Confessions of an Art Addict Read Online Free Page A

their death. They had wanted to die as gentlemen, which they certainly did, by gallantly giving their places to women and children.
    After my father’s death I became religious. I attended the services in Temple Emanu-el regularly, and took great dramatic pleasure in standing up for the Kaddish, the service for the dead. My father’s death affected me greatly. It took me months to get over the terrible nightmare of the Titanic, and years to get over the loss of my father.
    When he died, he left his business affairs in an awful muddle. Not only had he lost a vast fortune by discontinuing his partnership with his brothers, but themoney he should have had, some eight million dollars, he had lost in Paris. The small amount that was left was tied up in stocks that were yielding no interest and were at such a low ebb that they could not be sold. However, my mother did not know this and we continued living on the same scale. My uncles, the Guggenheims, very gallantly advanced us any funds we needed, keeping us in supreme ignorance. Finally, my mother discovered the truth and took drastic steps to end the false situation. To begin with, she started spending her own personal fortune. We moved to a cheaper apartment with fewer servants. She sold her paintings, her tapestries and her jewellery. She managed very well, and although we were never poor, from that time on I had a complex about no longer being a real Guggenheim. I felt like a poor relative and suffered great humiliation thinking how inferior I was to the rest of the family. My grandfather Seligman died four years after my father, and then my mother inherited a small fortune from him. We immediately reimbursed my father’s brothers. After seven years my uncles settled my father’s estate. They had finally put things into such shape by advancing their own money that my sisters and I each inherited four hundred and fifty thousand dollars and my mother slightly more. Half of what I received was placed in trust and my uncles insisted that I voluntarily do the same with the other half.
    During my sixteenth summer, while we were in England, war broke out. We returned to the United States, andeventually I was sent to school. It was a private school on the West Side for young Jewish girls, and I would walk there every day through Central Park. But after a few weeks I developed whooping-cough and bronchitis and had to spend the winter in bed. I was lonely and neglected, as it was the year of Benita’s début and my mother was very busy with her. Somehow I managed to do all my homework alone and kept up with the school course and passed all my exams. I am not at all intellectual and it was a great effort. But I did like reading, and I read constantly in those days.
    During my second school year I began to have a social life. I organized a little dance club with my schoolmates and some other girls. To cover the expenses of a monthly ball, we all contributed money. We were permitted to invite one or two boys to come and dance with us. We made a list of the desirable young men in our Jewish circles and then I held a mock auction sale and auctioned them off to the highest bidder, who then had the privilege of inviting them. These parties were gay and really not at all stuffy.
    During the summer of 1915, I received my first kiss. It was from a young man who took me out driving every night in my mother’s car. He invariably borrowed our automobile to drive home afterwards and would bring it back every morning at seven on his way to the station, when he went to New York to his job. My mother disapproved of my suitor because he had no money. Shecontrolled herself until the night when he kissed me for the first and last time. We were in the garage and as he leaned over me, by mistake he put his arm on the horn. This awoke my mother. She greeted us with a storm of abuse and screamed at us, ‘Does he think my car is a taxi?’ Needless to say, I never saw the young