Author: Stephanie Hammer
My maternal grandparents were Romanovs – distant relatives of the notorious Czar, and they brought to America and to New York City an aristocratic love for gift giving that they passed on to my mother, to my father, and to me.We gave each other presents with startling frequency, my parents, my grandparents and I. This was one of the few arenas where my mother could join forces with her mother and father without embarrassment or regret over their Old World ways. Barbe Tirtov Romanov Hammer led the vanguard of gift giving with no hesitation and with a painstaking attention to detail that was the subject of everyone’s admiration. “Your mother certainly knows how to select a gift,” my grandmother, Princess Stephanya Romanov would say, after the two of them had spent several hours in pearls and gloves, deliberating over scents at the perfume counter in Bloomingdale’s. “Barbe has stupendous taste,” my impossibly autocratic grandfather Prince Vladimir Romanov admitted, as he eyed his new paisley wool scarf. My father, who was not a Romanov at all, would just say, “Damn – she’s fabulous,” when my mother presented him with argyle socks in a perfect blend of colors. Leonard Hammer came from a grim, Lutheran Norwegian family in Seattle. Consequently, he took to gift-giving with an evangelical fervor, and actually out-bought everyone in his wife’s White Russian family, and outclassed them with this fondness for elaborately wrapped boxes from Tiffany, Brooks Brothers, and Saks Fifth Avenue. A son of a plumber who became a prince, Leonard Hammer amazed with his sense of the beautiful and the minutely extravagant.We exchanged presents all the time – not just at the ubiquitous Christmas which was indeed an orgy of paper, tissue, and ribbons – but on Easter, Valentine’s Day, Groundhog Day, Saint Patrick’s Day, and any anniversary of any family event we could think of, including half-birthdays, pet birthdays (entirely made up), and holidays celebrated in either Russia or Scandinavia. We gave each other presents when one of us came home from a trip, or when one or more of us went away. And, we didn’t just purchase: we crafted, crocheted, and sewed. My grandfather was a dress designer, he made us clothes and scarves. My grandmother had been a ballet dancer and was still a talented musician; she played us songs and knitted up a storm. My mother got us amazing books for free from the publishing house where she worked, and my dad took us to see movie screenings in the skyscraper where he labored from some big movie company. Of course there was the shopping as well: we gave each other hankerchieves, cologne, change purses, scarves, key rings, wallets and of course – since 3 of us were female – pocketbooks.My grandfather in particular loved evening bags and purchased them relentlessly until the day he died (which was Valentine’s Day, and even as we wept for him, we exchanged lacey cupids, and bottles of perfume). Years later, after we scattered my mother’s ashes, my husband, Larry, my daughter, Lillian, and I went back to the tiny apartment on 75th Street grief-stricken, only to discover a treasure-trove of hand-bags lurking in my mom’s overstuffed Manhattan closets. In them, we found more than 25 boxes of evening purses, wrapped carefully in tissue: beaded, metallic, with metal chain straps, patent leather handles, clutches, big and small, elegant and silly. My daughter and I each chose 2 purses, and we brought them home in their elegant boxes. My friend Idee took 2, and so did my friend Christie. I liked that these pocketbooks would be disseminated, and that somehow the eccentric love behind them would spread out and be shared.These days we live in a world where the present has become a subject of embarrassment, viewed with suspicion. What do you really want from me, say the dilated pupils of the designated recipient, while the giver hops on one leg and then the other, uncertain of his or her agenda. The French poststructuralist philosopher, Jacques Derrida wrote about the gift as a problem, as a thing that was never, ever free, a trick that inaugurates eternal, ambiguous obligation. Perhaps Derrida felt driven to deconstruct the gift, because he never really got one, or at least, never got a present he liked. I can’t say for certain, but I have my suspicions. I met him once, at a dinner with university colleagues, and he was urbane and brilliant, but he seemed rather sad. Now, if M. Derrida had come to my grandparents’ house on 64th Street, he would have been greeted by a poodle, a Pekinese and a Russian wolfhound, and swept upstairs to hear my grandmother play the piano. At my parents’ apartment, he would have been given cocktails and dinner. And if he’d come for Christmas, he would have received a gift. He was Jewish of course, but many of our friends were and are. We would have spoken French with him, and I think he would have felt at home.Perhaps he would have written differently about the gift had he visited me and my Romanovs and my plumber-prince dad, Leonard.Thinking about Derrida visiting my family, I rediscover as I write, my giddy pleasure at the sight of wrapped packages -- my delight at giving and receiving. I reveal my secret knowledge: that the world is a cornucopia. Life can be abundant. Rich. My Romanovs knew this, and whenever I open this elegant box of memory, I hear the rustling of the tissue paper, and inhale some delicate scent , as my heart pounds quickly in anticipation of a mysterious, and always deeply astonishing bestowal. An act of giving that is without obligation, shimmering with the preciousness of an unlooked for grace.
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