Daughters of the Shadow Men

Francine, her stepfather Alex and her mother, Tatiana

When I get upset at the contents of a book, my antidote is usually another book which will take me off into someone else's world where presumably people are kinder to each other, and especially to their children.  The book  about the poetess "Anne Sexton" upset me mainly because of her unforgiveable treatment of her daughter. I tend to idealize writers.

I immediately started reading a memoir called "Them" which was written by Francine Du Plessix Gray. She wrote regularly for the New Yorker magazine at one time, which I once read whenever I had the opportunity.  If I could not move to New York than I could read about it on a regular basis and feel closer. I thought that her memoir was sure to be a sane and safe bet to make me feel better.

And at first I was very well satisfied with her story.  Francine is the daughter of a beautiful woman named Tatiana Iacovleff who fled Russia to Paris during the revolution. I was fascinated with the Iacovleffs. Tatiana had an uncle Sasha who was just an amazing man, an artist and adventurer who organized a trek across the great desert of the Sahara for the the car company Citroen in Paris which had not been done before.  Once he had accomplished that feat and received great acclaim he organized another big trek driving the Citroens across the trade routes into Indonesia that was so harrowing one of the other main drivers did not survive it. Francine goes back into these ancestors' lives and highlights the peaks of their adventures in enthralling ways.

Then the main poet of the revolution, Vladimir Mayakovsky, meets up with Tatiana, Francine's mother and falls in love with her, and what a love story that is!  The young Tatiana is tall, blonde and beautiful, and Vladimir writes poetry to her that is still acclaimed in Russia, but he was forced to break off his courtship of her because of the party.  As long as Lenin was alive, he was okay, but after Lenin was gone, and Stalin took command, Russia changed for the worse.  Mayakovsky loved being the poet of the revolution who inspired so many people with his visions of what the revolution could do for the common man, but he hated becoming a 'party functionary' after Stalin became a dictator and responsible for thousands of deaths of his own people.  The poet committed suicide, but not until after Tatiana had married Francine's father and was having a baby. His heartbreak over her and disallusionment with the direction the party was going proved to be too much for him.  

Years later when Francine went to Russia, old party members spent quite a bit of time trying to persuade her that she was the love child of the glorious poet of the revolution, Mayokovsky, whose poetry by then had come back into favor.  You can't get much more romantic than that, and on what a scale.  Here I am reading about a Russian poet who hobnobbed with Lenin and eventually became a great hero writer of the revolution despite his suicide.  Tatiana, Francine's mother, kept the letters and poems he had written about his love for her and sent her all her life.  They are still in the possession of Francine.

The trouble starts when World War II breaks out and Francine and her mother Tatiana have to flee France, taken over by the Nazi regime.  By this time she and Francine's father, a glamorous French flyer have become estranged.  He goes off to fight the war and is killed. Tatiana has taken up with another romantic figure, a Russian Jew named Alex Lieberman, because she caught her husband in a dalliance with another woman. He is traveling with them, helping them to escape the Nazi regime in Paris.

I am still sympathetic to Tatiana at this point, but the story starts to go sour for me once the three of them, Tatiana, Alex and Francine who is nine reach America. Tatiana's father, who I would say was the black sheep of the family, had done nothing but gamble in Russia, and he eventually left her mother and Tatiana and another daughter and emigrated to America.  They did not hear from him for another 35 years!  But Tatiana had found out who he was, that he had changed his name to Jackson, and called him up for a meeting.   

They met all right, even though Tatiana found her long lost father quite dull compared to her uncles.  He had married a Russian woman they quite liked who had her mother living with her, and they had a son who was about sixteen.  Here comes the shocking part.  Tatiana insists that her father take her daughter while she and Alex get going in America.  So off Francine goes with this grandfather who is actually quite poor.  He has done a lot less well than his glorious brothers and sisters in Europe.  Francine has to sleep on the couch. 

Oh this could have turned out so bad!  I thought what was this Tatiana thinking of?  Fortunately the wife is a kindly woman.  I did have to laugh at Francine's description of her step grandmother and her mother cooking their meals and crying over having to leave the glorious life they lived in Russia years ago for the poor one in America. But this seemed more the fault of the father, who once he stopped gambling had no interest in succeeding, it seemed, and just took a job in a factory, never ever got a raise or asked for one.

I tried to excuse the beautiful Tatiana for this manner of getting her daughter out of the way. It was war time and people were having to make do with all kinds of unexpected arrangements just to survive.  And both Tatiana and Alex became well known figures in New York, Tatiana for the hats she designed and Alex for his work on fashion magazines including Vogue.  They were both on the cover of Vogue at one point looking dazzling.  Alex was very good looking, too, as befitting the partner of a beautiful and mysterious Russian woman. They were both quite shrewd in the way that they carved their careers out in the fashion business in America.   

But warning, Francine was still only eleven years old when the following was going on in their household.  Tatiana took heavy sleeping pills so nobody was allowed to wake her up until 9 am on the dot.  Alex would bring her breakfast, the same thing every day, and she would eat and rush down to her hat shop to design. In the process, nobody would realize that Francine, the eleven year old, did not eat breakfast at all.  Then Tatiana would come home from the hat shop and she and Alex would go out five to six nights a week to dine and socialize.  She would tell Francine this socializing was necessary for their careers, so Francine looked on it as part of their 'work'.  They had to see and be seen. 

A housekeeper was hired to fix dinner for Francine and leave it on the stove when she went home.  Francine spent night after night alone, so she would only eat part of the dinner and throw the rest of it away or put it in the fridge for the cook to take home, and maybe open a can of fruit  This turned out to be her only meal of the day sometimes, since she just had a snack at school.  She lost weight and nobody noticed! She claimed that she enjoyed being alone so she could read and improve her english, and practice her ballet steps, more or less whatever she wanted to do.

Finally she lost so much weight she fainted in school twice!  Her parent had no idea what was wrong with her. Francine begged the doctor she was sent to not to interfere with her mother's breakfast routine or she would become very upset.  Nethertheless the doctor told Tatiana that they needed to make sure Francine ate some breakfast. Tatiana hired the woman who fixed her dinner to stay longer and make sure that she ate it.  Or at least more of it than she was eating as she was severely malnourished and anemic! Even with this meager improvement, Francine, an intelligent child, ate and regained her health.   

I am so appalled at this story of neglect that I don't know if I can continue reading about this mother.  This little girl is not valued.  What is more she was not told for two years that her father had been killed in the war.  Tatiana said he was on a secret mission.  Francine had finally been informed that he was dead after two years, so she was grieving over that, too. 

I wondered why Francine called the book the strange name of  "Them." I think now it was because she became detached from  her mother because she could only care for her in fits and starts, not consistently.  I will finish the book, but slowly.  I will have to see how this story of a family fractured by war plays out. I am just surprised it is so hard for women with other interests on their mind to care consistently for the children they bear.      

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