My Nine Lives Read online

  His sister Veronica—fifteen years younger and from a different marriage—is the opposite. She is cool and detached in all her relations—part of the fascination that has made many people fall violently in love with her, and probably also the cause of her emotional pull with audiences. She is a film actress, at twenty-four already famous; whenever there are articles about a new generation of young stars, her name is prominent among them. She has beauty, of course, but she carries it lightly, as lightly as she moves, her long dress, which seems to be always the same, clinging to her like a length of cloth thrown carelessly over a classical statue, not to hide but to outline her figure. Her dark hair is long and free and sometimes she winds it into a knot to put it out of the way. But I need hardly describe Veronica, her picture is often in magazines, and sometimes on billboards ten feet tall.

  Although Veronica has received training from some notable acting coaches, including a famous and tyrannical eighty-year-old actress from Berlin, it was always, and still is, her brother to whom she turns for guidance. This began in her childhood, when she was six and Andrew twenty-one. Whatever he happened to be doing became her interest too—painting, poetry, even music, though she wasn’t musical. Every morning he would assign a poem for her to learn, and when he came home—this might not be till next morning—she would be waiting to recite it for him; and however exhausted he might be (for God only knew where he had been all night), he would patiently listen to her recital; and then she waited, and when he said, “Very good,” she let out her breath as if she had been holding it in anticipation of that moment. When she discovered her talent for acting, he encouraged and began to train her. He introduced her to classical drama, and at sixteen she was declaiming Phèdre to him while he, book in hand, modulated her like an orchestral conductor. Sometimes, to raise her pitch of passion, he accompanied her with tremendous chords struck on the piano. Or later, when she had begun to act in summer stock, he would take the text and read it with her. One of their favorites was Chekhov, especially The Seagull. She was Nina—and who more apt to play that youthful bird of hope aspiring to art and greatness?—while he read the young poet already doomed to failure. Only at that time there did not seem to be a breath of failure on Andrew, no diminution of his brightness. Except for the thinning of his hair, he was the same he always had been, slender and quick, with quick green eyes.

  Are suicidal tendencies hereditary? I know that from the 1890s onward they were almost endemic in many assimilated German-Jewish families, including my own. Much later, I tried it too, and so did Andrew, who cut his wrists. Debbie found him and took him to the hospital, and afterward she kept him by her at home, nurturing him more than she had been able to when he was small and she had been going through her first divorce. The idea of someone relinquishing life has remained utterly incomprehensible to her. Although both I and my husband Gerd had come to New York as refugees, Debbie acquired all the attributes of a standard American optimism. She grew up in our West Side apartment, among our books of philosophy and theology, many of them in German, our collection of classical records, our copies of Renaissance sculptures and Impressionist paintings, as though it were a suburban villa with a two-car garage and breakfast of pancakes and orange juice. She was rosy and blonde, healthy and pretty, with a meticulous taste in bobby sox and saddle shoes and boys as popular as herself, whom she cheered at their football games. Now, in middle age, Debbie is still an all-American type. She has been married three times, divorced twice, and is in the process of another divorce. She lived for a while in California—this was when she was married to a studio executive—and now has moved back to New York on the Upper East Side, across the Park from my apartment. Through all her vicissitudes, she has retained her faith in her ideal, which is success in the sense of a complete development of one’s human potential. Whether it is being the most popular girl in the class, or having the best decorated house, or the most highly promoted husband, she regards falling short of it as a sin of character that has to be atoned for and corrected by psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, medication, divorce, diet, or whatever else her friends have tried out and recommended.

  “I’m not an intellectual,” she used to tell us. As a girl, this difference from her parents was a matter of pride to her; but now, in view of how her children have turned out, she has become defensive about it. She still looks as far from an intellectual as she did as a bobby-soxer. She has remained blonde—though her hair is more a burnished gold now and built up to give her more height, for she has always been short. She has also tended to be plump, but since menopause she has had a real weight problem, compounded by what she calls her eating disorder, as a result of which she is always nibbling something. She has not changed much from when she was a little girl in short frocks with a frill at the hem. She is still wearing a version of those frocks, though a more expensive one, from Bergdorf’s or Saks designer salon. However, she has now largely disowned her teenage tastes in favor of her children’s. She has become interested in modern art and dance. She has also tried to read some of the books Andrew has bought for Veronica, and she likes to scatter them around where her friends can see them. These books, with their bright jackets and photographs of the author on the back, look more accessible and attractive than those she grew up with in our apartment, or saw at the Hochs.

  Debbie did not know until she was middleaged that Gerd, my husband, was not her father. Although in earlier years he and I had discussed the pros and cons of enlightening her, we kept postponing it and finally I did not tell her till after he died. It had turned out to be impossible while he was still with us and so devoted to her. He had delighted in all her plump, blonde, feminine ways, had loved to watch her ice-skate and tap-dance and whiz around on roller-blades, as graceful and vivacious as he was slow. After being a wonderful father to Debbie, he became a devoted grandfather to her children, who often stayed with us, and for long periods of time. Andrew and Gerd used to go for walks together by the river or sit in a park while Gerd told him about the planets and all the world’s natural and architectural wonders. He took him to the Metropolitan museum and led him, week by week, month by month, from the Egyptians to Cézanne (which was as far as Gerd himself had got in the history of art). By the time Veronica arrived, fifteen years later, Gerd had had two of his many operations and was mostly in a wheelchair, so they sat together in what had been his study, he with a tartan blanket on his lap, and she on the carpet with her frock drawn over her knees, listening to the English children’s classics he had already read first to her mother and then to Andrew. My apartment is full of photographs of Gerd with our two grandchildren.

  Gerd and I had been fellow students at Freiburg, and when that was no longer possible, in New York. Indeed, we had known each other as children and had been brought to play together under the supervision of our nannies while our mothers went to their coffee parties and matinée concerts. Later we arrived about the same time in New York and joined the same course under the famous Professor Hoch. During the first year or two in New York we formed a small, rather inward-looking group with other refugee students. Although some of us came from Germany and others from France or Italy, we had more in common with each other than with the American students—if only that we were adrift from the solid land of our own background and social assumptions, and our language. None of us was entirely fluent in English, though we were determined to become so and spoke nothing else, in a variety of accents and sometimes with comical mistakes. (Gerd and I never spoke German together again, till Debbie came, and then only when we didn’t want her to know something.) As children, Gerd and I had often played at weddings together, and although later we did not speak about marrying, there remained an assumption between us. But it was a point of honor among all of us to leave each other perfectly free; we were quite smug about it. I know that Gerd never availed himself of this arrangement, not even during those times when I did—and there were occasions, before Professor Hoch, when I could not resist trying out an affair with ano
ther of our refugee friends. I was adventurous at the time, afraid of missing something, ready to be stimulated by others or to take the initiative myself. But I really liked Gerd better than any of the other students.

  Gerd and I were married when I was six months pregnant with Debbie. We hosted a noisy, highspirited wedding lunch in our favorite Irish pub-style restaurant with a bar and checked tablecloths, and our friends’ epithalamia made jocular reference to the maternity smock I was wearing. No one except Gerd and I knew that Debbie—only we thought she was a boy, to be called David—was not Gerd’s child. Professor Hoch was not present; we all stood in too much awe of him to invite him to such an intimate occasion. It was very different with Gerd, when he in due course became a professor of philosophy and attended all his students’ celebrations. Hoch never hid his low opinion of his students—donkeys he called most of them, always in German, “Esel.” But Gerd not only loved, he esteemed his young people. I have seen him with tears in his eyes over a paper he was marking, only to have a student get something right; and it was the student he praised and admired, taking no credit at all for his own part in this achievement.

  I still live in the West Side apartment that the University allowed us to keep after Gerd’s retirement and even after he died. It is an enormous, cavernous place, and our furniture is also dark, standing on claw feet and embellished with carved clusters of grapes. We had bought it all second-hand, as soon as we could afford it, and in imitation of the furniture we had known in our childhood. On one of my birthdays Gerd gave me a chandelier. All through our years here we filled the place with friends and students. There were always house-guests, and people eating, either at impromptu meals or helping themselves out of our large ice-box. We also took every excuse for a party—New Year’s Eve, birthdays and anniversaries, Easter and Passover, we didn’t care what it was as long as people ate and drank and talked through the night. None of us was very tidy and there were books lying about, and records, used cups and glasses, and suitcases belonging to whoever happened to be staying. We often forgot to turn off the lights, so that lamps and the chandelier burned all through the day.

  The Hoch family lived in an almost identical West Side apartment, and their furniture was as ponderous as ours. Only theirs was not second-hand, for though they were also émigrés, they were voluntary ones who had been able to bring their possessions with them. Professor Hoch left Germany with the first dismissal of his Jewish colleagues and in protest at everything that was happening there. In New York they continued to live in a solid bourgeois German way. Frau Professor Hoch—Hedda—ran a strict and orderly household, to the exclusion of all dust and noise. Their two sons—tall, tow-headed—were models of respect and good behavior. Students were not encouraged to visit, except once or twice a year when there was a gathering at which Hedda played Bach two-handed clavier with her son. Only the Professor’s favorite students were invited; Hoch made no pretense of not having favorites. I was always included, Gerd only rarely.

  The front rooms in the Hoch apartment were given over entirely to the Professor, one to his study and two to his library, which also acted as a buffer against any disturbance from the rest of the household, or from the world in general. All domestic activity, including that of his growing sons, was confined to the other rooms leading off the long corridor. Here Hedda, with the help of her German maid, not only kept her house swept and polished but also acted as her husband’s secretary. Like the rest of us, she too had been a student of philosophy, his student, when he was a young docent at Weimar, so she was able to deal with his notes, to type and arrange them. There was no room for another study, and she had to make use either of the kitchen or the dining table, quickly clearing them as needed. It was always Hedda who answered the telephone, or who opened the door for the Professor’s visitors—of course none of us came without an appointment, arranged by herself, but nevertheless she scrutinized us before leading the way past the umbrella stand to the study door; and it was she who opened the door and then stood aside to let us pass—as stern, tall, and stiff as a Turkish dragoman, and as full of the pride of office.

  I entered of course with a beating heart—I was the only graduate student of our year whose thesis he was personally supervising, for he had allowed me to research into some minor aspect of his own work. This was like being allowed to splash in the shallows of his oceanic thought. Oceans and mountains—those were the images I associated with him, the only concepts large enough to contain my impressions of him. He overwhelmed me, not only mentally but by his physical presence. He was a big, heavy man, with a square stubbled skull; he had fought in the First World War and still looked more like a Prussian officer than a philosophy professor. When I sat close beside him at his massive desk, I hardly dared glance into his face. I kept my eyes lowered to the papers before us, so that all I could see of him was his waistcoat. He always wore a three-piece suit, with an oldfashioned gold watch-chain stretched across his stomach that rose and fell with his breathing. His breathing was heavy and became more so as his excitement mounted with his mounting thought; sometimes he seemed even to be panting like one who had climbed to a height never yet attained by man. I too felt my heartbeat increase with excitement as he spoke to me of his central idea (the reversal from the Western tradition of technology, or the excarnation of spirit into matter, to the Hindu concept of Maya, the incarnation of matter into spirit). And once, as if unable to sustain himself in those regions without some physical support—we are, after all, all of us here, still within the limits of our bodies—he put his hand on the back of my neck and said, “My little one.” He said it in German—“Meine Kleine”—which was always for him the language of his earthly desires. He shut his eyes when he kissed but I kept mine open. It was the only time I really dared to look into his face. He was in his fifties then, with heavy jowls that were always somewhat red and raw from the close shave he gave himself with a huge open razor. He was greatly attached to this razor and took it with him on all his travels; when I began to accompany him, I too became familiar with it, and with the leather strop on which he sharpened it and the shaving brush that looked like horsehair but was actually beaver.

  After my marriage and Debbie’s birth, my work with Hoch continued, for I had begun to act as his English translator and had become indispensable to him. I had nowhere to leave Debbie, so I always brought her with me, slung in a carrier on my back, along with my notebooks. The Hoch boys took charge of her and loved playing with her, all three of them fair-haired and rosy-cheeked. Hedda Hoch was also fond of Debbie and gave her cookies and milk in the kitchen and stroked her blonde curls, confiding that she had always longed for a little daughter. I could never make out how much Hedda knew or suspected. She appeared in complete command of her thoughts and feelings, as she was, of course, of the whole situation. It was she who slept beside him in their double bed brought from Germany; and it was she who cooked and served his meals and cleaned his house (on Saturdays, her major cleaning day, I had to get to his study by stepping over rolled-up carpets and past Hedda and her maid wielding mops). In the summer the whole family left for their vacation in the Swiss Alps; they always stayed in the same hotel, where months before Hedda had reserved his favorite rooms.

  Hedda lived on into her nineties and continued to work with me on the Hoch papers. Debbie often met her, but she remembered Hoch, who died when she was five, only as a threatening presence behind a forbidding closed door. The revelation that he was her father excited her perhaps more in its novel and scandalous aspect than the fact of her descent from one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers. She was also thrilled suddenly to acquire two half-brothers, and as a result sought out the two Hoch boys whom she hadn’t seen for maybe forty years. One was an engineer in Pittsburgh, the other a partner in a Washington law firm, both settled with their families in households as orderly as the one they had grown up in. They did not welcome Debbie’s revelation, nor I suspect Debbie herself, hung around with costume jewelry and
trailing her aura of adulteries and divorces—anyway, she came back disgruntled and seldom mentioned these half-brothers again except to say that they had inherited not one jot of their father’s genius, which had, she insisted, passed in a pure straight line through her to her own two wonderful children.

  *

  Although she has inherited nothing from Hoch except his height—she is much taller than anyone else in our family—there is something about my granddaughter Veronica that is reminiscent of him. This may be her complete absorption in what she is doing—that is, in her career, her stardom—and, with it, her absorption in herself. One has the feeling with her, as before with Hoch, that nothing can really touch her; that within herself, in her own sense of dedication, she is inviolate. The word ruthlessness attached itself naturally to Hoch, and so it does to Veronica. Yet her attitude to her own success is one of apparent indifference. She seems to regard it as her natural due, something she was both born for and works for, with all the strength of her ambition. And she has ambition—she is tense with it, always has been since childhood, even before she knew what she was going to do. Hoch’s ambition was to reach the loftiest heights of thought; hers is to star in what she herself sometimes characterizes as “dumb little movies”: in both cases the result has been a complete and utter singlemindedness. Not that there is any resemblance between Hoch’s personality and his granddaughter’s. He was ponderous, and it is her business to enchant. I think of her returning to us from one of her trips—and she is often away, on location, or in Beverly Hills, where she has recently bought a house. She comes to us straight from the airport, either to my apartment or to Debbie’s, wherever Andrew happens to be living at the time. Someone else has taken care of the luggage, so she arrives unencumbered—light as a butterfly in her simple frock and as if borne to us on a spring breeze (actually it was a chauffeur-driven limousine). Though protesting that she is dead tired from all that sitting on a horrible plane, she always has an amusing story to tell of something that happened to her en route, and from there other amusing stories—an encounter, maybe, with a stupid journalist—which she tells with great skill and that make us laugh. She is full of news and excitement—her news, her excitement, she doesn’t expect us to have any. Aroused by what she is telling us, she can’t sit still but strides up and down our living room, tall, slender, and strong: and her presence among us is wonderful—it is like having a goddess, a Diana or Ceres, descend into the middle of one’s little life, irradiating it for a moment with her splendor.