Inventing Memory (22 page)

And the crowd roared.

But of all the memorials to her, the oral history you did with her when
Sara was a baby, that rambling interview—or whatever you want to call
it—is by far the
best.
As I remember, she addressed her remarks to Sara,
whose legacy it will be. Don't bury it, darling—do something with it.
Her story matters. Everyone has an ancestor like Mama, and people will
identify. Give them the joy of knowing her. She was one of a kind. Suigeneris. She was a woman of valor.

We were never what you would call religious, but we do believe that
each generation carries the previous one forward by means of memory.
Memory is a sacred thing for Jews. That is why we worship words, books,
art, music, all the things that keep the past alive, all the things that deny
death, that rage against the dying of the light.

If we have survived despite all odds, it is because of our reverence for
memory. We believe the past is with us and in us. We do not believe we
can eradicate the past, nor that our enemies can. We document our past
as a way of revering it. We are all historians, in a way. We believe we
must lift up the past, remake it, transform it into the future. The secret
of our strength is merely that: we know that memory is the crux of our
humanity. We know that words are sacred. We also know that though
art defines our humanity, life matters too. Life matters most. Pass it on.

I love you.

Salome (Your Mother!!!!)

9

Sally's Story

IN THE
SKY WITH
DIAMONDS
1953-1969

Jews are the intensive form of any nationality whose
language and customs they adopt.

—EMMA LAZARUS

F
rom the time Sally was a little girl, she believed fate had picked her out for a special destiny. This was because her grandfather Levitsky, a bearded man with bushy eyebrows and glittery gold glasses, who used to put her to bed whistling Russian songs and rubbing her back, made it clear to her she
was
special. Every morning, he fixed her boiled eggs and toast soldiers. He walked her all the way from the town house on Fifty-sixth Street to her school opposite Central Park. And he picked her up in the afternoon, dropping everything to play with her.

She also knew she was special because there were portraits of her (painted by her grandmother) at every stage of her life—baby portraits, portraits in Elizabethan costume, portraits in angel gowns and Japanese kimonos, portraits in pastels, oils, watercolors. But most of all she knew she was special because her mother wanted her and her grandmother and grandfather wanted her and when she lay in bed in the morning before getting up she could make rainbows between her eyelashes. There was a black cloud on this rainbow, and that was her father, who lived far away in a sort of hospital place and was whispered about. But if she didn't think of that shadowy being—glimpsed a few times across a green lawn—and thought instead of her grandparents and her mother, everything seemed secure.

At her grandparents' house in California, she had a white tutu and white satin ballet slippers, and at her mother's house in New York she had pink ones. Sometimes she would lie in bed for hours, wrapping pink satin ribbons around her legs and pretending she was dancing on the ceiling
en pointe
. She had all the time in the world to grow up and be the most famous girl in the world, and that was what she planned to be.

"Sally!" her nanny Hannah used to call. "Get out of bed this minute!" But she didn't want to get out of bed. In bed she could imagine she was anything in the world. Bed was her favorite place to be. It allowed enough space for her imagination.

Her mother was beautiful—large tawny eyes and red hair. She was the most beautiful mother in the whole school. She seemed younger than the other mothers, and she liked to skip in the streets and ice-skate at Rockefeller Center and take ballet classes and do things other mothers didn't do. Other mothers were dull and wore beaver or Persian lamb coats. Sally's mother dressed like an actress or a dancer, in Indian silks and silver jewelry that tinkled like bells. Sally's mother had style.

When Sally was five or six, she wandered into her mother's room in the middle of the night, pushed open the door, and saw something she knew she was not supposed to see: her mother's head flung back over the edge of the bed and her stepfather, Robin—was he her step-father yet?—suspended over her mother, looking angry and rocking back and forth. The door had squealed softly on its hinges. Had they heard? Sally's heart pounded and hammered on her temples. But they did not hear, did not see. They were off in another place. She stood rooted to the floor, watching. She heard her mother moan as if she were being hurt. She wanted to help, yet knew she should not budge. She felt sick, yet fascinated. She literally could not move her feet. Suddenly Robin turned his head and saw her, his eyes wild. She ran away as if she had been hit.

For years she remembered it that way—as if she
had
been hit. And when her brother, Lorenzo, was born and turned her life upside down, she believed he was her punishment for watching. She was bedeviled by the thought that someday her mother would also know her secret and something even more unimaginably horrible would happen. But her mother never spoke of it, and the suspense of this terrible punishment hanging over her head was worse than anything. Sometimes she begged God to strike her dead so that she would not have to wait any longer for the punishment that might come at any time. Anything was better than this waiting. She used to lie in bed thinking that the nail scissors would fly out of its kit and stab her baby brother through the heart. She would get up every few minutes to look in his crib to make sure this
hadn't
happened. And her mother would sometimes rush in and say, accusingly: "
What
are you doing with the baby?" It terrified Sally that her mother could read her thoughts. Now, surely, an even bigger punishment was in store.

Even though she was not such a great ballet dancer, when the TV people came to her school, they picked her to be on TV and talk about ballet because she was different from the other little girls. She was small, but she spoke like an adult. "Ballet is about precision," she said precisely. She carried herself with confidence, with defiance. In a way, this was a cover-up, because she knew she had done things she was not supposed to do—had stolen a toy baby bottle from a playmate's house because she just
had to have it
, had seen her mother that way, had imagined her baby brother dead, had shamelessly gone on TV when she was not the best dancer, only the best talker. So when people told her how wonderful she was, she didn't entirely believe it. Her sense of a special destiny and her sense of being wicked and guilty were all somehow mixed up together.

When she wanted to feel exquisitely terrible and remember all the things she had done wrong, she thought of herself at five, playing on the floor of a friend's house, debating whether or not to take that bottle with the little red nipple. It was the perfect thing for her doll. But stealing was wrong. If she asked to take it, they might say no. So with a throb of terror in her chest, she put it in her pocket without telling anybody. It burned a hole in her conscience for years after.

She remembered that little bottle so well—even decades later. It had a long, pointed red nipple—not like a real baby bottle at all but like a baby bottle in a cartoon. The thing was, she didn't
have
to steal it. Anyone—her mother, grandfather, grandmother—would have bought a baby bottle for her. But she wanted
this
baby bottle—she couldn't
wait
for another one. Perhaps there would never
be
another one. It was from this incident that she knew how irresistible a compulsion could be. The need to have that bottle was not a choice. Many things in her life were like that.

Her grandmother painted, her mother had written books and now ran a famous gallery, and for the longest time she did not know what she could possibly do to distinguish herself. She knew she had a musical gift—her piano teacher raved about her, but it was not until she was given a guitar when she was twelve that she truly found her calling. Becoming one with that guitar, she felt entirely safe for the first time, as if the instrument and the music it made were an all-powerful shield against all the dangers of the world. Nobody could call her a thief when she had that guitar in front of her. Nobody could take her to task for patrolling the house at night or for the wicked thoughts she had had about Lorenzo when he was a baby. She picked out the chords and sang "Greensleeves" over and over to herself, imagining a beautiful lover to whom she was plaintively singing:

Alas, my love, you do me wrong

to cast me off discourteously,

For I have lovèd you so long,

Delighting in your company….

Greensleeves were all my joy…

Greensleeves were my delight…

Greensleeves were my heart of gold

and who but my lady

Greensleeves….

Sally commuted from Plaza 7 to Riverside 9 to study with a blacklisted folksinger of the thirties called Mason Herbst, who lived way uptown in a dusty apartment filled with stacks of crumbling sheet music. His upright piano was out of tune. His teeth were yellow, his stomach made basso noises, and he smelled funny.

Once, she made the mistake of mentioning her grandfather Levitsky to him, and his expression became so black she was afraid he would refuse to teach her.

"Not your fault," he muttered almost to himself, "that your grandfather's a stool pigeon."

"You know my grandfather?" she asked.

"I'd know him in
hell
," said Herbst. He went on demonstrating technique.

At the time, Sally didn't really comprehend what had happened, but later she understood. Things had occurred before her birth that people were still furious about.

Mason Herbst knew about Child ballads, blues, "progressive jazz." He was friends with Woody Guthrie, Alan Lomax. He subscribed to
Sing
Out
magazine. Mason Herbst liked to stroke her long red hair with his trembling fingers. She hated his touching her hair. She hated especially the pathetic way he looked at her, smiling crookedly with yellow teeth. But she made no move to stop him. She didn't want to offend. She let him touch her hair and blow his foul breath in her mouth. But one day, after he had taught her "Barbara Allen" and "Black is the color of my true love's hair," she left his apartment and never came back. He was just too spooky. She would teach herself to play, she decided, by being a sponge, absorbing music everywhere. It was true that later she would miss that link with the radical past—"We want bread and roses too" was another song he taught her—but by then she knew how to find it elsewhere. She never even dreamed then that her darling grandfather knew all there was to know about those forgotten days. He had stopped talking about them in the fifties—and besides, he was old and somewhat forgetful now.

By the time Sally was a junior in high school, she discovered the coffeehouses in the Village, where, as a lark, she called herself Sally Sky. (Sally Wallinsky seemed much too cumbersome a name for a singer, and she liked the spaciousness of Sky.) "This land is your land, this land is my land," she sang. "This land was made for you and me."

She also delighted in driving her grandfather crazy by singing the "International":

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!

Arise, ye wretched of the earth!

For justice thunders condemnation!

A better world's in birth!

"Vat better world?" her grandfather would ask. "The Communists all became capitalists—that's all! We
forgot
the wretched of the earth to mine opinion. The wretched of the earth were damned ungrateful—and they smelled bad too!"

"What happened to your idealism, Papa?" For Sally knew that much from her mother.

"A long story. America has no room for idealists and dreamers. Making a living is the American religion." (Only, he pronounced it "making a
leeving
.")

"I hope I never get as cynical as you, Papa."

"Just live long enough." He sighed. "For a long time I asked why the old had to die. It's not because your heart attacks you or because of cancer-schmancer—but because we lose our illusions. Without illusions we die. Without illusions there's no energy, no enthusiasm for life. So we have to be replaced—by the young who have fresh illusions. God planned it that way."

"Then you believe in God?" Sally asked.

"I have decided that God believes in me."

Papa went to his bookcase, extracted a yellowed anthology of poems, and opened it with a loud crack and a cloud of dust. He read a poem to Sally in his gravelly voice with its Russian accent:

The clock in the workshop, it rests not a moment;

It points on and ticks on; eternity—time;

Once, someone told me the clock had a meaning,

In pointing and ticking had reason and rhyme….

At times, when I listen, I hear the clock plainly:

The reason of old—the old meaning is gone!

The maddening pendulum urges me forward

To labor and still labor on.

The tick of the clock is the boss in his anger.

The face of the clock has the eyes of the foe.

The clock—I shudder—dost hear how it calls me?

It calls me "Machine" and it cries to me, "Sew!"

When he had finished reading, Papa rocked back in his chair and said: "To mine opinion, it's better in Yiddish." But he tried to remember it in Yiddish and just couldn't.

"Dat's my memory—a sieve—but I won't forget the
schreiber—
a great man, Morris Rosenfeld, who wrote poetry and worked in a sweatshop. Your grandmama did too…."

"My grandmama wrote poetry and worked in a
sweatshop
?" Sally asked incredulously. Sally knew her grandmama as an elegant lady in gold half-moon glasses and perfectly tailored suits from Balenciaga and Dior.

"A sweatshop?" Sally was agog.

Levitsky said: "There's plenty you don't know,
mayne kind, mayne
shayner kind…."

With a guitar you could go anywhere in New York in those days. Sally wore her frantic, frizzy strawberry hair down to her waist, and on her feet she wore rough-hewn sandals she had bought on Eighth Street in the Village. She dressed all in black. She sang as if her life depended on it. In a way, it did.

Boys started turning up when she was fourteen, first in the person of Gaiter Rowland—"Gaiter Gaiter Masturbator," as his friends called him—the six-foot string bean of Washington Square. He had soulful black eyes and dangled a smoldering Gauloise from his lower lip. Gaiter was a banjo player, Scruggs picker, pot smoker, finger fucker, and allpurpose rebel. He hung out with Izzy Young at the Folklore Center. In its back room, Gaiter initiated Sally into orgasm with his banjo-picking fingers, and for a long time she thought she was the only girl in the world to have experienced this gasping release. She began to starve herself in penance. No food, no water, long, tortured telephone conversations with Gaiter, in which she tried to break up with him and he begged her not to. He wrote songs for her. She wrote songs for him. He would win her back by singing under the town house window with two musician pals and strewing the stoop with rose petals.