The Suitors - By Cecile David-Weill Page 0,11

thus claim to have gone perfectly gaga over Marie, at least in the etymological sense of the word, as she literally spoiled her silly with the toys that cluttered our playroom: pretend grocery stands, playhouses shaped like castles (where we tried to hide from the governess), rocking horses with real horsehair manes (to which I was allergic), and pedal cars that seated four. In short, these expensive and exquisite playthings were accessories intended for the nanny’s own satisfaction, objects she could then parade before her colleagues to show off urbi et orbi the extravagance of her employer’s taste, lifestyle, and love for her children. Above all, this avalanche of toys allowed Miss Ross to savor the sight of Marie on a horse, in a car, or playing lady of the house, enjoying everything our nanny had never had as a child. Because she was really playing dolls with Marie, dressing her, arranging her hair, constantly asking my mother to buy my sister new clothes with matching barrettes and bows.

Of course, my mother didn’t buy clothes and toys only for Marie. I had some, too. But when she gave Marie a miniature kitchen with a working oven and real china, I received an exercise mat as well as a children’s encyclopedia intended to make up for the difference in the cost of our presents. Her unfairness to me was not that obvious, for my mother simply thought she was granting wishes we had supposedly expressed to our nanny and was thus taking into account our respective characters, which Miss Ross was actually inventing to gratify her own desires.

The same thing happened with our clothes. When it came to Marie, the governess would insist that we were growing so quickly that our mother needed to replenish our wardrobe. In my case, however, she thought it best to have my mother save a little money. So I often wound up wearing my sister’s old clothes, so tight they turned me into a sausage. In other words, I looked like the shabby plump one, trotted out as a foil for Marie’s charm when we were summoned to politely greet the guests. Even if we were already in our pajamas, we had to get dressed all over again, complete with matching hair ribbons, to perform to perfection our role of model little girls who knew how to bob a curtsy: Bonjour, Madame, how do you do …

With feigned modesty, our governess would caress Marie’s hair before pinching my cheek, in a brusque gesture of apparent affection and reinvigorating comfort for my desperate fate as a homely little ingrate. It was as if she were trying to say, Don’t worry, your mother loves you anyway, even if you’re not as pretty as Marie. While she was wearing a fake smile to fool my mother and her guests, however, she was really pinching me, and it hurt. She was punishing me, I realized sadly, punishing me for being less lovely than my sister and thus spoiling the pretty picture she wanted to present to these society people, and I steeled myself not to cry in front of “the grown-ups.”

I was too young, unfortunately, to confide in Marie about how I suffered from our mother’s neglect, or even to reveal the nanny’s treachery toward me, since her cruelty was so insidious that Marie would never have believed me and might secretly have thought me mean and twisted. This must have been what led me to psychoanalysis: the desire for enough knowledge and authority to persuade mothers not only to take a real interest in their children, but also to be intelligently aware of their own behavior, for mothers may well be irreplaceable—and with the wisdom of my experience (bolstered by that of Alice Miller, D. W. Winnicott, and Melanie Klein), I was certainly in a position to know!—but they may also do more harm than fathers, if they are all-powerful like the unhinged matron in charge of my upbringing.

As for my father, he paid hardly any attention to us at all. Like many men, he had handed over to his wife the bothersome chores of daily life, including the raising of their children. And so, vacillating between gratitude and guilt, he felt our mother was acquitting herself splendidly of this task through the aid of a governess, and he never gave a thought to protecting us. In any case, he considered our mother’s lack of interest far healthier than the obsessive attention mothers these days lavish on their