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Andreas-Salomé was said to be
a beautiful woman but, as is often the case with alleged beauties of the past,
photographs of her don’t bear out this claim but show a snoutish-faced woman
with intense eyes and a heavy chin. (Yes, I do somewhat resemble Andreas-Salomé
except that no one would have described me as beautiful.)
    My namesake, admirably “liberated” for a woman of
her time, also had affairs and intimate friendships with Maria Rilke, Viktor
Tausk, and Sigmund Freud. She’d become a psychoanalyst and published
psychoanalytic studies admired by Freud; she’d written novels, and a study of
Nietzsche. I’d tried to read some of her writing years ago but had soon given
up, it had seemed so dated, so sad and so— female.
    Once I’d asked my mother why she’d agreed with my
father to name me after Lou Andreas-Salomé and not rather someone within the
family—(which is a Jewish custom)—and my mother had said she had no idea—“He
talked me into it, I suppose. Why else?”
    He was uttered in a way
so subtle, you’d have to listen closely to hear reproach, accusation,
woundedness, resignation in that single syllable.
    At last count I have four stepmothers, in addition
to my own mother. They are Monique, Avril, Phyllis, Sylvia. There are
step-brothers and –sisters in my life but they are younger than I am, of another
generation, and resentful of me as their father’s favorite.
    I think of my stepmothers as fairy-tale figures,
sisters united by their marital ties to Roland Marks, but of course these
ex-wives of Roland Marks detest one another.
    Sylvia Sachs was the New York actress, and the
youngest. Just fifty-six, and looking, with the aid of cosmetic surgery and the
very best hair salons in Manhattan, twenty years younger.
    Monique Glickman was old by now—that is, Dad’s age.
For a woman, old.
    She was living in Tampa, Florida. She’d disappeared
from our lives—good riddance!
    Avril Gatti was the litigious one—a former
journalist, Italian-born, now residing in New York City with an (allegedly)
female lover.
    Of Phyllis Brady what’s to say? The daughter of a
distinguished Upper East Side architect might have expected to be better treated
by her Jewish-novelist-husband whose father had owned a (small, not-prosperous)
bakery in Queens, but she’d been mistaken.
    My mother, Sarah, had been Roland’s second wife.
He’d been still young at the time of their marriage—just thirty-two. Mom must
have thought that, impassioned as the handsome young Roland Marks had been,
eager to leave his “difficult” wife Monique for her, that his love for her would
be stable, constant, reliable—of course, it was not. And after four children,
certainly it was not.
    â€œYou must have wanted to kill him, when he left you
for—whoever it was at the time”—so I’d said to my mother impulsively, one day
when we were reminiscing about those years when we’d been a family in Park
Slope, and the name “Lou-Lou” wasn’t so inappropriate for me; and my mother
said, with a wounded little cry, “Oh, no, Lou-Lou—not him .”
    A neutral observer would have interpreted this
remark as— She’d wanted to kill the woman he left her for .
    But I knew my mother better than that.
    A FTER C AMERON left, the very air in the
house was a-quiver.
    â€œNot an auspicious beginning. If she wants to be my assistant .”
    Dad was muttering in Dad’s way: an indignant
thinking-aloud you were (possibly) meant to hear, and to respond to; though
sometimes, not.
    Casually I said, as often I did in such
circumstances: “She may have wanted to exploit you, Dad.”
    â€œOh well—‘exploit.’ That’s what everyone pins onto me .”
    â€œYou can’t trust interviewers. They can edit the
tape as they wish, and make you out to seem—”
    â€œShe certainly