Free L.A.WOMAN by Eve Babitz Page A

mother and father hadbecome one of the most gorgeous couples ever established here on earth even in Hollywood.
    My father’s black wavy hair was getting gray and movie-star-distinguished and he wore tweeds and those loose men’s pants they were still wearing—even Elvis Presley himself, during those first few years of Ed Sullivan when he was supposed to be too sexy for the folks to see down past his waist on TV. By this time my father was never without his violin in his left hand and his bow in his right—not ever. For in spite of the fact that most studio musicians like him were only required to work a few days a week, my father’s obsession with Bach’s six violin solos had taken hold never to fall by the wayside like most people’s obsessions eventually do. In his determination to play Bach exactly as Bach himself might have expected his music played, my father began altering his Stainer violin (the other very finest make besides Stradivariuses still extant), paring off the improvements added over the centuries by people who couldn’t play Beethoven on an instrument with a neck as short as it was in Bach’s day for chamber music and a bow outwardly curved so you couldn’t hear except in a chamber—and not the Hollywood Bowl. Yet in spite of how obvious it was that if you’re going to play Bach, you better start on the instrument he wrote his music for, my father was never accepted at anyplace in America (except Harvard for some reason) because he didn’t have a Ph.D. in musicology—even though people who had Ph.D.’s usually didn’t play an instrument anyway so how in the hell could they know that it made a difference to the music. But in Europe they believed him even though he was a Hollywood studio musician and the research he did at the Bach libraries in Marburg and Tübingen in Germany (which he started in 1932 in Berlin at the library there too) was okay by them. Even if they thought he was crazy at UCLA.
    (No wonder I grew up hating that place so much.)
    In a photograph in which my mother was over forty, she sits at the outer edge of a gathering of Jewish relatives all huddled in someone’s backyard. Three generations of squinting Russian exiles glare into the camera under the noonday sun and everyone is faded, hopeless, listless, and crabby-looking and either they are bulging or they are shrunken, clutching at something. Except that there sits my mother, her face looking away to the side, her neck so swanlike and her face so joyful, girlish, and tenderhearted and her expression so intelligent and gallant, that it’s still a mystery to anyone who sees that photograph today how she came to be there.
    â€œYour mother is a saint” is what everybody has told me since I was two.
    â€œYour mother is an exceptional woman, a true angel, a beautiful truly marvelous woman, you are lucky to have a mother like that. Do you know how lucky you are?” they say.
    â€œYes,” they say, “a true saint.”
    â€œYour mother . . . ,” they sigh.
    â€œYes,” I sigh back.
    â€œWhat a lucky man he is, your father,” they say.
    â€œHe is, all right,” I say.
    â€œOh, if only my mother had been like Eugenia,” they also say a lot.
    â€œYeah,” I say, knowing what always comes next.
    â€œMy mother, boy, now she was a monster! A beast! She used to hold my head under water and try and drown me in the bathtub when nobody was home. Can you imagine your own mother like that, trying to kill you? Your own mother?”
    â€œMy mother?” I gasp. “All my mother ever did when she got mad—”
    â€œYour mother got mad?”
    â€œAll she ever did to me once she started talking in her Southern accent and calling me ‘a little piece of shit on a stick’ was to—”
    â€œYour mother? What accent?”
    â€œâ€”was to slam me up the side of my head and knock me clear