Inventing Memory (25 page)

At twenty-two, Sally had been on the covers of
Newsweek
and
Time.
By thirty-two, she was in rehab—and Sara had already been taken away from her. Her fiery grandmother, Salome—still beautiful, still auburnhaired, in her late sixties—had wanted to jump into the breach and raise Sara on stories of Paris in the crazy years, stories that would get more and more vivid, no doubt, as fewer and fewer witnesses were alive to contradict them. But Sara's father, Ham Wyndham, a poet who had once been jailed as a war resister, had sued for custody, won, and spirited Sara away to Montana long before it was the "next place." For much of her childhood, she had helped with the herding of cattle under the jagged mountains, thinking she had no mother and having no idea where she came from.

Sara didn't meet her mother again until she took the mad initiative of running away at fourteen. She was never sorry she had done that, even if it didn't turn out quite the way she had expected.

After their passionate reunion, her mother of course sent her to finishing school in Switzerland with the sons of Arabian oil sheiks and the other neglected daughters of rock stars. Eventually Sara wound up at university in England, reading history. By then Sally was living on her ASCAP earnings in Europe, mostly sober but something of a shadow of her former self. She hated fame and all its trappings, didn't want a TV in the house, and made sure Sara had one of those European educations that make you a misfit in America forever after. Sara was determined to be a historian, not an artist of any sort. Empirical truth was what she was after—science, not art.

Sally had tried to evoke for Sara what it was like growing up in the sixties: how Yoko Ono was a conceptual artist who did photographs of people's bottoms (before she became the most famous Beatle wife), how you could walk down the streets of New York and suddenly be hit by a dense, aromatic cloud of marijuana smoke, how people suddenly started dressing like maharajas, African chieftains, ragged gypsies. For all that, Sally said, "the sixties" were more a creation of yearning journalists (yearnalists) than anything else.

For a while Sally lived in London because her AA group was there. She took up AA like a religion. Sobriety was her revelation. Day and night, she made herself available for people with problems, people who were in danger of losing their sobriety. She gave service. Sara remembered being jealous of Sally's "pigeons" and wondering what
she
had to do to become one of them. They seemed to get more mothering than Sara did. She wanted Sally to be a mother so badly that she mothered
her
in propitiation. It didn't work.

What did Sally live on? ASCAP and art. But she lived far more modestly than she had to. Levitsky had left her enough paintings to take care of several old ages, and she received a steady flow of income from her songs—which were still being played around the world.

From time to time, someone would want to make a movie based on one of Sally's ballads, and there would be long pointless meetings, endless negotiations, until eventually Sally threw up her hands and scuttled the project over some detail. She really sought obscurity and hated the thought of losing it. But all her protestations were of no use, because Hollywood, being Hollywood, would take all the details of her story and rip it off anyway. At least half a dozen movies used versions of her hegira—from
A Star Is Born
to
The Rose
. Her life was in danger of becoming a cliché.

"My generation," she used to say, "was told that fame was the greatest good. Stupidly we believed it—at least as credulous teenagers we did. In fact, fame is merely the fact of being misunderstood by millions of people."

As an example of this, Sara's mother always used to point out how people's attitudes toward her changed when they realized she was "Sally Sky."

"They become suddenly respectful, hesitant, looking for some benefit, some angle. But I am the same person—a stumbling human being. Why do they want me to be omnipotent?"

Sara wanted her mother to be omnipotent. All children wish for this. Sara did
not
want her mother to acknowledge being a stumbling human being. Sara needed a rock, an altar, a goddess. And what she got instead was "Easy does it," "Feelings are not facts," and "Ego equals Easing God Out."

Sara came to hate the Program. "A cheap synthetic religion for a godless generation," she called it privately. And as soon as she got the chance, she called it that publicly too. Sally was devastated. She didn't understand her only offspring. And that was why Sara was so ripe to fall in love with someone like Lloyd.

Sara fell in love with Lloyd the way an orphan falls in love. He was older, of course, and her teacher in all things.

They met at a Sunday lunch in Hampstead. A motley assortment of people: Sally's friends and pigeons, some poets, novelists, creative flotsam and jetsam. She spotted Lloyd immediately. He was handsome, for starters, and he had that cynical smile that said: I don't belong here and neither do you. He was dark-haired, green-eyed, clever, tall. He looked at Sara as if she were the only woman on earth.

They made excuses and went to walk on the Heath. It was late March. There were daffodils everywhere. Sara felt suddenly grown up, being with him. She wanted, more than anything, to be out of the grip of her feuding parents. She wanted not to be the hostage in some ancient war, begun before her time. Lloyd kissed her at the top of the Heath among the daffodils. Then he told her she was too young and they should go back.

"Too young for what?" she asked. She had that perfect self-possession and poise the children of alcoholics have. It made her seem much older than her age. If he was going to resist her, then she was going to have him. It was as simple as that. She knew most people are so indecisive that if you make up your mind to have something,
anything
, you can. She made up her mind to have Lloyd. He didn't know what hit him. Sara moved in on his life and facilitated everything, as she had learned to do for her mother.

"I believe there is no man you cannot have if you will do everything for him," she told her best friend in London, Cecily Hargrove.

Cecily said: "Dunno."

But then Cecily was a Sloane Ranger, with her own BMW, a family manse in St. John's Wood, a sixteenth-century castle in Kent, a restored farmhouse in Tuscany, and an amazing Art Deco villa in Beaulieu, used only two months a year: December and August. There was also an oceangoing yacht called
Cecily
, registered in Panama, where Cecily had never been.

Cecily's banker father raised money for the Tories. Her mother was a famous interior designer, who did up hotels all over the world. She even had a hotel named after her in London. The Augusta, it was called, and it was tiny, fully booked, and madly chic. Famous actors stayed there. And opera stars. And well-heeled young Chelsea matrons who booked rooms for midweek afternoons and paid only in cash.

Cecily's mother was a dame in her own right, and her father was a knight.
Arise, Sir Rafe
(spelled "Ralph"). Nobody remembered that his parents had been born in Hungary and fled in 1956. And certainly nobody had to know that her mother was a Russian-Jewish baby brought to London from Moscow via Berlin at the age of oneish—whenever that may have been. Dame Augusta was so plastically surgerized that she couldn't close her eyes. Naturally she never told her age or place of origin. As far as anyone knew outside of
Burke's Peerage
, her country seat in Kent had been the home of her ancestors.

Cecily had been born so privileged that she was languid. She loved Sara because Sara was definitely
not
. She adored get-up-and-go. She adored Sara's adamancy about not drinking or smoking dope. Cecily had a problem with dope. She had already been to three of the most expensive rehabs in the States. And she hung out with Sara, hoping that she would be the fourth.

Sara was right about Lloyd. She had his number. She troweled on the charm, and Lloyd got hooked on her in record time. She followed all the rules in a book that told women how to catch men. The book was written for people with room-temperature IQs, but it
worked
. It argued that men were hunters and women were gatherers and if you wanted to catch a man you had to understand that.

Sara understood. She'd understood it even
before
she read that book. She knew it instinctively.

Lloyd was astonished to find out that Sara was a virgin.

"Girls aren't virgins anymore," he said.

"If your mother has had the entire musicians' union," Sara said, "you have to do
something
to distinguish yourself."

"How can I sleep with you when it's such a heavy responsibility?" he asked.

"Stop thinking of it as a heavy responsibility."

"I can't," he said.

So she seduced Lloyd. Even though she was a virgin and he was "experienced," she had her way with him. And he felt honor-bound to marry her. She had counted on that all along.

Of course she seduced Lloyd in her mother's London flat. How could she
not
? She brought Lloyd home and had him in her own bed. In the morning, Sally made them breakfast.

Sally and Lloyd were faintly embarrassed. Sara was exultant. It was the very best moment of her life thus far when Sally came to wake her up and found Lloyd draped nakedly around her. Sara was oh so pleased with herself.

"I guess you'll just have to accept the things you cannot change," she told her mother.

"It's
your
life," her mother said, wanting a drink so badly she could taste it.

Sara consciously made an old-fashioned marriage with Lloyd. She took care of him. She took care of Dove. She collapsed her identity into his. Sara was convinced that all the unhappiness she sensed in her mother's life came from her desire to be the most flamboyant of a flamboyant clan. Sara would instead cling to
Kinder, Kirche, Küche
. She would travel back to the past.

"I suppose I am a typical member of the class of 2000," Sara wrote in her journal:

Since our parents were credulous enough to think that a drop of LSD in the water supply would bring world peace, we were cynical about everything. Since our parents were all divorced when we were young, we were never going to get divorced. We were as skeptical as they were naive, as tough as they were tender. We thought they were dopes—undisciplined hippies. We hated their narcissism, their selfindulgence. We thought their values sucked. We called ourselves slackers—with pride. A slacker was the opposite of a hippie. A slacker knew life was no rose garden. A slacker expected so little, she could
never
be disappointed. A slacker was disillusioned even before she—or he—could vote.

In prep school and college we all wrote memoirs—even though we had not yet much to remember. We were told the novel was dead and all that counted was personal experience—but we had had so little personal experience that it was hard to know
where
to begin. I decided it was better to study history. At Oxford I was taught by historians who believed that
all
subjective data was suspect, but now I am beginning to wonder whether there is anything
but
subjective data.

When Lloyd was writing his dissertation about the history of the Third Reich—his thesis, of course, was that the average German
delighted
in murdering Jews—he had found all sorts of proof: photos, home movies, diaries, journals. I helped him to assemble this material. We pay homage to the past first of all by documenting it. This is a great lesson for a historian to learn.

Like me, Lloyd was trained by Namierian historians, who believed that only impartial documents can tell the story of a given period. His research was always heavy with inventories of
things
: bank records, legal documents, birth and death records. He loved primary sources, mistrusted the secondary ones. This will probably turn out to be a terrific preparation for my work at the Council—whatever it turns out to be.

And then she scrawled at the bottom of the page: "
I am never sleeping
with Lloyd again!"

11

Sarah to Sara

RUB OF
LOVE

Little children don't let you sleep, big children don't let
you live.

—YIDDISH PROVERB

S
arichka, my love, I left off my story when Mama and Tanya and Bella and Leonid arrived from the old country. You will remember that Levitsky had disappeared, that Sim was in jail, that Lucretia eventually laid claim to poor weak Sim, who had not the strength to resist. When Mama and the family arrived, I realized that no matter how much I had missed them, I was
never
going to be free again. Now I had to live in worriment about their welfare. Every decision I made had to be made as part of a family. And families may be all we know of heaven but they are also all we need of hell.

I am telling you this because I want you to appreciate the rare moment you find yourself in—lonely, yes, but also free. My mama used to say: "You can get married in an hour, but troubles last a lifetime." The same is true with families. You miss them, you yearn for them, and then they come back—and troubles last a lifetime.

My brother, Leonid, for example, thought that Leonid Solomon was a good enough name for Russia, but in America he had to be Lee Swallow, the Sanitary Star. It was not enough he should make a fortune; he also had to have a wife to squander it. This is what America meant to him. Bella and Tanya turned into "sweaters"—they ran a sweatshop—and exploited new girls from Russia the way I had once been exploited. Then Bella and Tanya got married, and their husbands exploited both the girls
and
them. You wouldn't want to know how most of your family made their fortune—and that was
before
Salome introduced Levitsky to Robin the forger—who eventually put his mark on the Levitsky gallery and made another bundle. All I am going to say is that the world has a few more "Vermeers" than the master knew about.

When you look at the names of benefactors on buildings, notice that they don't engrave up there how their ancestors made the money in the first place. Behind every great fortune lies a great crime. I believe it was George Bernard Shaw who said that. He knew a thing or two, for a
goy.

Nobody ever encourages you to tell how
Zaydeh
really made his money. Sweeping his competitors' goods from the shelves, a little harmless price fixing,
a bissel
collusion, a soupçon of antitrust…the family would be furious if you remembered any of
that
. Sweet little
Zaydeh
no longer had a bodyguard when
they
knew him. Or a driver who packed a rod, excuse the expression. Or a revenue agent he bought off when an audit loomed. ("Buy him a hat," Levitsky used to tell his sonin-law Robin when there was a problem with the taxman.) The audits were always mysteriously forgotten, or they came out "no change." How Levitsky
loved
that expression. "no change"! In those days revenue agents were just
nudnicks
who wanted a nice "hat" like anyone else—imagine! But when we remember sweet little
Zaydeh
, we don't think about this
chazerei—
we only remember his pockets lined with chopped liver.

I know you are feeling pretty rotten about jumping into bed with Lloyd—who I never liked, by the way. But as my mama used to say: "A slice off a cut loaf is never missed." (I may have quoted it once too often to my Salome, who took it more seriously than anything else I told her. You should only pray never to have a daughter like her.)

Nowadays, looking at my family, I am not so very thrilled and delighted about the way they all turned out—but you, my little namesake, I think you have a real chance to redeem your mother, of blessed memory.
You
could become like the woman I knew who danced all the way to America. Your grandmother Salome, if the truth be known, was something of a wild one—a
kurveh
, as we say in Yiddish. But Salome had a lot of good theories, I'll give her that. She was something of a philosopher. About anti-Semitism she was never wrong. She had a nose for it. Many Jews have this nose, but Salome had something more. She was brilliant. She wrote poetry, which she never published. She was prophetic, ahead of her time. You know that she wrote one of the first novels of what is now called the Holocaust—even though she wasn't there, Charlie. Of course her
meshuggeneh
Aaron, of blessed memory,
was.

Now the Holocaust has become a miniseries. (There's no business like
shoah
business.) It
wasn't
then. In the forties, it was hell to even convince people that there
was
such a thing as a Holocaust. The newspapers in America didn't write about it. Even the newspapers owned by the Jews. They were afraid to be too sympathetic to foreigners. So the Holocaust was a secret. God forbid the allrightnik American Jews should get too cozy with refugees.

Oh, yes, we all had friends from Europe who came here talking about horrible things: mass murders in the East, relatives who disappeared, concentration camps, mail that returned "addressee unknown," businesses seized, houses, farms…But we didn't always know
what
to think. Refugees are always full of
bubbameisehs
. They're always
a bissel meshuggeh—
and who can blame them?

But Salome understood the Holocaust long
before
it was a miniseries. She heard stories from Aaron, of blessed memory. Of course she used some of his experiences in her novel—which, by the way, you should read. Men have been writing novels using their wives' stories for six thousand years, but a woman does it and suddenly it's a
shande
? I call it discrimination against women, that's what I call it. Salome was the closest thing I ever knew to a genius, the smartest person in a very smart family, but she was so
meshuggeh
she didn't always
use
her talents. She was too
meshuggeh
about men. Boy-crazy from the start. Let that be a lesson to you. She also had no
sitsfleish.

Talent is talent, but it's not
enough
. You have to be able to sit in your chair and work. And work. And
work
. And
WORK
. When they reject your work or cheat you out of your payment, you just work some
more.
You
never
give up. Never. I
had
that tenacity. Salome did not. She was a regular princess of Israel.
My
fault. I showered her with goodies. I gave her all the love I lacked from Levitsky, all the kisses I could not give to you know who. And it spoiled her. And so did the money. By then we were making a living. We were comfortable. (In truth, we were rich, but I was too superstitious to admit it.
Kayne hore—
God might strike me dead.)

When Salome left for Paris, I missed her terribly, as only a mother could miss a daughter. I felt rejected, abandoned. I knew she had to seize her life—but why did it have to be at my expense? I wanted her home with me forever. And knowing that, she had no choice but to run away. She had to run away at first to come home at last. She had to lose herself in Paris and the Berkshires to find herself at last.

Mothers and daughters—it's a comedy, but also a tragedy. We fill our daughters with all the
chutzpah
we wish for ourselves. We want them to be free as we were not. And then we
resent
them for being so free. We resent them for being what we have made! With granddaughters, it's so much easier. And great-granddaughters.

The truth is, Salome was more like me than I ever thought. That was the problem. Like me, she thought too much. About everything: life, art, anti-Semitism. Especially anti-Semitism. She always believed that as Jews we were resented mainly for our refusal to compromise. We believe our God is the most superior God of all, and we laugh when the
goyim
try to convert us. Later we cry.

Salome would brazenly say to
goyim—
any who would listen: "We worship a book, and you worship a bloody corpse on a cross—I fail to see why that's preferable." And people would look at her as if she'd taken leave of her senses. She would say
anything
to shock, but usually she restricted this comment to the bohemian circles in which she normally traveled. When she said it at a cocktail party at
my
gallery to the canon of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine (Levitsky and I always liked to have a few Episcopalians around—it added class, we thought), he didn't quite know what to say, ecumenical though he was. I think he said, "Hmmm. I see." I believe this is the
goyishe
equivalent of
Gevalt.

Why are Jews funny? Consider the alternative. We laugh so as not to drown in our own tears.

Leave Lloyd alone. You have a nice new suitor, in that young fellow whose mother is the queen of the Council on Jewish History. But the truth is, you don't
need
a man. Don't make the mistakes I made. Even in my day, marriage was not any longer a woman's only destiny. I took that traitor Levitsky back because my mother
blackmailed
me into it. Or maybe I blackmailed myself. I felt I had to be
coupled
. For Mama's sake. And the world seemed too dangerous for a woman alone. But the truth is I carried him more than he carried me.

I am trying to help you to be strong. "Why
should
I be strong?" you may ask. Because you owe your life to your ancestors' strength. Because we are all
counting
on you to be strong. Your strength is
our
strength now. We live through you. And by the way, we're
watching
! Not to make you feel guilty or anything…. But we are your guardian angels now.

I will never forget the day Mama and the rest of the family arrived at Ellis Island. It was the day after Yom Kippur in…it must have been 1912, but I'm never sure of dates. I waited in a gang of people at Battery Park under the elevated for my darling family, my very own
greeners
, to arrive from the island of tears.

American relatives, eager to show off their broken English, their bowler hats, their clean-shaven faces, their Yankee finery, waited in a throng held back with billy clubs by the high-helmeted Irish cops. What a contrast there was between the new arrivals and those who waited for them! The
greeners
wore kerchiefs, wigs, shawls, carried battered pots and pans, packs of bedclothing on their backs. Bedraggled from their wretched days at sea, blinking their eyes at the American sunlight, they actually
looked
green around the gills as they greeted their sleek American
landsleit
: another race—no, another species.

The Yankee cousins were unencumbered by baggage, wore threepiece suits, bow ties, elegant skirts and waists, hats brimming with feathers and flowers. They had gold teeth where the immigrants often had
missing
teeth. Gold teeth then were a sign of prosperity. (I should have a nickel for every one the Nazis later pulled out and melted down.) They wore their gaudiest Yankee finery to Battery Park. They wanted to impress. They wanted to blind the eyes of their relatives with their success.

The day before had been the holiest day of the year, and I wondered what Mama had done to worship on that sacred day. I wondered and worried. I was already six months pregnant and beginning to be unable to hide my condition.

Suddenly there they were!
Mamele
with her
sheitl
and kerchief, her shawl, her clumsy shoes—and cousin Bella with her huge bosom, her ruddy cheeks, her boisterous manner. My sister Tanya had grown up in the seven years since we parted. And Leonid was a man! He pushed forward to meet me, held his strong arms on my shoulders, and said:

"Mayne schwester, meine shayner schwester…"

And
Mamele
cried. She could hardly
talk
for crying. And then she patted my belly.

"Nu?"
she said.

I nodded my head in its gorgeous hat. "This one is blessed," I said. (That's how well I could predict Salome's future!)

The first few days with them were delicious. They raved about my studio on Union Square, told endless tales of Russia, of the ship, the
Fatherland,
of Yom Kippur services on Ellis Island, where the fine ladies from HIAS—the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society—had served a delicious dinner to break the fast: matzo-ball soup, fish, lamb, dried prunes and apricots, cakes and tea, all presented on paper plates so we wouldn't worry if the dishes were kosher. As the
greeners
left the dining hall, each was given dried prunes, fresh apples or oranges.

"In Russia, they beat us and burn us. In America, they feed us
pflommen
, oranges, apples!" Leonid said. "Even on the boat I made dozens of deals…. God bless America, kiddo! I bin learnin' English. In America, you got to speak English—right,
schwester
?"

I looked at Leonid with his greenhorn clodhopper shoes, his one good suit, made out of heavy Russian wool, far too thick for a warm New York September. He
looked
like a
greener
, but he already understood what there was to understand about America.

"Time
ist
money—
nu, schwester
?" he said, pinching my cheek. He made the universal money sign with his thumb and forefinger.

"Gelt,"
he said, "is the king of America,
nu
?"

Tanya meanwhile hugged me, and Bella assessed my elegant clothes.

"
Soora
," said Bella, "
du bist eine Yankee!
" And I laughed and hugged them all to the belly containing your grandmother Salome. Then we all went back to Union Square.

I was working for the picture fakers Filet and Cooney in those days, so I often traveled. I would take the overnight train to Palm Beach, and Mama would worry about "
das kind, das kind…."