City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [78]
Once, when we were being punted along, a young man ran along the fondamenta for five minutes shouting, “Principessa! Principessa!” She dimly nodded toward him. “I think he’s a man who used to work for me in the kitchen.” When I asked her why he called her a princess, she said, “They like titles and are disappointed if one doesn’t have one.”
Peggy was always patting the back of her right hand with her left. When I asked her why, she said that she had rheumatism and doing this was the only thing that made it feel better.
Sometimes we’d eat a meager, uninspired meal in her dining room, surrounded by major paintings. It might be a lackluster chicken broth and then pasta in a tomato sauce followed by fruit. John Hohnsbeen had told us that Peggy would count the apples in the pantry every day to make sure the servants weren’t eating more than one each. Conversation was tough sledding, though David was up to any demand and was always lavishing on Peggy his best gossip. She would look wide-eyed at him and say in foghorn tones, “How very amusing.” Or she’d say, “That’s outrageous, I love it.” Of course, Peggy never actually sounded either amused or outraged about anything whatsoever. She’d merely been saying these same words for half a century.
I once asked her where she’d picked up her strange accent with its hooty vowels, and its bored falling intonations so in contrast to her antiquated adolescent vocabulary of excitement: “How positively thrilling,” she trilled as a dismissive aside. In reply to my impertinent question she explained, “I went to a girls’ school, the Jacoby School, on West Seventy-second Street, which was for rich Jewish girls. We weren’t admitted to any gentile private schools and there weren’t very many of us. But we were very close and we invented this way of talking and so we all spoke this way.”
Often we’d take her out to dinner at some local restaurant where she could walk with the babies. She had weak ankles but still had good legs, which she showed off with short skirts and sandals.
She never talked about her feelings or her thoughts, though surely she’d had some, enough to write a funny, insolent autobiography, Out of This Century, in which she said that the day the Nazis marched into Paris she marched into Fernand Léger’s studio and bought a 1919 painting for just three thousand dollars. She had a funny, mashed-in nose, and as a young woman had gone for a nose job to get rid of her large “hook.” The doctor, however, had botched it, and Peggy had decided not to try it again. She accepted her potato nose with typical fatalism.
We felt that we were living with an extinct volcano, someone who’d been so often aroused and then damped down that she’d been left confused and indifferent. Peggy knew everything about Venice and enjoyed showing us strange facades, memorable little churches. She’d moved there right after the war, when she’d bought her palace for a song. It had just one floor above ground (it had never been finished) and had belonged to the Marchesa Luisa Casati, an art nouveau vamp who’d prowled the terraces with her leashed cheetahs and live snakes. Peggy had filled it with art, then decided to turn it into a museum, where she sometimes sat at the entrance and sold catalogs and tickets. She told us that once a woman asked her if Peggy Guggenheim was still alive and Peggy had said no. As she told us this story, she patted her hand, which unintentionally gave the effect of her reprimanding herself. Out front of the palazzo on the water side she’d installed an equestrian statue of a nude man by Marino Marini. The artist had given the horseman an erect penis that Peggy could unscrew when the cardinal came