Inventing Memory (21 page)

In the year 2000, I will be eighty-eight. Probably I won't remember what wonders I have seen—so I'd better write them down now. Possible titles for this novel:
The Last Century, The Last Jewess, Dancing to America,
Inventing Memory, People Who Can't Sleep, Of Love and Memory, Sleepless
People, Women of Valor, Of Blessed Memory.

I am writing the book with Aaron's suicide as the starting point of the story. What happens to a woman who is suddenly launched into her own life by a husband's suicide? How does it change her? How does it make her claim her own will to live? Above all, how does it
free
her? I think I am onto something important. Why do women always have to be abandoned in some way in order to seize their own lives?

LETTER FROM SALOME LEVITSKY WALLINSKY

IN BIG SUR, CALIFORNIA, TO MARCO ALBERTI

IN LENOX, MASSACHUSETTS, SUMMER 1952

Caro Marco,

On my way to pick up Sally in the City of the Angels and bring her
back to start school in New York, I visited my old friend from Paris,
Henry Miller, who lives here in bohemian glory, surrounded by merry
and hard-drinking hangers-on in a spot that looks like paradise before
the fall.

I can see why anyone would stop here—clouds stepping off into the
Orient, rugged country, the free air of the West, an invigorating life that
keeps you mentally and physically strong—and the light! The light in
Big Sur is almost as wonderful as the light in Provence, in Venice, in
Tuscany.

If only because I am here among the mad bohemians, I long for peace,
order, harmony, and I am tempted to say, yes, let's join our lives, but I
know I cannot do that. In a funny way, I have never tested my own
wings. I have always gone from man to man. And much as I love you,
I have to make it on my own as a writer before I seek refuge with you.

Salome

NOTEBOOK

August 1952

Aaron's suicide shifted everything in my head. Suddenly, instead of my obsession with Robin, I am obsessed with the book I am writing. Maybe it is seeing Henry and sleeping with him behind Eve's back, behind Robin's and Marco's, the old disorder and chaos from Paris, which is surely a part of my inspiration, versus the other part of me, the part that wants calm and space and peace.

I am enraged with Aaron. In my dreams, I am screaming at him, telling him he had no right to go away and leave me. All this is odd because, in truth, he left me long ago. More and more, I understand that
time does
not exist
. Dead people inhabit my dreams, and the living sometimes seem to belong to the past. I drive down to Los Angeles along the old highway that parallels the ocean, and I think about my life, feeling poised between two distinct parts of it, poised between past and future. I am too young for some things and too old for others. What shall I do? Keep driving. Finish the book I've begun. God grant me the time to mine my teeming brain!

There is a French movie by Carné (is it?), in which a woman who is suddenly widowed visits all the men who have been important in her life and
through
them revisits her earlier selves. I tried to do that with Henry. But you simply
can't
return to the past, or reexperience the glamour a man had when he was a hook into your future. Driving along the ocean, I thought of Henry, Ethan, Robin, Marco, and I wondered:
Should
I marry Marco? Should I marry him because he adores me and he will never hurt me? I believe that is why Mama married Papa. Otherwise it is unfathomable. Imagine—he
never
fucked her! Why did she stay? For security. Because they had made a life and a business together. Because she knew how to keep her mouth shut, as I don't! But from Mama's old friend Fritzi Goldheart, who also came to America from Russia in 1905, I learned that Mama had many lovers. I'm really glad for her. My path is different. I will have the heroine of my novel marry and have another child, but I myself will not.

NOTEBOOK

Los Angeles

August 1952

Here with Mama and Papa at Summit Ridge Road, whence Pickford and Fairbanks once ruled the tinsel kingdom. The house is beautiful, white, perched over the city and the sea. Sally has a swimming pool here. Mama wants her never to return to New York.

"Tell me more about the woman who danced all the way to America, Mama. It was you, wasn't it, Mama?"

Mama wheels around from the easel, her palette in her hand, her golden half-moon glasses sliding down her nose. She pushes them back with her right index finger.

"
I wish!
" she says.

"Mama—I know you well enough. You only deny when I'm on the right track."

"No. It wasn't me, but I always wanted to be like that. Anyway, what's the difference whether it was me or Luba?"

"Luba who?"

"Before your time—you never knew her."

"Mama—this is what I have to ask. Why did you dance to America when you were young and then stumble when you got older? Why did you stop thinking you could beat the system? Why did you surrender?"

Mama's eyes flared as if with flame: "Because of you and the family."

"You mean I clipped your wings?"

"Of course not—I grew them stronger for you. But my focus shifted.
You
became the focus. Everything else became less important.
Life
became more important than anarchist ideas, than art, than theories. If this is stumbling, then let me
go on
stumbling. I regret nothing. I consider this stumbling the real dancing!
Life
is the dance that never ends! Even if you
can't
dance at two weddings with one behind!"

Did she really say that—or did I dream it? I took Sally back to New York, and the first person I called was Marco. Then I went back to my book.

NOTEBOOK

July 1953

On the day the Rosenbergs were assassinated by the United States government, I finished my novel, which I have decided to call
Dancing
to America
. I could have been surging in the crowd in Union Square. I could have been carrying a placard. But I was protesting death in the way I knew best: by giving birth to the book.

Little did I know that I was also protesting death in another way: It may turn out I am pregnant!

NOTEBOOK

August 11, 1953

I am definitely pregnant. Though it is the last thing I wanted, I find myself rather pleased. What if this is my
son
? I think about abortions and quickly rule them out. Who cares who the father is? The baby feels all mine! Marco is thrilled. So is Robin. I dare not tell Henry, for fear he will kidnap me to Big Sur. The baby is due in March. I'm sure I'll be able to sort it all out by then!

[Dancing to America,
which Salome considered her most important work,
was never published. "Too ethnic," said one publisher. "Too female," said
another. "We'll be sued," said a third. "It's obscene," said a fourth. "We'll
all go to jail," said the last of them.

Salome then went into the art business, in which she prospered. She did
have a son, Lorenzo, whose father was anyone's guess. She married Robin
Robinowitz, but Marco remained her best friend, lover, inspiration. She went
on keeping notebooks for a while, then gradually stopped. The manuscript of
Dancing to America unfortunately has disappeared. Perhaps it will surface
someday. Ed.]

NOTEBOOK

12 April 1954

Sally seems utterly distraught by Lorenzo's birth. This is more than sibling rivalry. She whirls in place until she makes herself dizzy. She asks me, "What will happen if we close the Bathinette on the baby?" In my panic to protect my little man, I am afraid I have been too tough on her. Everyone fusses over Lorenzo the way people used to fuss over her. I fear for her and for him. I am so preoccupied with mothering and the gallery that I have almost no time to write—even in my notebook. Life has devoured me. Somehow I always knew it would. From time to time, I make little notes, but hardly with my usual passion. Lorenzo and Sally use me up. What is left of me, the gallery gets. More and more, my life is like Mama's. Sometimes I look in the mirror and see her face. Sometimes I hear myself quoting her quoting
her
mother. "If you're rich, you're wise and good-looking and can sing well too," I heard myself say to Sally the other day.

"What?" she asked.

"One of the proverbs of my grandmother," I mumbled. And then I was amazed at myself and laughed our loud. The genes get you in the end. It's inevitable.
That's
the novel I would like to write.

[Letter from Salome Levitsky Wallinsky to her daughter, Sally Wallinsky
Robinowitz, sometimes known as Sally Levitsky Wallinsky Robinowitz, but as
Sally Sky to her fans. Ed.]

3 May 1988

Dear Sally,

When you were little and I thought I had committed myself seriously
to the writing of novels, I remember how distraught you used to be when
I worked at home. I was there, but not there. "Look at me! Look at me!"
you used to yell in a panic. The panic only increased when your brother
was born. And I remember being suffused with guilt as if I had replaced
you—first with writing, then with Lorenzo.

After a while I came to feel that life was more important than writing.
How can any mother
not?
I knew that once I opened the door to that
possibility, I would cross some threshold and there would be no going
back. I was right.

But there has to be the possibility for women to create life
and
to
create art, otherwise what have we been fighting for all these years? After
I had a son, the struggle to write seemed suddenly not worth the candle.
I feel I let us both down that way—you and me. You, because I set a bad
example. Me, because now I suffer from dreams gone dry.

I have just been remembering how I used to make fun of my mother
for "giving up her dreams." But now that she is gone, I understand that
she had never really given up. She had simply shifted her priorities. She
had become a mother, but she never stopped being an artist, a lover of
life. She had a whole secret life, which someday I will share with you.

The demands of life and the demands of art are difficult to reconcile.
There is no way to
pretend
they are not. When I was with you, I wanted
to be with my book. When I was with my book, I wanted to be with you.
I know now that
many
of us feel this way. We bear the contradiction
inside us, and I believe we are heroines for it.

Why am I telling you this? Because I want you not to emulate me,
not to put away your dreams. Tolerate the contradiction within you. It
will make your work richer even while it takes away your time to do it!
But whatever you do, don't give up your work. Regret solves nothing.

If you are ever in a bad moment in your life and you feel that you
cannot go on, remember that you are the daughter of a woman who was
the daughter of a woman who believed that strength came from accepting
the contradictions of life rather than pretending life had no contradictions.

This is profoundly Jewish. It is also profoundly womanly. As a people,
Jews have had to accept the vinegar with the honey, and we got good at
it. All our humor is about that, all our art, our music, our literature.
And women also know that life is not perfectible. Only art is. And life
is always more important than art. But art is what remains.

Eventually, because of what I did and didn't do, what my mother did
and didn't do, and what you have done and will do, women will have
more possibilities, less restricted lives. Despair is a waste. We live on in
each other's possibilities. We extend our freedoms into the future.

I never thought my mama would die. She seemed immortal to me.
Since she was the ground of my being, her death seemed unthinkable—however much she annoyed me at times. Now I am standing at
the edge of the cliff with no one to catch me. I'm sure all daughters feel
this way when their mothers die.

The memorial service for Mama was very moving. She touched so
many lives. All her old cronies were there, looking frail. And her portraits
all around. I never knew she did so many. She painted everyone—Calvin
Coolidge to Loretta Young; Humphrey Bogart to Edward G. Robinson;
Betty Grable to Marilyn Monroe; Babe Paley to Nancy Kissinger—though (in the early years) not always under her own name.

Many famous people spoke—artists, politicians, writers—but it was
her housekeeper, Daisy, who brought the house down.

"Miz Levitsky always acted like family, not a boss. She was so tender
of my feelings. She used to say: 'The Jews in Russia were like the Blacks
in America,' and she wasn't just talkin'. She knew.

"One day, she come home when it was pouring rain outside and she
was all wet. I helped her get dry. Then, while we was sittin' in the kitchen,
drinkin' our tea, Miz Levitsky said, nice as pie: 'Daisy, there was bubbles
coming out of my stockings—in the future, please rinse my stockings.'"