Seeking Rapture: A Memoir. Kathryn Harrison
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when I told her of my own marriage plans. We were standing in her kitchen, and she crossed her arms and then backed me into the corner between stove and sink.
‘What’s that?’ I said.
‘Separate bank accounts.’
‘Oh come on,’ I said.
‘Be sensible!’ she said. ‘Not romantic. What if you want to leave him? What if you want to clear out in a hurry?’
In love, some people do tend to leave, while the rest of us get left.
‘I guess now it’s four of them,’ my daughter said to me after school one day. She fell back on the sofa and sighed gustily. The four were Drew, Jack, Kevin, and Dylan. I chaperoned a play date with Dylan. When Sarah stubbed her toe, he fell on the floor at her feet.
‘Please,’ he begged, ‘let me make it better.’ He reached for her pant leg, his eyes hot with new love. ‘I know a secret way.’
‘I don’t think so.’ Sarah withdrew her foot from his eager hands. She was sitting in the same chair in which my grandmother had first held her.
Nana was ninety-one when my daughter was born. She was crooked and gnarled and irascible, and as she bent whispering over the baby, I saw the dangerous old fairy from childhood tales, the one whom wise parents are careful not to slight. I couldn’t hear what she was saying to her only great-granddaughter, but I know what wish my grandmother would have bestowed, and I know my daughter.
‘You’ll break their hearts,’ she must have said.
Break their hearts, and avenge her humiliation. More than sixty years had passed, but still, she was stinging. In Nice, France, in 1925, having exhausted her father’s offerings, my grandmother found, or was found by, a prince. Titled and penniless, the handsome White Russian was after her money; of this my great-grandparents were sure. Forbidden to see him, threatened with the same punishment she would use to bully my mother – if she disobeyed, if she married him, she would lose her inheritance – at night my grandmother slipped away from the family villa to meet her Russian lover. The chauffeur tried to blackmail her; the butler lectured her on fallen women; her sister provided the distraction of a different scandal, that of a lesbian affair. My grandmother promised the Russian that she loved him enough to live as a pauper, and he left her. Her parents had been right, that wasn’t what he’d had in mind.
What was his name? What was his name? What was his name? I knew that eventually I would wear her down. She’d tell me if only to get me to stop.
‘Michael Evlanoff. I was a fool, and my father was right. He came to this country a few years after I did. Married Elizabeth Arden, and then she divorced him.’ My grandmother looked at me across the breakfast table. ‘That’s all I have to say,’ she said, and she laid her knife on the edge of her plate.
Armed with these few facts, after my grandmother’s death, I went to the public library to find out what I could, an obituary, a photograph. I wanted to know what he looked like, this alleged prince who had, unwittingly, changed my mother’s life, and my own.
According to the 1957 edition of Current Biography, on December 30, 1942, Elizabeth Arden married ‘Russian-born Prince Michael Evlanoff, a naturalized American citizen, from whom she obtained an uncontested divorce in 1944.’ The wedding announcement in The New York Times called Evlanoff a ‘member of a prominent family of the former Russian nobility … son of the late Prince Basil Evlanoff, and the late Princess Evlanoff … of a family dating back to the tartar warlords of the twelfth century.’
‘After the Russian Revolution,’ the announcement continued, ‘he made his home in Paris … Recently he had been residing at the Sherry-Netherland.’
There was an obituary as well, from May 9, 1972: ‘Michael Evlanoff, who wrote a biography of Alfred Nobel, died yesterday in the Florence Nightingale Nursing Home. He was 76 years old. Mr Evlanoff, descended from Tartar princes, graduated from the Russian Artillery School and served in World War I. His book, “Nobel-Prize Donor; Inventor of Dynamite – Advocate of Peace,” was published in 1944. His marriage in 1942 to Mrs Elizabeth Graham Lewis, founder of Elizabeth Arden, Inc., the cosmetics company, ended in divorce.’
I found his biography of Alfred Nobel, published by the Blakiston Company and dedicated to ‘My darling mother and Emmanuel Nobel, who were the guiding stars in my life.’ A romantic and melancholy work, characterized by a longing for what has been lost forever, it told me that Evlanoff met Emmanuel Nobel, the nephew of Alfred, in 1919, when both served in the Great War. The two men met in the Caucasus, ‘that beautiful and precious pearl of Russia.’ I paged through the portraits of the Nobels, hoping one of the photographs might include the author, but none did. And, as the dust jacket was missing, I was left with a vague and generic picture of an old man in pajamas, bewildered by my visit to the nursing home in Manhattan.
‘Margaret Esme Sassoon Benjamin,’ I would repeat her name to him until it produced a response. ‘You do remember her, don’t you?’
My imagined Prince Evlanoff had a day’s worth of gray stubble on his chin and a handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket of his pajama top. He seemed confused by my interrogation.
Would the real Evlanoff have remembered my grandmother, a woman whom he had not embraced for nearly fifty years? The question depended on how long and how serious their affair had been.
Through connections provided by a cousin in Paris, I wrote to an elderly White Russian, one who had also lived in Nice during the twenties. Did he know anything of a Michael Evlanoff, possibly Ivlanov, when the prince lived in France? I was researching my grandmother’s past, I explained.
The answer, from this gentleman who was a member of the Union of Russian Nobility in Paris, was prompt. No Evlanoff or Ivlanov ever existed in the official records of the Nobility of the Russian Empire; the name was entirely unknown. He was sorry to be the bearer of such news. In Nice, when he was a young student, he had himself had the misfortune of meeting certain Russians who pretended nobility for social or material gain. This pained him, he wrote, and it was a blow to what he called his national pride, but, alas, it was the unpleasant truth, and he was honor bound to tell me so.
My mother died of breast cancer when I was twenty-four.
I took care of her while she died. I gave her her morphine, her Halcion, her Darvocet, Percocet, Demerol, Zantac, and prednisone. I bathed her and I dressed her bedsores. Though I had to force myself into such communion with disease, I kissed her each morning when she woke and each evening as she fell asleep. Then I went into the bathroom, took a cotton pad soaked with rubbing alcohol, and scrubbed my lips until they burned and bled. Sometimes as I did this I thought of Saint Catherine of Siena, who in 1373 collected into a bowl the pus from the open breast-cancer lesions of Andrea, an older member of the Mantellate lay order to which Catherine belonged. Andrea had caused Catherine much trouble and public censure some years before when she had implied that the saint’s infamous raptures and fasts were a pretense rather than a manifestation of holiness. The bowl’s foul contents stank and made Catherine retch, but both in penance for her disgust and in determination to love her enemy, Catherine drank the old nun’s pus. That night Catherine had a vision of Christ. Her holy bridegroom bade her to His side, and she drank the blood of life that flowed from His wounds.
‘You were named for saints and queens,’ my mother told me when I was young enough that a halo and a crown seemed interchangeable. We were not Catholics yet. Judaism was our birthright, but we had strayed early, and now we were members of the Twenty-eighth Church of Christ, Scientist. Each Sunday, we drove together to the bland, beige sanctuary on Hilgard Avenue in West Los Angeles, where she attended church while I, in a lesser building, went to Sunday school. Above my bed was a plaque bearing these words from the church’s founder, Mary Baker Eddy: ‘Father-Mother good, lovingly Thee I seek, Patient, meek. In the way Thou hast, Be it slow