Inventing Memory (7 page)

All day, I would listen to my sitters preen and talk of balls and entertainments, engagements broken or dreamed of, grand tours to Europe planned or canceled.

They spoke to me as if I understood, and soon I did. I came to know that money prevents no griefs, cures no illnesses, and that a person can be as happy standing at an easel painting as having dresses fitted in Paris and arranging balls for four hundred. Happier, in fact. As my mama used to say: "The reddest apple may also have a worm."

At night the uptown sitters vanished and the hairy downtown anarchists arrived to argue and eat, and eat and argue.

We would drink tea with jam in the Russian fashion and slivovitz and vodka, smoked fish with black bread, and when there was money enough, black caviar.

The downtown world was intent on one thing: improving the human race. They really believed that if only their ideas were adopted, mankind could be saved. This was the principal difference between then and now: intellectuals really did believe that a better world was at hand. Utopias sprouted on the old Lower East Side like tubercular children. Capital was bad, it was argued, but people were essentially good. Thus many reasoned that the abolition of capital would change the world and bring back Eden. Anarchists in their cups spoke of which capitalists they would like to shoot. They discussed weapons. They ridiculed my portraits of rich ladies (which paid for the slivovitz and smoked fish). I ridiculed them too. I referred to my fine ladies as stuck-up
shiksas
and my fine gentlemen as
shaygetzes
with watch chains. I spat on the source of my good fortune just to prove it hadn't changed me. I was still Sarah from Sukovoly—no matter how much English I learned, how many rich clients I had, how much money I saved or sent home to Mama.

My uptown sitters
liked
the world the way it was—except for one thing: it was changing too fast. Too many "new people" with money, too many "foreigners," too many anarchists, unionists, troublemakers. Balanced between two worlds, I listened to the innermost secrets of each. Often I wished I could tell the poor anarchists how unhappy the rich were—or tell the rich how angry the anarchists were.

But it was my role to hear everything and hold my tongue. Everyone was poised for flight. The uptown people sought to flee the strictures of their proper families, while the downtown people thought only of saving their pennies to reunite with their relatives. Everyone was discontented, but in opposite ways.

The anarchists in our circle presumed Levitsky and I were lovers, and I think this suited him just fine. He wanted me safe on a shelf—but he did not want to climb up there with me.

One night when we were alone, I asked him about this.

"Why do you let our world think we are lovers?"

Levitsky stroked his bushy beard. "Do I?"

"You know you do," I said. "It's enough to keep any man from courting me."

"You need to paint, not court," Levitsky said solemnly. "Any little hen can make chicks. Not everyone can paint as you do."

"But what about being a woman!" I raised my voice.

"Being a woman gets you married and buried," said Levitsky. "Why do you think men bless themselves for not being women? Painting will make your fortune."

"You're afraid of me," I said.

Levitsky gave me a hateful look. I knew then that I was right.

Not that we did not try. One day, he embraced me in the studio and I felt the unmistakable hardness in his trousers that told me he was not as indifferent to me as he claimed. Possessed by the
dybbuk
of dominance, I was mad to have him and dragged him to the model's dais. There I undid his buttons, flung my breasts into his mouth, and searched in his shirttails for his bauble—it was no bigger than a field mouse. It put its head up tentatively, seemed to pulse in search of pleasure, and then retreated. Neither tongue nor moist lips could give it courage, and had it buried itself in me for shelter, I would have felt less than nothing.

I wept bitter tears of frustration—for what can be worse than a woman eye-to-eye with that conqueror who should subdue her but instead is subdued? I was sick with disappointment. Here was a man close to my heart in every way but that which makes man and wife. I hid my head in his breeches buttons and wept.

That night Dovie came back. "A dream not interpreted is like a letter unread," Mama used to say. In my dream, Dovie was grown, and he approached me like a lover.

"You are my son," I warned, holding him off, but he seemed ready to transgress the moral code. Then suddenly he was an infant again—but with a man's penis. It was bigger than Lev Levitsky's and more insistent. I awoke with a sense of dread and foreboding. Something horrible was sure to happen.

It was a time of heroics. We had an anarchist friend whose dream was to assassinate John D. Rockefeller in the name of the workers of America. She was a small, pretty woman, and she bought a pearl-handled pistol that looked like a toy.

When she entered Rockefeller's office and informed his well-dressed male secretary that she was there in the name of labor, unionism, and the eight-hour day, the secretary gave Rockefeller a prearranged sign to leave by another door. Then he flung off his father-killer celluloid collar, his braces, spats, and shoes, and had his way with her right there on his massive rolltop desk. Thinking herself a heroine of the revolution, our disheveled friend rose from the rape, brandished her preposterous pistol, and declared: "Tell Mr. Rockefeller that if he doesn't stop starving the miners, I will empty the contents of this pistol into him."

"I'll give Mr. Rockefeller the message, miss," said the smug secretary, and he showed my friend to the ornate carved door.

She boasted of her exploits at my next anarchist evening and proudly showed us the bruises the fabled furniture had left on her back. Of the rape she was even proud since she fancied the secretary's lust would gain her admission to Mr. Rockefeller's sanctum sanctorum again. Next time she would kill him and save the world! Those were the days, my child!

The question under discussion that evening became whether sex could be useful to the revolution.

"I bet your sitters could be useful to the cause," said one of Levitsky's cronies, a dapper little droopy-mustached man in a Russian peasant blouse whose name was Aaron Plotnik. (I have learned, in my much too long life, never to trust people named Plotnik.)

"Bite your tongue!" Levitsky admonished Plotnik.

It was all an act. He was as obsessed as any of them with the idea of changing history with a gun. More, perhaps—because his own gun was so useless. He read books on daring assassinations and hungrily followed all the news of anarchists at home and abroad.

I tried never to think of the slaughters that had brought me to America, the little bodies laid out in the
shul
after the
pogrom
, the dead fathers, the weeping mothers. Usually I was so busy with my work that I had no time. But when I dreamed of Dovie, all the past would come tumbling back—the sour smell of Russia, the fear, the time in Odessa when the photographer came to my narrow cot in the dark.

If you are innocent and expect no harm, it is not easy to be protected against evil. I used to fall into my bed exhausted from retouching pictures all day. My hands and feet were always numb with cold and my
tush
was numb with sitting. So when the big, smelly, vodka-breath bear came to my cot, all I felt at first was heaviness and warmth and fear of reprimand. He was my master after all.

A rough hand groped between my rags. Sandpaper skin, and a sour mouth muttering, "No harm will come to you." I pretended to be asleep because I was so afraid of resisting, and I prayed for Mama—who was hundreds of miles away—to save me. Here is the strange thing: I was ashamed of what was happening as if I were at fault, not he! Even after it was over, I was not sure what had occurred. Separated from myself, I believed my virginity had not been breached. So when Dovie came, I thought of him as the Messiah and rejoiced in him as if he were sent by God.

Attended by ghosts, I came to America. They were always there with me, whether I painted or prayed. Dovie, my father, my brother—they choired around me like cherubim as my brush made its dry sounds on the canvas.

I had discovered that most of my fellow immigrants in
der fremd
, the foreign world, dreamed always of the wretched homes they'd left. And the Yankees dreamed always of Europe, as if it would civilize them and make them whole. Those who could afford it sent half of Europe's brica-brac home by ship. I had seen this plunder at Fontana di Luna: stainedglass windows from France, altarpieces from Italy, statues from Greece—the furnishings of Europe transported across the seas to civilize the Americans. It didn't work. The Americans murdered each other even more often than the Europeans—especially on the rough-and-tumble Lower East Side.

"I dream of seeing my darling daughter again once more before I die," my mother writes to me, along with gossip about people I have almost forgotten. Everybody is dreaming. When will we all wake up?

When I didn't have a sitter, I would take my sketchbook and charcoal and roam the poorest sections of the city, with Sim as my guide—Jewtown, Chinatown, the foundling hospitals, the tenements, the tumbledown houses on back lots and the desperately poor children sleeping in back alleys, the Polish-Jewish families who subsisted on pickles and black bread, the Irish cops who cudgeled the barefoot boys on the street for stealing apples, the Italians who grew tomatoes in soup cans, and the Chinese who deadened their pain in opium dens. I would sketch the "sweaters" (whom I had so lately escaped) as Sim interviewed the pale girls coughing their lungs out with consumption, the skinny boys of eight or nine pretending to be older when the inspectors came.

The poverty of New York gave the lie to those who thought of it as the Golden Land. (My mama had a friend at home in Sukovoly who always said: "People tell me that in America the sugar is not sweet," and on dark days I was tempted to agree with her. But madness lay that way. The only thing that has preserved our people for six thousand years is hope. When we lose hope, we doom ourselves as Jews. Hope is our bread, hope is our honey, hope is our means of survival.)

There were flophouses with hammocks where the refuse of the city could sleep for a few cents a day—but even worse were the streets, where many lived, if you could call it living, including children whose lives were mercifully short. They either perished of exposure as infants, died due to the neglect of orphanages, or expired in the streets at eight or ten, having helped to enrich some boss.

I sent my sketches to the
Forverts
under the name "Sol," and I signed them with a sun. It was presumed the artist was a man—for what woman would dare impersonate the sun? Besides, they were paired with writings by "Sim."

After a while, my sketches were much talked about, and so were his writings. Some people complained that Sim and Sol were slandering New York, and others said that we were honestly depicting the need for reform.

But "Sol," the sketcher of the ghetto, lived a separate life from Sarah Solomon, the fashionable portrait painter.

Levitsky hated these excursions to the ghetto, but he felt powerless to forbid them because Sim had launched my other career.

Sketching as "Sol," I felt utterly liberated. It was the freedom of the mask, the fact that I need not sign my own name to these drawings and so could depict the cruelty of the city as I saw it—the orphans, the shopgirls, the street Arabs, the newsies, the consumptive waifs, the rumsoaked beggars, the porkpie-hatted gang leaders, the urchins who slept on the sawdust floors of bars.

Tell me the story of a foundling dropped on the doorstep of a wealthy house and saved. I will tell you of another foundling, dead and buried in a pine box. The rich are not so tender of the children of the poor. They may lecture them, preach to them of the joys of labor while they give them their dust to sweep, but do they ever bestow charity without a plaque to commemorate their goodness? What became of anonymous charity? Is charity true charity when it embellishes a rich name? I bless the man who gives without a plaque to commemorate his giving. In those days, all charity was private, and bodies of babies found floating in the river testify to its efficacy.

America was supposed to be the place where challah was served on weekdays, where the workers walked from factory to bank laden with bags of gold, where greenhorn girls wore feathered hats like duchesses. When I began doing these sketches and sent some of them home with the money I was making, my mama was outraged. She did not want to hear that America was not a perfect country, and she reproached me with my ingratitude to the new land. I unburdened my heart to Sim about this.

"You are taking away her dreams," he said. "People can forgive anything but that. I know, because you are taking away my dreams."

"Sim!" I exploded. "Do you want to be an outcast for all your days? Marry me and lose the world."

"Gladly I would," he said. "Otherwise I creep into my coffin early, with only Lucretia to row across the river Styx."

Even if Levitsky did not like my rovings with Sim, he tolerated them. No doubt he thought Sim would open more doors for him. I wanted to keep Levitsky happy. He was essential to my business. Also, he was
landsleit
. We shared a way of speaking, a way of thinking, a way of looking at the world.

Levitsky (as I always called him), a big man with a grizzled black beard, big dark eyes, those distinctive larval brows, and a paunch, looked older than his years—he was only a few years my senior. His greatest assets were his ready, easy way with strangers, his joke-telling, his fluent talk. He was a born salesman who could ensnare the unsuspecting with clever words and separate them from their thrifty intentions before they knew what was happening.

"Any fool can paint a picture," he used to say. "But it takes a genius to
sell
a picture."

I took him at his word—not recognizing for a very long time that it was
my
contribution to our partnership that was being maligned.