Inventing Memory (12 page)

"My anarchist friends flew free, but I received the gunshot wound in the groin that has marked the rest of my life—to which my comrades responded with anarchist slogans instead of sympathy.

"'At least you are unfit for the Czar's army now,' they said, 'and can devote yourself to the revolution.'

"When, months later, I had lost touch with the anarchists and I finally came to Paris with the
fussgeyers
, I was gravely ill with a systemic infection and lingered between life and death.
Tsum shtarbn darf men keyn luach
nit hobn
. You
fersteh?
For dying, you don't need a calendar.

"In Paris I would have starved and died, but for a girl called Marina on the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, whom I reminded of her Russian father. Or so she said. She made me the mascot of her
bordel
and cured me during the several months I stayed there, sketching the girls. It was a good
bordel
and the rooms had themes and the customers had a choice. In the cheapest houses they had none, and the girls were scarred or ill. These
bordels
or
maisons
or
bobinards
of Paris were full of traditions at that time. They were synagogues of sin. When, after a time, I was healed, I made my way to New York, arriving in the very year the century turned. By the time I met your mother, I was well established as a catalog artist and boss."

"What then? What then?"

"From the moment I met her, I knew she was the woman of my life, but since, because of my wounds, I could not possess her as a lover, I possessed her as a business partner. What I wanted was to control her life, and I achieved it.

"But I knew she was a flesh-and-blood woman and that our truce with the body was uneasy…. And then the anarchists came back to find me in America, and I drifted secretly into their orbit. Mama prospered as a society-portrait painter, thanks to her love-struck
goy
."

"What love-struck
goy
?"

"The one she met on the boat coming over—you must ask your mama. This is not my truth to tell." Here he broke down and began to sob. "If you are a man and not a man—how do you keep a wife who is a woman?"

I wanted to hear no more. My head ached. My eyes were starry as if I had been hit in the face.

"But I could have kept the crazy balance of our lives if only I had stayed clear of politics. Yes, I was jealous—though I had no right to be—and at the meetings I let it be known how important Mama's sitters were. After that they were all over me, prying secrets out of me, trying to use me for their ends. I meant not to, but I gave away too much—or maybe I wanted to hurt them both, Mama and her lover—"

"Her
what
?"

"Salome, you are not the first to have a lover."

"Papa!"

"I am not your papa—but I am your friend."

NOTEBOOK—UNDATED, 1932

There is no doubt I am going to leave Paris and make my way to Massachusetts. But when, I do not know. To tell the truth, I am scared of what I might discover. So I linger. "Only get desperate enough and everything will turn out all right," is Henry Miller's motto. I am becoming more desperate by the day.

[In 1932 the Depression hit bottom; hard times were at their hardest. Hoover
was President. He cut his own salary to give hope to the people—but it was
a matter of too little, too late. He appointed a woman, Mary Emma Woolley,
the president of Mount Holyoke College, to the Geneva disarmament conference
of the League of Nations. She was quoted in
Time
magazine as saying that
women wanted peace most fervently because "only a woman knows what a
man costs." Ed.]

NOTEBOOK—UNDATED, 1932

Val Miller has disappeared into his mad dash to write
Tropic of Cancer.
He writes as if his life depends on it, as if only pounding the keys of the typewriter (as if it were a mortal weapon) could save his life.

Paris grows dingier as the Depression deepens. Without the rich Americans to buoy things up, the desperation of bohemia shows its true face. Kiki de Montparnasse is swelling up like a Christmas pig—a pig with green eyeshadow and black mascara. And the girls of the Rue de Lappe look more diseased and sordid than ever. Brassaï wanders about with his camera, taking night pictures of all that is seediest about human nature. I feel like someone who has stayed too long at a beach resort when the cold weather comes, like someone who has overstayed her welcome at an orgy. It's time to go home.

But where
is
home? Home used to be Riverside Drive and Seventysecond Street, where my mother lives with my grandmother and my "friend"—formerly my papa—Levitsky. Like so many others of my generation, I feel I
can't
go home again. I don't even know where home
is
. So I close down my magazine and make my way to the country of my birth. Deliberately, I sail for Boston, not New York. (I am
that
afraid of seeing my mother again.) I have been in Paris almost three years.

5

Salome

TREE OF
LIFE IN THE
BERKSHIRES

1932-1941

A mother is always attached to her daughter but not so
a daughter to her mother.

—TALMUD

NOTEBOOK

November 1932

It is a bleary, chilly November when I arrive in Boston and head by train for Lenox, Massachusetts.

A gray sky and mist rising everywhere. Pockets of fog fill the valleys. Outside the ornate railroad station, built at the century's turn for the private railroad cars of robber barons, I find a taxi and ask the driver if he knows where Mr. Sim Coppley lives.

"Jump in, miss," he says. Then he loads my trunk, turns on his engine, and takes off over the rolling Berkshire hills. Where am I going? And why? I have three years' worth of Paris clothes and Paris memorabilia: manuscripts, rolled-up canvases, photographs. I have no idea where I belong.

On the train from Boston, I saw the face of the Depression in the shantytowns along the railroad tracks: hungry-eyed children wrapped in tattered blankets, women cooking on outdoor fires, men collecting sticks, rags, anything to warm body and keep soul from fleeing to a better place.

On the train, I also read—at last!—
Brave New World
. Oh, to be an Alpha and go to "feelies," wearing a "malthusian belt," to be generally "pneumatic" and dance to the music of the "sexophone." What a contrast between Huxley's deathless, childless, motherless utopia and the world outside the windows of the train! How strange to be in bleak America again after syncopated, sleepless Paris!

A long, curving driveway. Yew trees bending somberly at either side, their tops whipping in the wind. The house, once grand, has broken, boarded windows and a bedraggled air.

The driver helps unload my trunk and waits while I ring the bell. No answer. I ring again. Finally, dim footfalls. A dog barks. The door is opened by a sharp-faced middle-aged woman in a tattered red velvet dressing gown.

"I would like to see Mr. Coppley," I say.

"Why?" asks the woman rudely. "Mr. Coppley can't be seen." She starts to slam the door.

"Because I have come all the way from Paris and I believe he is my father," I say.

The door slams. Now what? I am trembling like those yew tops in the wind. How to get back to New York and my family?

I hear shuffling and faint noises inside. The sounds of argument. Eventually a tall, thin elderly-looking man with disappearing hair the color of weak tea opens the door. He looks at me quizzically, then intently. He grabs his heart.

"Salome! My little one!" he exclaims. And then he swoons and falls facedown, cutting his nose on the doorjamb.

"You see!" the woman says accusingly.

The driver, the woman, and I carry him up to his bedroom—a grand affair like the rest of this house meant to be staffed by hundreds and falling into disrepair for lack of maintenance. We lay out Mr. Coppley on the oaken bed. His eyelids flutter.

"What happened?" the apparition asks.

"You fell," I say.

"Suddenly I was queasy in my stomach, and after that I remember nothing. Is Sophia here?"

A thin red rivulet descends from his nose.

He reaches a bony finger up, feeling the warmth of the blood.

"What's this?" he asks.

"Apparently you still have blood if not your Sophia," says the woman tartly, applying a white linen handkerchief to stanch the flow.

"Can this be Salome?" he asks.

"It can be and is," I say.

"Oh, my dear," says Coppley. "You were a little, little girl with titian curls. I saw you between bars. In your mother's arms." And then he passes out again.

Mrs. Coppley, as I assume her to be, leaves my trunk on the verandah, dismisses the cabdriver, then addresses me. "Don't get the idea there's money in any mattresses, but let me offer you tea—even if you
are
an impostor! Titian curls, my ass. I guess you see what I'm up against, taking care of him!"

I follow this madwoman downstairs to the cavernous turn-of-the century kitchen, meant for flocks of servants but containing none, and we huddle at a small table near the fireplace, drinking tea out of earthenware cups and eating cake from a common plate. In the glassfronted cabinets are porcelain and crystal services for fifty, which tinkled softly as we passed them.

"How did you find us?" asks Mrs. Coppley.

"Luck," I say.

And then I tell her about Paris and the visit to Mrs. Wharton and the portrait.

"Edith was always a strange bird," says Mrs. Coppley. "A woman who stays in bed all morning, scribbling and having her maid collect the pages and bring them to her secretary. It's queer. And her books are queer. She's a bolshevik, I'll wager."

"It's queer enough just to write books—to separate yourself from the whole world so as to re-create the world in paper and ink," I declare.

"I don't know why anyone would do it," says Mrs. Coppley. "Do you?"

"Because it gives you back your life, calms your soul, bestows the ecstasy of understanding. And you hope it does the same for your readers."

"A strange obsession," said Mrs. Coppley. "But then so many of the things humans do are strange obsessions. My husband, for example, worries constantly about a book he never finished that he began in youth."

"What book?" I asked.

"Oh, some silly book about the silly Jews," said Mrs. Coppley. "
You
know, your chosen people—those troublemakers who think they're so damned smart. Without them, we'd have no income tax, no financial collapse, no Depression. They run
everything
for their own benefit—except that it never benefits
us
."

"Excuse me," I say and dash to the nearest bathroom, where I throw up my tea, the cake, and the remains of my lunch.

My so-called father is as welcoming as his wife is hostile. But he is frail. His legs are as thin as chopsticks. Sometimes I think I've come only to bury him.

Jail almost destroyed him. He was raised too delicately to survive its horrors.

"Thank God Lucretia waited for me," he says, referring to Mrs. Coppley. "What I would have done without her, I do not know."

He is grateful for her most grudging ministrations. Like a beaten dog, he is grateful to be stumbled over rather than intentionally kicked.

NOTEBOOK—UNDATED, 1932

What are so dead as the passions of the previous generation? My father—or so he declares himself to be—wants me to know all about his illicit obsession with my mother, but this is one of the things a daughter cannot hear. I listen but register little. Maybe I'm too young to want to see my parents that way. But he also tells me of a safe behind the Bordeaux in the wine cellar. Whatever is left of the Coppley legacy is there, he says. He wants me to memorize the combination. And never share it with a living soul. That will be simple as long as I stay in this house of the dead. I think constantly of Mama and Papa, and I long to contact them, but I feel so disloyal for having sought out my mother's secret life that I'm afraid to. I consider myself a traitor, and staying here is my punishment.

The Coppleys have been buried in a pie-shaped plot for the last two hundred years. They had names like Ebenezer, Ezekiel, Anna, Edwina, and Hermione. They look down on the Housatonic River from their granite graves. Snow falls early here and the ground freezes, and anyone who has the ill luck to die in midwinter waits for the ground to thaw in order to be buried.

I spend a lot of time in the cemetery, staring at the Coppley graves, trying to understand what strange destiny brought me here.

You'd think a cemetery would be an unlikely place to find a lover, but that is where I first met Ethan.

"Looking for anyone?" he asked.

His eyes are gold, his body slight and slim and muscular. The snow seems to melt around him because of his warmth.

"Want to meet my mother?" (This from him.)

He leads me to a grave marked with a stone that says SARAH FORRESTER LYLE, 1881-1932, identifying her only as "beloved mother." She was interred last summer, he tells me.

"My mother is called Sarah too," I say.

"Fancy that," says Ethan. "I knew we had something in common." He looks at me pruriently, as if he had just given me a good fuck—as Henry would say. He is the sort of man who takes possession with his eyes.

Ethan is supposedly the groom, but because most of the horses have been sold off, he does everything from chopping wood to odd jobs around the house. In better weather, he landscapes. He's the life of the old place, makes it run. From the moment I bump into him, I abandon indefinitely the idea of going back to Paris—or New York.

His mother was Sim Coppley's mother's housekeeper. My grandmother's housekeeper—though I can't think of a woman I have never known as
grandmother
. My real grandmother speaks mostly Yiddish and Russian and is inclined to spout paradoxes and proverbs in Yiddish.

"My mother told me it was once
splendid
here," said Ethan. "But then Mr. Sim went to jail and times changed and the Crash came and their banker jumped out the window and the banks all closed. But I know there must be something of the old fortune left, or
she
wouldn't bother. She's not the type to bother." Ethan had a swamp Yankee accent, and he looked good in overalls. He seemed like the sort of man who wouldn't take no for an answer. His eyes were wild.

"Who?"

"You know—Mrs. Coppley. That harpy. My mother was sure she was poisoning him. Slowly, I mean. I shouldn't tell you all this."

"Tell me," I say. "It's waking me up, and so are you. You're very good news."

"And you," he says. "You're a fire on a rainy night, hot biscuits on a winter morning, brandy to an avalanche victim…. Watch out for
her.
There's nothing she won't do."

From the moment I met Ethan, I found I couldn't think about him without a tumult in my belly. I would lie in bed at night, dreaming of going down to his apartment over the stables, appearing, as if in his dream, and making love to him: his wiry little body, his muscular rump, his arms with the hard, lean muscles. I fought the attraction, but I knew it was just a matter of time. One always knows it. There's that mist in the air when one meets someone who gives off matching molecules. Besides, Ethan has that wildness I like in men, that smoldering deviltake-the-hindmost air. He is unafraid. I like men who are unafraid.

But Lucretia is watching us. Each of us is a threat to her power. And together we are a bigger threat. A man and woman together can do anything. God knew that when he dictated the Bible.

(What shall I call Ethan in the new novel? He reminds me of Mellors the gamekeeper!) In the apartment over the stables, we melt the snow and ice. Ethan sucks the honey out of my hive and I drain him to the dregs. He kneels on the bed above me, his cock ready to plunge and his eyes soft. Hell may gape, heaven may be proved mere myth, but I have to have him.

Ethan is teaching me self-sufficiency—how to chop wood, fix the roof, do simple carpentry. He is teaching me how to ride, how to hunt deer with bow and arrow. He is making an independent woman of me.

Meanwhile, Sim gets weaker. He sits in his bed, trying to finish his old book about the Jews, but he is mostly too frail to write. And the book is out of date. He knows it. He has lived his book, not written it. He is not happy about the way his life has turned out, and his life force seems to be ebbing away. He looks as if someone has emptied him with a straw and the skin and muscle have collapsed around the bone.

Being around old people makes the time go slowly. Ethan is my antidote. But when I am in the big, dilapidated house, with most of the rooms boarded up, I think I'll die of boredom. I spend as much time as I can quizzing my supposed father about his past. But his memories break down into set pieces, and he seems to tell the same story again and again. How he met my mother on the boat, the obstacles to their affair, his family's disapproval. It is as if he made it all up long ago, locked it in his brain, and never revised it. He needs to repeat it again and again simply to prove he is still alive.

"Promise you will write my story," he says.

And I promise. But how can we
ever
write another's story? What we write is always some version of our
own
story, using other characters to illustrate the parables of our lives. I make furious notes, to please him and because I hope I may someday know what to do with them.

"We might as well be allies," Lucretia says to me. "We will be saddled with the responsibility of cleaning house together, so we might as well agree now," she says.

"Agree on what?" I ask.

"Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about," Lucretia says.

How do people die?

First the organs go, then the blood, the bone, the will, and finally the breath. The heart is the last to stop. The heart beats like a crazed clock when everything else is gone. Yet the will is the most important part—excuse the pun. Sim has apparently always been asthmatic, but before he also
wanted
to breathe. However low he sank, he intended to return. Now he fades in and out of consciousness and finds it sweet. He is more than half in love with easeful death.

"I don't know why I'm here," he says. "I let go a long time ago. There must be a reason I remained."

"To meet me," I say.

"Of course." And then the wheezing begins, the sound of death in the lungs, rattling the cage of life. He calls out for someone I've never heard of. Neither has Lucretia.

"Margery! Margery—help me! Make them stop! Make it stop! Help!"

"Who is Margery?" I ask Lucretia.

"How should I know?" Lucretia says. "His nurse, maybe. He's back in the nursery."

Lucretia sits doing her family's coat of arms in needlepoint, pushing the sharp silver needle in and out. I feel utterly helpless.

"
Please
don't die," I say to Sim, "until I have learned how to live. I'm not ready to be an orphan yet."