Inventing Memory (15 page)

Mama tells me that a
schnorrer—
one of her favorite words—named Ethan Lyle approached her in California, claiming to be a "close personal friend" of mine. He had become a "business manager" to celebrities, and he wanted to make a deal with her: he would bring his clients to have their portraits done, if she would cut him in for half the fee. Mama was outraged.

"In the first place, young man, I have
more
clients than I can paint, and in the second place, I don't pay
schnorrers
to bring me sitters. As George Bernard Shaw said,
you
may be interested in art, but I'm only interested in money."

"How did he look?" I asked, feeling the old throb in the belly his name always evoked.

"Like a snake," said Mama, "in moccasins." She paused for humorous emphasis. "With a suntan."

We laughed and laughed. And hugged.

There was no way to talk about Aaron's depression. Somehow I felt it was disloyal to share all that with Mama.

Papa said: "If you're not happy, you can always come home. To mine opinion, unhappiness is the only sin." He knew.

"I have a school to run, you know." Too proud to accept help.

But standing there in the familiar smell of Mama's turpentine forest—so different from Aaron's forest of many-colored coats—I suddenly said to Mama: "What was it like when you were young?"

"They had spittoons everywhere and telephones that cranked—but the griefs and heartbreaks were the same. Always the same: when things go wrong, they blame the Jews," Mama said.

"You should tell your story, Mama," I said. "If not for me, then for your granddaughter."

"I'm too busy making a living," Mama said, "but when I have a greatgranddaughter…maybe by then I'll have the time."

"I'll hold you to that promise, Mama," I said.

"Promise, schmomise…
You're
the writer in the family, Salome—you should be writing, not waiting for a man to do it. Men are weak. Wait for men to get strong, and you wait forever: that's the truth of it."

So I had my message from Mama at the end. I am finishing this journal entry four days later on the train back to Lenox. Her words are ringing in my ears.

Mama may be more intimate in letters than in life, but if you wait long enough she always delivers.

"Ach," said Papa, "still a follower of Emma Goldman."

NOTEBOOK

Lenox

November 1948

Often I think I fell in love not with Aaron but with his heroic history. After Val Miller, all those lost boys in Paris, after lost Ethan, Aaron's martyrdom seemed
important
. I wanted to love something important. I wanted to love something Jewish. Now I do: Sally.

Aaron seems like a big, cranky baby—writing and burning, writing and burning. I'm supposed to fetch his manuscripts out of the fire—aren't I? But I don't care anymore. He seems so self-indulgent. There is something about the immediacy of a child that makes everything else seem like vanity.

The difference between writing a notebook and a novel: With a novel, you describe people; with a notebook, you assume that the reader—your self?—already
knows
. Aaron has reddish hair and a reddish beard. His skin is pale and freckled. His front teeth are large, and one is misshapen. When I loved him—or loved his history—I found this irregularity beautiful. Now I'm not so sure. He can be terribly droll, but in his depression, he falls silent a lot. His cock—which I have not seen for ages—used to be large. Who knows if it even exists anymore?

NOTEBOOK

November 1948

My guilt at walking on this earth as a Jew (when Jewish children had so lately been marched into ovens) made me cling to Aaron past the point where there was anyone to cling to.

I see that I talk about our love in the past tense. This terrifies me. No. It doesn't terrify me enough.

NOTEBOOK

1 December 1948

I have hired a baby-sitter—a lovely woman from Stockbridge named Hannah Weeks—and I have started writing again. This book is very different from
Bad Girl
: I am writing from the point of view of a survivor of the Nazi slaughters—rescuing Aaron's stories from oblivion. But my protagonist is a woman—the woman I would have been if my history were Aaron's. The book is spilling out almost as if by dictation from a secret source. I have no idea if it's any good or not. I only know that I can't stop.

When it comes this way, it's like straddling the globe and galloping through space. Nothing else matters.

Sally is far less trouble at this point—nine months old already!—than Aaron. He sulks. She smiles. Mama used to quote
her
mother as saying: "A hair shirt is bad enough, but worse if you weave it yourself." I told that to Aaron, who was not amused.

"I come last in this house," he said. "First the baby, then your writing, then your students…" I feel he is choking me with his grief. I refuse to let myself be choked.

But depression is contagious. Sometimes I think I can't go on. He drains all my energy.

21 December 1948

Dearest Mama,

Happy Hanukkah and Merry Yule Log and all that. It must be odd
to be in California at this season. Here it is snowing as usual—though
not as madly as last year, when I was heavily pregnant during the great
blizzard of '47. I will never forget the cars buried in snow, appearing as
blue-white humps whose identity was uncertain. I still remember your
telling me on the phone that all of New York was under a drift of white
and you couldn't get a train back to L.A.

My snow baby gets more and more wonderful every day. Mama, so
many things in life turn out to be disappointing—but babies are even
better than advertised. This still amazes me.

The bad news is that Aaron has not been well. He is in a place called
Chestnut Lodge (in Stockbridge), and he is in treatment with a doctor
who seems to know how to help him. Needless to say, it costs a fortune,
but there was really no choice. He seems to have had a "nervous breakdown"—whatever that is. I only know it was terrifying for me and the
baby. He claimed to be Jesus Christ and preached from the Sermon on
the Mount. He walked along the highway, exposing himself and stopping
cars, saying, "Didn't you know that your Lord was circumcised?" In
the bitter cold, he was found strolling across the ice on Stockbridge Bowl,
wearing only a loincloth. He accused me of being the "woman dressed
in purple" from the Book of Revelation, and he called me the "mother of
harlots and of abominations." It is impossible to tell you how terrified I
was when he also became violent. He dragged me into the cemetery where
the Coppleys are buried and threatened to dig up Sim Coppley's grave
to "prove" my "abominations." Finally the school's philosophy professor,
Laurence Wilder, and I took him to the Lodge to see Dr. Bartlow, who
has been very kind. Aaron is under sedation, but what the next step is,
I don't know.

Love to you and Papa,

Salome

[The next item in the file is an illustrated letter done on a sheet of watercolor
block and creased to indicate quarter folds, quarters perhaps to fit it in an envelope. The words are made as pictographs, so that "dear" in the salutation
is a picture of a deer and the references to birds and nests are illustrated, not
written. A baby is illustrated as a cherubic redheaded toddler in watercolor.
Of all the pictographs, the most confusing is "memory," depicted as a woman's
face with eyes upward as if in a trance; a cloud over her head shows a distant
landscape with birch trees and little wooden houses. Translated, this letter
seems to read: "Dear Salome, my mother, of blessed memory, used to say:
'You can't stop the birds of tragedy from flying overhead and doing their
business wherever they please, but you can refuse to let them nest in your
hair.' Papa and I have enclosed a check to help you with these unexpected ex
penses, but you are not your husband's keeper. You and the baby come first.
Mama." The bank check is seen as a little blue rectangle with wings flying
over a snowy landscape. Ed.]

NOTEBOOK

26 December 1948

Dr. Bartlow says that Aaron has constructed an imaginary world to shield himself from all the things he cannot face. The Jesus Christ thing is probably only the latest identity. In Poland, as a child, he made up other imaginary kingdoms and lived in them—but in the stress of wartime and the Hitlerite abominations his family faced every day, his "delusional system" was overlooked. How can you call your son mad when the whole world has clearly gone mad? Aaron's family may have seen that something was amiss, but how could they focus on it? Bartlow says that when a disturbed adolescent experiences the fulfillment of his violent wishes (parents and siblings killed), he begins to believe the gods of his inner world really are in charge and omnipotent. He asks me if I ever saw signs before of Aaron's delusional system. Did I?

"He only seemed wildly imaginative to me and on the best of terms with certain inanimate objects…."

"Which, for instance?"

"He used to do this routine where he called down into the toilet to summon certain beings—toilet trolls, he called them—whose bodies he claimed were made of excrement and who could impersonate human beings, sort of like a golem…but I always thought it was meant as a joke."

"He seems to have internalized certain Nazi stereotypes of Jews into his mythical system—as if by accepting them, he could save himself."

"Does this mean the Nazis made him mad?"

"He probably would have had delusions even in normal times, but this we cannot know. In any case, we have to keep him from hurting himself and others and hope that he has the will to get well. He may not, you know."

"Then what?" I asked.

"It is too soon to contemplate that now," said the doctor evasively. (They must teach a course in evasion in medical school.)

But they have him in a unit called "Disturbed," so they must be concerned that he plans to harm himself. He asked for his pens and portable typewriter but was told that he could not have them yet on "Disturbed."

"Oh, very good," he thundered to me. "That way you and the toilet trolls get to steal my book! Very clever, Miss Levitsky!"

Dr. B. talked to him in a way that was probably meant to be soothing, but Aaron found it condescending—as I knew he would.

"I'm not an idiot!" he yelled in a voice that made my blood run cold.

[Handwritten excerpt from what appears to be fiction. Rough draft with many
strikeouts and much crosshatching. Ed.]

So she kept silent. And sometimes she could almost deceive herself that it had
not happened. But from time to time in her dreams, machine-gun fire exploded
through her willed deafness, and the moans and screams of the dying were heard
again, and she remembered the bad smell when her little brother had lost hold
of his bowels, and the blood that had blinded another boy when he was wantonly
struck on the head for not keeping still…
ruhe, ruhe
(oh, the memory of being
screamed at in a language you scarcely understood, paying with your life for
not comprehending—like in some nightmare school…).

No. The answer was to not speak of it, to not even remember it, to blot out of
her eye's remembrance and her ears' echo and the lingering lizard cunning of
her animal sense of smell (so linked to memory) any traces of that day, that
night, that pit, that cloth tower, that forest. Sometimes she could do this for
days and nights on end. And then she would be not happy but not quite sad
either. She would just be numb. And for a little while, she could mistake
numbness for life.

Then, quite without warning, some smell—the smells were the worst—some
sound, some harsh word, would flash her back into the midst of it, and she would
wish they had shot her too. Oh, sometimes it seemed they had and only her ghost
walked around this bland country, far across the sea.

But the suppression of memory carries a terrible price. For it is in the territory
of memory that we are born and practice to become ourselves—so if we suppress
that invisible, odorless part, we have, in fact, lost ourselves.

Territory of memory, territory of the dead…Who is so dead as those who have
been forgotten?

When it was all over and she was safe in another country—though "safe"
was not a concept that had any meaning now—she discovered that it was a
mistake to tell anyone what had happened. Just as she had not believed it when
the shooting of naked people began, just as she had managed to deafen her ears
and blind her eyes while she was building that biblical tower of coats, she now
realized that to tell people in this bland country, which had never known war,
what had happened in the east, across the sea, was to rupture their covenant
with their parents and with God. It was as if she were robbing them of their belief
in goodness, their belief in answered prayers, and instead of pitying her, they
hated her for it.

Perhaps, she thought, this was why the Jews were so troublesome to everyone
throughout history—they were a reminder of how dark darkness could be, of
how death could triumph over life. So easily, so quickly! All you had to do was
turn some secret key in the brain, and ordinary people changed into murderers.
No. The murderer was there waiting all the time in each of us. Something or
someone simply had to give it permission to show itself. And then the secret
was out—we were all murderers at heart. We had, in fact, become our enemy.