The Lost Frida Kahlo
Catherine Davidson

        Look, there have been times when I have felt not so much pessimistic as realistic. Like my father, Ben, student of history, I know if you look at the facts and weigh them up, no good can come out of hoping for the best. In the blink of an eye, disaster can strike without warning, your neighbors can turn murderous, your food poisoned. Peace is the anxious pause between chaos and horror. I was in Los Angeles during the riots, and I watched as my familiar low-key neighborhood turned street by street into a place of menace and danger. I saw two people, dressed in jeans and t-shirts, smash the window of a store down the block and reach in to take what they wanted. They walked out holding cases of beer, blond hair wet with spray from their open bottles, bouncing like at a party. Here is what my father’s daughter thought: why don’t people do that all the time? What thin veil holds them back?
        Once I tried to explain to my mother, Fotini, how fearful the thought of having children made me. She listened to my list of reasons not to make yourself vulnerable, not to give yourself the chance to be so deeply hurt. She told me that when she was heavily pregnant with me, the radio was full of news about impending nuclear disaster and how to protect yourself in the event of a blast, which, she said, even then, everyone knew meant the end of the world. And she looked at me, beaming, as if to say, and now here you are.

        Fotini had once said that she could never commit suicide because she always wanted to find out what happened next. In her version of the world, wonderful surprises are more likely than terrible ones.
        You could say it is irrational to put your hope in the future into the hands of one random person, especially when I think about all the careless chances I took with my own personal safety over the years, but my mother comes from the realm of the irrational. She is the part of me that wakes up in the morning filled with happiness for no reason, when I look out the window and feel as if even the rooftops are shimmering with possibilities. Around my mother, strange things happen, ghosts and sightings. Babies speak languages that vanished long ago; people can return from the dead.

        Now I am going to tell you a story about someone who was not strictly a member of my family. My parents accumulated layers of friends in California; far from their own relatives, they adopted aunts and uncles and cousins and children.
       This is the story about a woman we knew who was the one other person, besides my mother, who had been the recipient of a genuine miracle. My father’s daughter would say it was just a remarkable coincidence, one of those random events the universe throws up, like the theory that if you gave it long enough, a monkey typing on a computer would eventually create the works of Shakespeare. My mother’s daughter would say, are you kidding? You only have to look into the smallest and least surprise in the human body, let alone the digestive system of a mouse, to know that even evolution is not random.

        Every year of our lives, in good times and bad, there were occasions when Fotini and Ben united together in a kind of public performance of their life together, and the people invited became witnesses as well as participants. Their two big annual parties, one at Christmas and one at Easter, were like moments of theater. The whole house would be scoured and transformed; the air filled with the incense of strange foods, and the stage set with white backdrops upon which would appear banks of bottles, platters of mezes, bowls of olives purchased from the Alexandrian deli downtown. The Easter party was smaller, another Greek Jewish family whose daughters became like cousins, an international cast of devotees who came for the food and the exotic midnight ceremony. The Christmas party, held on balmy December nights when the dry winds rustled through the canyons, attracted loyal followers who appeared each time, wearing the same costumes, performing the same roles, the children who disappeared into our bedrooms growing gradually bigger, the elders never seeming to age, and the parents, through the storms and divorces of the era, returning for a moment of peace as if nothing could ever change.
        Some of the men would gather at the window, holding their whiskies and popping nuts into their mouths, arguing about politics. The mothers would pass in and out of the kitchen, trying to help Fotini, who would grab us and send us out on missions, bringing back empty bowls, filling them up with new dishes pouring out of the oven and off the simmering burner. There were a few people who did not know anyone else except from the party itself; some of them made their own performances, like our neighbor, George, a former UCLA anthropologist who taught courses to fellow octogenerians at the University of the Seventh Age. He had sandy, longish hair and a body that was still well-shaped, as we discovered when we spied him on his deck behind the house nude sunbathing. There were big holes in his ears from the years he lived with a South American tribe; he would let us stick our fingers through when we were little. He could recite poetry extemporaneously, and would make up limericks to suit the occasion. After her divorce, one of the Jewish mothers always came with her friend Danny, who was the curator of the first Los Angeles musical comedy library. He spent most of the party sitting at the piano, belting out showtunes. And then there was Trudi.
        Trudi had met my father when she had been his patient at the hospital. Although she was very healthy, her own doctor had referred her, because he was exasperated with her hypochondria and demands for service, calling in the middle of the night at home, complaining that the hospital was run like the factories named for its sponsor. When she discovered Ben lived on her street, and that he reminded her of the doctors she knew in her youth in Vienna, she became unfailingly calm and polite and many of her imaginary ailments disappeared. Whenever he introduced her to someone new, she called him the doctor who had saved her life.
        Trudi would come to the Christmas parties with a box of exquisite pastry she bought from another refugee she knew who owned a patisserie on Fairfax. She would appear at the door with the immaculate square box trussed in red ribbon, her long white hair braided across her head and her French imported dress perfectly pressed and hanging in Coco Chanel fashion over her thin body. After dinner, in a corner under the lamp, sunk into a deep chair, Trudi could be found, one elegant hand gesturing, her listener attentive apart from the occasional uneasy laugh when her observations cut too close for comfort. She was telling the same story, over and over again, about her lost Frida Kahlo and its miraculous recovery.

        Trudi’s son was a wealthy banker in New York; he had two sons of his own who would come with him for occasional visits, bored and reluctant, hair slicked, jaws slack, hands tucked between their legs after Trudi snapped to keep their paws off the furniture. Whenever they appeared, Fotini would force us to dress up for a trip to Trudi’s house, under the theory that the boys would like to meet someone their own age. Trudi would greet us at the door and assess our outfits, over which our mother had taken great care. Her nails tucking our hair back against our heads were sharp and she would lean down to whisper, full of perfume, “girls are so much better” while the New York grandsons sat on the couch, their eyes glued to her black and white television. Years later, I can still remember walking from our house where we never left our jeans, feeling the heat of the stockings and the pinch of hard shoes. My sisters and I would look up at the sycamores with the last glance of the condemned. It was like entering a museum, her glass box perched over the canyon, all white carpets and strange, modern painting on the walls. When we tried to get out of the visits, our mother told us it was good for us to know Trudi, to listen to her.
         “She’s a bit like our own Alma Mahler” Fotini would say. We all knew about Alma from the Tom Lehrer albums Fotini played. (Alma, please tell us. All other women are jealous. You didn’t have to use Ponds to get Gustav and Walter and Franz.) When we got home, we would run into the garden, back to the ivy-covered fence where we once found a snake coiled in the shade. Then we would play Nazi. We would take turns rounding each other up and enduring “tortures” like sitting on your victim’s chest and dribbling spit slowly in their face. We had heard our mother shout, during arguments with Ben after a snub from one of his relatives - “do you think Hitler would have cared if they were half Jewish?” That game was our own version of duck and cover.

        Years later, I had to bite my tongue when Trudi invited me to lunch on my own during a visit home, not long after I had moved to London. I brought her flowers and put them in a vase she handed me and watched while she re-organized them (“no one knows how to arrange flowers these days”) but I could tell she was glad to see me. Her table was laid with beautiful polished silver and she had a bottle of wine chilling in a bowl (“For you, now you’re grown up.”) Trudi had a kind of all-in-one help person. She refused to have a nurse, but after she fell and broke her hip, taking an hour to drag herself to the phone, her son hired someone who lived with her (“to cook and clean”) and keep a discreet eye on her health. There was a high turnover, and I could see why as she held out a plate of sandwiches: “These are the dreadful salmon sandwiches that spy my son hired has made, but that’s all I have to offer you, darling.”
        I was telling her about my life in London, being very enthusiastic, not looking at her narrowed eyes that seemed to hold all the recriminations no one had yet spoken about my having abandoned everyone to live in another country. She interrupted,
         “But don’t you find the English people very cold?”
         I explained my husband Mark’s theory - unlike Americans who make friends instantly (superficially he might have added but usually did not), it may take time to get to know an English person, “but once you do, you’re friends for life.”
         “Yes, but darling,” said Trudi, pausing dramatically, “who could live that long?”

        Trudi’s other famous line, the one we used to quote to each other in her own rolling accent was this: “Never think about the man you are going to marry, girls. Think about the man you are going to divorrrrce.”

        Like Alma Mahler, Trudi was born in Vienna, to a wealthy family. Her father was a successful Jewish doctor and her mother, a well-known Catholic pianist who gave up her work and converted when she married. Trudi was an only child, tall and precocious, petted by the composers and musicians who would come have tea with her mother, drilled in dead languages by her father, who taught her to sing nursery rhymes in Latin when she was only six. Every September for her birthday, she received a new brown coat with gold buttons, hand-made by her father’s tailor. It was no wonder that she was completely spoiled (“and ripe for the picking.”) In her parents’ house, the wood floors shone and the large windows muffled the sounds of the street and all the world outside.
        For her eighteenth birthday, instead of a coat, her parents told her they would buy her a proper evening dress for her first outing to the opera. This was the passage, they considered, to real adulthood. Women wore gowns for the evening (“not like here,” Trudi used to say, “with their canvas shoes and denim jeans!”) and she knew that her shoulders looked soft and pearly against her ivory satin dress when she was introduced to one of her mother’s former admirers, a theatrical producer, twice her age. He was a man who had been beautiful in his youth, a man whose slightly budding waistline and no longer imperceptible crows feet had caused him to say to his mother just that morning, over their weekly chocolate and pastries, perhaps, mother, even old rogues must marry eventually. (“Can you imagine, I actually felt proud when he stared at my bare flesh!”)
        When they got married, Trudi’s mother draped a black cloth over the piano.
        Despite having a tall and pampered eighteen year old as his wife, Trudi’s husband did not change his habits in any way. He kept his weekly chocolate mornings with his mother; he continued to buy French perfume for his mistresses. Still, they managed to have a son, the one who grew up to be a banker in New York. (“The only gift he ever gave me.”) Whatever she thought at the time, tears wetting the blankets of the baby whose mouth on her breast felt like a heavy iron anchor, Trudi’s son saved her life.
         Six months after the baby was born, Trudi took him for a walk in the park. “My parents forgave us enough to buy a new buggy, the most expensive you could get; it had blue organza awnings and ivory trim.” She remembers how proud she felt, with that tiny prince, fat on her milk, bundled in the best linen. How she thought the world would have to admire him, how no one could resist his beauty. She saw a woman coming from the other direction, fat, a burgher’s wife, big-busted and maternal. “Of course, I expected her to smile at my child.” The woman looked at her, hard in the face. Instead of smiling and petting, the woman drew back and spit on the ground.
         “It was worse than a slap.” While her parents and her husband still believed, as Trudi had only the day before, that they were safe, that troubles were caused by fanatics elsewhere to other people, Trudi knew otherwise. People who could spit at a baby were capable of anything. Within a month she was in Lisbon, her mother’s jewellery in her coat, her husband’s guilt money in her pocket. She had told him she was going to be gone for a month. By the time he found out otherwise, she was on a boat to Mexico.

        It would be nice to spend some time in Mexico City with Trudi, where she lived for ten years, Mexico City with its swirling crowds of refugees from around the world, German artists and Russian liberal professors and Argentinian photographers. Trudi’s was grateful and so were all her friends for the country that let them in when their northern neighbor’s doors were closed. She found a job as a translator and she lived with her son in a tiny brown apartment which she kept immaculately clean.
         In that decade, Trudi shed her expectation of happiness. She would wake up before dawn and organize before her son woke, take him to the neighbors and go to work, come home at six and pick him up for some sleepy dinner and a cuddle, put him to bed and lie there, unable to sleep, knowing the morning was coming closer. In the dark, she would feel her body drying out from the heat of her anger; she never let herself cry, afraid of disturbing the boy whose bed was only a few feet from hers. During the day, she would dress in beautiful outfits, still proud of her tall body. Men could touch her only accidentally, brushing her hand at one of the parties they all went to as often as they could, squeezing into each other’s apartments, drinking and smoking, while Trudi’s son ran between their legs. One of her admirers was a German Jewish doctor, a short man with enormous brown eyes magnified even larger behind his glasses. He courted her with great passion, but Trudi found herself petting him with a maternal hand. Ever since she had swaddled her son, who liked to lie naked on his back with his legs in the air, grabbing his genitals with both hands, she had lost all interest in that department. Look at the trouble it had brought her.
         One day, the doctor made a last attempt to get her to take him seriously. He came to her apartment holding a painting from one of his patients. “I thought you would like it.” he said. “She is also a woman who has suffered a great deal.” Trudi thanked him and told him she would cherish it. The painting ended up propped in the back of her closet. “I thought it was morbid. If I’d only known!”

        Trudi’s parents perished in the camps; her mother followed her father. Her father’s two sisters and eight nephews, all doctors and scientists and mathematicians, full of the secrets of the universe, murdered. How did Trudi make it from Mexico to Los Angeles? She never told us but this is what I imagine because of her resemblance to Alma Mahler. The family fortunes had been transferred to New York after Trudi had already left. Her parents were trying to find a way to get it to her when the knock came on the door. After the war ended, lost letters appeared and frozen channels were opened. Trudi found herself in possession of a bank account in New York that had grown fat while it waited for her.
         On the day before the banker’s letter arrived, Trudi looked at her son. He was growing out of his clothes, and spoke Spanish better than German. He had his father’s dark hair and a lazy way of closing his eyes half way when he looked at her. He spoke English well; she had kept him in a British run school all these years, but when she tried to imagine his future, she panicked. She wanted her son to be an American, to be thoughtless and happy.
         One of her friends from Vienna was marrying a man who worked for an orchestra in Los Angeles, an oboe player she had known before the war. She gave Trudi a list of the intellectuals and artists who had taken refuge there. So when she found herself suddenly wealthy, she decided it was easier just to go directly north.
         On that day she decided her future, she looked around the apartment, at the carefully mended tablecloth and the cushions she had turned over too many times to hide their sun marks. She wanted to leave it all behind. Perhaps she would take one small Indian bowl, and two suitcases. For the new world, they would get everything new. To her neighbors who had looked after her so well, she left the linens and the crockery. She gave the morbid painting to their daughter, Bette, who had taken to wearing her hair like Trudi, in a chignon, and who would try to stretch herself at night to make her pudgy frame long and lean. And that was how Trudi lost her Frida Kahlo.

        When she arrived in Los Angeles, stepping off the cruise ship in a harbor that smelled like diesel and oleander, Trudi was finally the grand dame her parents had expected her to be. She bought herself the house in the hills, with its Bauhaus lines and mountain firs. She met them all, the exiled writers and musicians and artists. One of her new friends suggested she begin to collect art, and that he would help her. Ironically, you could say, maybe, Trudi began to open her eyes to a new world. She became a connoisseur, opening a gallery near the beach and redecorating her house to suit the paintings she became passionate about; there was a Lichtenstein in the hallway, a woman with surprised red lips, a Rothko above the fireplace, orange and brown. She had a side-line in ethnic art; kachina dolls and snake patterned Hopi bowls, rugs she bought on car trips to Apache reservations in Nevada. But as if making up for her decade of unhappiness, her real specialty was Mexican art, and her obsession became the lost Frida Kahlo.
         She had tried to find Bette, her young neighbor, but she had married and moved to Paris. Her parents had died and no one knew what had become of the painting. In Trudi’s mind, the painting she had given away in a moment grew and grew in its beauty and its value. At the end of every gallery tour or discussion of her collection, she would find a way to mention how of all her paintings, the one she loved the most was the one she lost.

        With each year in Los Angeles, Trudi became more focused on the country she had left, the language of her childhood which would never again be spoken by someone she knew then. When her son went to Harvard, he wore European shoes and silk ties. With his German/Spanish accented English, he seemed more like a foreign prince than an Angeleno, except of course, for his killer tennis. For the rest of her life, Trudi wore wool cardigans with silk buttons and served heavy, dense pastry in the middle of heatwaves.
         Then, one day, as Trudi tells the story, long after she had given up hope, when she was already an old woman with grandchildren, she rediscovered the taste of desire. She found her painting, unexpectedly and almost by accident.
         Trudi did not like to fly, but for her eldest grandson’s bar mitvah, she agreed to let her son pay for a first class ticket to New York. She brought a companion and she stayed in her son’s apartment, in a luxurious four poster bed which she complained was too tall for her. All the way through the visit, she did not refrain from commenting on the poor taste of the furnishings, the shallow opulence of the bar mitvah party, the appalling greed of her grandson. Finally, her son, who knew her only too well, grew impatient. On her last night, he arranged for her to come with him to a dinner party, hosted by one of the senior partners in his bank, and ignored Trudi’s hints that she was too tired to go out.
         Trudi went, fully prepared to make her son sorry he insisted. She complained in the taxi ride about the pain in her spine; she disparaged the officiousness of the doorman. But when they got to the apartment itself, there was nothing she could fault. The low-key warmth of the furnishings, the charm of the host and his wife, the conversation, all suited her. During dinner, she was placed next to a young grandson of the banker, a boy just out of college, with wild curly brown hair, on his way back to a project for the Peace Corps in Nepal. Normally, Trudi would have been merciless in her dissection of his ambitions, his idealism, but something about the way he asked her questions about her own life and listened to the answers flattered her. She found herself telling him the story of her Lost Frida Kahlo.
         The boy grew very excited.
         “My grandmother has a Frida Kahlo in her bedroom.” Trudi peered across the table at the woman sitting next to her host. Not her Bette. The flutter in her breast died, the way it had on every other occasion she had come across a Frida Kahlo painting in museums and collections. She could see the boy next to her was getting excited, and she did not want to crush his hopes. There was nothing else in the house to suggest she would find one here - nautical paintings, deep blue wall paper, antique table.
         “Tell me,” she said, “how she came to have such a rather unusual sort of painting?”
         His grandfather, the boy said, had been the child of a Dutch Jewish maid and the wealthy son of a family in Amsterdam who had employed her. He had grown up in that city, and had been a teenager when the Nazis invaded. His mother begged his father’s family to forgive the past and take him in; their son had died the year before and they softened toward the boy, who looked like his father. They adopted him on the condition he did not contact his mother, who agreed it might be dangerous. All through the war, he had been coddled and protected by the wealthy family. As soon as he turned 18, he tried to find his mother, but she had vanished. He came to New York and married an older woman, who was a refugee like he was.
         Everyone was drinking coffee, stirring crystal sticks of sugar into silver cups.
         “His first wife died,” the boy said, “before having any children. My grandmother was his second wife, and he often says she made him an American by giving him hope again.” Then, as if remembering the first subject of their conversation, he added, “The painting comes from the first wife, who brought it with her from Mexico.” Now Trudi put her hand on his arm.
         “Perhaps your grandfather would be kind enough to show it to me.”
         He interrupted the quiet to ask and as he explained, the rest of the dinner party was alerted to Trudi’s quest. The grandson offered to lead Trudi to his grandfather’s bedroom and everyone else followed at a respectful distance. On the way, Trudi thought of many things, including a fleeting wish that she were 19 herself again, her arm a pearly warmth, her breath a sweet invitation.
         It was her painting, of course. The whole party was electrified. The banker’s eyes filled with tears when he and Trudi talked about his first wife. The other guests left, and Trudi and her son were left in the living room, a rug spread over her knees, sitting next to a low ember from the fireplace. The young grandson slumped on the floor next to them, his head resting on the back of her chair, where her hand could have so easily reached down to caress his curls. The banker, who had drunk a lot of Sauterne, put his face next to hers and asked her if she would like to have the painting back.
         No, Trudi said, surprising everyone with the strength of her voice. She never knew afterwards if he had been serious in his offer, and always claimed to wonder why she had not pursued it. The next morning, she thanked her son for a nice visit and even kissed his wife. Both of them were so surprised they worried for weeks that she might actually be ill, calling her every day until she snapped on the phone and her son put the receiver down, relieved.

        After all that, none of us actually ever saw the famous painting. Trudi kept a poster of Frida in her kitchen, the photograph of her wearing jeans and one of her headscarves, leaning up against a wall, smoking a cigarette. I used to stare at the picture when I was growing up, even before I had read her biography, caught by the contrast between the practical, workman fade of the jeans and the whimsy of her hair and blouse, the softness of her beautiful cheeks and the hard glint in her eyes. Out of that portrait, out of what I later learned, I have fashioned my own Frida painting. In it, her face rises like a moon against an early evening sky. I have put a watermelon in a wash of blue, tiny teeth marks in its red flesh. In her house next door to the house of her famous philandering artist husband, the scent of turpentine and chiles mingles with the breeze wafting over an unmade bed, out of which rises one of her own lovers, male or female. Between the two houses and their marriages and remarriages lies a bridge of longing, a walkway marked by daily passages to share a bite of tamale, the revelation of a shade of green.

        Behind all of us, even the most hidden woman, lost behind the legends we weave for ourselves out of our sharp tongues and empty beds, or out of our sweaty skin and armies of lovers, is the same secret. We all know the feeling in the painting I have imagined for Trudi. It’s like standing on a lawn with a house full of lights, wanting to go into the warmth and mingle our voice with others and at the same time, wanting to walk out into the stars and dive into the sky

Read Catherine's poem-series
From a room as blue as the sea
as featured in A Journey