Jewish Mothers Never Die: A Novel by Natalie David-Weill Page B

alive, she had been a control freak; she could never have let herself go like she was doing now.
    It occurred to her that if she wandered further she might get lost. Would she forget Nathan? Was that even possible? Wasn’t her son the one thing that she loved? If she had shown interest in her students or if certain books had enchanted her, only her son truly kept her invested in life. She had had no friends. Caught up in her courses and research and conferences, brooding endlessly over her son, Rebecca had never taken any time for herself. She had some girlfriends from her university days, of course, and they could spend hours discussing the placement of a comma in Flaubert. He had a famous line: ‘For me, the most beautiful girl in the world is nothing next to a perfectly placed comma.’ An opinion Rebecca shared; for her, nothing was better than a well-written book! The few childhood friends who had remained close were like a fine wine to her: their flavors and intensity had changed with time but on occasion still left delicious notes she was happy to find again. New friends weren’t part of her baggage, though. She had Nathan.
    But he wasn’t with her in this place. She regretted terribly that she could never ask his forgiveness. She used to nag him constantly about his manners, his taste, his degree of culture. She realized now that maybe she had been wrong. Nevertheless, she hadn’t the slightest idea how to raise a child by complimenting him and respecting his opinions and decisions. In the end, she had been a terrible mother; rather than make him jump through hoops to become a lawyer, she should have indulged him a little and encouraged him to find himself. If he was unhappy, if he lacked self-confidence and was unable to convince anyone of his worth, including himself, it was her fault. Nathan’s pessimism reminded her of something Woody Allen says in Annie Hall, when his character is telling his therapist the story of two elderly women at a resort in the Catskills. One woman says: “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “I know, and such small portions.” Woody Allen’s character concludes: “Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life—full of loneliness, misery, suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.”
    How badly had she failed Nathan? She had paid both too much attention to him and too little. Whenever she would ask him what he was doing, she only half-listened to his answer, for fear she wouldn’t be able to resist imposing a contradictory opinion. She never wanted to be a dictator. Too often, she had lost her temper and had made him feel her own worries, but she had fawned upon him too. Maybe he would turn out alright? All these mothers had raised their children in their own way. What had they done better than she?
    Rebecca imagined the joyful disorder of the Marx household where creativity was king. She couldn’t remember ever making Nathan laugh. He usually regarded her with apprehension, as if he expected a critical remark, as if he could never please her. But their lives had certainly been more peaceful than the Cohens’, where Albert’s instinctively violent father had been “the male and the tamer” who had reigned in terror over his wife and son. Albert felt sorry for his mother, whom he considered a victim. That had never been Rebecca’s problem. Then there was Mina; her suffocating, vampiric love had undoubtedly ruined Romain’s life: no one could ever love him as she did. He admitted it himself: “In your mother’s love, life makes you a promise at the dawn of life that it will never keep.” With the Prousts, on the other hand, the trick was to be a good boy, or suffer the wrath of Jeanne’s insidious harassment. She fooled herself that her abusive attention to Marcel was “for his own good.” She would tell the servants to turn down the heat in the evening in the sitting room so that Marcel couldn’t