A glass of red and a Craven ‘A’
Karen von Hahn remembers her mother in book What Remains
In her new book, What Remains, Toronto Star columnist Karen von Hahn shares vivid recollections of her mother. She tells the tale through objects her mother, the late interior designer Susan Young, cherished the most: a mirror, satin sofas, an address book — and the strand of pearls that von Hahn later inherited. In this excerpt, von Hahn explains their significance.
The story of how my mother, who emerged Venuslike to the amazement and admiration of her smalltown Ontario family in 1939, managed to land such a prize set was one of the pearls she might pull out at parties. With a glass of red in one hand and a Craven “A” dripping its ash in the other, she would grab at the creamy strand dangling just beneath the deep V of her silk blouse, arch her dark brows dramatically, lower her lids till her eyes were half-closed like a psychic in a trance leading a séance and offer, as if she were sharing a closely guarded secret amongst the world’s top gemologists: “You know, pearls as good as these no longer even exist.”
Gripping at your wrist to ensure your continued attention, she would go on: “These used to belong to the woman who ran that European jewellery store. You know her, the one with the terrific taste. She wouldn’t even consider selling them to us because they were so absolutely perfect. But of course, Perce went back to the store afterwards, and the woman wasn’t there, so her own husband, who I always thought was a bit of a suspicious character — I think he had a gambling problem, she was the one who really ran that business — pulled them out from under the counter and sold them to Perce while his poor wife was out at lunch!”
Perce would be my father, the princely youngest child of Russian Jewish émigrés so fancifully named by his two much older Europeanborn sisters that he was forever after misidentified by others as Percy or Pierce. But no, a beautiful alien from another planet entirely, he came with a name invented just for him. In some unconscious way, I always imagined Perce stood for “persistence” because, even before everything went haywire inside his perfectly square-jawed head, that was his most marked quality, and thus the point of many of my mother’s best stories.
My mother had a similar yarn about the fabulous old house my parents lived in for many years — a graceful Palladian villa in the highly established Rosedale neighbourhood of Toronto. My husband and I were married there in a grand, black-tie party for two hundred and fifty of our nearest and dearest on a recordbreakingly sweltering summer night in a record-breaking July heat wave. Everyone drank so much, the next morning the place looked like a frat house. One of the beautifully panelled interior doors had been broken down with an axe to free a trapped and panicking guest from an upstairs bathroom (we have the pictures, of my father and brother, stripped to the waist in their tuxedos like a pair of axe-toting dancers from Chippendales). And random eggplants from the Tuscan-themed tabletop arrangements (what can I say, it was the ’80s) were strewn all over the lawn.
My mother, naturally, took over the planning of this world-historic event, along with her gay pal Van (a lovely man, a florist with a Roman background who grew up in Niagara Falls and used to make us fried artichokes alla Romana before he died, too young, of HIV/AIDS). So over the top were the results of this signature Susan Young production that she complained bitterly for years afterward that none of the guests even noticed the frozen vodka caviar station melting under the chandelier in the dining room. “All that beautiful caviar, and it was eaten by the band!”
The house, which was white, had Palladian windows and overlooked a park. It was the kind of house that would prompt interior decorators like my mother to talk admiringly about its “bones.” The story was that it had been built in the ’20s and six decades later, it was still inhabited by its original owner. When my parents drove by one day and knocked on the door to inquire whether she might ever consider selling it, the elderly woman who answered the door told them that the house had been built for her by her parents as a wedding gift, and she would have to be dragged out the front door in a coffin before it was to be sold.
“And a week later, she died!” my mother would laugh, banging a nearby tabletop or unprotected upper arm with one of her pavé diamond Liberace rings for emphasis.
Yes, my mother was a gay icon.
But no, a beautiful alien from another planet, my father came with a name invented just for him
Excerpted from What Remains: Object Lessons in Love and Loss copyright © 2017, by Karen von Hahn. Reprinted by permission of House of Anansi Press Inc., Toronto. houseofanansi.com