Dear André
The natural history of an experience, from age 14 to age 77.
By sharing this narrative today, I’m taking you into my trust. I’m trusting you will view this writing as a story that’s provisional and always in motion. I don’t use words such as assault or abuse in writing about André. Those words are bombs that go off and don’t allow you to see through the smoke they produce. I know this story will generate all kinds of response in readers, and so, in part, this post is an experiment to see what I can share and what you’ll remain interested in reading. This is PART ONE.
Dear André (part one)
In 2017, when my sister was dying, we got in touch with a cousin we’d known when we were young. There she was on Facebook with her thick blond hair and shy smile. A few days later, on the phone, our cousin asked my sister if anything funny had ever happened between her and André. She was talking about the shrink who, in the 1960s, had treated my mother, my sister, and me—as well as other members of our family, including the cousin, her sister, and both of her parents. We were part of a cult of sorts, a gaggle of rich Jews, some schooled, some unschooled, under the influence of a smart man, a doctor, a sad man, a lonely man, a fat man, a French Jew who had gotten out of Europe.
Our cousin called him Glaz. My sister said to her, “You should speak to my sister.” I was the one André had touched. This thing my sister and I did, this digging around to find our cousin, was our last adventure together, and thinking of it makes me miss her.
When, a few days later, I spoke to my cousin on the phone, she said André had had his pick of nine or ten women every night. She called it his “harem.” I had not talked to her since we were children. I remembered a little girl with peachy skin, two years younger than me. In childhood, everyone younger than you is a baby and everyone older is a party. She said, “André shaped my life.” I said, “Mine, too.”
She had a whiskey voice, a smoky, New York voice. She said, “André started having sex with me when I was eleven. He had sex with my mother and sister too.” She said that, near the end of his life, he’d asked her sister to sleep in his hospital room. He’d accused a woman of killing her young son, and he feared the woman had put a hit out on his life. I tried to imagine his large, gray head at the end of a killer’s gun, and I felt like laughing. He would die in a hospital bed of something else.
The day André touched me, he lifted my sweater and said, “Your breasts are fine.” It seemed an old-world thing to say, and I felt embarrassed for both of us. I was fourteen. I had already kissed boys and knew the difference between kissing a boy and whatever this was. He put his hands in my underpants. He circled my nipples and asked if it felt good. His breath speeded up. I don’t know what I said. Right now, I’m trying to imagine what I could have said. I know it wasn’t, “No.”
My sister and I are on her bed. She says, “André didn’t mean that much to me.” What we remember is not the past. She’s too weak to move without assistance. Starting in 1958, she saw André five days a week after her classes at NYU. Each session cost $50. She says, “For the first six months, it was a standoff. Neither of us spoke.” I say, “You’ve said he helped you.” She looks into space and says, “He did help me.”
In the middle of her freshman year of college, she returned home from Boston, sad and anxious. It would turn out she’d stolen a wallet from a girl in her dorm and left it on her dresser in plain sight. That’s when André entered our lives. He was already treating our cousin’s father (my father’s brother)—a furrier, a gambler, a charmer with a permanent tan. André was treating as well the furrier’s wife, their two daughters, and another forlorn brother of my father.
I’m writing this in 2017 from the home of people I don’t know well. (I’m also writing this right now, again, as I’m posting, but back to 2017.) I’m minding their property and cats. I’m perched on a deck, overlooking a pool, surrounded by flowering plants. Green trees rise up fifty feet around the land. In the distance are rolling hills. I move from house to house like the swimmer in the story by John Cheever, who swims from swimming pool to swimming pool. Summer rain alternates with bursts of sun.
According to my cousin, André told his patients that having sex with him was part of their treatment. Another woman he had sex with told me this as well. André had touched her for the first time when she was four-years-old. Her parents knew. He was having sex with her mother, and her husband knew. The husband remained loyal to André. There is nothing about André I wouldn’t believe. Honestly, if you told me André could speak fluent Sanskrit and often ate the still-beating hearts of freshly killed chickens, I would say, “I’m not surprised.”
Before André led me to his bed, he didn’t speak to me. Maybe he did speak to me. I don’t remember any words. I suppose we all make calculations ahead of time about who to advance on. I was visiting his house in the country and had arrived by train that afternoon. The light streaming through the windows was golden. I heard birdsong. He took me to his bed a second time that night. Every time a man has put his tongue in my mouth when I did not invite him to do it or want him to do it, I have felt bad about something in the world I cannot put my finger on. Yesterday, I wrote a letter to a friend I have known for forty years and I told her I was stepping back from our friendship. It wasn’t her fault. Many times she had shown me I wasn’t a first-rung friend, and I had gone along with it.
My aunt and uncle—the parents of my cousin—were at André’s house the night he took me to his bed again. They were rich and glamorous and lived in a giant apartment on Park Avenue. My aunt was beautiful with a fluttering, anxious smile, as if she felt her beauty was nearing its sell-by date. When André announced the sleeping arrangements to my aunt and uncle, my aunt said that her daughter slept with André all the time. She said it lightly. The lightness was part of the strangeness. I was beside André on a blue velvet couch. I thought, She doesn’t know what he does. I thought, How can she not wonder what is happening in a bed between an old man and a 12-year-old girl? Over the years, I thought she must have known, although I couldn’t figure out why she had gone along. My uncle looked uncomfortable. A nerve pulsed in his cheek. He didn’t say anything.
I have thought about this day at André’s house almost every day, if not every day, since then. I’m 77 now. I’ve been writing about André from the time I began thinking of myself as a writer. I wrote a novel about him called Starting with Serge that was published in 1990 by Doubleday.
Every time I think about these events, I think about them in a different way, with a different set of feelings, and a different thought I want to attach to the actions that were a turning point in my life and also weren’t a turning point in my life because nothing is, not really. Only in retrospect can it appear to be so, and that is in order to calm ourselves and believe we are telling a story.
My cousin said André had been handsome in his thirties. She’d seen pictures of him in a French military uniform. She’d seen a portrait of him painted around the same time. The other day my sister remembered she had pictures of André in her closet, an album filled with black-and-white snapshots, taken on a trip around the world André had organized for eight patients, including her. I went to the closet, and there he was in Japan, with his unhappy smile, standing beside a Buddhist monk. There was my sister, sleek and lovely in Bermuda shorts, feeding a deer in a park.
The snapshots had been taken in 1960, when my sister was nineteen. André had charged each patient $5,000 for the tour. He’d charged my father $5,000 when he laid out money for my sister’s abortion. She was sleeping with a man André didn’t like, a handsome man from Greece who cut my sister’s hair. I met him once in a French restaurant. He wanted me to like him. I didn’t understand why he cared what I thought.
André always struck me as an awkward, gloomy person, and he spoke with a thick accent that was sometimes hard to understand. He read all the time and collected art and rugs. I’d never known anyone who read all the time and collected art and rugs. These things seemed like things I would want to do. The second time he took me to his bed—the night that was later in the day he’d first touched me sexually, the night when my aunt and uncle were also in the house—he went further, and I felt aroused in some way.
I was interested in the feeling apart from the person producing it. It was possible to be in two places at the same time, and I don’t think this was a new sensation for me. Who did André think he was with? Me and another plump girl he’d known as a boy in Alsace-Lorraine? Just some generic, female-shaped body? No one had touched me that way before. I hadn’t touched myself that way. I didn’t feel attractive. I thought my mother and my sister were beautiful.
I stopped André from putting his penis inside me. He asked me to touch his penis, and I said, “I’m tired and I want to go to sleep.” I didn’t sleep. He didn’t try to overpower me. Perhaps he worried I’d make a noise. There wasn’t much he feared, it seemed to me. He’d been a Jew in occupied France and had gotten out. I wouldn’t have made a sound.
I don’t know where he slept that night. The next morning, his tone was angry and maybe a little panicked when he said, “Don’t tell your mother.” He didn’t need to worry. He didn’t mention my father.
He didn’t make sexual advances to my mother or my sister. In our family, it was only to me. On my sister’s bed, she says, “Why didn’t you tell me?” I say, “I don’t know,” but it’s not the truth. The truth is I thought she and my mother wouldn’t believe me. I thought they would think I was hurting the person they looked up to more than anyone else in the world.
His name was on their lips all the time. They believed he knew better than they did how to live. I wanted to believe that, too. You can’t imagine how much I wanted to believe it. Thinking back to a time you want to believe something, it’s hard to grasp it, and it’s also beautiful in its way, a time when you’re absorbing things, when you’re a reed, open at both ends. People sometimes call this innocence. I don’t call it innocence. I call it the desire to fall in love.
I didn’t believe in André the way my mother and sister appeared to do. I was more questioning in general. It was part of the wait a minute and no of my personality. I thought the reason André had moved toward me was me. I’d been seductive with him, as I’ve been with everyone throughout my life. Doubt is the beginning of freedom and loneliness.
My sister is breathing okay if she doesn’t move. She says, “It’s hard to get up from the toilet. My arms are too weak or maybe it’s my legs.” I say, “Try using your abdominals.” She says, “Mom kept us apart.” I say, “She did and she didn’t.” She says, “I will miss you.” She doesn’t believe in anything after death. I say, "I will miss you, too." I miss her every day. Sometimes all day.
Eight months after she began seeing André, my mother became his patient. Two years later, I began treatment. Richard says, “What did you think you were going for?” I say, “To be part of his world.” He says, “But it was therapy. You must have thought you needed to have a problem.” I say, “My problem was not being part of his world.”
My sister says, “After I got married, André would call me. I had one or two kids by then. Someone would cancel an appointment, and he’d say, ’Don’t you have $50?’ I thought, He doesn’t care about me. All he cares about is money.” After our mother died, my sister told me André had borrowed money from our father and lost it in the stock market. He didn’t pay it back, and our father didn’t ask for it back. That is very Murray Stone. After one of my mother’s sessions, she told André she wanted the money back, and he wrote her a check.
I say to my sister, “He cared about money, and he cared about you.” I’m beside her, leaning on pillows. I sit forward and say, “Suppose everyone felt trapped in their relationship with André, and they were all carrying around the same secret. This thing they were doing, this man they were trusting they didn’t really trust. He was a manifestation of the chaos we can’t escape.” She says, “I didn’t cry when he died.” I say, “I wish I knew more about what made him tick.” She says, “He had nine sisters.” I say, “I wish I could ask what he was thinking when he did what he did, although I don’t think he’d tell me the truth.”
The End of Part One
Biz
To paid subscribers, I send you a huge thanks! You are truly transforming my writing life and helping keep the stack available to all readers without a paywall. I will never have a paywall.
But honestly, to keep going, I need more people here to upgrade to a paid subscription. Writing the stack is a full time job. If you’ve been enjoying the writing for a while, maybe this is a time you can make a contribution.
Paid subscribers are invited at no additional cost to monthly Zoom conversations on writing craft. For example, the way today’s piece has been written and rewritten over the course of 64 years. Why are some pieces always there and always changing? Paid subscribers are welcome to send ahead questions about their own projects, and paid subscribers gain access to the full archive of 160 literary pieces.
You can subscribe for as little as a month. Once you begin a paid subscription, you can unsubscribe at any time, and I will understand and thank you. I set the prices very low with the hope that a collective of loving readers, paying small amounts, is more encouraging to us all than seeking donors. I don't have donors. It's all up to you and your friends.
Right now, new subscribers can upgrade to a paid subscription at a monthly rate that's less than a cup of coffee, and I will keep you caffeinated every day of the month. With a subscription-based business, YOU HAVE TO GET NEW PEOPLE TO STEP IN, because there is always a churn of supporters leaving. If you can, please upgrade to a paid subscription here. xxL
Zoom conversations.
The next Zoom conversation on writing craft and on the subject matter of the stack posts is on SATURDAY May 25 from 3 to 4pm EST.
The Zooms are joyous gatherings FOR ALL PAID SUBSCRIBERS, where you can interact with other writers and readers, and where, ahead of time, you are invited to send questions about your own writing projects. Very tender and smart people show up. I can't believe the number of smarty-pants people who come. To RSVP and receive a link close to the event, please send me an email at: lauriestone@substack.com. Some emails go astray, so please be sure I have confirmed you on the list. If not, I haven’t received your RSVP, so please send me a message here or on FB messenger.
Working together one-on-one.
To work with me on a one-to-one basis, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com. The first conversation IS FREE to establish whether we are a good fit and I can be of use to your work.
Prompty People
Write about a time when you were changed by the weather of another person.
Outside factory buildings everyone was waiting for a blind date.
Write a short piece in which every sentence begins with the word “Sometimes,” or with the word, “Meanwhile.” Or try alternating them!
The prompts are for your pleasure and to use for your writes. Please don't post your experiments in the comments section below, but feel free to post them in "Notes" on Substack, where people can read them and leave comments. Enjoy!
There are three links at the bottom of every post: “like,” “share,” and “comment.” Your responses attract new readers, and I love your comments about the form and content of the posts. Please tell a friend to check out the stack. Huge thanks and happy spring. xxL
Many will see André as a monster -- and he certainly did monstrous things, and abused his psychic power over others monstrously. But I see him as a tragic character, a man so split off from himself that he could offer actual help and insight to the same people he was twisting around within the spell he cast, so much so that they would let him lead their daughter to his bed. Repeatedly. Dr. Gabor Maté, a specialist in trauma whom I've recently been reading and listening to, describes this as "spiritual bypass." He also points out what I've recognized feels true: that much of childhood trauma comes from having to make the impossible choice between our two most basic needs: first, attachment, without which we can't survive when we're young, and authenticity: our real, gut feelings, our true wants and needs. The drive for attachment is so strong that we can give up our authenticity to maintain it, without at all recognizing that we're doing so -- and being young, we assume it's because there is something wrong or lacking in ourselves, not the people we depend on for survival. I so hope you don't still believe that you bore any responsibility because you think you'd "always been seductive" (if true, that was an adaptation, not a fault). Your piece is so beautifully written, so shattered and layered the way memory is, and so honest. I see why this story has been a work of a lifetime.
As Jan commented, it would have been quite easy to depict Andre has nothing less than a monster. Nothing more than a monster. You went for something more here, and I feel grateful that you trusted your readers - us - with it.