Inventing Memory (6 page)

The morning he was to greet me at Fontana di Luna—which was Lucretia's family's palazzo—he apparently had one of the worst of these spells. He soaked his nightshirt back and front, wet the rug, and found himself unaccountably on his knees like a dog, coughing and sputtering and gasping. He thought that if I could see him this way I would loathe him.

"Weak, weak, weak!" he railed at himself when he found his voice. His father had been contemptuous of his asthmatic wheezing, and Sim's nursemaid had tried to hide these fits from Father when the boy was small. The fact that he was still visited by them seemed to Sim proof of his undeservingness. He had the feeling that I could fill his lungs with breath.

When I awoke in the cottage, sunlight was streaming in my window and I was troubled by the shreds of a dream. In the dream, Sim Coppley and I had to meet the President of America, but when I looked down at my shoes I saw that both they and my stockings were unmatched. One shoe had a strap across the instep and one did not. One stocking was brown and one was green. How can I meet the President like this? I asked Sim in a panic. And then I thought of what Mama would say: "Even a prophet's dreams are not always prophetic."

There came a knock at my door, and a serving maid in a ruffled cap arrived to bring me my breakfast in bed.

The dream of unmatched shoes disappeared with the first sight of the breakfast tray. The white linens, the silver cutlery, the basket of hot cross buns, the tea in porcelain cups as thin as eggshells, the little pot of amber honey, the fresh country butter, the brown-speckled eggs in their cup and cozy, the sausages under their silver
chuppah
. So transfixed was I that I never wondered if the sausages were
trayfe
! And there, neatly folded, was the
Berkshire County Eagle.

I am still amazed to inhabit a world where some people pick food out of the garbage and some eat on silver trays. The first time I had white bread at Ellis Island, it seemed like cake to me. Do all Americans eat like this every day? I wondered. But my first breakfast tray at Fontana di Luna was an absolute marvel: a whole little universe of silver and porcelain and creamy linen. What effort had gone into this breakfast alone! How many cooks and craftsmen had labored to make the breaking of bread into a work of art! Even though I believed in the brotherhood of all men (no one mentioned women then), I knew I could get used to breakfast in bed in the wink of an eye!

This is what memories are made of: the first breakfast tray, chalk letters on the rejected at Ellis Island, a private railroad car clacking along the Housatonic Railroad line, a dream of unmatched shoes.

To travel backward in time a century or so—you're not going to trap me into saying how old I am!—and re-create these early days is not easy, but it is always the smells and the objects that take me back.

What I remember from that weekend: the ladies in their pastel frocks and parasols playing croquet on the lawns of Fontana di Luna, the paneled library with thousands of leather-bound books, the trellis of white roses trained into a living, fluttering canopy, humming with bees.

At that time, the worst thing on earth was to be a greenhorn—a
greener
, as we used to say on the Lower East Side. Embarrassed about my accent, my uncertainty about which fork to use, I hid behind my sketchbook and spoke as little as possible. What if I should mispronounce something!

When Sim came to fetch me that morning, having first sent maids to fit me with new clothes—a mutton-sleeved, high-necked linen waist, a blueand-green tartan skirt with matching fitted jacket, a wonderful green hat with parrot feathers and swaths of green veiling—he found me admiring my green suede high button boots with scalloped edges.

"Oh, what I dreamed!" I said.

"I dreamed of you," said he, "all night long."

"And what was I wearing in your dream?" I asked.

"Nothing at all," said Sim, blushing pink as a marzipan pig and starting to cough in nervousness.

He brought me pastels and paper and an ingenious French folding easel which could be unfolded and placed on the grass. It even had its own parasol to shield me from the sun. He carried this folded contraption as he took me on a tour of the grounds and showed me the beauties of the Berkshire countryside.

The "cottage" was immense—fifty rooms or more—and was perched whitely on the hilltop. With its gabled windows and many chimneys, and its terraces of Italian gardens, sundials, fountains with rearing horses, it seemed a place of enchantment, such as I imagined Versailles—which I had seen in pictures. My job was to memorialize the weekend with my pen. The house, the gardens, but most particularly the guests…all these I was expected to sketch.

I will never forget the way Levitsky trailed us, watching from afar as if he expected Sim to steal me away.

Sim was very solicitous of my needs, wanting me to participate in the croquet, the archery, the lunches, teas, and suppers. But feeling sure I would make an utter fool of myself among these swells, nobs, and brownstoners—what did I know of archery from Sukovoly or even Odessa?—I pretended such sport would interfere with my work and that I preferred only to sketch. I meticulously laid out my pencils, inks, and pastels, and I disappeared into the creamy drawing paper.

Impressed as I was by the purple hilltops, the deep-blue lakes, the sloping lawns like the dark-green velvety suede of my boots, I was even more impressed by the women, who seemed a breed apart from any I had ever known. Their slimness could hardly be due only to corseting! One among these took a particular interest in me.

"Meet Miss Lucretia Weathersby," said Sim, leading over to my easel a thin, almost pinched lady with what appeared to be a pair of pigeons taking flight from her huge white straw hat, whose gossamer streamers lifted in the wind and fluttered. Miss Lucretia had eyes hard as crows' beaks and little crinkles at the cruel corners of her mouth.

"Show us your temptress of the tenements, Sim!" she said with a bitter laugh. Then she minced over to be presented to me where I stood next to my easel under its spot of silken-parasoled shade.

She put out her bony hand. I clasped it and found it cold. She appraised me like a pawnbroker appraising a stolen watch.

"Ah, Sim," she said, not even deigning to address me, "you did not say your little Hebrew protégée was also a juicy morsel!"

Beads of sweat broke out on my forehead, and my cheeks prickled with heat. I hated her on sight and might have shown it had not Levitsky stridden forward to be introduced.

"Madame," he said, "let the lady sketch your likeness in that becoming hat!" And fetching a wicker chair from a nearby gazebo, he placed it on the emerald grass for Lucretia.

She arranged her shroud-white skirts and crossed her bony ankles, then pierced me with her birdlike gaze.

I thought for a moment of drawing her as the bird of prey she seemed. Then I remembered myself and made a likeness, but a flattering likeness in which all the sharpness I saw in her was softened. Sim stood behind me, watching, while Levitsky clowned for Lucretia. He was obnoxiously playing the stage Jew—with gestures stolen from Tomashevsky—and she ate it up!

"You people are sooo talented," I heard her say. And Levitsky played on her
goyishe
sensibilities like a ham Shylock. She would give him
her
pound of flesh—if only she had any! Sim, meanwhile, hovered over me.
That
was the day he pressed his Yiddish translation of Mrs. Browning's "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" into my hand. I hid it promptly in a pocket of my borrowed finery.

By the end of the afternoon, I had sketched several of the ladies, and they were all oohing and aahing over their little pastel sketches. Some began to bargain with Levitsky for me to paint proper full-length portraits of them. Yet for all that I had flattered Lucretia, she still eyed me warily. She knew me for her rival, and I surely knew her for my enemy.

I think of Lucretia as I saw her then (now that she is long dead) and she seems like such a black-and-white villainess. But remember, I viewed her not only through my own eyes but through the eyes of Sim, who had confused her somewhat with his own imperious mother. Sim was bound to Lucretia by manacles forged in childhood, and the crueler she was to him, the more bound to her he felt. Pain binds more securely than pleasure.

I have been asked to tell you everything I remember—perhaps because it is presumed that my great age gives me wisdom of some sort, or perhaps because I am now so old that my recollections are museum pieces. The young need to believe that the old know something. Otherwise life seems too random, too full of chaos. So I am dictating my story to your mother, because I want to give you something of value, and life is always of more value than
things
. Perhaps when you are old enough to read this I won't be here anymore. This is my testament for you, Sarichka, my spiritual will. "Writing an autobiography and making a spiritual will are practically the same," says the great Sholem Aleichem. So what if I am not writhing but talking? I imagine you listening,
mayne leben, mayne
neshomo, mayne libe.

You were born in that generation whose parents were all divorced when you were young, so perhaps continuity means even more to you than to other generations. The class of 2000! Whoever thought we'd come to such a year! And who'd have thought we'd have a generation like yours, so deeply cynical about love, about sex, about politics. Perhaps you were reacting to your parents' belief that a drop of LSD in the water supply would bring world peace. With parents like that, no wonder you're confused.

Sitting here, talking into this machine, my mind wanders. Painting is really much more comfortable for me than writing—or even dictating. Speaking, I see everything in pictures. I wish I could tell this story that way. But time is my subject, and time requires narrative. That's me: the ancient narrator.

I never look at myself in the mirror anymore, because I am no longer the self that I remember. It dislocates me to see that old crone in the mirror. I'd rather remember myself as I was then—auburn-haired, beautiful—as you are today. I'd rather look at you and see myself.

Since you have followed me this far, you are probably wondering how much of all this is true. I can only say it is as true as memory, and memory is a notorious deceiver. Mama used to say: "
Oyf a mayse fregt men nisht
keyn kashe
." (With stories, you don't ask questions.) Like all records of a life, it is a sort of note in a bottle cast upon the waters, to be found perhaps by a future survivor of life's shipwreck. I hope that future survivor is you.

Time is an undertow. Most of us live in the past our whole lives, and when death confronts us, we surrender and are not surprised to rejoin our lost loved ones. I find that the older I grow, the more real Russia is to me, though I lived there only seventeen years. But I know it is an imaginary Russia, which no longer exists; perhaps it never did. Nevertheless, it is where I live in these last years of my life. Often I find myself surrounded by relatives who died long ago. The worst thing about being this old is that the telephone seems useless because you cannot call up the people you are mostly thinking of. No telephones in heaven! (Though probably the other place is wired for sound!)

I try to remember all the things my mother told me, so that I can pass them on to you. "You may have doubts about love, but you can't doubt hatred," I repeat.

"Another pessimistic proverb!" I imagine you saying. "Didn't your mother ever say anything cheerful?"

"By her, that
was
cheerful," I say.

Yiddish wasn't just words, you see, it was an
attitude
. It was sweet and sour. It was a shrug and a kiss. It was humility and defiance all in one. "A worm in horseradish thinks his life is sweet," Mama used to say. "If God wills it, even a broom can shoot" was another favorite.

What I wish for you, my darling, is that all the brooms in your life should turn into magic wands and that you travel always from horseradish to honey, knowing the sweetness for what it is and having keen taste buds to appreciate its savor.

It was a world of outdoor privies, Irish cops, whalebone corsets, dumbbell tenements, and Beaux Arts (or brownstone) mansions—but the griefs and heartbreaks were the same. The panic about being broke, the thud in the heart when love came to call, the hopelessness of the old and the arrogance of the young—all these were the same.

Human beings do not, after all, have such a varied repertoire. For more than a hundred years, people have been saying that new machines will remake the creature, but I have seen people remain the same from horsecar to automobile, from clanking railroads to supersonic jets, from outhouse to rushing indoor cataracts.

After the weekend at Fontana di Luna, Levitsky decided there was more to be made on portraits of the rich than on catalog art, so he began to look for a proper studio for me.

He found one near Union Square, in a gloomy brownstone with a wide stoop and a parlor floor backed with glass that gave onto a northern sky.

We furnished the place in what seemed to us splendor: a fainting couch covered with Oriental rugs, a model's platform raised up on ball-footed legs, Turkish lanterns and a Turkish corner, embroidered shawls over the round table, plaster casts of Michelangelo's slaves, Donatello's David, Bernini's Daphne turning into a laurel tree.

And then the clients came, the women tittering and titillated by taking off their clothes and going into costume—for some wanted to be painted not as they were but as they wished to be: Juliet, Portia, Ophelia. (Men preferred to be painted as their heroic selves.) Many women changed into their own brilliant ball gowns and hovered over me to see that I highlighted every pearl.

Painting portraits is a good way to listen to the soul of a person hanging in the air. For the more silent I was, the more my sitters spoke. They began by establishing their wealth and station, as most people do, and ended by revealing the depths of their desires. And I would paint—the greenish shadows that define a nose, the yellow shine across a forehead, the wedge-shaped chocolate shadow below a lip. The portrait painter knows that all God's children are multicolored.