When I arrived in Los Angeles as a babe of less than a month old my mother rented a house near my grandparent’s home to hide me in. She hired a series of nurses to take care of me. According to her testimony she came to visit me daily, and I was quite happy there. I don’t remember anything about it myself.
I later learned that Carlos visited her there and that they took up their affair again for a while. I don’t remember it, but he later told me that I used to crawl around at his feet when he sat at a table there and talked with my mother or did some writing. However the relationship was never the same after she had gotten pregnant and my mother ended it after a few visits. He wanted to marry her, but she didn’t want to marry a Mexican because her family would not have approved.
Until she was married, my mother continued to live in the big family mansion on West Adams. The Brunswig mansion was an exact copy of an eighteenth century French chateau. The stones with which it was built were imported from France. It was huge, with twenty-five rooms and had once housed a large domestic staff including a cook, butler, nurse, governess, upstairs maid, downstairs maid, two gardners and a chauffer. By the late 1930's when I was a little boy visiting, the staff had been cut in half, but there were always plenty of servants to be called when one needed anything.
The entrance to the house was done in classic eighteenth century style with steps leading up to the front door and two large stone lions guarding the stone stairway. Upon entering the house one walked into a large entry hall and then came upon a large wooden staircase at the center of the house. It was carpeted in red and led directly to the second floor. There were twelve rooms upstairs and at least as many large rooms downstairs.
When she was living there, my mother's room was the end room on the first floor. Later it was a guest room, where I slept when we stayed late in the evening. Adjoining this room was the governess's room, later a guest room. There were also two small rooms and a large guest room. In the middle of the house was the master bedroom, which was where my grandmother lived. Then came my grandfather's room and next to it a hobby room where he kept his barbells, his pornography, and his photography equipment.
Across the hall there was a big linen room and then my uncle Walter's room. Near the far end of the hall there was a large sewing room, where the dressmaker came to do the repair work after the washing. Downstairs was a music room or ballroom, a sitting room, a wood paneled library, a dining room, a billiards room, and a small chapel, as well as a large kitchen, pantry, sewing room, guest rooms and an outdoor dining room on the loggia.
The grounds were large and included tennis courts, a swimming pool, and at the bottom of the garden, a large dolls' house in the form of a miniature copy of the chateau. This had been built expressly for my mother when she was a little girl. She had spent much of her time there.
The large red-carpeted oaken staircase climbed up through the center of the house going from the entry hall downstairs to the master bedroom on the second floor. I used to enjoy sliding down it from the second floor to the mezzanine landing below, where I had to stop. I was not allowed to slide down to the main floor lobby below because I was not supposed to disturb the old ladies, Madame, my grandmother and her friend, whom we called Tante Nana, wrapped in black veils. It was a huge house with many places to discover and to hide in.
The house was segregated off from the next door neighbors homes on the left side by a small bamboo forest. I used to climb through this clump of bamboo in search of playmates next door. Most of the people at the mansion were too old and did not like small children anyway.
My grandfather, whom I called, Monsieur, was an old man when I knew him. I remember that he was very nice to me and called me le petit bonhomie.
There must have been at least twenty-five rooms in that building and as many servants, including two gardeners and a chauffer. I enjoyed going downstairs into the cellar kitchen and hanging out with Annie the Scottish cook and Walter the butler there. They used to sing to me “Oh Johnny Oh Johnny how you can love” and I would blush all red and try to run away.
There were extensive gardens behind the mansion. One time the family held a benefit to raise money for the Alliance Francaise. My grandfather wore a high white toque as he made crepes in the garden that afternoon, and he let me help him and even wear a toque of my own. I loved that.
In that same garden behind the mansion my mother had a miniature mansion of her own, like a giant doll’s house. There she had her studio where she worked on her sculpture, and there I played many hours with clay and paints myself. Here is a poem I wrote about that.
Pointedly unconcerned that my shoes
Were slowly getting wet
While Mother carved away
pieces of clay from her sculpture
When the clock struck four
I became worried and began to wonder
if Mother really even cared if I was there
She was so absorbed in her work,
I felt she had forgotten about me.
One day Mother gave me a lump of clay of my own
To mould, to penetrate, to caress and to fondle.
It was not bread, or milk, or honey, or fruit,
but in my hands it became an imaginary companion
into whom I could pour out my pain and longing
Make of it what you will she said,
recalling the stories of the prodigal son
and the servant who squanderd his talents.
That was her way: always moralizing.
I felt both angry and grateful towards her.
admiring her dedication to her art, but
wanting more dedication to me, her son.
It is so difficult to be the son of an artist.
Mother died more than ten years ago in 1988.
Her heart just gave out and she collapsed.
I was not there, but I was devastated by the news.
And what of that timid little boy I once was?
Like Rachel Field's "Little Boy Blue,"
I felt that I was that little wooden soldier
who was thoughtlessly left behind, standing alone.
Mother had abandoned me many times before,
But this time it was permanent. Gone forever!
There is no road back home after that.
The only option was to take the plunge
To choose sanity over delusion and to move
Forward into adulthood despite my inner pain.
"I will keep her memory alive," I thought to myself
imagine her alive to avoid facing and feeling the loss of Mom.
I will become an artist. I will explore many media,
turning nothings into somethings, just like she did,
to fill the gap, that gaping insatiable maw within.
and I was alone again with that hungry hole inside
Gnawing at my entrails, driving me to consider
joining my beloved mom in death.
"Can I ever outgrow my Mother as my main reference point?
Am I doomed to spend the rest of my life
entangled and enmeshed in her life,
as that "cute little jewel in her crown?"
and support from sane men and women,
many recovering from child abuse themselves,
I did find my own ground and my own center.
and succeeded in separating from Mother
to create my own independent life at last.
But let's not exaggerate.
Little Johnny is still here inside me.
If I ignore him and his needs for too long,
he takes his revenge and lets me know that
I cannot ignore him with impunity any more.
“What can I do now, Madole?” I would cry when I got bored, and she would give me some clay and indicate a project for me. Then she would lose herself in her clay creating endless figures of animals and people, all stylized in the modern fashion. She even made a statue of me as a baby. I didn’t like it, felt embarrassed by its presence in our living room, because it displayed my naked penis for everyone to see!
Whereas my mother and her mother were deeply religious, the fine points of theology were of no great concern to Monsieur, still a Jew inside. After all, he had only converted to Catholicism to win the hand of my recently widowed grandmother, a Creole aristocrat who, as a Catholic, would never have spoken to him, much less married him, if she had known he was a Jew.
On his marriage license he changed his father's first name from "Daniel" to "Charles" to avoid any association with his Jewish ancestors, and his mother's name became "de la Haut," after a famous French general. Actually his mother was a Jew named Lazard. In fact, my grandmother, Marguerite Wogan Brunswig, was married for many years before she discovered that Monsieur, her second husband, was a Jew. At that point, she vowed she would never forgive him for his deception. She moved to a separate bedroom and refused to sleep with him ever again. Given her puritanical attitude to sex, I suspect that she was grateful to find an excuse to avoid le devoir, her conjugal duties.
Unrepentant and untroubled, Monsieur, who was a womanizer from the word go, simply carried on a long-term affair with his attractive secretary, as well as openly flirting with other women at the office and elsewhere. He had a lively sexual- fantasy life which he stimulated at home. I recall once wandering into his large dressing room and finding, to my delight and amazement, photographs of nude women on the wall. I was so fascinated that I just stood there stupefied, gazing at these forbidden wonders, until nurse Madeline found me and, in disgust, dragged me out of the closet by my ear.
"Curiosity killed the cat," she whispered loudly.
"And satisfaction brought it back," I replied defiantly, too smart for my own good.
It seemed I was always getting into trouble right from the start. I was too nosey. My eyes, my ears, and my nose were too long. I was advised to stop poking my nose into adult affairs that were actually none of my business.
But Monsieur found me delightfully amusing--in small doses-- and welcomed me as a respite from his boring routine. For him I was always le petit bonhomme, and he usually greeted me with a gentle smile and a good word, and sometimes even with a story based on his adventures either in the Old World or in the Wild West. I can still recall his descriptions of the marvels of the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and of how he had been nearly caught as a stowaway when he arrived there from France.
Monsieur was a great storyteller and delighted in regaling me with various accounts of his travels and adventures. It was he who first introduced me to the art of the improvised short story and set me on the path to becoming a storyteller in my own right.
“I went to a military academy in Evian, on the Lake of Geneva,” he said with pride. I listened, wide-eyed, to his wild tales, and only learned years later that they were mostly fabrications based on his lively creative imagination. He consciously constructed castles in the air only remotely based on facts to make his stories more entertaining. And if truth be told, these tall tales were wonderfully entertaining to me as a young boy.
Monsieur died when I was six, in 1943. His stature commanded two funerals, one in Los Angeles, and a few days later, when the body arrived by train, another service took place in New Orleans, where he was buried in a splendid pyramid like an Egyptian pharaoh.
To me, Monsieur, with his grand white beard and prominent Jewish nose, resembled the image I had of God himself, and it seemed as if he had the power of God in our family. Though he ruled everyone with an iron hand and controlled the family with "the golden leash" of money, he was always kind and generous to me. He inspired not only my curiosity and love of cooking but a keen eye for the ladies and a cruel enjoyment of practical jokes at the expense of others. He egged me on, though I didn't need much encouragement in my penchant for mischief which included the joy buzzer, exploding cigarettes, and collapsing soup spoons.
My grandmother, who I called “Madame” rather than “Grandmere” as her other grandchildren called her, was deeply religious. I believe this was the source of my mother’s intense--almost obsessive—preoccupation with religious matters.
According to my mother, Madame was a beautiful Southern Belle in her youth. That may be, but the Madame I knew was a crotchety impatient old dame, who detested the unruly behavior of small children like me and let me know it. She let me know in uncertain terms that I had to keep very quiet when she was around. For me, who was a chatterbox, that was very difficult to do. I was very energetic, and my mother used to have me run around the family dinner table to run off energy while the adults finished eating and talking.
Deeply religious, she often had clerics visit her and she was never happier than when she was assisting at mass or praying the rosary with a group of other old women. As I remember her, she always dressed in black and she wore a black veil in front of her face signifying her widowhood and perpetual mourning for her deceased husband. I found her quite frightening.
I had too much youthful exuberance for that sombre house, filled with starchy old ladies who believed that children should be seen but not heard. Often when the silence enforced on me by Madame became unbearable I would burst into a babbling monologue, and my mother would command me to "hop around a little bit" to wear off some of my excess energy.
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