There is a way, though, that Freddie was nothing like Gilbert Osmond. Osmond, ultimately, for all that he allows Madame Merle to do for him, is the opposite of passive. He is fierce in his desires and detestations. Freddie wasn’t like that. He was almost always amiable, just sometimes shockingly unfeeling.
My mother becomes Madame Merle, and, again, this seems an imperfect fit. How can a woman of my mother’s courage and vivacity, someone I’ve already cast as the zestful Becky Sharp, also be the smooth and duplicitous Serena Merle? Isn’t sharp the opposite of smooth? James describes Madame Merle as “not natural” in that “her nature had been too much overlaid by custom and her angles too much rubbed away.” She is “sympathetic and subtle,” “a worshipper of appearances,” “a woman of strong impulses kept in admirable order.” Serena Merle is all concealment and calculation; my mother, notwithstanding her secrets, seemed open, impetuous, and innocent.
But my mother was also someone who assiduously concealed her past and who used people to further her own ends. Madame Merle says, “I don’t pretend to know what people are meant for. . . . I only know what I can do with them.” That’s chilling, but I wonder if it’s any less chilling than the way my mother used Trevor Westbrook, a man for whom she had no love; or the way, even, she used the movie stars as fodder for her column. “My paragraphs,” I have said she called them. It’s interesting to me, however, that when she had the scoop about Ingrid Bergman’s running off, pregnant, with Roberto Rossolini, she didn’t print it. I like to think this was a show of scruples, that my mother felt compassion for Bergman, perhaps arising from her own experience. I don’t think my mother would ever have run off with a Roberto Rossolini and defied the world for love. She did, however, break her engagement with the Marquis of Donagal to take up with the married and debt-ridden Fitzgerald. But my mother also had a healthy respect for convention. If not as zealous as Madame Merle to be “the incarnation of propriety,” she detested being referred to as Fitzgerald’s mistress and would stress how throughout her three-and-a-half years with him, she had always maintained her own apartment. No less intently than Madame Merle, my mother craved respectability. It bothered her that Fitzgerald had died in her living room, and she made sure the world knew his fatal heart attack had not occurred in her bedroom. Some of her concern for respectability was surely for her children. But then isn’t Madame Merle devoted to the advancement of Pansy?
We come to my role in the story. And here I’m torn. I want to be both Pansy and Isabel Archer. I am both the child who doesn’t know her parent, the “blank page” who submits to being shaped by others, and I am the “engaging young woman” whose drama of consciousness is the central interest of this tale.
It is tempting to be Pansy, the victim of others’ aspirations and conspiracies. A friend to both my mother and me once noted that I was her product. Just as Pansy is sent to the convent to be “finished,” I had been sent to Rosemary Hall and Bryn Mawr. The analogy does no justice to Bryn Mawr’s fierce secularism and intellectual rigor. But to my mother these schools were the route to occupying a certain place in society. Scottie Fitzgerald had gone to Ethel Walker and to Vassar and had married a Washington lawyer. My mother hoped I would have a similar kind of life, one more privileged and protected than her own.
To hope such things for one’s daughter is not criminal. It’s just that certain inconvenient truths were suppressed in her plans for me—the Jewish heritage I might have shared with her and the identity of my father. At least, though, I knew my father and I liked him. Pansy doesn’t like Madame Merle, but Freddie charmed me from our first encounter. I even told myself I had always loved him, but it was, at best, “post hoc” love that had a kind of backward formation after I knew the truth of his relation to me.
Pansy, though, does not take me far enough. Among the many brilliant metaphors and insights of Chapter 42 of The Portrait of a Lady, a passage that has always struck me with special force is the one in which Isabel notes of her feelings for Osmond:
There were times when she almost pitied him: for if she had not deceived him in intention, she understood how completely she must have done so in fact. She had effaced herself when he first knew her; she had made herself small, pretending there was less of her than there really was.
I, too, understand the notion of making oneself small, when someone one admires seems dazzlingly large. It’s an act of mistaken generosity and perhaps a strategy as well for coping with outsized personalities. For me, the first and foremost of outsized personalities has been, of course, my mother. She liked to feel she could do anything but needed others to be lesser than herself. You took a seat in my mother’s carriage—James would like that metaphor—and went along for the ride. In one of her books she wrote that her children “had to learn [she] wasn’t God.” In truth I think God
