Inventing Memory (30 page)

One night in Venice, Sara went out drinking with Gianluca, the son of Grandini-Piccolini. She supposed he was a princeling, since his father was a prince. She "fooled around" with him—meaning they tonguekissed ("sucked face," as Sara's smart-ass friends liked to say) in a narrow alley and he felt her breasts and pressed his erection against her. AIDS and her mother's reputation had made Sara cling to her virginity, but she figured "fooling around" was okay. Nevertheless she felt like a fool when Gianluca said, "I will call you," in his careful English and then did not.

"They always say that," her mother said. "It means nothing."

His failure to call had been the first stab in the vitals, but her mother's commentary was the second. Whenever she felt bad, her mother knew exactly how to make her feel worse.

"Don't you think
I'd
like to start all over again?" her mother yelled. "Be young again? But I can't, goddamn it—I'm too fuckin' old!" Sally was only in her forties. She was still foxy, and sometimes she walked like she knew it. Men still propositioned her in all languages. What the hell was the matter with her? Whatever it was, it was all in her head.

"You're beautiful, Mom, and men are crazy about you!" Sara was making a special effort to call Sally "Mom," even though it felt weird to her.

"Men are crazy—that's true. I'm such a dope!" Sally started to cry. "When I was young and beautiful I didn't know it, and now that
you're
young and beautiful, I
do
!"

Then, prompted somehow by Sally's outburst, and wanting to make herself feel better, Sara did something that made her feel even worse: she called Gianluca. To her horror, a girl answered, giggling. "
Una
straniera
," she said derisively in that Italian way which implies that to be a foreigner is the worst sin of all. Sara quickly hung up the phone. She was devastated.

Remembering all this from what seemed like a century ago—both the disappointment and her mother's disappointing reaction to it—Sara thought she should not have been so surprised by Lloyd's recent fickleness. Somehow she knew that men were led around by their cocks, that they tended to fall in love, fleetingly, with whoever made these fickle organs rise. It didn't even
mean
much. They were as confused by their emotions and erections as the women they betrayed and disappointed. They were at the mercy of a length of muscle, blood vessels, and skin that never seemed long enough, durable enough. At least women had solider values. Sara was starting to know that what mattered was her work and Dove. Sara's work right now was inventing her own ancestors, inventing memory itself.

In Sara's dream, there is a sooty-winged angel with a tall black silk hat, a cloak lined with sable the same color as his long beard, and the inky blue eyes of a baby. Looking at him, she understands that he is
her
angel as much as he is Sarah Sophia's. This is, in fact, the angel who has brought them all to America, who has choreographed their hundredyear dance. This angel will protect Dove from the vicissitudes of her life. He will perch on her shoulder as Sarah perches on her great-granddaughter's shoulder. He may, in fact, be Dove's alter ego, Dovie. Do souls transmigrate across generations? "Why rule out the possibility?" the dreaming Sara mutters to herself, starting to awaken.

Then, in that unpredictable way of dreams, the angel turns into David de Hirsch.

With the dream still holding sway over her reality, Sara takes a sleepy morning shower. When she emerges and looks in her bathroom mirror—still fogged with shower mist—she suddenly sees Sarah Sophia as she appeared in that first defiant photograph. The same ropes of hair, the same determined mouth, the same soft, deep eyes. At that moment, Sara knows for certain that Sarah Sophia is her great-grandmother and that she is growing into her great-grandmother's bravery as surely as a geranium cutting soon fills up its pot of soil.

Sara hasn't written poetry for a long time, not since she married Lloyd, but now she sits down at her desk and scrawls this poem into her notebook:

I plant my heart in the earth.

I water it with light.

The sweet green tentacles

of spring urge toward the light.

They nudge the earth like fat worms wriggling,

loosening light in the darkness.

They open the channels and passages
that allow the flow of life.

Sweetness follows them.

The sweetness of the new pea pod,
the ginkgo leaf in May,

the sticky buds of the weeping cherry
not yet burst,

the fuzz of the pussy willow

in the pink hour

before dawn,

the small green arrows of the crocus

pushing through a glaze

of bluish snow.

O light that nourishes life—

let us be mirrors

of your splendor.

Let us reflect your pure energy,

not dampen it.

Let us be givers of the light.

The dull earth turns
on its rusty axis.

The dolorous echoes of the dying
fill the ears of God—

who responds by planting

hearts with light,

hearts in the moving earth.

Let us learn to imitate
this infinite making of new hearts.

Air, water, earth are all we need.

And the miracle of the heart

alive with light.

Sara writes almost as fast as her thoughts, which tumble over each other like pebbles in a rushing river. And then Dove wanders in, rubbing her eyes with sleep.

"I had a scary dream, Mommy, but I don't remember it. There were monsters…."

"The light sends the monsters away, darling. Even at night, they aren't as powerful as they look. It's all a bluff on the part of the monsters, because, really, they're afraid of
you
."

"Really?" asks Dove. Her expression is one of those can-I-really-trustyou expressions six-year-olds specialize in.

"Really," says Sara. "Monsters are the most scared animals of all."

Sara can see that Dove has decided to trust her. She feels suddenly jubilant. Dove's faith in her makes up for any number of betrayals.

Later that day, working in the Council's book stacks, Sara is moved to write a letter to the real David de Hirsch:

Dear David,

I'm going to ask you not to make me dinner for a while. You don't
know me, and the truth is I don't really know myself. I can't give away
what I don't own, namely myself. Maybe there will come a time when I
know myself better and can be your friend. You have already been a sort
of guardian angel to me in ways you don't even know.

Sara

And to Lloyd, she writes:

Dear Lloyd,

I realize now that I married far too young, didn't really know my
own mind, but was looking for refuge. I think you should decide to stay
where you are for both our sakes. But I expect you to share the raising
of our child fairly with me and I hope I won't have to take you to court
to make that happen. Someday I hope we can be allies for Dove's sake.

Sara

Sara knows that she will have to cut herself off from these two men to take the journey with the angel she is destined to make. Except for Dove, she will have to dwell among shades for a while. Hadn't Sally hoped she would be as unlike her as possible? Sara knows she is only starting that process of separation now.

"I had to find my ancestors," Sara writes in her notebook, "to separate from them." And then she scrawls the following notes to herself:

Sarah's oral history tapes are priceless—even in their raw form. Of course I
will have to cut a lot of her ering and uming about how much she hates tape
recorders and all her puzzlement about whether she is doing it right. I will
also have to organize her recollections in roughly chronological order. I wish
I could give a taste of her accent. She sounds like an ancient Yiddish comedian—but
she
believed that people thought she had a
French
accent and that
was why they sometimes found her hard to understand!

Salome's files consist mostly of letters and journals—but I am still convinced
that
Dancing to America
(or pieces of it) must be somewhere buried in the
Council's crypt. To be lost in a library has been the fate of many great works.

But the documents of Sally's life are nothing like Sarah's narrative or Salome's
letters and journals. Her files consist of masses of visual materials, glossies
of concerts, folded posters, album covers, press kits, fragments of interviews.
The only complete one is the
Rolling Stone
that never ran. As I pick my way
through the boxes, I see Sally age from a pure-faced teenager to a strong-jawed
woman of middle years. In her youth, she could play the audience—the great
anonymous audience—instinctively. She was a shy person who could be embarrassed by a conversation in a living room, but with an audience of thousands she felt loved, secure, adored—especially if no one she knew was in that
room.

It was not surprising that there was no afterlife to that life. Performing on
huge stages, becoming the voice of the voiceless crowd, their sweat, their smell,
uses a person up totally. What could you become afterward? How could you
reinvent yourself? She went up in flames in the usual way of her generation:
alcohol, drugs, men. Looking for spirit, she found spirits. Looking for ecstasy,
she found self-destruction. The cure was recovery. But how can you "recover"
from being an artist? If your essential job is to give birth to yourself over and
over, how do you do it without becoming God?

Back in Venice that awful summer, Sara remembered how much she wanted to leave and how trapped she was there.

"Don't go—wait for
Redentore
," her mother said.
Redentore
was a feast day to commemorate the ending of a fifteenth-century plague. The Venetians built bridges of boats from San Marco to Salute to Giudecca, festooned their boats with flowers, and lay outstretched in them, getting drunker and drunker and staring at dazzlingly ostentatious fireworks that exploded in the night sky to the sound of Vivaldi's music.

Redentore
was a popular holiday, one of those bones thrown to the common people since the time of the Roman Empire to make them tolerate their wretched lot. Sara wanted to leave Venice after her humiliation with Gianluca, but everyone was waiting for
Redentore
, waiting for the Redeemer—weren't we all? So she stayed. Stayed in that filthy, disorderly house with her mother drinking, stayed in the heat and smell of that sewer city, stayed amid the deceiving Venetians, who saw her only as a
straniera
, and finally escaped the day after the Feast of the Redeemer, with thousands of day-trippers who had slept in boats or in the streets and doorways of the city.

She was never as glad to leave any place in her life. On the train, she promised herself never to take a vacation with her mother again. She doesn't wish me well, she said to herself, and even if she
is
my mother, I have no reason to be around people who do not wish me well.

The other late memory she had of Sally was much sweeter than the Venetian one.

She always thought of it as her "Holden Caulfield Day in New York."

In Montana, at her father's house when she was fourteen, Sara had found a letter from her mother—so she had a mother after all!—folded around a yellowing birth announcement (her own!), hidden in a cigar box in the bottom drawer of her father's desk. It started with this mysterious fragment:

JAZZ
AGE
POEM

Jass, jazz, jazzbos

and flappers in their beaded dresses

doing the black bottom

on the Great Black Way

slumming in Harlem

the twenties

the original Broadway babies

drinking bathtub gin

my mother what a world you grew up in

my world now

Then it went on:

Sara must be fourteen by now. Your cruelty in depriving me of contact with her is not to be believed. My meditations on my own mother
remain an important part of my identity. (See poem above.) I know Sara
needs me, and I need her. She will only hate you for keeping us apart.
Don't you realize that? I will never stop cursing you until you tell her
I am alive and love her! My curses are powerful. Look what they've done
to me.

Sally

And the birth announcement, from a 1978
People
magazine, read:

Sally Sky's latest hit: Baby Sara Sky-Wyndham born in New York City on
August 1st to singing legend Sally Sky and war-resister poet husband Ham
Wyndham. Baby Sara sings her first lullaby to Mama Sally Sky.

And then there was a grainy, faded color photo of a beautiful smiling strawberry-haired woman crooning to a little lump of a newborn baby whose mouth was open in a howl.