Inventing Memory (13 page)

"I am wondering," Sim asks in a moment of clarity, "if when animals die they worry about being remembered, of having their stories told. They are so like us in so many ways—the quest for dominance, the urge toward reproducing their own kind—but do they have
memory
? Is it memory that makes us human? Is memory the crux of all that we invent…poetry, sculpture, painting? I loved your mother for many things but above all because she belonged to the people of memory, the people of the book. What is so great as memory?" The question was clearly rhetorical.

"The body breaks down, but memory remains," I say.

"Only if transfused into another body, another brain. And only love transfuses the life force." And he begins to wheeze again.

Lucretia runs out to phone the doctor. Sim takes note of this and quickly says to me:

"Whatever she or her family may imply, we aren't really married."

"Am I the only one who knows this?"

"Ethan's mother knew, before she died."

"And have you left proof that I am your child?"

"The safe. Everything is there. Take care of your mother."

And then he begins to drown.

"Please stay," I say, clutching his hand.

"Please don't ask me to do the one thing I cannot do.
You
are
my
memory now," he says.

My heart feels as if it is cracking as I hear him struggle with his breath, draw in air, choke on it, and turn it into strange music. A hurricane is brewing in his lungs. It blows away my selfish resolve to keep him here.

Let him go, I say to myself. Release him. That is the kindest thing you can do. But it takes an active effort of will to accomplish this. His dying requires both his and my letting go. It is not a simple matter. People may be summoned into the world thoughtlessly, but they do not leave it that way. Too much thought, memory, regret, holds them back. Every death displaces a great weight from the shoulders of God.

What does his life mean? I feel I need to know that in order to know what mine means. By the time the doctor comes, Sim has ceased to breathe.

We can't bury him, because the ground is frozen. His body is to remain all winter in the icehouse, as if he were still with us. Lucretia plays the part of the grieving widow so well that she must believe it. Her family lost everything in the Crash, so her only claim to comfort is Sim's legacy—this house (nowhere as grand as her family's lost mansion, Fontana di Luna) and whatever the Coppleys have preserved.

Ethan and I speculate on the contents of the safe. We are afraid to open it for fear of Lucretia's treachery. Ethan is now convinced that Lucretia killed his mother and is not beyond killing us. And the winter is so cold and snowy that we are all confined here with Sim's corpse till the spring thaw.

NOTEBOOK

December 1

Lucretia is becoming more and more irrational. She is given to outbursts:

"Don't think you can just waltz in here and take everything," she said today. "I gave up my life for him, nursed him, waited for him! I could have had a family but for him! I could have had a brilliant career!"

She visits him in the icehouse and has long dialogues with him as if he's alive. She supplies both sides of the conversation. Her theme is always the Jews: how it is our corruption, pollution, and money grubbing that has destroyed the world. She reads aloud from her well-thumbed copy of
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
; she quotes Henry Ford's
Dearborn
Independent
(to which she subscribes); she denounces "the International Jew."

I suppose that's me.

"At home nowhere and everywhere," she says, "hucksters who make nothing but only resell what others make—these are the people with whom you have mingled your pure Christian blood."

(That his pure Christian blood is frozen does not seem to occur to her.)

"Don't just lie there!" she screams. "
Say
something!"

And then she reads to him from the Bible and glosses the texts to make them seem to refer directly to her own situation. She lies down beside Sim's corpse and says: "I'm your Margery now."

NOTEBOOK

December 7

Why do I believe I have no other options but to stay here? Often I feel as orphaned as Jane Eyre. The house encourages it. It seems to have a madwoman in the attic. I am paralyzed with fear. Even Ethan cannot melt me. I feel I have burned my bridges—Mama, Paris, Papa—and I have nowhere to go. Here I am with a corpse and a crazy woman, confined to a frozen, crumbling, boarded-up mansion in the Berkshires.

NOTEBOOK

December 18

Some mornings, I find that Lucretia has left messages for me. Crucifixes and biblical quotations and scribbled exhortations about the necessity of loving Jesus. DENY NOT YOUR SAVIOR! I read. Or: CHRIST-KILLER! Or: DARE TO BE A COMPLETED JEW! (Lucretia has some batty theory that Jews are cursed because we are "incomplete"; we spawned the savior but did not recognize him, and that is why we are doomed to wander the earth.) RECOGNIZE HIM! HE IS HERE! I am an odd choice of target for her—my mother was too busy painting to give me a religious education. But to Lucretia I am heretic incarnate, the source of all her troubles, the reason she has been replaced. I might as well
be
my mother.

My life in Paris now seems like a lark to me. How spoiled and unserious I was! How little I understood the darkness in the human heart.

NOTEBOOK

December 22

Today I joked to Ethan that it is too bad we can't lock Lucretia up in the attic like Mrs. Rochester. But from his look of fascination, I am sorry I said anything.

"Who's Mrs. Rochester?" he asks.

I am suddenly terrified that Ethan, in possessive passion for me, might attempt foul play. He is a man who recognizes no limits.

Some nights, Lucretia lies down beside Sim's body and I have to rouse her and bring her indoors before she gets too cold.

"Why don't we let nature take its course?" Ethan asks.

NOTEBOOK

Christmas Day

Last night Ethan got me drunk on eggnog, his mother's secret recipe. I slept like the dead. In the morning, I found Lucretia lying beside Sim, her lips quite blue and a fine frosting of ice in her delicate nostrils.

Ethan claims that someday freezing will be seen as immortality. I think he may be going mad too. Did Lucretia freeze to death out of sheer hatred? Stranger things have happened.

NOTEBOOK

December 26

Ethan has packed both bodies in ice chests and covered them with snow. When I say I am afraid they will rise up and haunt us like
dybbuks,
he piles more logs and kindling on top of the chests. And laughs.

"What if somebody finds the corpses?" I ask in a panic.

"If I had a penny for every house in New England with a corpse in it, I'd be a rich man," says Ethan. "They died of natural causes. God grant we go as easy."

"Is freezing painful?"

"It's better than boiling oil," he says. He is starting to frighten me. I hide my notebook so he won't find it.

"Did you get her drunk too?" I ask.

"A lovely death—tipsy and losing body heat. You melt away into the snow with no regrets. Painless," says Ethan. "Christian martyrs were not given this choice…."

NOTEBOOK

December 28

What did we find in the safe?

No rubber mouse. No gold bullion. But a will leaving the Coppley house to me and my mother and a quantity of stocks and bonds whose value could not be immediately determined. Sim's partial manuscript was there, of course. A romanticized view of the Jews, attributing to us superhuman warmth, charity, intelligence. "The only people who worship a scroll with words written on it; this is why the Jews have made their mark in every age. They worship learning. We worship death. They pray to a holy book blazing with light."

And then there was an amazing letter to Sim from Levitsky, congratulating him on his courage and regretting his own cowardice:

My brother:

When you first came into my life, I regarded you as a rival for my love's attention and I resented you bitterly—though I never said so, pretending instead
to be above jealousy. My lies festered inside me, leading me to let slip information
which I knew would hurt the one I claimed to love. You were innocent of this
and risked your life to save hers. Nor did you ever seek to implicate me. Instead,
you took the punishment which should have been mine. If there is a heaven for
those who love without stint, you will be there. Since there is no chance we will
meet in that place, farewell and bless you.

Levitsky

LETTER FROM SALOME LEVITSKY TO LEV LEVITSKY

21 April 1933

Dearest Papa (I know you are not, but despite everything, I still
feel
that you are)—

We buried Sim and Lucretia this morning. During the five months
we waited for the ground to thaw, I had plenty of time to think about
you and Mama and Sim and Lucretia and what it all meant. I am not
willing to give you up as my papa. You are the only papa I have ever
known, and I feel closer to you than I ever felt to Sim Coppley—whatever
you may say. I know we both owe him a debt for saving Mama, but I'm
sure there must be some mistake about the rest of it.

I seem to have got myself into a bad situation with Ethan. When we
first got together he seemed wonderful—but more and more I am afraid
of him. He is given to rages. He threatens to accuse me of terrible things.
He is physically violent, and at times I think he may kill me. It was
passion that drew me to him, and passion has a fierce brightness, but it
also has a dark side. His kisses are sweet, but must I die for them? I am
afraid I am in deeper than I dare admit. I feel like a prisoner in my own
house, and Ethan keeps pressuring me to marry him. I think he reads
my mail and also my notebook. What should I do?

Your loving

Salome

Dear Salome,

This is not a dress rehearsal. This is it. Your life. Save it. You are
always welcome here. Your grandmother always said: "Kindness is the
highest wisdom." This goes double when it is toward yourself. Mama
and I love you with all our hearts.

Papa

Dearest Papa,

Your letter itself was balm to my soul. It gave me the strength to
stand up to Ethan. The money I got for the stocks in the safe also changed
his mind rather quickly. He has gone to California, where he dreams of
being discovered as an actor
.
Good luck to him. It is not easy to remain
here alone, but I feel I must do it. Tell Mama I also love her with all my
heart. Perhaps I will make you proud of me yet.

Salome

[A number of years go by without any letters or journal. When these writings
resume, their tone is different. Ed.]

December 1942

Dear Papa,

I have opened my house as a school for refugees from Europe. The
first few were sent to me by some of my artist friends in Paris. They tell
incredible stories about what is going on in Europe: children being sent
away by their parents because of fear that the National Socialists will
kill them all. There is a program called the Kinder Transport. In England,
children are being boarded with various families, and most will never
be reunited with their parents. The word is that the Nazis plan to kill
all
the Jews. Some refugees even whisper about killing factories that are
being built. They have already killed many more than are generally
known about. The more I hear, the more I believe that
anything
can
happen and will.

Aaron Wallinsky is one of the refugees. He survived the
Aktionen
(as the Germans called their first murders) in which his parents and
brothers were all killed. The SS and their enthusiastic native helpers took
all the Jews to a forest in Poland—hundreds of people—made them dig
their own graves, and began mowing people down with bullets.

Because he was young and strong, Aaron was put in charge of piling
up the discarded clothes. He says he went into a trance doing this to the
sound of bullets, blocking out what the bullets were doing, blocking out
the screams of the dying. He was sure that he was next to be killed, but
as he piled the clothes, he created a tower behind which he could hide.
Then, propitiously for him, one of the naked prisoners attempted to escape,
and the SS men went off after him. For all their methodical madness, the
Nazis sometimes abandon the goods they so carefully collect for the Reich.
In this case, they were completely distracted by the runaway, and they
broke off the killing to pursue him.

At first Aaron couldn't believe his luck, but then, as night fell, he
layered himself in the clothes of the dead and began to wander away from
the bloody pits filled with the dead, the half dead, the buried alive. He
wandered until morning, when he came to a lean-to on the banks of a
river, which was being used by rebels against the regime. A series of
impossible coincidences saved his life and brought him to this promised
land. But America is ignorant of what is going on in Europe. America
wishes to be ignorant, Aaron says. He has become my soul mate, my
teacher, my friend.