I don’t know why Claude Lanzmann dying the other day has made me think almost non-stop about Irene, my son’s Polish nanny from so long ago. Lanzmann wasn’t Polish; he was a French Jew, very different from being a Polish Jew.
And very different from what Irene certainly was: a Catholic child who came of age in the aftermath of the Shoah, in a Warsaw where there weren’t any Jews. We were in fact, the first Jews she had ever met. Soon after, Irene met more Jews: Mrs. Greenberg and her family who had a huge place on the East Side, and whose apartment she cleaned in the mornings, and to whom I gave a phony reference.
“Irene has worked for my family for ten years. And I trust her with my life!” In fact I only knew Irene then for a month or two, when she asked me to speak to Mrs. G. Somehow she sensed that I implicitly understood the rules one follows under dictatorships be they in America or Warsaw. One lied for one’s friends to the authorities. One shared one’s treasures, and one never ratted each other out.
Irene arrived in New York before the solidarity movement briefly flowered. She was escaping the cruel arm of communist repression. And come to think of it, she treasured above all things, the black Lancôme tote I gave her (perhaps because of the solidarity rose) filled with goodies from the Lancôme company store. On the days I worked at Lancôme and other cosmetic firms, Irene would pick my son up from nursery school and then kindergarten. And stay with him until I got home. If this all were now, of course, I would have Irene’s contact in my phone and I’d be able to reach her. All I know is that she is back in Warsaw. But like so many of the good people I know and revere above all others, Irene was a pre cell phone friendship. I have no idea how to find her.
I met Irene when she came to clean the half of the apartment where my son and I were living, which included the kitchen, the laundry area, the bathroom I used–and that my little son learned to use–and the back bedroom with the terrible bed my mother-in-law refused to let me replace. It didn’t seem odd to my mother-in-law that I hired someone to clean the half of the apartment we were occupying. My mother-in law was an odd bird. Very generous in her way, and very tolerant too. As far as I know the only thing she deplored was the state of Israel.
Our arrangement was peculiar, but seemed very familiar. My husband was off in LA most of the time doing movies and TV shows. I was in New York writing advertising copy, we needed a family, and my in-laws welcomed us. I thought the least I could do was keep my side of the apartment clean.
Around this time, my son’s other nanny went back to Haiti. I hired someone else and he and my father-in-law fired her on her first day.
“Irene should be my nanny!” my son declared.
“Irene doesn’t speak English,” I said to my one-and-a-half-year-old.
“I’ll teach her,” he assured me. And he did and he didn’t.
Irene promptly took over the title of “other mother,” she and my son adored each other. She stayed with us from the time my son was one-and-a-half, until he passed his sixth birthday and we moved to LA. She broke every one of my rules about sugar, never listened to a word I said, but she kept us together, and when my husband got a movie to do in New York and we moved from my in-laws’ enormous four bedroom apartment overlooking the Museum of Natural History, to our small two bedroom overlooking the back of a building, she took over there too. When I got home from work, the three of us sat down. Irene and I with vodka and (I’m embarrassed to say, cigarettes) and my son with his orange juice and sips of vodka.
Once on a cold winter afternoon when son and I had arrived home from Kennedy after visiting the coast and not seeing very much of my husband, feeling lonely and out of sorts, we opened the door and there was the familiar smell of Magic Noire perfume and cigarettes and Irene, in her housecoat, smoking and doing the floors so they’d be nice when we got home.
I owe her so many things: her great cheerfulness, back when we needed cheerfulness. And for a morning when she told Mrs. Greenberg she had to go to the doctor, but it was really to my son’s doctor. He was three and very ill as only small children get ill. He was red and throwing up and his little head was on fire. She skipped her morning job, and came over with me to take him to the pediatrician.
In her broken English she told me how many sick children she had seen on the subway ride over from Greenpoint. And how glad she was, that my son could take a cab to the doctor’s office.
It was a definitive moment for me. Never again that long winter did I feel sorry for myself for being a more or less single mom. I had the money to take my son in a cab to a doctor’s office where we didn’t have to wait in line.
When we left New York, I gave her the prettiest thing I possessed then—she was borrowing them all the time anyway, since she went to the opera: my long string of pearls.
Sometimes I miss those pearls. And sometimes I miss Irene.
“You are the best boss,” she used to tell me. “You are my only boss!”
I felt the same about her and more so.
Illustration by the fabulous Aimee Levy
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