Clara Mondschein's Melancholia Read online

  Actually, I’m thinking of moving to New York when I graduate from high school next year. I haven’t told anyone, not even my grandmother, who would probably be thrilled. She hates New Jersey about as much as I do. “How can you sleep with all this clean silence?” she always asks me. But she lives on 148th Street and Broadway where, if you don’t like merengue, you could lose your mind, especially in the summer.

  I asked my mother once why my grandparents didn’t celebrate my mother’s birthday and Yom Hashoah with us, and she said disdainfully, “Because they don’t like to be reminded. They’d rather forget.” But I don’t think it’s that they want to forget, but that they somehow think of my mother’s depressions as a kind of weakness, as a way that the Nazis had beaten them.

  Usually, when my grandparents came to visit with their pastries and chocolates, everyone made an effort to get along. My grandmother was careful not to overly criticize the suburbs, and my mother would rouse herself from her bed for the visit. Sometimes, though, things didn’t go so smoothly. I remember one Sunday when my father had spent the whole morning telling her that she “had to make an effort” for her parents, and my mother had said that they didn’t make an effort for her, which I don’t think is true. Anyway, she had managed to get up and dressed and was sitting in the living room when they arrived. Right away my grandmother knew that my mother was in one of her moods, and instead of just ignoring it like she usually did, she said something about how they came all the way from New York to visit and about how it was a beautiful spring day out and we should all sit in the garden and have coffee and eat the pastries they brought. My mother sat there staring at the rug and when my grandmother finished speaking, my mother looked up and said, very slowly, that she despised the spring. My grandmother got really tense and looked straight into my mother’s eyes. Then my mother started crying and crying and my grandmother just sat there without saying anything. Finally, my grandfather and my father brought in the coffee and pastries and my father put on Vivaldi and my mother stopped crying, and my father and grandfather talked and my grandmother sat really close to the CD player with her ear right up to the speakers as if she were waiting for a special part and didn’t want to miss it.

  I think my grandmother believes that if my mother really wanted to, she could be happy and productive. What she doesn’t understand is that everyone has a different definition of happiness. I guess she also thinks that she and my grandfather should have been able to do something to make my mother happy and that somehow they failed because they were the ones who brought her up and they were the ones who should have been able to give her the same strength to carry on that they had. I don’t really think of things in terms of strength and weakness, though, because it depends on how you look at it. Some people would say that it was only the fear of death that keeps people from killing themselves and that the ultimate act of courage is suicide. Anyway, one thing I know is that parents always have an inflated idea of their power over their children and always feel like it’s their fault if things go wrong, just like it’s all their doing if their child does something great like win a prize at school or become a lawyer, which I don’t think is so amazing anyway. They won’t accept that there are so many things that parents don’t have anything to do with at all.

  I guess I ended up apologizing about my Eucharist comment because I really did feel that I had been harsh and just like children don’t want their parents to be cruel, parents don’t deserve cruelty from their children. My mother didn’t accept my apology. She just looked at me sadly and went back to flipping through her magazine. A year ago I would have kept trying. I would have played pieces by her favorite composers—Vivaldi, Boccherini—even though I knew it wouldn’t work. She loves the Italians. I guess she doesn’t think of them as having been fascists, too. Once I asked her about it, and she said the Italians weren’t real fascists, but she got angry when I pushed her to explain what wasn’t real about Italian fascism.

  Music is sometimes the only thing that will get my mother out of a depressed state. When I was little, as young as eight or nine, my father used to wake me up in the middle of the night and have me come into their bedroom to play for her. She would usually start crying after about half an hour and then I would want to stop, but my father would make me continue playing while she cried and cried. Then finally she would fall back asleep, and the next day she would be better. There she would be in the morning, greeting me with freshly squeezed orange juice and bagels, lox, and cream cheese, which we usually ate only on weekends. She would give me a kiss and send me off with chocolate in my lunch bag. It’s always been like that; I seem to have a great effect on mother’s moods, though now I am only able to get her depressed, having lost the ability to cure her. Maybe that’s because I have stopped trying to experience what it is she feels when she has us do the rituals and when she lies in her bed for days on end. I have never told her that I have stopped trying, but she can tell.

  Before we went to Madrid last summer, the only person with whom I could spend hours and hours at a time without getting bored was my mother. Now I guess the only person I can spend hours and hours with is myself. My mother and I never did the usual mother-daughter things. We didn’t go shopping or to the movies or even go into the city. A lot of times we just sat in the living room and listened to music while my mother sipped bourbon. She’s not an alcoholic although I bet some people would say she is. She just likes a bourbon or two at the end of the day. At other times, we drank strong coffee with heavy cream and sat at the kitchen table while she read me her favorite poems by Yeats, Auden, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, Keats, Blake, and, of course, Sylvia Plath. She would give me assignments to memorize her favorite poems, and then she’d test me the next day. When I was younger, I didn’t really understand what I was memorizing, but I memorized them all perfectly and proudly. I think I was eight when she first read me “Daddy,” and it was easy to memorize because it contained so many familiar words like “Auschwitz” and “Vienna” and “swastika.” It was only much later that I came to hate that poem and Sylvia Plath, and I never could understand why my mother liked that poem so much because my grandfather was so kind and quiet and his patients lined up outside his office at dawn. Sometimes I would try to get my mother to show me her own poetry because my father told me she had written some “very promising poems” when she was in college, but she said she had burned them all. Maybe she did, but I’m sure she knows them by heart. I know all the music I’ve composed by heart.

  I suppose other children wouldn’t find any of this very amusing, but sometimes I would lie awake all night practicing a poem so I could say it perfectly for her the next day. I still know them all by heart, too. They come in handy—when I can’t sleep or when I’m waiting for a bus or suffering through a boring class at school, I start reciting poems to myself. I even remember the poems I don’t like, and when I’m just spacing out or walking, one will suddenly pop into my head like that stupid one by Wordsworth:

  I wandered lonely as a cloud

  That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

  When all at once I saw a crowd,

  A host, of golden daffodils,

  Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

  Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

  Three years ago, when I was in eighth grade, my mother and I went on a really long walk. She asked me to bring my cello because she wanted me to play for her when we got tired. Of course, she never offered to help me carry it, but my mother never thinks of stuff like that. My arm was so numb by the time we got to the park and sat down that it was really difficult to play properly. But I played anyway. Mendelssohn. Then she said that she wished she could play an instrument the way I did, and I told her I would give her lessons, and then she started crying, so I just kept playing because that always made her feel better. After a while, she stopped crying, and I packed up my cello and we walked back home.
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  It was around that time that she started bugging me about my clothes. She said I was getting to be a young woman and I should take more interest in my looks, and I would always tell her that she shouldn’t be judging people by how they look, and she would say she wasn’t judging, but that I looked like a chimney sweep. I’ve never even seen a chimney sweep except in Mary Poppins and she probably hasn’t either, which is what I told her, but she said it was just a manner of speaking. She also started bugging me about the way I sat and every time she caught me with my hands in my pockets she would tell me to stand up straight and get my hands out of my pockets. Then she wanted me to take dancing lessons, but I refused. It’s not like I’ve ever seen her and my father dance. Even at bar mitzvahs, they just sit there and watch.

  My mother has always insisted on getting dressed up even for occasions that most people don’t get dressed up for. Whenever we go out to eat at the Chinese restaurant in Tenafly, she always makes me put on a dress, and my father always wears a tie and jacket. Even when he is at home working on his articles or preparing his lectures, he wears a tie and jacket, except in the summer when it’s too hot. I always feel really stupid going to the Chinese restaurant with my parents because no one else dresses up to go there and, since we usually go on Sundays, we always look like we’ve just come from church. I’ve explained this to my mother plenty of times, but she just tells me I’m conventional because I worry about what people think, and then we get into an argument about which one of us is more conventional.

  Last spring, before we went to Madrid, was the last time my mother and I did anything fun together, and now, after all that happened there, she is in the worst depression I can remember although my father says that the worst period ever was when I was a baby. It was so bad he had to ask his mother to come stay with us to help him take care of me. I don’t remember too much about that grandmother since she died when I was five. All I do remember is that she scared me because she was always talking really loudly and wore a heavy fur coat that smelled of mothballs and made her look like a bear. I could never understand, either, why moths were such a problem that she had to keep her drawers and closets full of mothballs and why the moths never ate any of the clothes in our house even though we didn’t use mothballs. I asked my father about it once, and he just laughed and said that old people have an irrational fear of moths. I would always picture my father’s mother sitting up late in the middle of the night (she had insomnia) watching for moths by the glow from the television. Of course, I don’t remember her taking care of me those first few weeks when I was a baby, and I don’t remember that even after my grandmother went back home, my mother wouldn’t leave her room for almost half a year. I suppose I should be angry at her about that, especially since they say those first months in a baby’s life are so important.

  I’m embarrassed to say that I went through a period in middle school when I was into reading pop psychology books. I especially liked the ones about mothers and daughters. That’s when I got freaked out that my earliest memories are all about my father and that’s when my father told me about my mother’s great depression after my birth. I wonder if they ever thought of having more children or if they were too afraid to risk my mother’s falling completely into the abyss and never being able to crawl out again. As far as I’m concerned, I’m glad they didn’t take that chance. Most people tend to believe that it borders on child abuse to have only one child, but I don’t think that’s fair. On the contrary, being alone a lot at a young age can be very edifying, and I don’t think I would have become so dedicated to the cello if I had had the distractions of a brother or sister.

  A Husband and a Doctor

  “I should be in New Jersey. Simon, my son-in-law, says Clara hasn’t left her room in days. I know I should rush out there, sit with Simon on her bed, explain to her that it makes no sense to waste the day lying around. As if it were so simple. But instead of making a rescue mission to New Jersey, I headed for the Village, even treated myself to a cappuccino at the Peacock Cafe.”

  “The Peacock. I wouldn’t mind going there one more time before I die,” Tommy agreed.

  “Maybe we could go together. It’s not far, not like the Eclair, you know.”

  “I can’t go like this.” Tommy ran his fingers through his hair and along his face.

  “You need to get out. That’s exactly what you need.”

  “And you need to go visit your daughter, but instead you’re here with a dying fag.”

  “So you think I should go to New Jersey?”

  “What I think is irrelevant, although I admit I prefer company to being alone these days. Strange, isn’t it? I used to prefer my own company.”

  “Then you want me to stay?”

  “I can’t make it that easy for you, Mrs. Mondschein.”

  “That is exactly what Karl would have said.”

  “Was Karl handsome?”

  “Handsome? Yes, he was, very handsome.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “When he was old or young?”

  “When he was young. Why should we think about age?”

  “He had small, strong, hairless hands that were always very clean. Doctors’ hands have to be very clean. He was dark and had almost black eyes, thin, aristocratic eyebrows, strong legs and arms. He wore glasses. He always wore good Italian suits. He always walked slowly, looking around as if he were watching for people who were admiring him. We were the exact same height. For a while he wore a mustache. That was before the war.”

  “He sounds terribly sexy.”

  “Tommy, I’m an old woman.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “I’m not upset.”

  “Please, Mrs. Mondschein, tell me more about Karl. It takes my mind off the pain.”

  “Do you feel a lot of pain?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Perhaps you would prefer to rest.”

  “Why does everyone always think rest is what we want?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No apologies, Mrs. Mondschein. I can’t bear apologies. Tell me a story. Please.”

  “You want to hear about Karl, but I cannot begin with Karl. I must start much farther back with my mother, who first pushed me out of the dull safety of the Second District. If she had not escaped and if I had not tried to find her, well . . . my life would have been much different. For one year, I looked for my mother. You see, she simply disappeared one night. She kissed us all before she left—my father, my sisters, me—and when we woke up in the morning, we all had bright red lipstick smudges on our cheeks. She kissed us all in the same place, even my father. There was no warning. I didn’t even know she was unhappy.

  “I searched for her in the fancy cafés of the First District, snuck out of the house and waited for her in front of the opera and the theater, walked up and down the Kärtnerstrasse, looking past window displays of fur hats and French pocketbooks, but I never dared walk through the gilded doorways framed by Art Deco Greek goddesses, or talk to any of the tall, glittering participants in this world I was sure my mother had entered.

  “I met him on the streetcar coming back from another unsuccessful day spent searching for my mother in the park, absentmindedly observing laughing couples, watching them perform waltzes under the gazebo. I was sitting and he was standing—a tall man in a linen suit with a clean, clipped mustache. He smiled at me, and I smiled back. I got off the trolley at my stop and he followed, caught up with me and asked if there was a florist’s nearby because he wanted to buy me flowers. That’s when I noticed a tiny stain, coffee maybe, on the lapel of his suit. A momentary surge of repulsion welled up in me, and I wanted to run away, but instead I said, ‘No, there is no florist in the whole district.’ And he said, ‘What a pity. Come, we will go where there are flowers.’r />
  “I went with him, and he was my first husband although we were never married. That was something I never told my father and my two sisters, but they probably would have said nothing anyway, so stunned were they by my mother’s sudden disappearance. It was as if she had taken their senses with her, along with her constrained laughter and the faint smell of cheap perfume. After only a week of outings in the park and coffee and pastries at the most elegant cafés in Vienna, my husband took me to his big apartment in the First District, and I began taking piano lessons, but I found that my fingers were too short and big, and I could only bang out a few chords without feeling like a complete stranger to that instrument. My granddaughter Deborah, now there’s a musician. She only has to touch her cello and music flows out of it.