations on which she built. She looked up at the limestone-faced New York town house.
They had all come a long way since the first day Mimi had seen the house. During those early days after the reunion with her father at the skating rink, she had taken him to the Central Park West flat. She remembered the look on his face as she proudly showed him the luxury in which she was living with Sophia: not so much appalled as upset, though he tried to hide it. ‘Yes, it would have been perfect if there were only to be the two of us,’ he had explained. Then he had told her about her mother and brother and
that they were all to be a family again. They needed a larger place, something more luxurious, with a garden and more privacy than a flat in a building could offer, if they were to make it work. Together they looked for a new home.
She remembered, when she had first seen the house, how extravagant she thought it was for them to live in it. Mimi had been born into luxury and wealth and then overnight been cast into poverty at too young an age for it not to have marked her for life. Her father had escaped that, so had Lydia and her brother. In Lydia’s and Laslo’s case, they had suffered something else: loss of wealth, beautiful objects, properties, security and their freedom. In addition Lydia had almost lost her sanity: she had personally experienced man’s inhumanity to man. They were marked by the war and how it had dealt with them. As a result they had their own idiosyncrasies.
Though it had been strange for all of them at the beginning, they did become a family, and took to the house off Fifth Avenue as if it had been theirs for always. The Stefaniks lived a conservative life, they watched how they spent their money, their time, but they did live elegantly, with style. They lived together, enjoyed each other and the luxury of being a united family. The one thing none of them did was to talk to each other about their lives during the war. They were as close as they could be, considering the differences between the four of them. Differences that had to do with wartime lies lived and deprivations endured in the name of survival.
Each of them in their own way had led furtive and necessarily deceitful existences. And it had affected their psyche. How? To what degree? Those questions were ignored. Life was easier without looking back. Mimi could only guess that they felt at least somewhat the way she did. Different on the inside from the person she presented to the world. Beneath the polished surface of their lives lurked their psychic scars. Father, mother and brother shared a
black view of human nature that eluded Mimi. She had found comfort in strangers; human nature for her was an infinitely more hopeful prospect.
Only recently, with her mother’s death, had she been able to look at Lydia with some objectivity. Beauty, as the proverb puts it, is skin deep. Lydia had such beauty. She was set apart from the hard-as-nails, more glamorous New York women with a dash of flash by her serene, timorous presence. Her face was commonly termed ‘enigmatic’, but more often than not that look was merely a vapid expression. Emotion or spirituality seemed in Lydia to have been made null and void. Physically she was reticent, almost spinster-like, introverted. It was in fact a super-selfishness, not wanting to give anything away, wanting always to keep her divine self for herself.
With her platinum blonde hair and amazing green eyes, her slinky body, she had a nearly supernatural loveliness. To see her, to know her, was to understand why, when they were together, Auroyo had painted her incessantly. There had been an unearthliness about her, and yet she was like a rare exotic flower, an orchid maybe, that needed a close and clammy hot-house to bloom in. Everyone thought that her years in the bosom of her family had been that hot-house because she had bloomed, she had been happy. But they had been wrong. Her happiness was superficial, a showpiece that she wanted to believe in. But the loss of Auroyo, and then the horrors of Belsen, her past deeds and inability to hold on to an international playboy prince she had finally left the family for, caught up with her, and drove her finally and all too literally over the edge of sanity and into the Pacific Ocean. She left her robe on the beach in Malibu near where she lived in a house that the prince had built for her. A farewell message to Auroyo and the prince, nothing to Karel or the children. Then she walked naked into the sea.
There had been a will in favour of Laslo, nothing for
Mimi. The justification given: she had the love of her father. After her death Karel found boxes of small diaries where she had recorded her years at Belsen, atrocity after atrocity, with profiles of her tormentors. The brutality and sadistic treatment of her by the officers who had used her as a prostitute, treating her fractionally less badly because she was not a Jew, and then, bored, thrown her out. The horror of the text was the greater for its being written in the present tense and dated ‘New York’ with successive days, months and years. The first entry was made several weeks after they moved into the house off Fifth Avenue. And never, not once, had she spoken to her husband or her children about those years. Was she too ashamed? Or was she too busy reliving them? No one would ever know, but the family guessed that in the end Belsen had killed her. She had been faking life ever since. Karel had the diaries cremated with her.
Since Lydia’s death, memories of things that happened to her as a child before she met Barbara sometimes troubled Mimi’s mind. She neither understood nor respected that American trait of telling everything to anyone who would listen. All memories, all experiences, easily hashed over, discussed with any stranger who would listen. All that openness, intimate feelings and relationships laid bare over the dinner table or inside a bus, from a strap in the subway, during intervals at the opera, concert or ballet, over a martini in the crush of a cocktail party: it was not only embarrassing but boring. Who, after all, wants to know another man’s bleeding heart, or his happy heart for that matter? It was the natural state of the Stefanik family to remain silent about their personal affairs, past or present. So, living with Jay and listening to his close-knit Jewish family spilling their guts out to each other at the least provocation, always confounded Mimi.
Before her father’s house she took another look at the beautiful white limestone façade, the frieze of carved stone,
the impressive architrave. The double front doors of iron fretwork in deep curlicues and stunningly executed Longe lilies over clear glass. Her father often reminded her of when they had been taken for the first time through the interior of the house, and returned to the street to look at the façade again. He had asked, ‘What do you think, Mimi?’
‘About what, Poppa?’
‘About our living in this house.’
‘How many of us?’
‘Four of us, and Sophia, if she wants to stay with us.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I think that’s a lot of people to live on one floor.’
He had laughed and said, ‘No, the whole house. We don’t have to share a building any more. Now what do you think of it? I mean, compared to the other houses.’
She had answered, ‘It’s a house and a half wide instead of a house wide, like the Peabodys’, Poppa. Since we’re going to be a different kind of family than most, I suppose we’d better have a different kind of house than most. I think we’ll take this one.’
He often told her, when he reminded her of that, ‘I didn’t know quite what to say. I wanted us to be a family like any other, but I knew it wasn’t possible. We’d better enjoy our differences.’
What he had said to each of them on their first night together was: ‘These are our new beginnings as a family. This is our new home. Each of us has an obligation to the other, but mostly to himself, because of what we’ve all been through, and what the world has been through. This will be a happy home until one day we return to Prague. We’ll give it and each other the best we’ve got. But if any of us is unhappy – let’s out with it, solve it and move on.’
And it had been a very happy house. It still was.
Mimi put her key in the basement door while bending to look in at the window and wave to Sophia.
This was her domain, and unless you were made known visually through the window, whether family or delivery man, you might have an airborne frying pan to deal with. In Sophia’s kitchen, all strangers were burglars.
The two women kissed. Mimi loved that kitchen; so did Karel and Sophia. The house itself, with the exception of the lower-level kitchens, was architecturally quite magnificent and in good order. Karel considered it extravagant but a good investment, so he took his time and spent his money carefully in furnishing it. Now, after twenty years in New York, the Goodrich House, as it was named, after the original owners who had commissioned it at the turn of the century, was considered one of the finest in the city, a beautifully furnished house. It was known for its quiet dinners, with Trumans and Rockefellers and Harrimans as guests. A place where dissident hopefuls from the Eastern bloc, and all the Czechoslovakian or Hungarian intelligentsia, were wined and dined.
Mimi looked around the kitchen and reacted as she always did when she was there. This was where her heart was, no matter where she lived. Here in this kitchen, with Sophia and her father, she was at her happiest. Karel had been so clever and so generous about the kitchen. Though he never quite fathomed why it was so important to the two women, he had nevertheless created this place for them. He had gutted most of the basement until the kitchen was one vast area terminating in a series of French doors that opened on to a large garden.
Across the back of the house there were two terraces, one on the ground floor off the dining room and the second from the first-floor drawing room, a room the size of one full floor of the house. From the drawing room terrace, a graceful curved stone staircase led down to the garden.
It was a minor Manhattan palace. Its kitchen was handsome, grand even, but functional. Sections of it were just plain homely, with its log-burning fireplace, its sofas
and wing chairs, rustic tables, and elegant Chien Lung Chinese Imari lamps. The walls were dotted with eighteenth-century walnut provincial
armoires
that were used as kitchen cupboards. Butcher’s tables, old-fashioned wooden carpenter’s benches, marble-topped iron tables used to roll out pastry, large pine tables scrubbed white with salt, had down their centre glass preserve-jars stuffed with peaches, plums, cherries, pickled lemons and oranges, green and black olives, turnips and radishes – every sort of culinary delight. Bowls of fruit and nuts glistened in the light. Jars of candied violets and carnations, chocolate-covered orange peel, silver-coated almonds. Lovely old cookie tins filled with delicious titbits were standing everywhere. Above the main table a rack held copper skillets and pans of all shapes and sizes, hanging from black iron hooks. Between them bunches of dried herbs tied with coloured ribbons. There were braids of large red Spanish onions and fresh white garlic. Eighteen inches below the ceiling, a frieze of copper fish-kettles, antique apothecary jars, pottery bowls and mortar pestles stood on a walnut shelf which ran round each side of the room. Between the
armoires
and the French baker’s racks, set against the walls, hung a collection of eighteenth-century Japanese prints by Utamaro and Hokusai in flat gilded frames. Sophia cooked on an eight-burner, four-oven black French iron stove, glistening with brass trim.
Karel loved his garden and his flowers. In the kitchen he saw to it that the women always had fresh flowers. Large, white daisies with big, yellow centres like fried eggs. Sunflowers when in season, and in season fresh tulips, his favourite flower, bowls of them. In terracotta pots, all the year round, they grew for the kitchen rosemary and basil, marjoram, chives, sage, dill. This room was Sophia’s home, her sitting-room, her place of work, most of her life. Just off it was her bedroom, an average-sized room where she slept but otherwise never retreated to. All her living was done in
the Stefanik kitchen or with the family.
Mimi’s father arrived in the kitchen from the small greenhouse in the garden he kept specifically for raising orchids. He was bearing a pot of white moth orchids. They were in peak condition. He went to Mimi and kissed her. ‘Good morning.’ Then he placed the pot on the breakfast table and from his pocket removed a small silver knife and severed one of the flowers from the plant’s stem. He removed a pin from the inside of his lapel, went to Mimi and pinned it in the perfect place high up on her shoulder. ‘Like a butterfly,’ he told her. And kissed her on the cheek again. Then he sat down to breakfast with his daughter.
‘How was Paris, Poppa?’
‘Still the grande dame of all cities. Met quite a few people who had recently arrived from Prague.’
‘The usual dissidents and exiles longing to go home?’
‘That more or less sums it up. Except for one young man, just majoring in literature at the Sorbonne. I’ve taken rather a liking to him, and so will you, I think.’
It was her father’s interest in the young man more than his youth and maleness that sparked her own. ‘Why?’
‘I suppose because he reminds me of myself as a young man. Hungry for life, with a fierce love of his homeland – where, by the way, he still lives. He’s interesting and vital, this young man. He will make something big out of his life if his courage doesn’t get him killed. His most recent escapade was to organize the removal of the entire collection of rare books from the Prague library. On Friday they closed the library as usual. Monday morning, the director comes to open up again for his readers – there’s not a book left on the rarities shelves. All gone. Enterprising, eh?’