Inventing Memory (9 page)

"There's always money for matzos and shrouds," Mama would have said. Or: "For death you always have time." How would Mr. Johnson have behaved if he'd known that posing for his portrait was the last act of his life?

After long interrogations, threats of deportation, and humiliating searches of my property, I was cleared of guilt—but not before my reputation had been ruined by the newspapers.

Sim had the worst of it. Because he had published scathing attacks on New York's poverty and inequity in the Yiddish press, he was pilloried as "a traitor to his class." The evidence against him was purely circumstantial, but Lucretia came forward to swear under oath that she had heard him plotting the murder in an anarchist café. Sim had once made the mistake of telling her that he would rather die than live the life of a member of New York Society. It was this statement—quoted everywhere—that sealed his fate. Sim was indicted as an accessory to the crime.

Levitsky could not be found. Those two Italian union men received the tender mercies of the police until they confessed to Johnson's murder. Anarchist protests, poems, broadsides, were not enough to keep them from being sentenced to execution for the crime of being foreigners.

"America is rich and fat because it has eaten the tragedy of millions of immigrants…." Who said that? It was Michael Gold (who was later erased from the golden book of poets for turning into such an enthusiastic Communist). Mike Gold was born Irwin Granich in an East Side tenement—people changed their names in those days—and he fell in love with the dream of the workers' revolution and gave up literature for what he considered a higher calling. But what he said in
Jews Without
Money
was true then and it's true now: The immigrants have changed, but the
tragedy
of the immigrants is the same. America's melting pot is a cauldron of boiling tears. And even the real Yankees sometimes drown in those immigrant tears.

Portrait commissions, needless to say, dried up. By the time my mother and Tanya and Bella and Leonid arrived at Ellis Island (looking like greenhorns), I had been forced to indenture myself to the picture fakers and become a ghost painter. My bosses were those art con men who set up swell studios in Palm Beach and Beverly Hills and on Fifth Avenue and posed as artists, while they farmed out the work to hungry immigrants like me.

Of course, I resented the picture fakers for the huge percentages they took, but I have to admit they saved my life. I worked mostly for a certain Mr. Filet (the name was pronounced in a Frenchified manner as "Feelay"—though its owner was born Feeley in County Cork). Filet had as his partner a fellow named Cooney, who hailed from Killarney. He called himself "Coo-nay." Filet and Cooney certainly had a good racket going. Filet was the one who posed as the artist—flowing smock, beret, the absentminded air of a
luftmensch—
and Cooney was his manager, agent, all-purpose factotum—and artist's wife. For these two gentlemen were pederasts, to use the quaint terminology of the time. On the East Side, we were blunter:
feygele—
bird—was our term of art. I knew, knew by Filet's bouncing blond mustaches and the feathery way he talked and walked, knew by his uxoriousness and Cooney's mincing, that they ate together, slept together, and banked together, and that the fine ladies of Palm Beach were thrusting out their bosoms for naught. "Such charming manners," they said of Monsieur Filet. "Such delicacy and tact," they said of his partner. "Such talent," they said, as I painted the portraits Filet pretended to paint and Cooney charged a fee that was ten times my take. Still, I was glad for the work.

Filet and Cooney were favorites in all the best society. Matrons introduced them to eligible daughters, whom they never, of course, married. At Palm Beach, they had a rented Mediterranean mansion on the sea, complete with potted palms and a liveried staff of lackeys, maids, and laundresses as well as handsome young equerries and grooms. I would arrive by train in the dark of night—Jews were not welcome in Palm Beach in those days—be concealed behind the arras like a
gonif
, and proceed to paint the actual portrait while Filet posed as the artist. He played the role so well he had begun to believe it himself. He talked about the paintings as if they were actually his.

"I learned everything I know about painting lace, my dear, from Van Dyck, and my flair for drapery was the gift of Veronese," Filet would tell his sitters. "Rembrandt van Rijn taught me about light. And the divine Tintoretto tutored me in
chiaroscuro
. Yes, Cooney
ed io
toured Italy together—just
noi due—
so I could apprentice myself to the dear dead masters. Carpaccio, Raffaello, Botticelli, Bronzino…" He would roll the
r's
in the Italian fashion. "I would forever be copying, copying, copying, until I learned all their beautiful tricks…. I learned to grind my own pigments—cobalt, ocher, titanium—to prime canvas so it will last for at least a thousand years, to underpaint and overpaint and overpaint and underpaint, until the paint itself metamorphoses into flesh! Ah, 'tis but the magic of art!" He'd rattle on, miming the painting of the portrait—dabbing his brush on the canvas, wiping it theatrically—then flinging a damask drape over the easel before the sitter got up to stretch. Meanwhile, ensconced behind the tapestry, or behind a screen decorated with birds to do Mr. Audubon proud, I would be peering from a pierced pair of eagle's eyes. While the painted eagle ambushed the painted mouse, Monsieur Filet would ambush his sitter.

Did the deception delight me? It did. And so did the money. My daughter, Salome, later attacked me for "hiding my light under a bushel." But I hardly wanted more notoriety after the madness of the trial. I wanted merely to disappear as Levitsky had done. Since
he
seemed never to be coming back, I took his name and gave it to my daughter, to spare my mother's fragile heart. I was an abandoned woman, as far as my mother knew. As for the friend I visited in prison every week, how could Mama know that he was more than a colleague and friend fallen on hard times?

It was sometimes my misfortune to visit at the same time as Lucretia. I remember one occasion when both of us were waiting outside the jail for visiting hours to begin and Lucretia brazenly came up to me and said: "I will win this round."

"I didn't know you were a prizefighter, Lucretia," I said.

"A winner," shrilled Lucretia, through pointed teeth.

If Sim goes to his enemy, I thought, he is weaker than I suspected. I hadn't counted on Lucretia's tenacity and Sim's lack of it. Weak men always find tough women, and vice versa. But how could Sim do anything but spit on his betrayer? Was he so deeply guilty for his affair with me? It never occurred to me that Lucretia would convince him that I was his betrayer and she was his savior. But I am rushing ahead.

Have I forgotten to say that by the time Mama, Leonid, Tanya, and cousin Bella arrived at Ellis Island, I knew I was pregnant? This time it was a comfort to me, because I felt so alone in the world. I will never forget seeing my mama come off the boat looking like an old woman. On her coat was chalked the remains of the letter H. We were lucky they let her into the Golden Land despite her bad heart. In her European shoes, handmade shawl, and crude false teeth, she resembled someone I could not know. And then I took her in my arms and smelled the smell that told me I was home.

I turned myself into a drudge. Painting under a false name is liberating because the element of self-judgment is gone, the sentinel at the gates that inhibits all wildness, all brilliance. At times I turned out two or three portraits a week. Often I traveled with the picture fakers, posing as their secretary or assistant by day, painting all night by electric light while they went to the swell parties and gathered the commissions. Extra men—"Champagne Charlies" or "men about town" they called them—are always welcome at swell dinners. Not so "women about town"—which then as now meant prostitutes. Oh, the double standard is still alive and well!

When Salome was seven, Levitsky returned like a bad penny. He quickly took advantage of the situation, announced to Mama that we would marry again in the synagogue because we had only married in City Hall. He legitimized my Salome.

I disappeared into marriage, motherhood, and work. Work was my drug, my anodyne, my aphrodisiac. Meanwhile, Levitsky squandered my money, opening a variety of downtown galleries, which failed. I anchored myself in the comforting certainties of stretching canvases, mixing paint, and watching the everyday miracle of the flat plane of the canvas turning into three-dimensional life. Salome became my compensation for all that I had lost. I cared about her too much. Our relationship was so intense that she had to run away. There is an old proverb that equates an only daughter with a needle in the heart. I am here to vouch for the truth of that.

4

Salome's Story

FROM THE
GOLDEN
LAND TO THE
CITY OF
LIGHT AND BACK
AGAIN

1929 and after

We are not born all at once but bit by bit, the body first
and the spirit later.

—MARY ANTIN

NOTEBOOK

The Dôme, Paris

21 May 1929

My mother named me Salome after a novel written by one of her Lower East Side cronies, though by the time I remember anything, we had long since moved uptown to Riverside Drive—Allrightniks Row—with my old Nana, who never quite learned to speak English, and my weird old squirrelly cousin Bella from the old country.

They were shocked when I became a flapper at fifteen, hung out with girls who were called "speeds," haunted the speakeasies in Greenwich Village, the chop-suey dance joints in Chinatown, and did all the various black-and-tan joints in Harlem during its heyday as a so-called sepia sin spot. But my uncle understood—and whenever I fought with Mama, I had a place with him and Aunt Sylvia. They had no children and were happy to claim me as a surrogate daughter. They were already rich in the linen supply business, driving a milelong Packard with a liveried chauffeur and having penthouse parties that lasted till dawn—parties where you saw starlets and jazz babies, whoopee mamas and John Held, Jr., girls (with their sheiks, jazzbos, and
soi-disant
jelly beans), as well as the usual political bosses, gangsters, publishers, and starving poets. Uncle Lee said that parties were good for business. But Mama and Papa never came to any of them.

Uncle Lee spent his days in the laundry plant on Tenth Avenue. He would walk the plant, staring at the floor like a Zen monk, picking up the little bits of string that otherwise would get balled up in the wheels of the laundry carts and stall them. He was forever muttering curses in Russian about the stupidity of "the help."

Mama painted every day in her studio at Seventy-second Street and Riverside Drive, with its perfect north light. She wore little half-moonshaped glasses and rested her hand on the maulstick, and Papa came and went, bringing her more commissions, more pictures of these dulllooking capitalists with center-parted hair, high collars, and diamond stickpins, more swatches of tweed or silk, more bank checks. Mama did well, but it galled me that when the time came to sign the pictures in beautiful vermilion script, she never signed her own name. Sometimes she signed one name, sometimes another. She never signed our name—Levitsky—either. And Papa had long since stopped painting. He spent all his time stirring up work for Mama and scheming about galleries he wanted to open. His biggest dream was to establish a downtown gallery and sell the latest avant-garde painting, but Mama thought it was a waste of money—and Mama ruled the roost. I felt sorry for Papa and vowed that when I became famous myself I would give him everything Mama had denied him.

I told Mama this.

"You're a little
pisher
who understands nothing," she said.

"And
you've
given up your dreams," I would shout. "I never want to be like you!"

"And I never wanted to be like my mama either," she said, "but look at me now!"

And it was true that she and Nana looked more and more alike, spent more and more time together, spoke Russian so that I could not understand, and seemed in league against me.

But Uncle Lee gave me the money to go to Paris when I was eighteen. And sent me a generous allowance too. Mama was furious, but I sailed for the City of Light without so much as asking her permission!

In May of '29, I sailed on the
Bremen
, a German ship known for its flowing (real, not bathtub) gin, good-looking pursers—we called them
pursuers—
and endless nights. With my shorter than short beaded flapper dresses and coy strapped shoes, I always had plenty of admirers.

On the very first night, I was tight (as usual) and dancing a mad Charleston in the cabin-class cabaret with a German student who wore a monocle, white tie, and tails. His name was Emil von something. (In the novel I should call him Erich—with an h.) He had dueling scars from Heidelberg.

We were red hot, and the whole shipboard
boîte
was watching us.

Suddenly Emil stopped, scanned the onlookers, and said to me: "I smell
Jew
."

I was stunned. I felt as if my face had been slapped. For a moment, I didn't know what to say.

"But, Emil," I said, "didn't you
know
I was Jewish?"

Now it was his turn to look shocked.

"You can't possibly be a Jewish cockroach," he said with a mixture of lust and loathing. Nevertheless he turned on his heel and walked away. He avoided me for the rest of the crossing. Oh, Thomas Wolfe is right that Atlantic crossings are filled with "the life, the hate, the love, the bitterness of six-day worlds!"

That was my first taste of the nastiness that was beginning to megaphone in Germany—not to mention my first inkling of what it meant to be a Jew away from Gotham. In New York, being Jewish is entirely unremarkable. Everywhere else, it is a source of shame. Or mad pride.

[This appears to be Salome's initial journal entry from her fabled first trip to
Europe in 1929. She was not quite seventeen and a half—though she claims
to be eighteen! Her story is told in letters and journals, which, like her mother's
taped oral history, I have arranged chronologically so the reader can follow.
Ed.]

2 June 1929

Dear Theda,

I'm finally in Paris! I have taken a flat—a room with a bidet really.
(Do you know what a bidet is? Hint: it's not for washing socks!) It's on
the top floor—seven flights up—of a dive on the Rue de la Harpe. Paris
is everything it's cracked up to be and more. And how. You should definitely come over.

This city never sleeps. The cafés are swept at four in the morning
and they reopen at six. I sit in the Dôme—where the artists are—every
night and scribble all my ideas for the great American novel. In the book,
I'm going to disguise you, don't worry. To protect the guilty. (Do you
think, by the way, that you and I are best friends because of our names?
I do.)

I absolutely haunt the cafés—the Rotonde, the Select—meeting
everyone: artists, of course, and queens dressed in women's clothes, and
artists' models like Kiki de Montparnasse, who drink real
absinthe
(the
kind with the worms in it).

The first ones to discover you are the Sapphists, of course, just like
in the Village. They all write cryptic poems and sign them with initials.
They are often very beautiful, but a lot of them are wasting away from
too much
absinthe,
not to mention opium. The Sapphists wear the most
elegant clothes and some of them dress like dandies. Some of them prefer
men's tailoring and some are so exquisitely feminine you can hardly tell
what they are. Pale faces, arched eyebrows, marcelled bobs, filmy dresses,
gallons of Arpège. I have written some cryptic poems too.

I am much more cryptic in Paris than I ever was in New York. Will
you come over? You will never regret it if you do!

Love, Love, Love,

Salome

NOTEBOOK

13 June 1929

With Uncle Lee's money, I have decided to start a magazine—everyone starts a magazine here—called
Innuendo
. Access to the printing press gives power. And sex. (At least, that's what I'm hoping.)

Poets of all races and genders will flock to me because of my magazine. Already I am not unknown on the Left Bank and in Montparnasse. (That's too modest—I am seen as a
figure
if not quite yet a
legend
.) Mostly the medium of exchange is sex—chocolate boys who play the trumpet, piano, and clitoris; vanilla boys who claim to have been wounded in the war. I will sample them all! Quantity if not quality! I am also picking up paintings for a
song:
Pascin, both Delaunays, Picasso, Man Ray, Tanguy, Braque. (For my old age, if I ever
have
one—ha!)

1 July '29

Dear Theda,

What do you mean, your parents won't let you come?

Don't ask them. You can't cling to your parents forever. If they have
their way, you'll wind up married to Artie Lefkowitz and making chopped
chicken liver and brisket every Friday night. You'll wind up in
Brooklyn,
for God's sake. And then what will be the use of all we've taught each
other? Be firm. All great women flout convention. Think of Edna St.
Vincent Millay! Would
she
listen to her parents? Courage!

Love,

Salome

2 August 1929

Dear Theda,

Of course I wish you well. Of course you can still be a free woman
and a flapper though married. Of course I will never stop being your
best friend. Of course I know you are not doing it for your parents. The
only reason I am not coming to the wedding is
Innuendo.
Love is love
but I have a responsibility to my deadlines. This is what it means to be
a publisher—even an avant-garde publisher.

Love,

Salome

5 Sept 1929

Dear Theda,

Life gets crazier and crazier here. Last night I went to a ball where
most of the women exposed at least one breast and were painted gold or
silver. Before that there was an art show with no lights at all—very
Dada—we were given flashlights and lanterns to see the pictures. I am
learning more here than I ever learned in school. And I have met
everyone.
The talk of literary Paris is a book published privately in
Florence by a chap named Lawrence which details a love affair between
a lady and her gamekeeper. He twines violets in her pubic hair! And
other things too unprintable to mention. I will try to find a copy for you
as a wedding present. Hot stuff!

Love,

Salome

12 Sept 1929

Dear Theda,

It didn't require a cable. Stop. I will keep the book for myself. Stop.
Don't want to shock your old man. Stop. Keep the aspidistra flying!
Stop.

Salome

NOTEBOOK

3 April 1931

I am overcome with guilt for not writing in this notebook for so long, but everything changed after the Crash! A lot of the Americans packed and went home, and the ones who stayed were a different breed. The remittance kids went home, I mean—except for me (since linen supply is a Depression-proof business)—and the ragamuffins arrived. One ragamuffin in particular, a certain H. Valentine Miller of Brooklyn and Yorkville and Greenwich Village, arrived. I decided to stay.

NOTEBOOK

12 June 1931

Sex in the thirties—just like in the twenties—is plentiful if not always dependable: a tremendous amount of passing out goes on because of the
absinthe
. I'm told that when Pernod (an artificial absinthe that the old-timers always complain about) came in, it was an excuse to drink even
more
. And then there are the
fins à l'eau
everyone drinks and drinks and
drinks
. Sex and drink do not great sex make—as Zelda Fitzgerald was forever telling everyone. The Fitzgeralds
too
have gone home after following the Murphys to the South of France. I met all these birds since
Innuendo
gave me entrée everywhere.

But the most exciting person I've met is this bald writer on a bike—he calls it his
racing wheel—
who always needs a meal or a place to stay. He's from Brooklyn, is in love with astrology, philosophy, and sex—in reverse order—and he is definitely the sort of vagabond who comes into a woman's life and turns it upside down.

[undated]

Dear Theda,

So I was sitting in the Dôme and writing one day—because even
though I have been away from New York almost two years, I still have
only bits and pieces of my novel. Too busy leading the literary life to
actually
write,
I guess. (No wonder Flaubert said, "live like the bourgeois." Or words to that effect.)

Anyway who should be writing at this other table but a sinewy guy
with Asiatic-looking eyes, a slouch cap on his head, and a wide mocking
mouth. As I walk to the back of the café to find the W.C., I peek over his
shoulder. The Land of Fuck, I read, in his sloping rhythmic hand. Suddenly he turns around, looks in my eyes, and asks:

"Do you wanna go there?"

This with a heavy Brooklyn accent.

"Every cunt needs to go there regularly, don'tcha know?"

I laugh and continue to the W.C. But the phrase strikes me. In fact,
like Lady Chatterley, I start to throb you know where! "The Land of
Fuck" is what I have been
looking
for in Paris—as you know better
than anyone—and have not yet found. It's not as available as avantgarde literature might indicate! Not really.