Inventing Memory (29 page)

13

Inventing Memory

1995, 1992

God invents us, but we invent our own ancestors.

—VENETIAN PROVERB

S
ara remembered when she first realized that her mother might not make it. It was the summer she was seventeen and she had joined Sally in Venice, where she had rented a sixteenth-century house on a canal, a house with a long back garden, rumored to have once been a cemetery. The garden was wild—huge Rousseauesque palm fronds, enormous crimson roses that looked as if they had been fed on human blood, two tortoises who made love all the time, grunting noisily—and a blue mirrored ball reflected this Edenic scene.

Sally was drinking again—tentatively at first, then enthusiastically. She was keeping company with a descendant of doges whose name identified
palazzi
and
campi
in Venice as well as many country estates in the Veneto. He was called Prince Alvise Grandini-Piccolini, and his highbridged aristocratic nose was red from the wines of his region. Whitehaired, paunchy, courtly, he escorted Sally about in a custom-made motorboat, a re-creation of a wooden
motoscafo
of the 1920s—though in fact it was new.

Sara understood there might be a problem when her mother said on the first night they had dinner together: "I am starting to think I might not be an alcoholic after all. I appear to be able to take it or leave it."

That night at Montin's, they drank only bubbly water, and Sally seemed proud of this—as if she had
not
been drinking only water with Alvise. They ate grilled fish, smothered in fried zucchini, and salad made of carrots, radicchio, and tender baby lettuce.

Later they were met by Alvise and his gorgeous green-eyed son, Gianluca, and were taken on an evening tour of the self-consciously romantic city, winding up at a small, red-lacquered
osteria
near the Rialto, where platters of baby octopus and bowls of steaming bright-yellow polenta were put before them, together with an icy bottle of prosecco. Sara watched in trepidation as Sally dipped first her nose into the prosecco, then her mouth.

"Whatever you do, don't let her pick up the first drink," her father had cautioned. "She can't stop."

But the process was not so obvious to Sara. What she saw was a gradual loosening of inhibitions, accompanied by a giddy laugh, rather too much preening and flirting, and tiny sips of prosecco alternating with large gulps of water.

Sara didn't know what to do. Stop her? Let her go on drinking? Empty all the bottles into the canals? The results were not dramatic at first. But after a week, Sally was finishing bottles of wine with Alvise and ordering more and sleeping all day in the dark and depressing front room of the little house, with the shutters closed against the morning sun.

Another intriguing feature of the house was that the people who rented it to Sally—a flea-bitten Venetian contessa named Fiammetta Malfatti and her beautiful young gigolo, or possibly son, Sante—never really seemed to vacate the premises. They lived, supposedly, in a
mansarda
(or attic) at a friend's house, but in truth they were always around; they appeared to scuttle into the house like rats whenever Sally, Sara, and Alvise went out for meals.

Sara hated Venice, hated the decrepit house with its rotten shutters, its ghostly owners, its too lush garden, its cobwebs in corners, its ants making a procession across the fruit that sat on the breakfast table. Venice was death and decay to her. People who loved it, she thought, were in love with death, drawn there by an unhealthy desire to be out of the mainstream, in a backwater where life was placid and mild because nothing, in fact, had mattered there for five hundred years. The trade routes had shifted to the Atlantic and Pacific, and the people who continued pottering about the Adriatic were, to Sara, the world's losers. No wonder they gave themselves such airs.

What did Sally do there? What was she saving herself from by fleeing her work? She slept most of the day and drank with Alvise most of the night. Americans would come and be impressed by the dark little house with its moth-eaten antiques and luxuriant garden—and then they would go away raving about what they had seen. But what
had
they seen? Entropy and decay in exotic surroundings—that was all. Life was supposed to be a battle against decay and death, and Sara saw her mother willingly succumbing. She hated what she saw. She hated her mother for her passivity, for her bad Italian (Sally imagined she could speak it, but her phrases seemed to come out of nineteenth-century operas or twentiethcentury cookbooks), for her embracing death with outstretched arms.

"I need you to set an example for me," she told Sally. "I need you to be strong for me."

"I also needed plenty of things I never got," Sally said. "What makes you immune to the human condition of death and disappointment?"

"It is
not
the human condition," Sara said. "It's
your
condition. Despair and disappointment are not all there is to life—but you make it seem that way! It's your choice!"

"Stop lecturing me," Sally said. "I'm supposed to lecture you.
I'm
the mother."

"Then
act
like one," Sara said.

Sally took another drink.

Sara went for a long walk alone. Then she jogged along the Fondamenta where the
Dogana
, the old customhouse, stood. She sat and drank a coffee and looked at the glittering waters below the church of the
Redentore
. She did not understand her mother's pessimism, but she felt its tentacles reaching out to engulf her like an octopus. If she stayed here with her mother, despair would win. She did not have to understand this black thing with suckers to reject it. All her life, it seemed, Sara had fought her parents' despair. But in Venice, the despair was winning. Sally had put herself in a kind of exile here. Surely the music business and the stress of New York could not be worse than this living death under a sky painted by Turner or Tiepolo.

Later Sally got sober again in London and resumed her addiction to AA. But what Sara had seen in Venice left an indelible mark. It was in Venice that summer that she decided she had a total aversion to alcohol. She still had not taken a drink—to this day.

Something else she saw in Venice left a mark too. The crumbling old house on the canal had an extraordinary library, full of books on philosophy and mysticism and religion—many of them in English. One passage in one of these books left such an impression that she had copied it into her notebook, even though there were a great many things in it she did not fully understand:

When the Baal Shem had a difficult task before him, he would go to a certain
place in the woods, light a fire, and meditate in prayer—and what he set out
to perform was done. When a generation later the Maggid of Meseritz was
faced with the same task, he would go to the same place in the woods and say:
We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayers—and what
he wanted done became a reality. Again, a generation later, Rabbi Moishe
Lieb of Sassov had to perform this task, and he too went in the woods and said:
We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know the secret meditations belonging
to the prayer, but we do know the place in the wood to which it all belongs—and that must be sufficient. And sufficient it was. But when another
generation had passed and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform
the task, he sat down on his golden chair in the castle and said: We cannot
light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we
can tell the story of how it was done. And the story which he told had the same
effect as the actions of the other three.

The passage was by a man called Gershom Scholem, whom she had never heard of. But it intrigued her; could writing chronicles be a magic act? So she also dated her interest in history to that summer. And her interest in things Jewish. If telling a story could make magic happen, she needed to know more about this religion.

"I feel like a castaway," she wrote in her notebook during that summer. "My mother is less than a mother and my father is less than a father. Actually they are a lot alike. My mother likes Europe because she imagines herself out of the competition there. And my father likes Montana for the same reason. If I ever have a child, I will try to set a better example."

From Venice, Sara jumped back in time to Montana. When Sara thought of Montana she saw in her mind's eye the weathered log cabin with the tin roof where she spent most of her childhood, the house she'd fled when she was just fourteen. Jagged peaks frosted with snow, dark-green forests on the flanks, wide valleys where you might see baby moose loping on splayed legs in the long-awaited spring. The western larch is yellow, the conifers are dark green, and the rivers are wide and serpentine and crammed with fingerling trout. The rivers in this last Eden have names like Belly, Big Blackfoot, Bighorn, Milk, Powder, Yellowstone, and Wisdom, and the mountains are called things like Bitterroot, Swan, Tobacco Root, and Yakt.

Sara lived on Bear Creek. When she was older she was shocked to learn there are many Bear Creeks in Montana; in her childhood it was, of course, the only one. Her father and the gypsy artist woman he lived with, Sandrine Kaplan—she was French, but her parents had blue numbers on thin arms—had torn down an old log cabin with crowbars, labeled the beams, and floated them down the river to their property, bought in 1968 for the equivalent of twenty-six dollars and a bottle of booze.

Sandrine was big, busty, exuberant, and her love for Sara was never a mother's unconditional love, but since Sara didn't have any other mother for a long time, she bonded to Sandrine and learned a lot from her—how to manage her father in particular. Sandrine also made her want to be Jewish even before she knew for sure she was.

"Flexibility is Jewish survival," Sandrine used to say. "It's important to be able to pack up and move, learn new languages and customs. The rabbis may inveigh against assimilation, but it's why we've survived for six thousand years. We assimilate, but we still keep our pride of identity. And we keep our holy books. Never forget that, Sara."

Sandrine was the first woman who had made her feel that being Jewish was a heroic destiny. Sandrine's parents had passed along to her the conviction that life was a gift carved out of a universe of death. Sandrine desperately wanted children, but she and Sara's father never were able to conceive. So she adopted Sara as her spiritual daughter.

Sandrine had been there the day Sara got her first period. Sara was thirteen and a half. She had been weeping for weeks. Weeping over a baby grouse with an injured leg, weeping whenever her father said: "Shhh. I'm writing." Weeping whenever she was asked to do a household chore. Finally Sandrine was so exasperated with her that she dumped a bucket of well water on her head. This sobered Sara up immediately, and she threw her arms around Sandrine, saying, "I love you, Sandrine, I really do."

Later she found blood on her white underpants, a blackish cherrycolored stain that looked as though it would never wash out. She closeted herself in the single bathroom, wondering if she was ill or if this was "it." Sandrine began banging on the locked door.

"Wait a
second
!" Sara yelled.

"Let me in!" Sandrine countered.

Sara reluctantly turned the lock. She looked up sheepishly from the toilet seat.

"Is this
it
?" she asked Sandrine.

"Oh my God—my baby!" Sandrine yelled. Then she slapped Sara on the cheek and hugged her right after.

"Why did you slap me?"

"Good luck," said Sandrine. "An old ritual."

"
Why
is it good luck?" Sara asked.

"Damned if I can remember!" said Sandrine. "But I had to do it. My mother did it to me."

"I think that's a stupid reason," said Sara.

"You may think so now, but you won't if you ever have a daughter."

"Do you think of me as your daughter?" Sara asked.

"Why do you ask such silly questions?" Sandrine said, tears running down her cheeks. And she rummaged under the bathroom sink for a box of pads, went out and got Sara a clean pair of underpants, and showed her how to stick the pad on the crotch of the underpants. Then she dumped her bloody pants in the sink and ran cold water over the crotch.

"Cold water only," said Sandrine. "Otherwise the blood sets." To Sara's astonishment, she rubbed her bloody pants between her hands under the cold water.

"Nothing wrong with blood," she said matter-of-factly. "Basis of life, in fact."

"What's going on in there?" Sara's father shouted from his desk.

"Nothing!" Sandrine yelled. "Mind your own damn business!"

But Sara thought she might have told him later, because he was very tender with her that day and the day after.

Her father. How to describe him? He was a man who used his political consciousness to cover human deficits—a sort of male Mrs. Jellyby. He was a lot more emotionally dense than Sandrine—but he wrote poetry that made women think him sensitive. That and his handlebar mustache and sad, puffy eyes. (Sara knew it was just the booze.) He and Sandrine had come to Montana with a copy of
The Whole Earth Catalog
and a chain saw. They were utterly unprepared for the Montana winters. Stronger types than they had broken their teeth, noses, and backs on this landscape.

But they persevered. Once they had rebuilt the log house, given it a new glittery tin roof, the house owned them as much as they owned the house. In the winter the snow could be waist high. When it melted, blue lupine, Indian paintbrush, asters, alpine poppies, and columbines all bloomed at once. But even this blossoming could not assuage Sara's primal loneliness. Only Dove's birth would later assuage it. Dove's birth had filled the bottomless hole in Sara's heart. She remembered the wholly unexpected thrill she had when she saw that soft skull, those inky eyes, for the first time. She was at once madly happy and terrified. Suddenly all the holocausts of history seemed to threaten that little skull.