I. Roses and Peonies

I am looking at two pictures. One is a color reproduction of Ingres’s great 1832 portrait of Louis-François Bertin, a powerfully bulky man in his sixties, dressed in black, who sits with both hands assertively planted on his thighs, and engages the viewer with a look of determination touched with irony. The other is a black-and-white snapshot of a two- or three-year-old girl taken by an anonymous photographer sometime in the nineteen-thirties. She’s sitting on a stone step, dressed in a polka-dotted sunsuit and matching sun hat—her eyes squinting against the sun, her mouth set in a near-smile—and she has assumed Bertin’s pose, as if she had seen the portrait and were mimicking it. Of course, what she has done, and what Bertin himself did, was to unconsciously draw on the repertoire of stereotypical poses with which nature has endowed all creatures, and which we tend to notice less in our own species than we do in, say, cats or squirrels or marmosets.

Scala / Art Resource

Ingres had a lot of trouble with his portrait of Bertin. He made and rejected at least seven studies. According to a biographer, Walter Pach, Ingres broke down in tears during one sitting, and Bertin comforted him by saying, “My dear Ingres, don’t bother about me; and above all don’t torment yourself like that. You want to start my portrait over again? Take your own time for it. You will never tire me, and just as long as you want me to come, I am at your orders.” Finally, Ingres saw Bertin outside the studio—at a dinner, in one account, and at an outdoor café, in another—sitting in the pose, and knew that he had his portrait.

The child in the snapshot is me. I know nothing about where or when the picture was taken. The sunsuit speaks of summer vacation, and I am guessing at my age. I say “my” age, but I don’t think of the child as me. No feeling of identification stirs as I look at her round face and her thin arms and her incongruously assertive pose.

If I were writing an autobiography, it would have to begin after the time of that photograph. My first memory dates from a few years later. I am in the country on a fine day in early summer and there is a village festival. Little girls in white dresses are walking in a procession, strewing white rose petals from small baskets. I want to join the procession but have no basket of petals. A kind aunt comes to my aid. She hastily plucks white petals from a bush in her garden and hands me a basket filled with them. I immediately see that the petals are not rose petals but peony petals. I am unhappy. I feel cheated. I feel that I have been given not the real thing but something counterfeit.

I have carried this memory around with me all my life, but never looked at it very hard. What gave this disappointment its status over other childhood sorrows? Why did they fade to nothing, while this one became a vivid memory? Children are conformists. Was being given petals from the “wrong” flower so afflicting because it set me apart from the other children, making me seem different? Or was there something more to the memory than that? Something primitive, symbolic, essential. Are roses better than peonies? When I recoiled from the peony petals, had I stumbled on some knowledge of the natural world not otherwise available to a child of five?

Peonies have a brief blooming season, from late spring to early summer. It is tempting to buy bunches of them at the florist’s, with their lovely tight round buds, pink or white or magenta. But when they open they are blowsy and ugly. You’re sorry you bought them. Sometimes they have a delicious fragrance, but often they don’t smell at all. In the garden, they are battered by rain and smashed down, and have to be staked. Roses bloom all summer and stand up to rain. As they open in the vase, they grow more beautiful. There is no question of their superiority to peonies. The rose is the queen of flowers.

The idea of absolute aesthetic value is a debatable one, of course. I have inclined toward it, but sometimes I turn from it. I think of the little girl who somehow wandered into the debate on a fine summer day and feel the stirrings of identification.

Photograph courtesy Janet Malcolm

II. The Girl on the Train

A black-and-white photograph, three and a half by two and three-quarters inches, shows a man and a woman and a little girl looking out of the window of a train. On the back of the photograph are four handwritten words: “Leaving Prague, July 1939.” The man and the woman are smiling, and the girl has an expression on her face that the Czech word mrzutá conveys more powerfully and succinctly than any of its English definitions: cross, grumpy, surly, sulky, sullen, morose, peevish. The onomatopoetic character of mrzutá expresses the out-of-sorts feeling that the definitions only gesture toward.

The man and woman are my parents, at the ages of thirty-nine and twenty-nine, and the child is me, at the age of almost five. I have no memory of being on the train. As I look at the picture, I wonder where my sister, Marie, then two and a half, was. Perhaps lying on the seat in the compartment, after crying herself to sleep? In the family lore about the leave-taking, there is a nurse whom my sister was inconsolable about parting from.

The train was headed for Hamburg, where the ocean liner on which we had booked passage to America was docked. It was one of the last civilian ships to leave Europe for America before the outbreak of war. We were among the small number of Jews who escaped the fate of the rest by sheer dumb luck, as a few random insects escape a poison spray. The Nazi bureaucracy that granted us our exit visas in return for bribes (family stories have it that we bought an S.S. man a racehorse) stipulated—to extract more money from us—that we travel first class on the liner. We were not rich. My father was a psychiatrist and a neurologist and my mother was an attorney at a small law firm. There was no family money. When we arrived in America, we were supported by relatives for the first year. At sea, my parents put on evening dress for dinner; Marie and I were left in our cabin in the care of a ship stewardess. I still remember the gown my mother wore to dinner on the ship; perhaps there were others, but this one hung in her closet throughout my childhood. It was dark blue, some sort of appliqué affair. One day, it wasn’t in the closet, and when I asked about it my mother said vaguely that she had got rid of it some time ago with other unwanted clothes. It had evidently not been the charged heirloom for her that it was for me.

My memories of the passage were as vague as hers of the expulsion of the dress. There was a boil on my arm that had to be lanced by the ship surgeon, and midmorning broth served on deck in tin cups to passengers who lay prone under gray-black-and-white plaid blankets. I am struck now by how young my parents were when we emigrated. I always saw their Czech past as a huge rock standing before their American present. I read it as a voluminous text that reduced their life in America to a footnote, although in fact they spent the greater part of their lives in this country. The false idea of my parents as permanent exiles must have come in part from the fact that we spoke Czech at home. The language fostered the impression of their essential foreignness. My paternal grandmother, who knew almost no English, lived with us, and we spoke Czech on her behalf. She had joined us in 1941, when the Nazis allowed certain older Jews to leave Czechoslovakia. Probably money was again the Nazis’ motive. She travelled to Cuba, and then came to us in New York.