Inventing Memory (31 page)

The blood rushed to Sara's face as she read the hidden letter and the astonishing birth announcement. She knew now that she had a real mother, and the return address proved it. And how amazing that her mother was someone whose
songs
she knew! "Listen to Your Voice" had been her favorite song ever since she could remember.

Sara had a bit of money saved from birthdays and baby-sitting. She had a New York address—some gallery on Fifty-sixth Street. She left a scrawled note that read:
Gone to find my mother!
and took the bus to Bozeman that stopped in front of the hardware store in Bear Creek.

In Bozeman, Sara transferred to a bus to Chicago. In Chicago, she transferred to a bus to Cleveland, and in Cleveland she transferred to a Pittsburgh bus. From there New York City was only a hop, skip, and a jump.

The Greyhound tickets set her back $149. One way. "It's a dog of a way to get around…," as the Harry Chapin song goes. But she had a mission—a real live mother in New York City. And she was going to
find
her.

Let the blue chemical toilet in the back of the bus slosh; let the passengers fart; let the guy with the two-day growth and lazy eye stare at her breasts—she was going to find her birthright.

New York was a revelation—starting with the filth and menace of the

Port Authority Bus Terminal. Sara had never seen bums sprawled out on the street, festering men rattling filthy paper cups full of change or women sitting on ragged blankets, holding smeary babies aloft, along with signs that read HELP ME BUY PAMPERS or HOMLESS N' HUNGREY. The ride had been purgatory; the bus terminal was hell.

Sara didn't know New York—except from TV shows. She was a country girl. New York assaulted her with its frenzy, its sad, wandering homeless people, its busier-than-busy rich people (who walked fast and looked straight ahead so as not to
see
the homeless people), its side streets crammed with belching trucks, its traffic jams, its gridlock, its greasy soot that settled in your eyes and on the sides of your nose.

She walked east from the Port Authority, not really knowing where she was going. She had an old knapsack on her back, Doc Martens on her feet; she wore Levi's, a purple turtleneck, and a green nylon parka to protect her from the cold. It was January, and the day was freezing but glaringly sunny.

Discarded Christmas trees threaded with tinsel stuck out of trash baskets or lay askew between the curbs and the streets. New York had more garbage than she'd ever seen in one place! She hadn't slept all night, but the sheer energy of New York woke her up with a rush. The city was like a dynamo, making its own power, turning all day and night to produce heat, light, and fire. What drove the dynamo? Ambition. The yearnings of millions upon millions of people, coming from everywhere in search of everything: excitement, money, sex, fame, a better life.

Did they find it? Most of them didn't. Some ran shrieking through the streets, having gone mad in New York. Some got hooked on crack and wound up in seedy hotels in Forty-second Street's vomit district. Some made it to the other side of town, where they would avert their eyes from anyone who reminded them of their origins.

But the pulse of the city was unlike anything Sara had ever felt. It was a great heart beating, and the arteries that fed it pulsed with bright-red arterial blood. Sara walked east to Times Square, then made the mistake of taking Broadway downtown for a block or two, thinking it was Fifth Avenue. She became slightly disoriented. On Thirty-ninth Street she walked east again, hoping she wasn't lost. A dazed-looking man with dreadlocks lurched up to her, blowing pungent smoke in her face. "Smoke, baby?" he asked. She started to run. When at last she got to Fifth, she turned left and started uptown.

It was only when she saw the great Beaux Arts hulk of the New York Public Library—with its white lions, its shallow marble steps, its carved names of antique benefactors—that she knew for sure she was going the right way. She sat down on the library steps and took out a tattered map of New York that was at least twenty years old (she had taken it from her father's shelf of travel books, actually torn it out of a book—a crime in her family). Then she continued north up Fifth Avenue. When she came to Rockefeller Center, she had to detour to see the skating rink, great, golden Prometheus capturing fire (apparently without consequences to his liver), and the channel garden—that little alley with the angels of wire and light, still trumpeting the holiday season. She walked past Atlas holding up the empty world, gawked at Saint Patrick's across the avenue, and then she crossed to the other side to admire the clothes and shoes and jewels in store windows. In Montana, you'd have no place to wear such things, but here…the very thought made her heady and dazed.

On Fifty-sixth Street, she turned east by mistake, and then she corrected herself and turned west. The house she was seeking was between Fifth and Sixth, and at first she panicked, thinking it wasn't there at all. She traversed Fifty-sixth Street twice before she caught sight of the discreet sign, LEVITSKY GALLERY, in stainless steel on a white marble facade.

As she rang the bell, she thought of how she must look—a hick from Montana ringing the bell of a chic marble town house in New York.

The door opened. A staggeringly pretty blonde, in a short, flared black wool dress that skimmed her thighs (which were almost visible under shiny semitransparent black tights), opened the door. She looked at the country bumpkin figure Sara made and said: "We don't want any."

"You don't what?" asked Sara, taken aback.

The blonde started to turn away, her hand on the door. (Within, Sara saw a white room, hung with paintings, creamy Japanese screens as dividers, and beyond, a long rectangular back garden, with a Japanese teahouse and a Japanese raked sand garden and boulders frosted with snow.)

While the blonde tried to close the door, Sara took off her backpack and fumbled in it. She extracted a piece of paper that had been folded so many times it looked like an ancient treasure map.

"Ms. Levitsky?" Sara asked nervously, and "Ms. Sky?"

The blonde hesitated. She wanted to get rid of this kid, but clearly she was more than just an intruder.

"I am Ms. Robinowitz," said the blonde, "one of the owners of the gallery. Ms. Levitsky is upstairs. Ms. Sky is with her. Who are you?"

"Sara Wyndham, ma'am, Ms. Sky's my mother," said Sara, feeling like a fool—like Huck Finn being "sivilized" or Holden Caulfield sneaking into his parents' apartment while they were out. Or maybe Sara was more like Pip from
Great Expectations
, her absolutely favorite book in the world when she was fourteen. Other kids watched the tube, but Sara liked nothing better than to lose herself in a book. Sitcoms seemed moronic to her.

Sara was freezing out there on the marble steps. The tiredness and fear had just hit her.

The blonde eyed her warily, seemed to calculate the potential gains and losses.

"Come in," she said reluctantly.

The gallery looked like a gallery in a movie, starring Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn as the blonde. There was a show in progress. Sara recognized works by Picasso, Braque, and other important artists.

"We're doing a memorial show," the blonde said, without explaining. She walked in her clunky black platform boots to the telephone, pressed some buttons (it had more buttons than Sara had ever seen, except in a bank!), and whispered into the mouthpiece. Suddenly there was a commotion in the stairwell, and a middle-aged woman with long red hair, a Wedgwood-blue cashmere sweater, black cashmere tights, and soft cobalt-blue leather boots ran down the stairs.

"Sara! My baby!" she shouted as she ran toward her ragtag daughter.

And shortly after, an elevator door opened at the back of the gallery and out stepped a silver-haired lady in elegant black slacks and a gray silk blouse and masses of silver-blue pearls.

"Can it be true? Is it Sara?" the older woman asked. "Let me look at that
punim….
" And walking toward Sara, Salome Levitsky Wallinsky Robinowitz began to cry. "I never thought I'd see
mayne shayner kind
again!"

By now Sally had her arms around the stunned teenager.

"Darling," she wept. "Darling."

And time seemed to stop as the three elegant New York women contemplated Sara from Montana, with her backpack, her scuffed Doc Martens, baggy jeans, and dirty parka.

"Sally? Sally Sky?" Sara asked. And Sally couldn't say a word—that was how hard she was crying. Sara was crying too.

Later Salome kissed her and kissed her, and Sally was delirious. Sally wasn't drinking then. She was religiously going to AA meetings at Saint Thomas Church and the Citicorp Center. She was serene, centered, accepting of life's complications.

"We have so much catching up to do," she told Sara, "so much catching up. Where to begin?"

By then Sally lived in London. She had come back to New York only for the memorial show dedicated to her grandparents—Sarah and Lev Levitsky. They had died within weeks of each other, Sarah at just a hundred, Levitsky at possibly a hundred and something—but who could find his birth certificate? Their passing was as strange as their marriage had been. First he was hospitalized for pneumonia; then she was. She died, muttering about how her great-granddaughter should never have been given her name, for fear of confusing the angel of death. But Sara was in Montana, and perhaps the all-seeing
malech ha-movis
couldn't see that far. The family was afraid to tell Levitsky she was gone—he might die of a broken heart—and they buried her. But the night of the funeral, while Salome stood beside Levitsky's hospital bed, with silent tears running down her cheeks, he said: "I hear Mama calling to me from heaven. She keeps saying:
Nu—what's taking so long?
" He died early the next morning.

Sally was staying with Salome, and they for once were getting along—mostly because they had a common enemy, the estranged wife of Sally's half-brother, Lorenzo, who had come to claim her husband's (and children's) share of the gallery and wasn't leaving until she got it. (Renzo had left other children scattered here and there in Europe, and they might eventually claim their patrimony too.) The very blond, very bossy Babs Hart Robinowitz was an art historian, who had worked at the gallery before marrying Renzo. She was after the keys to the fabled safe-deposit box in Lugano, and she wanted to force the sale of the gallery and divide the spoils. Sara had walked in on this ugly struggle.

Renzo, meanwhile, having gone through all the money he could beg, borrow, or manipulate out of Lev, Sarah, and Salome, claimed to be broke again. He was a
luftmensch
who fancied himself a producer, and he always had crazy schemes: the gay musical
Hamlet
that bombed, the musical based on the Book of Genesis that bombed (Raquel Welch was signed to play Eve), the newly discovered Shakespeare comedy that turned out
not
to be by Shakespeare or even the Earl of Oxford. All his producing projects hemorrhaged money for as long as possible, then went belly-up. Babs was sick of him too, but they had never bothered to get divorced.

Renzo was living in Lugano with an aging German supermodel named Ursula, who thought he could make her a star as the Dark Lady in a London musical based on the Sonnets.

The Levitsky wills and trusts were so complicated that in the few short years since Sarah and Lev passed on to their reward, no one else except the lawyers had been rewarded—which perhaps explained why Renzo was secretly negotiating with the Council on Jewish History to sell the Levitsky family archive.

Sara barely understood any of this till much later, but she could feel a strong undercurrent of hostility between Babs and Salome, Babs and Sally.

Sara kept studying Sally and Salome to see how she resembled them—if at all—but it was all too overwhelming.

Sally said: "Well, let's take the darling girl to dinner—but first let's clean her up. I think she'll clean up well."

Then ensued a movie montage of days of shopping. Shopping at Bergdorf's, Bendel's, Saks, so that Sara-from-Montana could become Sarafrom-Manhattan.

"I should write a song about this," Sally said. "A shopping ballad. Maybe I should write it to the tune of 'Turkey in the Straw.'"

Sally was the perfect mother during those days in New York, and Salome the perfect grandmother. Sara felt like the princess she had always dreamed of being.

During those January days in New York, Sara explored the city—the Metropolitan Museum, the Cloisters, the Frick, the Empire State Building, even the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.

Salome went with her on some of these trips. She was eighty then and slightly breathless in the cold wind that blew off New York Harbor, but she was certainly game. Still a beautiful woman, she dressed in the softest silk knits, cashmere and mohair, all in shades of gray, mauve, amethyst. And she wore beautiful antique jewelry from Italy, England, Japan, China, India.

Sara was too shy and inexperienced at fourteen to ask Salome all the things she would know to ask later. She could not even formulate the questions. Trapped in her own adolescent angst, she knew that her grandmother was remarkable but didn't know how to
begin
with her.

Sally, for her part, adored her daughter, but she didn't really know
how
to be a mother. She could not substitute
we
for I. Imprisoned in her own skin, she was always smarting over some real or imagined hurt. Sara was surprised to find her a bit of a disappointment compared to her songs. The best part of her was in her music.

But Sara did learn one very important thing from her mother: "Discover what you love and do it." Even after Sally started to drink again, even when Sara was in boarding school in Switzerland with all those rich nerds, she asked herself, "What do I love?" And she decided that when she could answer that question she would be launched on her own life.

Sally was glad that Ham and Sandrine were worried sick.

"Fuck 'em!" she said. "Let them worry. I worried so much it took years off my life." She was right about that, but not for the reasons she thought.