Them by Francine du Plessix Gray

Author:Francine du Plessix Gray
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2005-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

Only a few weeks after I’d returned from the Greenes’ and had begun to spend my days moping at home, with nothing much to look forward to beyond another installment of Scarlett O’Hara, Gitta Sereny, the eighteen-year-old Hungarian girl who had been with us at Villandry, arrived dramatically from Europe—someone always seemed to come to Mother’s rescue. Mother eagerly invited her to stay with us for as long as she wished in exchange for helping Sally, who did all the cooking and cleaning, to take care of me. For the next months, Gitta, who had recently defied fascist border police to walk across the Pyrenees into Spain and had hitchhiked much of the way to Lisbon, could do no wrong in my mother’s eyes. (“She is a heroine!”) Gitta at eighteen was a robust, awesomely precocious brunette with dark hair, blazing eyes, and a very ringing laugh that exhibited her uneven but sparklingly white teeth. Her manner was aggressively forthright; she was quadrilingual and had a distinct interest in playing an active role in other people’s lives. She also had a special sense of mission about children—about rescuing them, counseling them, figuring them out: Decades later, upon becoming a celebrated journalist, she would do groundbreaking research on the fate of children in Nazi concentration camps. And in June 1941 it somehow dawned on her that I sorely needed her help. I had liked her at Villandry, and as she began to share my room at Central Park South I started looking on her as an older sister—very powerful and wise and a potential dispenser of that forbidden knowledge that precocious ten-year-olds are eager to acquire or at least be exposed to. “Too bad I’m not married when I smell so good!” she would say to me as she lay in her bubble bath, eyeing me carefully to see how much I knew about the basics of life.

So during those summer weeks, Gitta and I went to the planetarium and the Frick Museum and the Bronx Zoo and the movies. On hot days, we took the train to Jones Beach, and she helped me to perfect the swimming strokes I had learned with Alex the previous summer. When we stayed home in the evenings—Mother and Alex went out more often than ever after Gitta’s arrival—we played gin rummy, and I read aloud to her from Gone with the Wind to improve my pronunciation, or else we prepared for one of Mother’s wonderful parties.

For by the time I came back to live with Mother in June 1941, she had already started holding her noted soirees. As much as she loathed crowds in public places, pleading that they caused her to suffer panic attacks, like most Russians she dreaded, above all else, to be alone. And she simply did not understand the meaning of the phrase “too many people,” as long as they were all under her roof. At her own parties, no crowd was ever too vast, no table ever too full.

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