Inventing Memory (14 page)

Lovingly, S.

P.S. I find myself more and more meditating on the fate of the Jews in
Europe, which could be our fate. Aaron has told me of horrors which no one
here wants to know about. I have written the following poem, which I want
to dedicate to you, Papa of my heart.

THE GOD OF THE CHIMNEYS

For what angry God

arching backward over the world,

his anus spitting

fire, the fetid breath of his mouth

propelling blood-colored clouds,

his navel full of burnt pitch and singed feathers

have we given

our eyes, our teeth

our eyeglasses, bales of our hair,

and the magic of our worthless gold?

For what angry God,

who tested Job,

and Abraham,

Moses, Esther, Judith

and the severed head of Holofernes—

for what atonement do we walk

again and again

into the fire?

Invited

with our industry, our instruments—

bookbinding, goldhammering, silversmithing—

given a ghetto, gold stars, curfews,

after some centuries,

we burst its seams

with our children and riches….

Then we are invited

into the ovens to die,

leaving our gold molars behind.

Who are the Jews after all—

but a people without whom

we would have to confront

the void in our own echoing hearts?

The symbol

of our phoenix yearning

to rise on the ashes of death?

People of the dream,
moving through history's

insomnia,

people who can't sleep.

6

Salome

EMBLEMS OF
ETERNITY

The Jew is an emblem of eternity.

—TOLSTOY

LETTER FROM SALOME LEVITSKY TO SARAH LEVITSKY

Lenox

28 March 1948

Dearest Mama,

What to tell you after all these years of silence? That I admire you?
That I love you more than words can express? That I know now all the
things you did for me? That I am a mother now and understand
everything? That I am ashamed of how long it took me to understand?

My little one was born two days ago in Pittsfield. Aaron and I do
nothing but stare at her in utter amazement. Where did she come from?
Surely she cannot have come out of my body. She looks like you….

The school we started is going well. We have staffed it mainly with
"displaced persons," refugees from Hitler, survivors of the horrors of
Europe. The stories they tell!

Most are the sole survivors of all their kin—siblings, cousins, not to
mention parents and grandparents.

How can you and I be separated when such horrors go on in the
world?

Tell me, how is your work going in California? Papa says you are
the toast of Hollywood and that every movie star has to have a portrait
by you. Nobody deserves this success more.

Why didn't you tell me how remarkable babies are and how they
change your views of everything? Sally is sunshine itself…for the first
time, I feel my life is whole.

But I am so afraid I might do something wrong. When she coughs,
I am afraid she is choking. When she sleeps soundly, I am afraid she will
never wake up.

I have only one wish: that you should know her and know her father—a remarkable man, made more remarkable by the things he has endured.

All my love,

Salome

1 April 1948

Dearest Salome,

Of course when I didn't hear from you directly for what seemed like
an eternity, I knew you were in a rage at me for my lie, and there was a
part of me that sympathized. I worried about you and wondered.

But as my mama used to say: "The whole world is one town"—so
news of you drifted back
. A Bad Girl in Paris
was rubbed under my
nose not only by Levitsky but also by my brother Lee and various smartaleck "friends" who carried it home from Paris or even found it under
the counter at the Gotham Book Mart in New York. Another of my
mama's pessimistic proverbs goes: "A mother is always attached to a
daughter, but not necessarily vice versa." I never stopped writing to
you, but I could not always bring myself to
send
the letters. By the time
I gathered courage enough to mail them to Paris, you were no longer
there.

I was never really angry at you. You were warming up for the great
things you would eventually write—like that poem you sent Papa, which
I have been carrying back and forth to California all these years. It is almost in tatters. I will not recount how fearful we were for your welfare
at times, how we worried. All that is over now.

As you know, my fortunes improved and so did Levitsky's. A Hollywood actress—Loretta Young—whose portrait I'd painted (under one
of my aliases) sought me out and made me her pet artist. At the height
of the Depression, here I was doing movie posters and portraits and
making a fortune—or it seemed like a fortune to me.

Of course you know that Levitsky's new gallery finally hit. The
paintings by the Jewish artists in Paris found a ready market with the
Broadway and Hollywood
alter cockers
who, like Levitsky himself, want
to
own
art especially if they can't create it! It gives them the feeling of
being artists even though they are parasites.

God is the true artist—and what glory he created with California!
California is full of orange groves, smudge pots, dusty canyons. Whales
frolic in the waters near Catalina. It is really the West—the land of impossible dreams. Levitsky and I go out on the train with our pockets full
of nothing but talent and ambition and come home heavy with Hollywood
gold!

Dotty Parker says that Hollywood money melts in the hand like snow.
Only if you dissolve it in booze, I think. The danger is staying out here
and starting to live like the moguls. Then nothing is ever enough. But
our needs are not so great. We still remember how to save string.

Levitsky is a pessimist, and he is always afraid that a new Ivan the
Terrible will take over America, so he saves like a Russian peasant. Or
do I mean a French peasant? I think the Russian peasants mostly drank
vodka! Now he worries about some committee in Washington. Always
something.

"Shrouds have no pockets," Mama would say. How I miss her! I seem
to quote her more now that she's gone.

I cannot wait to see my granddaughter! Blessings on you all!

Your Mama, who loves you more than her life,

Sarah

[Salome's mother, the first Sarah, always signed her name with a bold flourish,
in an old-fashioned European hand. She made her S with an almost eighteenthcentury largesse. As the years passed, her letters became bigger. At the end,
they trembled like her hands. But they were always as bold as she was. Ed.]

NOTEBOOK

1 September 1948

Aaron is working on his memoir. He is in despair most of the time. He says that no words can possibly convey what he witnessed and that in attempting to write of the horror, he experiences it all over again. He seems to feel guilty rather than happy about the baby. Just at the time he should be celebrating life, he is still in the grip of death.

I tell him: "Just tell the story straight. It does not have to be the most literary—it only has to be true to the feelings of human beings." I try to encourage him with what I learned in Paris from Henry:
Life, not literature,
matters most
. He gets angry at me and says: "How can you possibly understand?" But I feel I
do
understand. Often I think he is trying to destroy our happiness because he is so guilty about all the people who died when he did not.

"Don't you understand?" he shouts. "We who survived were the worst and those who died were usually the
best
among us! It was a death factory. Only the broken, imperfect, insensitive ones were cast aside and did not make it to the ovens!"

The first chapter he wrote was called "The Boy with Too Many Coats." An astonishing description of a boy piling coats in the forest. Only at the very end do you understand that the wearers of the coats have all been methodically murdered, that the drumming in the boy's ears is the sound of machine guns.

But Aaron was not happy with it, and he burned the chapter.

"How can I make embroidery with words when they are
dead
?" he shouted.

I tried to comfort him, saying that being a witness was the worthiest goal, that to a Jew especially, words were life-giving things, living things, that we all die eventually and that if no one tells our tale we are doubly dead. I urged him to consider his memoir a
Kaddish
, a hymn to life sung over all those graves. "Stories endure but flesh does not," I said.

Funny I should say this when I have largely given up my own writing to nurture him and the baby—but I deeply believe it. And I feel betrayed by his burning the chapter, because it seems a slap in my face. I also loved it, and I rocked the baby so he could write.

How did the story begin? "The boy was piling coats in the forest. Every time he saw one he fancied, he pulled it on over his own—until he was wearing a half-dozen coats and with them, it seemed, the souls of the people to whom they had belonged…. After a time, the weight of these souls was so heavy that he could barely move…."

Everything written is only a pale approximation of the vivid specters in the mind. If we stopped communicating because of such disappointment with our own poor productions, we would have long since fallen silent….

"Are the dead more honored by silence?" I ask Aaron. He puts his head down on the desk and covers it with his hands.

When at last he looks up, he says: "Do you know that whenever I get dressed in the morning, I panic, looking for my patch with the Star of David on it? Then I remember I'm in America—the land of the free, the home of the brave." He laughs bitterly.

"So I suppose I should throw Sally in a pit because of all the Jewish mothers who lost their babies!" I scream. "But I
won't
let death win, and neither should you! Everything that has been done in this world has been done because of
hope
! How dare you give up hope? How dare you do that to our daughter?"

So it goes. But you cannot argue someone out of despair. Aaron goes so deeply into despair that some mornings I see him sit at the edge of the bed staring at his shoes, wondering whether it is worthwhile to put them on. He is dragging me down into despair with him. Once, I screamed at him: "You might as well have been shot!" Then I groveled on my knees and apologized. But in my secret heart I am starting to believe that the Nazis killed his soul. It just took the birth of Sally for the murder to emerge.

NOTEBOOK

In New York

18 October 1948

Have taken the baby and gone home to see Mama, who is briefly back from California. Mama and Papa have bought a rather grand town house on Fifty-sixth between Fifth and Sixth, where they have the Levitsky Gallery and a pied-à-terre for themselves. "All deductible" as Papa says. "Uncle pays."

"I see you're saving string," I said. Nobody laughed.

The whole place is white, with shoji screens and pickled floors and all those wonderful paintings everywhere. Mama and I fell into each other's arms and wept. She insisted on kissing the baby nine times for luck, until Sally began to fuss.

I wanted to talk to Mama—there were so many things I wanted to ask her—but the first night there was a huge cocktail party in my honor, with everyone famous there—from Gypsy Rose Lee to Tennessee Williams to Leonard Lyons—and the second night I'd planned a secret dinner with Uncle Lee and Aunt Sylvia (Mama doesn't speak to them, blames them for my Paris period and a lot else). And then Mama had a portrait to do, of course, and she had a sitter in her white studio—some socialite named (can you believe it?) Babe. And before long our time together was almost up and we had hardly talked.

How I've dreamed of really
talking
to Mama—and how impossible it is when we're together. Why is communication so difficult between the generations? Will Sally and I be the same? Perhaps it is easier when several generations are skipped. Maybe if my grandmother had spoken English and had not been a greenhorn, I might have really known her. As it is, all I remember is the smell of old Persian lamb—which I thought of as the smell of Russia—and some cologne that smelled old-fashionedly of lavender. Whenever I smell Yardley's English Lavender, my old Nana appears.

Went to see Theda, who lives in Great Neck and has three maids, a chauffeur, and a butler—not to mention three children and a husband who has made a fortune in Brooklyn real estate…in the very neighborhoods she would never again live in.

"What happened to that copy of
Lady Chatterley's Lover
," she asked. "I understand now it's a collector's item,
takeh
."

"Your husband forbade it," I said.

"You're kidding!"

She had forgotten the whole story, and now she blamed me. It was clear she was jealous of my life—Paris, underground success, my small fame as a denizen of the Left Bank in
les années folles.

Oh, how the rich want fame and the famous want riches! Is that a rule of life?

Theda does not seem happy at all. She is fat, claims her husband has a mistress, and takes all kinds of pills for her "nerves." She is seeing a fat psychiatrist who practices in Greenwich Village. She even wanted me to meet her, for advice about my dismal marriage.

"She saved my life," Theda says.

"How?"

"Well, when I was feeling sick at heart about Artie's affairs, his never coming home, she showed me her
pushke—"

"Her what?"

"You know—a box for donations."

"So?"

"So every time I had an orgasm with another man, I was to put a dollar in the
pushke
. This was to show me that I could still be attractive to men. And it worked! Dr. Magid and I have quite a stash—and it's our little secret. She is so pleased for me every time I put another dollar in the box. It's really helped me get over my sexual inhibitions."

I tried to digest this. (When I first knew her, Theda never had sexual inhibitions.)

"Well, once a flapper, always a flapper," I said diplomatically.

Would I have been happier had I made a conventional marriage? I would be just as miserable as Theda, no doubt. (Theda wears makeup to bed, by the way, because Dr. Magid suggested it, and she gets up at four to reapply it before her husband wakes up.)

Oh, yes—I nearly forgot to report that when she and the good doctor have enough money in their
pushke
, they are going to buy Theda some really fabulous sexy present—a silk peignoir, perhaps. Am I crazy, or is it the world?