I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (18 page)

She pulled Andrée from the shower, her hair still sudsy with shampoo. She made her dial the number of Paul's concierge, then got on the phone herself.

“Is Françoise's motorbike in the courtyard?” Josée asked.

“Yes,” the concierge said.

“Go up to the apartment,” Josée demanded. The concierge had Paul's keys.

A few moments later, the concierge rang back. “There's no one there,” she said. She had shouted Françoise's name into the apartment and no one had answered.

“Go back and look around,” Josée demanded. She paced anxiously as she waited. She dialed the concierge again. The phone rang and rang.

“Oh,
Madame
!” the concierge said, finally picking up, out of breath. “She's not! She's not dead!”

Josée dragged Andrée to the car. The paramedics were on the scene when they arrived. There was very little time to spare, they said. Françoise had been dying since Friday afternoon.

My mother's eyes flashed with anger and disbelief as she told me this last part. I could feel her aching for an explanation.

Josée believed in the supernatural. She once told me that ever since a near-death experience waterskiing she'd had a deep connection to the afterlife. Some of her experiences were with the spirits of departing mothers who hadn't been able to say good-bye
to their daughters. Sometimes, they were able to tell her their daughters' full names. Josée would call them. Invariably, she'd learn that they'd recently lost their mothers. “She wanted me to tell you she's always been proud of you,” she'd say to them.

Andrée would later tell me that after leaving the hospital that day, Josée took her to a movie. There was time to kill before Andrée had to catch her train back to boarding school. They went to see Roman Polanski's
The Tenant
. “What a film to see on such a day,” she told me bitterly. “What a film to show your child.”

I had not seen the film, so later I looked it up. It was released in France that final week of May 1976. It begins with two people meeting around the hospital bed of a woman who has just attempted suicide. As they flirt, the dying woman, unable to communicate, screams her last. The couple leave the hospital room and go to the movies.

I believed without question in Josée's powerful magic. I was grateful to her. But I knew better than to express this to my mother.

—

“L
AST TIME
I was in France,” my mother told me at our kitchen table in New York, “I rifled through a book on adolescent suicide in a bookstore.” The authors had defined adolescence as the state of being ripped apart by two desires of an equal intensity: to be rid of your parents and to be loved by your parents, to become an adult and to remain a child. And suicide, suicide was the perfect paradox that allowed you both. On the one hand, it was the ultimate autonomous act. It was taking control. But after your death, your parents threw themselves on your body. You were allowed to remain a child forever.

“We've all been through that phase,” Paul said cavalierly when he came, newly tan, to visit Françoise in the hospital. Her pride was wounded. It was almost as if her father was disappointed by her lack of originality. But maybe, my mother told me, maybe it was the best thing he could have said. She ceased hoping her parents would care. And then she was free.

“Do you ever . . . ,” I asked, “do you ever still consider it?”

“Things change,” she said with a sigh, leaning back. “I'm in much more of a . . .” Her hand planed through the air like a bird as she searched for the word. “There are people who depend on me now. I still have moments when I feel . . . lost. But never as lost as before. It's like there's a big ocean and I still fall in from time to time. But then there are all these . . .” She pressed her thumb against her fingers like a shadow-puppet duck and made dots in the air between us. “There are all these things I can catch onto.”

She turned her hand against her mouth, fingertips and thumb pressed against her lips, and then allowed it to collapse. She spoke through her fist for a moment, then her hand was in motion once again.

“It's the collateral damage of the human condition,” she said with a heavy sigh. “I think therefore I am. Sometimes I envy very small children. You'll see, when you have them. Until a certain age, they live purely in the moment. It's magic. All these states of the soul, this despair, all of that doesn't exist when you're in the present. When I was younger, I didn't know how to listen to the rain. I didn't know how to take hold of my breathing. I didn't know how to stop the rushing thoughts in my head. I didn't know all of these things.”

—

A
FTER SHE WAS
RELEASED
from the hospital, Françoise recovered, moved back to her loft in SoHo, met my father, fell in love. But although she answered all my questions about events up to that point with candor, she insisted on stopping when she met my father. There are some things I should never know, she said.

Though of course I knew the origin story of my parents' romance, had always known it in the way of things you don't remember learning. My mother first met my father shortly after moving back to New York, in the fall of 1976. It was at a dinner party thrown by a couple she'd met in the downtown art scene, part of the circle that radiated outward from her days in Richard Foreman's plays. He'd had a Jewish girlfriend at the time, a short-lived romance born from a sense of compulsion. Françoise had seen him as easily cowed and had not been impressed.

Later, she came across a four-page strip he had published in an underground comix magazine. It was black-and-white, jagged angry lines, raw emotion etched so strong and ragged it seemed strange the paper wasn't torn. It was about his mother's suicide. It was about his anger.

She called him. They spoke for hours—all night, in some retellings—ignoring the mounting phone bill. Her English was limited and speaking on the phone was difficult. But she had a pressing need to understand.

“How could you?” Françoise wanted to know. “How could you publish something so intimate about your mother?”

I don't know how he answered her questions. I could ask, but my parents are no longer the people they were then. The question
would be answered the way they would answer it now, with all the filters of time and my father's ensuing fame. However he managed to respond, it was during that conversation that they fell in love.

—

O
NCE
,
WHEN
I was well into this book, my father told me that my mother, when he'd met her, was not the person she'd become. Yes, I said knowingly, she was not as confident then. I'd seen the photographs. I was proud that, in her twenties, my mother was not yet the striking beauty she was now. I hoped that I, too, would only grow more beautiful with age. In old photographs, there was a timid set to her mouth, a guardedness to her eyes, a face hidden behind a halo of frizzy hair. That girl wasn't my mother. My mother could get dressed in ten minutes flat for a swanky party uptown. She could make a thirty-dollar dress look straight off the runway. In recent photographs, my mother's eyes met the camera with a startling frank intelligence that made you stare.

But my father had furrowed his brow at my answer and shook his head and said
Um,
which was rare from him. “She was very . . . broken,” he said slowly, then stopped, biting back more words. He'd had to raise her, he said. He'd had to guide her through an accelerated childhood. A teddy bear was involved.

“Is it true that Papa had to raise you?” I asked my mother.

“Your father is rewriting history,” she said. “To his advantage. As usual.”

“And the bear?” I asked. A cross-eyed teddy bear named Gladly. Gladly, my cross-eyed bear. Gladly my cross I'd bear. I remembered the pun being explained to me once, one of the first I ever
understood. I remembered, vaguely, seeing it in my mother's arms, in my mother's closet.

“What bear?” she said.

“The one in your closet,” I said.

“That was your bear,” she said. And it's true that when I decided I was too old to keep my teddy bears in my room and yet still too young to give them away, my mother put them on a high shelf in her closet. They were still there, mixed with my brother's, the cross-eyed bear among
them.

I
have always known what it means to be a character in someone else's story. My birth was marked by an asterisk in
Maus
.
*
As I emerged into the fluorescent lights of St. Vincent's Hospital in the Village (it seems strange, to use “I” for that self I cannot remember), some other part of me fell through my father's black tear of ink on the page. Or rather, not one page, not one asterisk, but hundreds of thousands in books being opened for the first time, being printed for the first time, even now. And later, in other strips and other stories, there I was, at four, at fourteen, my stretched face drawn straight from my high school ID card photo.

“How's Nadja's book going?” an acquaintance of my mother's asked her once, while I was sitting next to her. “Has it been published yet?”

It had not. At that point, I had been working on it, on and off, for nearly six years. My father told people about my project with pride. My mother resented him for it. She became angry when anyone asked her about it. “It has nothing to
do
with me,” she told me when I asked why. “It's your book. I have to think about it as being about someone else, some other girl who shares my name.”

“Not yet,” my mother said to her inquiring friend. “It's a little like being on death row, awaiting my lethal injection.” They laughed.

“Is that how you really feel?” I asked her later. “Death row?”

“Oh,
mais chaton
!” she said. “They treat people very well on death row. Last meals and all that.”

“Having a writer in the family is like having a murderer in the family,” my father told me wryly, and often, in reference to both himself and me.

My mother had told me that even in the hospital she refused to let the nurses take me from her arms. Each time they tried to slip me from her grasp—
so you can sleep
—her eyes snapped open.
I can't sleep without her.
She checked herself out of the hospital the day after I was born and never put me down. But I could not remember a time when I was small enough for my mother to carry. I didn't know how it felt to be aloft in her arms. Was that me any more real than the versions drawn and printed?

My paternal grandparents were a book. I learned to know them only in its pages. My father had closed away a painful part of his past and left it there for us, for anyone, to find. It wasn't until I read
Maus
at fourteen that I discovered that his mother had killed herself. I was sitting on the carpet in a corner of my bedroom, the house strangely quiet, each of us behind our own closed doors. I was so absorbed that I had sunk to the floor.
This is the grandmother I never had,
I thought. Here she was, in a book so many other people had read before me. My father's grief howled from the page, uncut by time. The anger and pain was as raw and unfiltered as it had been in 1972. I hadn't told him I was reading the book now. I hadn't planned to read it. I had tried several times before and slammed the pages shut.

“Would Anja have liked me, do you think?” I asked him very quietly that night as we set the table for dinner. I watched his eyes: the surprise, the rising well of tears.

“She would have
loved
you,” he said. He looked away and back again. “She would have loved you.”

Each time I asked my parents the origin of my name there was a different story: It worked in both languages; I'd been named for the title of a book by André Breton; they'd met an Italian tour guide whose name they had liked. But my favorite was that I'd been given the name of my father's mother, Anja, recombined.

I had had once, in an impossible past, a sprawling family tree of Spiegelmans so dense I could have disappeared in its shade. Sometimes when I believed in magic, or wondered, as I often did, why I had been chosen for this unfairly charmed life, it was this: that crowd of Eastern European Jewish faces who hovered near me, nameless, with mouths and eyebrows like mine, hair like mine, with so much spilled blood concentrated into my own. There were so many of them and so few descendants to watch over. The one I saw most clearly was Anja, whose face I knew from a single photograph, whom my father had loved and almost never mentioned. Sometimes in moments of deep crisis, I asked her for guidance. I knew she stayed closest. I thought of her often, that grandmother I'd never had.

—

I
N
J
ANUARY OF
2012
, my mother and I went to France, just the two of us. My mother had arranged the trip so that she and I could spend two days in Paris before continuing on to the town of Angoulême, where we would meet my father.

In the past, I would have packed bags of nuts in my suitcase to
preempt fights with my mother over food, would have made a list in my notebook of the hurtful things she might say to me, to preempt their sting. But now my notebook contained only our flight numbers and travel times. When we got to our Paris apartment, a studio in the heart of the city that my mother had purchased a decade before, I made us dinner while she plugged in her laptop and worked.

The next day, she leapt out of the bed we shared, crackling with nervous energy. I heard her on the phone with my grandmother, apologizing in a voice that sounded young. I heard Josée's muffled scolding on the other end of the line. It was two in the afternoon, and we'd been due for lunch on the houseboat at noon. I got out of bed and tried on four different outfits, trying to smooth away my stomach with my hands. I counted the months since I had last seen my grandmother, August to February, and wondered if I had gained weight in that time. I had. My mother took a shower, then angrily reminded me we were late. We ran outside to hail a cab. I noticed my mother's lipstick was perfectly applied.

“But aren't you ravishing!” Josée said to my mother when we arrived. “As slim as ever.” She looked me up and down but said nothing.

We removed our shoes in the entryway. “You'll catch a cold with your bare feet,” Josée said. “Here Françoise, I bought these especially for you.” She produced a pair of elegant soft white slippers. “Nadja, you can wear these,” she said, handing me a pair of floppy gray booties with pom-poms on the back. The houseboat was difficult to heat, and it was cold. Josée had spent a rough winter, battling floods. She moved stiffly.

My mother and I immediately set to work in the kitchen. She
handed me a baguette and I sliced it. She pulled out a basket and I found a napkin with which to line it.

“You see!” Josée said, laughing, as she watched us. “Daughters
are
good for something, after all.”

“When did you first realize that?” my mother asked good-naturedly, as Josée poured herself a glass of wine.

“When I got old and sick,” Josée said. “When I was thirty, a friend told me we have children so that they'll take care of us one day, and I laughed at him. Children are so much more fun when they're young! But you'll see, as you get older, that it's nice to have someone to lean on. It could be anyone really, a secretary or a housekeeper even, but it's that much more comfortable when it's someone you know well.” There was an undercurrent of resentment in Josée's tone, but my mother laughed easily, a casual smile in place.

Six months earlier, during a family trip to Paris in August, my mother had received an emergency phone call from Josée. She said she had just fallen and broken her hip. Normally she would have called one of her other daughters, but since my mother was here, perhaps she could come? My mother, brother, and I jumped into a cab. On the way to the houseboat, we puzzled aloud. Why had Josée called my mother instead of an ambulance? How would we get her off the boat? But when we arrived, Josée was standing at the top of her stairs, packed and ready to go. She managed to climb into the taxi and directed the driver to a clinic she liked. “
Madame,
” the doctor told my anxious mother, “if your mother has a broken hip she should be in a hospital, not here.” But Josée insisted she did not want to go to the hospital, and eventually she was assigned a room. She gave a sigh of relief as we hoisted her onto the bed. “It's very comfortable here,” she told us. That
evening, X-rays were finally taken. In hushed tones in the hallway, the doctor informed my mother that there was absolutely nothing wrong with Josée's hip—in fact, there was nothing wrong with her at all.

But my mother knew that something was wrong, even if not medically. Josée did not often ask for her help. What was she trying to communicate? My mother thought she knew what it was: Josée was too old to live on the houseboat alone and too proud to admit it. The winter chill and damp cut straight through her.

My mother had worriedly discussed solutions with everyone in the family. Sylvie and Andrée felt Josée should enter an assisted-living facility. My mother recoiled at the suggestion. Instead, my mother mused, Josée could sell the houseboat and buy herself a comfortable apartment. Josée brushed the suggestion aside.

“Of course she can't sell the houseboat,” I said. “It's her life's work. It's her
chef d'oeuvre
.” It was unclear who Josée would be without the boat. It was how I explained her to my friends—the Jacuzzi, the table that rose out of the floor with a remote control. It was how she introduced herself to strangers: “I live on a boat.”

Perhaps she could afford to keep the boat and rent herself an apartment, my mother suggested. This, too, Josée shrugged off.

“Of course she can't rent,” my brother said. “Renting is temporary. It means admitting that she'll die.”

Eventually, my mother decided that she would buy Josée an apartment. My mother was proud that she had earned her living well enough to do so, but she knew that Josée's own pride was a delicate thing. She framed it carefully. She told Josée that she would like to buy an apartment for my brother and me, which Josée would furnish and live in. To this Josée agreed. She chose an apartment a ten-minute drive from the houseboat. She referred to it as
“Nadja's apartment” and complained often of the work involved in renovating it. In the years following, she would continue to spend a great deal of time on the houseboat, in constant motion, frequently dining and sleeping there. But in winter months, she would marvel over the apartment's central heat.

Now Josée would show my mother the apartment for the first time. But as it was still under construction, she'd prepared lunch for us on the houseboat first. As soon as we sat down to eat, Josée began complaining about Jean-Claude, Sylvie's husband. Jean-Claude was a mild-mannered, diffident man with an array of food allergies. He took up very little space in a room and seemed to me difficult to dislike with any vehemence. But Josée's affections were cyclical, and loving one of her two Parisian daughters meant fighting with the other. On that day, Andrée was in, Sylvie was out, and Jean-Claude was taking the brunt of Josée's displeasure.

“But you know, I was very impressed with Jean-Claude once,” my mother said, and I knew exactly which story she was about to tell. She had told it many times.

One afternoon, when my cousin was young, he had fallen into the Seine. Jean-Claude had jumped right in to save him.

“He didn't even take off his coat!” my mother said, as she always did. “It was quite heroic. I was very impressed with him!”

“
Mais non!
” Josée scoffed. “The boy was clinging to a buoy raft. Jean-Claude jumped right down onto it and split his kid's lip open. Some hero!”

This was the first time I'd heard that version of the story. I looked at the two women; neither wavered. I'd been there that day, ten or eleven years old, standing on the deck of the boat. I strained to remember. I tried to see my cousin's lip, the blood dripping into murky water, but I remembered the moment as if in a movie, from
behind a roving camera. I even saw myself standing there. I'd inhabited my mother's memory and lost my own.

There was a beat of strained silence. My mother shrugged and changed the topic. I knew she would continue to tell the story just as she always had.

“Nadja, I'm glad you're here,” my grandmother said, turning decisively to me. “I've been meaning to talk to you.”

My body tensed. With startling clarity, I knew what was coming. I'd been too busy sucking in my stomach to anticipate it. Now I saw that Josée had planned for this all along.

“When I first read what you said in that book I felt
sick
!” she exclaimed. “Sick to the bottom of my heart. And I have been sick sick sick ever since.”

I stayed silent and looked at her calmly. I felt myself exit my body, the way I often did when faced with anger.

My father was in France to promote the French edition of
MetaMaus,
a book about the making of
Maus.
I'd been interviewed for the book, and in response to a question about my own relationship to the Holocaust, I had replied, “There's also my French side of the family, and what they were doing during the war. My great-grandmother got caught up with this Italian who had dealings with the Nazis, and when he died she was blamed for what he'd done, so she was in jail for being a Nazi sympathizer. Which was a very indirect way of being involved, but there's still this conflicting sense of my ancestry. Victims and perpetrators both.”

Josée had received the French edition in December. She'd found the reference to her mother immediately and been distraught. My mother had mentioned Josée's displeasure to me only in passing, but I knew that my comment had provoked tension between them. Now Josée had the opportunity to confront me about it herself.

“And on top of it all, it's not even true,” she said now.

“How is it not true?” I asked. My mother had told me Mina's story when I was eight years old. She'd heard it directly from Mina herself. I wrote it up for a fourth-grade project. I titled it “My Great-Grandmother, My Hero” in marker on the cover and bound it with yarn. Later my mother told me that she had gulped when she'd seen my project alongside the others in my classroom. She wondered if perhaps she'd told me a few things prematurely. But it was a story I felt I had always known, and one I was proud of.