House of Glass

INTRODUCTION

I STOOD UP to shut the closet door and that’s when I spotted the shoebox, right at the back, behind a pile of leather handbags. It was burnished red, although it looked almost grey, covered in over a decade’s worth of dust. Surely, I thought, it would just contain another pair of slightly battered kitten-heeled sandals. But still, I’d come all this way, I might as well look inside. So I sat back on the floor, pulled it out and opened it. I did not find shoes. Instead, it was filled with the secrets my grandmother had managed to keep all her life and some years beyond.

The road that led me to rifling through my grandmother’s closet a dozen years after she died began, for me, twenty-three years earlier, in 1983 when I was five years old. That was the year my parents took me to Europe for the first time to meet my French family: my grandmother’s oldest brother and his wife, Henri and Sonia Glass, another brother, Alex Maguy, and their last surviving cousins, Alex and Mania Ornstein. My grandmother, Sala, also joined us there, flying over from her home in Florida, where she lived with her American husband, my grandfather, Bill.

My dad was keen for us to meet them all, perhaps to balance out our family tree: where my mother’s side was fruitful, with its abundance of American aunts, uncles and cousins scattered generously around the United States, from Washington DC to Cincinnati to Seattle, my father’s side was comparatively barren. Until this trip it had consisted in my mind solely of my grandparents and my uncle, my father’s younger brother, Rich, all clustered together in Miami. I knew my grandmother had had to leave her relatives behind in France when she escaped what was vaguely described to me as ‘the war’ and this, my father said, was why I didn’t have much family on his side. He didn’t explain where the family was on his very American father’s side, and I was too young then to think to ask why.

My mother’s family was warm, rambunctious and close, and I always looked forward to seeing my cousins, who I thought of as quasi-siblings. But when we visited my paternal grandparents, they snapped at one another continuously, which scared me because I never saw my parents fight. Also, for reasons I was in no way capable of articulating then, I found my grandmother difficult. If pressed, I would have said she was ‘weird’, but what I meant was that she seemed sad, and sad adults are confusing for children, especially ones as sheltered as I was. When we visited them in Miami, my grandfather, in his white trousers and golf shirts, would sit with us by the hotel pool on the candy-coloured sun loungers, enjoying the sunshine, letting my sister and me twirl his enormous moustache. My grandmother would sit under an umbrella, separate from us. She was further protected from the sun by a wide-brimmed hat, various Hermès – or Hermès-esque – silk scarves wound in complicated knots around her neck, mini Dior handbag in her lap. She looked as distinctly French as my grandfather looked American, with the naturally soft, elegant looks of a Renoir painting but now overlaid with the melancholy of a Hopper one.

Often by the pool she would read the French fashion magazines her brothers sent her from Paris, and despite having lived in America for forty years by the time I was born, she clung on tightly to her French accent. So it made sense to me that she would come with us to France. After all, she was, emphatically, French.

I flew with my parents from New York to Paris, and then took a train to Deauville, a seaside resort in Normandy. Deauville looked then and still looks now frozen in the mid-twentieth century, with its grand hotels and long beach dotted with large, colourful beach umbrellas, to which liveried waiters brought three-course meals on silver trays. We went there to meet the French relatives because that is where they liked to go on holiday from their homes in Paris, albeit rarely with one another.

Even though I was only five at the time, my memories of this holiday are clearer than of ones I took in my teens and twenties. Partly this was from the novelty of being outside of America for the first time, and the experience was as jarringly formative as the first day of school, or my first job. But it’s also because my family takes so many photos, and more photos were taken of this holiday than of most people’s weddings, mainly by the family photographers, my grandmother’s brother, Henri, and my father. We are also a family of anecdotalists, and it is impossible for me to separate now what I actually remember about this trip, and what I remember from the photos and stories told afterwards. Am I remembering actual memories or are they memories of memories? In my family, the line between the two is not always clear. But everything I

have written here about this trip has been corroborated by those wise enough to make this distinction better than me (my parents, in other words).

ON OUR FIRST NIGHT in Deauville we arranged to meet everyone at the front of the hotel dining room before dinner. I assumed that my French family would turn out to be like my American one, and I’d be running up and down the beach with my new relatives the way I ran around Cincinnati with my cousins, because in my five years of experience that’s what extended families were like. But when we arrived in the dining room, a group of impossibly old people was waiting for us, none of whom looked predisposed to run anywhere. Only two of them could speak English, Alex Maguy and Sonia. The rest just smiled and nodded at me and I, gripping my mother’s hand, shyly did the same back. Deauville, it turned out, was nothing like Cincinnati. So it was with some relief that I saw my grandmother arriving, the last of the group – at least I knew her and she spoke English. But instead of joining us, she hung back, watching her siblings and cousins. Just as I was about to go over to her, I noticed something I’d never seen before: she was crying. And then she turned around and rushed out of the room.

‘What’s wrong with Grandma?’ I asked my mother, but she shook her head at me and held her finger to her lips. I looked up at my father for an answer but he was looking towards where his mother had disappeared and went after her.

Alex Maguy – whose real surname was Glass, like Henri and Sonia, as well as my grandmother originally, and it didn’t occur to me to ask why he’d apparently changed it – had a cabana on the beach, and my parents said I could use it to change in and out of my swimsuit. Having one’s own cabana seemed to me the absolute pinnacle of cool, but that was before I saw what Alex Ornstein had on the beach: his own giant umbrella, red with a blue flag on top, and every day we would all meet under it for lunch, attended to by smartly dressed waiters. Even though it was Alex Ornstein’s umbrella, Alex Maguy dominated those lunches. He was small, bald and tough like a bullet, but he loved talking with my father, as well as with his cousin, Alex Ornstein, who he occasionally embraced fondly. He didn’t give hugs to my sister or me, but he seemed to enjoy talking with us, telling us about the famous artists he knew, none of whom we’d ever heard of, because we were, respectively, three and five years old. When I got lost on the beach one day, it was Alex Maguy and his cabana I looked for, because I knew he’d know how to get me home.

Like my grandmother, Sonia was short and had red hair, but where Sala was thin, quiet and melancholic, Sonia was a solid ball of vibrating energy. With her bright hair, pink lipstick and blue eyeshadow, she looked like a firecracker. She taught my sister and me how to play bridge and introduced us to pain au chocolat, which was even more exciting than bridge. In the mornings she would meet us in the hotel lobby and walk us onto the beach, where she seemed to know every person on the boardwalk.

‘Who was that?’ I asked once, after she’d had a long, involved conversation with an older American lady about their respective dogs.

‘I have no idea,’ she replied, marching onwards.

Sonia’s husband Henri was, at 6 feet, about a foot taller than his wife and siblings, but gentler than them, and at eighty-three still strikingly handsome. He would catch my eye across the table and make apologetic smiles for not being able to speak English, and he would often hold my grandmother, stroking her hair like she was still his baby sister. When Sonia and Alex Maguy argued viciously over lunch Henri would just sit back, letting it blow over. We all knew you shouldn’t get between a firecracker and a bullet.

Alex and Mania Ornstein were the frailest and in many ways the easiest-going members of the groups, often acting as peace-brokers between Sonia and Alex Maguy. Being an Ornstein seemed to be less complicated than being a Glass.

Hadley in Deauville, next to Alex Ornstein’s umbrella.

Despite Deauville’s differences from Cincinnati, I had a wonderful holiday. I was introduced to French culture essentials, such as triple-scoop ice-cream cones and baguettes. But the grown-ups occasionally seemed to be grumpy, especially Sonia and Alex Maguy, who were barely able to sit at the same table by the end of the holiday. This was the first time in decades that they had all spent any time together. It was also to be the last.

At the end of the week, I went back to the United States with my parents and sister and soon after, slowly, inexorably, everyone I met in Deauville died. My grandmother died in 1994, when I was sixteen. She had made a life for herself in America but she never stopped seeming sad to me, and her sadness never stopped unnerving me. As a result I never let her get close to me. By the time she died, I was closed off in my own sadness, hospitalised for anorexia, which kept me from her funeral. For years afterwards, thinking about all this made me feel things I still couldn’t articulate so, again, I probably would have said it made me feel ‘weird’, but what I really meant was that it made me feel terrible. So I deliberately didn’t think about her, or any of my French family, at all.

But when I became an adult, I suddenly couldn’t stop thinking of them. Moments I had barely noticed at the time, yet which had made enough of an impact to leave a footprint in my memory, began to surface: my grandmother reaching out for Henri’s hand in Deauville, as if he – or she – were about to drift away; Alex all alone in his grand apartment in Paris in the 1990s, surrounded by Picasso and Matisse paintings; Sonia and Alex not even speaking to one another at my bat’mitzvah, despite living almost their whole lives as neighbours in Paris. I was ashamed of how I’d pushed my grandmother away, and that I’d never asked my French relatives about their pasts when they were all alive. But then, no one else did either: my father, my uncle Rich, and Henri and Sonia’s daughter Danièle hardly ever talked to their parents about their pasts.

We all knew lightly pencilled outlines of stories, but nothing concrete, and certainly nothing that seemed provable. I knew that my grandmother, along with her mother and brothers, lived in Paris in the 1930s. At some point, through Alex Maguy, she met my American grandfather and went with him to the States. I knew that Alex had fought in the war, and was then captured and sent to a concentration camp, but somehow escaped, and I knew he had worked as a fashion designer and then an art dealer after the war. I knew there was also another brother who had not survived the war. About Henri and Sonia’s past, I knew almost nothing.

It felt increasingly apt that the one time I had met them all was in Deauville, because Deauville is a picture-perfect image of an idealised French past. My grandmother – with her chic French fashion, her home full of French art and magazines – was herself an image of idealised Frenchness and, in her obvious homesickness, embodied a longing for the France of her past. I knew there was a story, but even thinking about it felt like touching a bruise and I started alternately tapping this sore spot and then running away in horror at what I was doing. Just an afternoon trip to an archive to look for the Glasses’ birth certificates, for example, would exhaust me so much emotionally I’d have to take a two-hour nap afterwards. I hid my early files and notebooks in the backs of various cupboards around my flat, kidding myself that I wasn’t doing what I was, in fact, starting to do.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I came up with an idea of how to write about my grandmother in what seemed like a painless way: I would write about her relationship with fashion. By now, I was working as a journalist in London, and my grandmother had used her wardrobe to make a defiant statement about her identity. While other Jewish grandmothers in Miami wore shapeless shift dresses or badly fitting clothes in garish prints, my grandmother always looked like she was going to a fashion show, even if she was just going to the supermarket. Her hair and make-up were always impeccable, her accessories exquisite. She wore distinctly French styles – Yves Saint Laurent-like peasant tops, Chanel-esque jackets – proudly emphasising her non-Americanness through her clothes.

At this point, my uncle Rich was living in my grandparents’ former apartment and, fortunately for me, he hadn’t thrown away any of her old things.

So I flew there, simply intending to go through my grandmother’s closet and describe her wardrobe, using it as a sort of meta way to write about her, because writing simply about her without any proxy still felt like staring straight into the sun. And so, after arriving at what was now my uncle’s apartment, I opened her closet door and began.

Her dresses were still carefully preserved in the dry cleaners’ plastic wrap, and still smelled of her mix of Chanel perfume and Guerlain face powder (even her cosmetics were strictly French). I sat on the floor, making sketches of her shoes, her bags, her scarves, until I’d filled up my notebook. And then I saw the shoebox at the back. This is what I found inside:

a small photo album with a carved wooden cover, filled with pictures of Henri and Alex looking younger than I’d ever seen them. There were also several photos of my grandmother as a child. Later in the album there were photos of her as a young woman embracing a man whose face had been scraped out by someone’s – presumably my grandmother’s – fingernail;

a professional photo of my grandmother in her late twenties that someone had ripped into quarters, and taped back together, but missing one quarter;

a couple of photocopied pages from a book titled Dressmakers of France;

three letters from someone called ‘Kiki’, all dated during the 1940s and sent from Los Angeles, but in French;

photos of a balding man in round spectacles I’d never seen before, including one in which he was in army uniform, and two in which he was with a group of men. On several of the photos my grandmother had written in her distinctive cursive ‘Jacques’;