All through my childhood, I tried to live up to my name Rosemary. I knew how hard it was for Nina that I was not pretty, let alone beautiful as she was. She would buy me frocks that would have looked lovely on some other little girl and I put them on eagerly. But it was Nina herself who said, “Take it off, darling,” and she would turn away—in tears, I imagined, so that I ran after her and clung to her. Then she would say, “Never mind, darling, what’s it matter?” But that only made me more miserable because I knew how much it mattered to her.
Nina herself had been a spectacular beauty. In Germany in the 1930s, before they were forced to emigrate, she had begun a career as a film actress that might have led to stardom. Nina left because she was married to a Jew—my father, Otto Levy; she herself came from a Catholic family of modest means (petit-bourgeois, she said, but only just). The Levy family had sufficient influence to arrange for visas to America; also sufficient funds to start a New York branch of their prosperous business in fine leather goods, with Otto as the managing director. Nina and I did not stay with him for long. By this time they fought a lot, and I believe Susie too had already attached herself to them. But mainly it was because Nina felt that her place was in Hollywood, and following up some leads and promises, she boldly packed us up and left. Her stunning looks, her courage, her perseverance, and maybe to some extent Otto’s money with which he was always generous to us even after their divorce, all these helped us through. She did have some success in Hollywood, though never on the scale she might have expected in her native Germany. She always played foreigners, for though her English was fluent and even racy, her accent remained heavily German; and with this accent, and her sultry, pouting looks, she was inevitably cast as the bad woman—during the war years even as a Nazi—in contrast to the wholesome American heroine. They were not good parts, nor were they good films, and she spoke of them disparagingly, pretending to shrug them off as merely her, and my, bread and butter. But in fact she worked hard at her roles, however small and unworthy they were, analyzing them, researching the background, extracting possibilities of depth that may have been in her but were not in the characters she was called on to play. And after a while, when she got older and heavier—she always had a weight problem—the parts that came her way were smaller and fewer, until finally she decided that it was not worth staying in Hollywood but that she might as well go back to New York, to allow Otto a share in my upbringing.
It was Otto who found the Upper East Side apartment in which Nina and I lived for so many years. He and Susie, whom he had since married, were just around the block, so we became one fairly harmonious family. He and Nina no longer fought the way they used to; they had far too many interests in common and were eager for each other’s company. Susie did whatever they did, but since she had less stamina, they preferred to leave her at home for their more strenuous activities, such as their “antiquing” expeditions. Both loved buying objects and both had the same taste. Nina had a flair for picking up bargains, and they always returned flushed with victory and loaded with vases and clocks and tapestries for Nina’s and my apartment. Susie didn’t care to have too many things in her and Otto’s place—they only collected dust, she complained, and that was a problem for her who could never keep household help for more than a few weeks. But she joined them on their visits to museums and private openings at galleries; on Sundays they attended chamber music concerts, on Wednesdays they had subscription seats at the Metropolitan Opera; and of course there was always the theatre, classical theatre, where Nina sat far forward in her seat with clasped hands and bright eyes, imagining herself as Hedda Gabler or Madame Arkadina. Otto loved to arrive at these events with a woman in furs and jewels on each arm, himself impeccable with his white silk evening scarf and his Clark Gable mustache.
Otto was very correct, very German, in the tradition of his family who had, until told otherwise, considered themselves entirely, patriotically German, reveling in every German triumph, which they regarded as their own. But there was one strain in their ancestry at odds with these characteristics. Of course as Levys they were of the priestly tribe—which they treated as a joke, worldly uncles bantering about it over their pork cassoulet and their lobster mayonnaise. But there was one item of family memorabilia, dating from the seventeenth century, that filled them with pride, even as they joked about it. This was a letter—a farsighted uncle donated it to the Hebrew University in 1936 (before himself emigrating to Argentina where he too did well in the leather business)—written by a Rabbi Mordechai Levy who had been sent by his Frankfurt community to Smyrna to inquire into the authenticity of a self-proclaimed Messiah. The letter he sent back home to Frankfurt confirmed every claim—yes yes yes, it is He, the Messiah sent to redeem us; and we must do His bidding immediately and sell all our goods and properties and go to Jerusalem to await our redemption. But my ancestors Were too hardheaded and cautious for that, and anyway the Messiah later turned out to be false. Otto always kept a copy of the letter from Smyrna, in its German translation—the original was in Hebrew, which he could not read—and later he had an English translation made. That was the one I read and I suppose somehow its expectations entered into me; that cry of yes it is He! He has come! though I never seriously expected a real Messiah to enter my life.
As a small child, I asked the usual questions that children like me ask about God and Death and Time, and Nina did her best to answer them. Even when she was on the point of going out, looking over her shoulder to check if the seams of her stockings were straight, she would pause to find some suitable reply for me. But later, when I reached my teens and should have been asking other kinds of questions, she became impatient. I know she and Otto discussed me—“Why doesn’t she have any friends—any boy friends?” Nina would ask. “My goodness, at her age—” She rolled her eyes heavenward at the thought of herself at my age.
Finally, she had to resort to giving me the answers to questions I hadn’t thought to ask. She made a solemn occasion of it: we went for tea at the Plaza—I loved that, because I knew she often met friends there and they talked about Life, which was such an overwhelmingly important subject for her. And now she was here with me, in the crowded, scented, opulent room, among banks of hothouse flowers and the string orchestra playing and the waiters with their trolleys of giant pastries oozing chocolate and cream. It was with me that she was discussing the human condition in its weightiest aspects. She talked the way I had seen her do with others—with men, all of them artists and intellectuals—her elbows propped on the table, her sleeves pushed up from her creamy, rounded arms with bracelets tumbling down them. Her eyes vague and dreamy through the smoke of her cigarette, she informed me what it was that men and women did together. This information, though entirely new to me, did not engage my interest; and the only question I asked was why they did it. She opened her eyes wide in surprise (her eyes were green but looked dark because of her lashes, black as patent leather). Then she laughed: “But darling—because they love each other.” “The way I love you?” I asked—sometimes, I have to admit, I was deliberately childish with her, to amuse her, but that time I was serious. However, I had succeeded in amusing her and she responded in the way I loved most: with a burst of laughter, her lips parting to reveal her still perfect teeth, her healthy tongue, and she leaned forward to kiss me, enfolding me in the warmth of her breath, her perfume, the smell and taste of the good strong coffee she drank all day long, even at tea-time.
Although in the years ahead she and I often talked about Love, she hardly ever again brought sex into it. When she did, she was dismissive: “What is it, after all? Just technical.” And whenever she broke up with a lover, her invariable verdict against him was: “All he cares about is sex. Men are swine.” Only Otto was exempt. They had long ago ceased any sexual relation but were bound by other, stronger ties: myself, their past, their conception of the importance of experience, the course of life, of Life—das Leben. But what was for her the highest, finest part of it she shared not with Otto but with me: it was with me that she discussed Love as she understood it, as something entirely, overwhelmingly other, breaking into a different dimension altogether. And that’s