I tend to feel an almost theatrical fright when I am near a subject that hints of her. I’ve felt this way since I was six and learned that my real mother had died and that I did not know her.
In the last year before the war that shaped her life, in 1913, she was nineteen; and she has too stylishly formed, too stylized a body, too sexual, too strongly marked for me to be comfortable with the thought of her. Her body when she was that age I recognize; I invent it. I know
her feet, her hands, her hair—as a girl: they are unlike mine. She has longish brown hair, very fine-drawn, so that, although it is curly, its own weight straightens it except at the ends. Fine hair, which sets an uneasy and trembling too thin silkiness, a perilously sexual lack of weight around her face, which bobs nakedly forward from what might have framed or hidden her vitality; beneath the too fine hair is one of those girlishly powerful faces atop a tall body, a face large-lipped, eyes set very wide; a face bold with an animal and temperamental and intellectual electricity. She is both regal and peasantlike, gypsyish—or like a red Indian—a noticeable presence, physically exhilarated and willful. She is muscular. She is direct in glance. She has a long neck and a high rear end and longish feet and short-fingered hands with oddly unimpressive nails—her hands are not competent; they are cut off a little from life because her mind is active and her hands consequently stumble, but her energy and a somewhat hot and comic and even farcical grace of attention she has make up for that, and she is considered by others and by herself to be very good at manual things anyway.
And she is literate—she is bookish and given to quoting and argument—and she is active physically, and she is given to bad temper rather than to depression. In comparative poverty, in an era of grave terrors, she has lived in enough danger that she has become courteous and ironic, and has been ever since she was a small child, but the courtesy and the irony lie atop a powerful other self. As a personality, she was a striking image for others from the beginning—she was what would be called by some people A Great Favorite: much pawed is what that comes down to. This is among Jews and Russians. Things were asked of her often by her mother and her father and by others: errands and talk and company, physical company. She was noticeable and had that quality of mind which made people take her as
special,
as being destined and farseeing, more
reasonable
than others. She was (in a sense) the trademark or logo of the community, of the family—sought after, liked, used, I would imagine, but she was patient with that because she was praised, and so admiringly looked at as well. People close their minds off and charge and butt at their favorites—or tease and torment them: A Peasant Beauty.
Here are some sentences from Chekhov:
The village was never free of fever, and there was boggy mud there even in the summer, especially under the fences over which hung old willow trees that gave deep shade. Here there was always a smell from the factory refuse and the acetic acid which was used in the finishing of cotton print.… The tanyard often made the little river
stink.…
[Bribes to the chief of police and the district doctor kept the factory open.]
In the whole village there were only two decent houses, made of brick with tin roofs.
And:
The sonorous, joyful clang of the church bells hung over the town unceasingly, setting the spring air aquiver.
And:
The charming street in spring, on each side of it was a row of poplars.… And acacias, tall bushes of lilacs, wild cherries and apple trees hung over the fence and the palings.
Barefoot, in Russia, near a small ravine, she moves, much too showily present, not discreet, not slipping and sliding along in the Oriental fashion, not devious or subterranean or flirtatious or in any masquerade, but obvious and present, forthright in a local manner, a common enough manner in that part of the world where women ran farms and inns and stores and had that slightly masculinized swagger or march, that alive-in-the-world-of-men, alert, and roughened air, that here-and-now way of presenting themselves.
Ceil, almost nervously, always overrated rebellion—and discipline—loyalty to the absent
king,
complete law-abidingness as rebellion, the claim of following the true law, the truer one.
In Illinois, where money was comparatively plentiful, she would despise money, which she liked; but despising it was a further mode of bandit independence and religious, soaring freedom. She would be confused by the utter secrecy of the actual politics of the county and the state, the bribes and the use of force and the criminal nature of much that goes on; she will not understand the sheer power of the lie in creating a password-based social class of rule, of stability: this Christian doubleness, perhaps largely English in style in Illinois, will strike her as contemptible.
(She was always talking about being realistic; she wanted everyone to be realistic about everything all the time; she lorded it over everyone because she was so realistic.
The woman who became my mother, Lila Silenowicz, told me this.)
She never lived in a city. Well, actually she did try to live in St. Louis for a while, but the urban sophistications, the interplay of things, of money and information and shibboleth—respectabilities and concealed coercions—upset her, and I believe she lost out in whatever she tried to do, in whatever she attempted in the way of dignity there.
And Max’s proposal, my father’s proposal, offered her a life in a small town, a really small town—thirty-five hundred people. Long after Ceil died, my mother by adoption said, “Ceil wanted a foothold. She wasn’t
really under anyone’s protection. She could do what she wanted; no one could stop her. No one wanted her to listen to Max; he was no good, no good for a woman; but it didn’t matter what anyone thought; she could do as she liked.” Max’s proposal involved her going to live in that small town, under an enormous canopy of sky like that pale canopy that overhangs plains anywhere, and it’s true that her pride and victories took root again once she was in so small a place.
My mother’s mind, and to some extent her language, tribal and local but influenced by St. Petersburg, and her conceit are somewhat like those of the poet Mandelstam, who was born not far from where she was born. He lived at the same time; similar dates cover his life, too, but it was a different life, of course, except that it, too, was stubborn and mad, and his death was as empty of reason as Ceil’s.
Mandelstam went to St. Petersburg, and he went south a number of times, to the Crimea. He went to school in St. Petersburg, and he was considerably more
civilized
than Ceil was, early or late, and stiff-necked and romantic and unromantic, and as passionately self-willed and oddly placed in the world as she was: he was deathful and lifeful in similar ways. He has a line in a poem that I will say goes into English as (it is about the dome of Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul)
“It is swimming in the world.
” It is swimming in the world at the end of a long gold chain let down from Heaven.
On a dusty road, here is Ceil, here is my mother, and she is like that in her mind.
C
EIL THOUGHT
of herself as a Jew first, then as a woman, and when I knew her, she thought of herself as an American—she had no interest in being European.
Her father, it was known, could talk to God; he could influence God; God cared about him. On certain special (cathedral, or sanctified) occasions, Ceil’s father could tug the gold chain let down from Heaven.
“Ceil didn’t like him so much—she loved him; she was a good daughter, don’t get me wrong, but everyone thought only about him, and it suffocated her. She had a bad streak; she thought she was as smart as anyone.” (Lila. My mother by adoption.)
Ceil was an immensely passionate woman, who loved steadily and somewhat harshly in the nature of things; that is, that was the form her energy and attention outwardly took.
“She loved to work; she loved to keep things clean. She loved to have you on her arm. She loved to have her hair done. She didn’t giggle none.” (This is Old Ruthie talking. My grandmother by adoption.) “She had no foolishness; she liked to work.”
“She was a cold woman, pardon me for saying it—very cold. But you couldn’t tell with her. She liked that little town; she liked Max for a while. You never knew with her—she sometimes seemed very hot, even sentimental, to me; I was colder in the long run. But she said she was alone; she said she had always been alone until you were born, and now she had someone and she was happy. It’s too bad it didn’t last.” (Lila.)
“Ceil was big; she carried herself like a queen; she couldn’t come into a room quietly, you know.” (Lila.)
My grandfather was a ferocious Jewish charlatan. Unless he actually was a magician. Ceil believed in him. The family myth is that he was a wonder-working rebbe, who had a private army and a small group of industries that he ran and, because he was a religious genius, fifteen thousand loyal followers at his command—a man six feet six or seven or four or five, a man unashamed of his power in the world, his influence over men and over women, a man who could
scare a Cossack.
But I don’t believe it. It is not true. It is mostly untrue, I think. He was poor, and his congregation was poor.
Lila: “Ceil said she hardly knew her mother. There were fifteen, twenty, twenty-five children by the same woman. Ceil said she was a shadow. Ceil said she paid no attention to anyone but the father. Ceil was the youngest, the last one. It used to embarrass Ceil to tell this. Ceil said the father was too smart and too religious to like women. If you ask me, he didn’t care about anything but himself; your grandmother got the benefit and the work.…”
And:
She was his shadow; she liked it like that; Ceil didn’t like that, she didn’t want to be like that, she told me she didn’t want a man she had to feel obligated to at all.
Ceil’s mother spun and flamed and guttered out her life, my grandma, in hero worship (maybe).
Lila: “Your mother was raised by her older sister.”
Lila: “Ceil never knew what kind of man Max was. What could she know? She was ignorant; she only knew what she knew, you know what I mean? She knew what she could know. I wish you understood me, Wiley.”
The stories of women go unheard, I understood her to say, Lila.
“No one knows what happens to women. No one knows how bad it is, or how good it is, either. Women can’t talk—we know too much.”
Ceil’s father, my grandfather, claimed literally to be the unnameable God’s vicar on earth, his voice on earth—poor or not.
I mean, within four walls he was magnificent, not boastful but merely dutiful toward his powers: he was as powerful as Bach.
She, Ceil, was his pet. She is physically very striking, even exotic, not Jewish-exotic but Tatar-exotic—Byzantine, Saracen. And she has a mind of notable quality, a rankling form of forwardness that shows itself early, and she is educated more than a Jewish woman usually is in such communities, since her father considers her remarkable in her way, and thinks that she might be a prophet and his true heir more than his thick-witted and numberless sons.
F
OR A WOMAN
, surely, words are the prime element of force, of being able to enforce things on others, to coerce them. The prime
realistic
thing, in a certain sense, for women in this world is words, words insofar as they contain law and announcements of principles, the semiminor apocalypses of Utopia, or at least of peace on earth. For Lila, too, it was criticism, judgment, social and psychological coercion. But for Ceil most words were God’s, and were cabalistic: the right terms could summon happiness.
Lila: “She hated the Communists by the time they were through; she said they wouldn’t give anyone any peace; she said they were mean and stupid, amen.”
And: “She had wonderful skin, and she was a good sleeper: I think she had a good conscience; she was very strict. She wasn’t shy with people. She wasn’t scared; she could talk to anyone; she was like a queen. Your mother had a nice laugh, but she wouldn’t laugh in front of men—she said it was like showing her drawers. I never saw anyone as sure of herself as she was—it could drive you crazy sometimes. I never saw her tired.”
L
IFE IS UNLIVABLE
, but we live it. No virgin would have married Max Stein. No good-hearted daughter of a strikingly holy man would have left such a presence.
He wants to marry her to a scholar, a rachitic and skinny scholar, devoted to
pilpulim
and to certain Chassidic songs, certain spells of rapture, certain kinds of cunning wit, and, above all, to him, the rebbe, the physical and sexual and worldly power who has been the holy body for the thinner bodies who are his flock. The skinny and lesser mystic he has chosen, and Ceil will preserve the line. In the past, Ceil was intoxicated by such notions, but now it is too late. Events have aged her. The war. A brother’s disappearance. Perhaps something personal—a man, a woman. A book. A movie. A grief. Or greed:
she wanted a chance to live.
Ceil will choose sin and will be an outcast.
Tall, long-legged, the odd-eyed young woman resists, refuses the marriage. (“There was real trouble between her and her father. He forgave her and he put a curse on her, both. He was ugly about her. But she was selfish. She wasn’t afraid of him anymore.”)
Ceil wasn’t ashamed of anything. That’s one reason she married Max, so she wouldn’t be ashamed of the people back in the old country
—the court.
She did things, oddly, for her father and against him. She straightened out her life for his sake, in a way.
Lila: “She went to the beauty parlor twice a week and she liked Garbo. She didn’t speak English and she worked as a maid, I think. She wanted to have her own money, her own life, right away. She had offers, but she turned them all down. She always acted as if she knew what she was doing.”
I start with Garbo; I think of scenes of Garbo
traveling
—that almost impossibly powerful presence on the screen, at once challenging and Nordically disciplined, costumed, unafraid.