Inventing Memory (4 page)

Do you want to hear about the other jobs she found for us? Turning worn collars over and resewing them: poor clothes for poor people. Sewing buttons, sewing buttonholes, washing, pressing, the steam flying up in our burning faces. And always hanging over me the thought of the money my journey had cost—the equivalent of twenty-five dollars for the steamship ticket (the precious
shifskarte
) and kopecks for the bribes of the border guards—and more kopecks for the packed train to Hamburg.

How would I repay my family by bringing them one by one across the sea? Turning collars would not do it, nor would making caps in a locked factory with twenty other girls, nor even draping pretty springcolored evening dresses on a mannequin, whom I talked to as if she were Mama, wetting the chiffon with my tears. My perfect little stitches would not bring them all across the water. I had to find another way.

And then it was a Sunday in spring and my day off, and I was walking down Rivington Street in a swelling tide of people. They pushed and shoved, argued in a mélange of languages. Boys stole apples and pears from pushcarts. Girls danced frantically around the hurdy-gurdy man. Drunks guzzled beer. Babies howled from tenement windows. Corpulent, red-faced mothers leaned out to watch the pageant of the streets—their only entertainment, distraction, pleasure. The fire escapes were hung with worn featherbeds, torn sheets, tattered blankets. The roofs were alive with flapping laundry, pigeons, adolescent boys at their dangerous play. And suddenly my eyes were drawn to an open window on the street level, and I wandered over as if in a trance.

A naked girl—pink, plump, large-breasted—was arranged among folds of fabric on a low wooden platform at the room's center, and a variety of men were sketching her. One man had a gold stopwatch, protuberant eyes, and a bushy black beard. His eyebrows were like black caterpillars. They jumped up and down on his forehead as if possessed by their own will. Instead of the usual skullcap, he wore a sort of embroidered beret. Every five minutes or so, he clapped his hands, and the girl changed her pose.

The other men, those who were sketching, were young, old, thin, fat. Some could draw like demons, some were awkward and slow. One of the laggards complained, "Levitsky—not so fast!"

"Out!" shouted the man with the stopwatch and the funny eyebrows, and he sent the
nebbish
of an artist packing. The girl changed poses again, and seeing the door was open, I walked in.

"May I watch?" I asked politely with my heavy accent.

Levitsky immediately replied in Yiddish: "A pretty face is half a dowry." It was a proverb my mama always used. Then he added in English: "How can I say no to such a beauty?" His accent, strong too, was redolent of Russia:
beautzy.

I stood and watched through various cycles of poses. The odalisque was now on her back, now on her stomach, now standing, now sitting cross-legged among the drapes of fabric. I was fascinated with the folds of her fat and couldn't stop staring.

Levitsky came over to me and put his arm around my shoulder—I almost jumped.

"Are you an artist too?" he asked.

"A retoucher," I said. "But I can draw as well as this lot."

He looked cynical—as if he didn't believe a girl could draw. Then he handed me a board with paper pinned to it and a piece of charcoal.

"Draw!" he commanded. And draw I did. I had never sketched a nude before, but I was
born
knowing how to draw. How could a nude be different from the other things I'd drawn—houses, animals, portraits? Levitsky sucked in his breath as he watched me draw the sprawling nude. Then she changed poses, and he gave me another sheet of paper. I drew the next pose as well.

"I'll be damned," said Levitsky, in English. "You're better than my other slaves."

"Slaves?" I asked.

"Slaves who can draw fast!" Levitsky barked. "Heads, hands, legs, feet, shoes, hats. To mine opinion, if you work quick enough and specialized enough, you can make quite a lot from the catalogs, but you have to hustle. These
schmegegges
"—he gestured at the drawing fools—"would love to be my slaves, but they ain't good enough. I got the commissions—more than I can handle—but I need the hands to draw 'em. If it were only me drawing, I couldn't make enough to buy a pot to piss in, let alone what I have in mind…."

"And what do you have in mind?" I asked.

"I ain't telling a girl I just met," he said rather roughly.

"Begging your pardon," I said, "but with a hardworking woman with

a business head on her shoulders to help you, you could be,
eppis
, a millionaire."

What gave me such
chutzpah
I do not know, but Levitsky was piqued by my brazenness—as brazen people often are.

"So
nu?
" I said.

And that was how I came to leave the coal cellar and work for Lev Levitsky.

The first night I spent in his studio, we drank tea with damson jam, ate walnuts (which we cracked with our teeth), and talked in Yiddish like two prisoners who had been in solitary confinement. Such talk, talk, talk! It warmed my heart. Levitsky was the greatest talker I had ever met—and I had met some great ones.

Then he showed me his drawings. He was a cornucopia of ideas, and his drawings brought back the old country to me and made me homesick for Mama. (In those days,
everything
made me homesick for Mama. I used to read the Yiddish poets in the
Forverts
and weep.) Not only Levitsky's work but his way of speaking made me homesick. And his
smell
. He smelled like my dead papa. His drawings depicted towering tenements, trains that ran on single rails through the air, strange flying machines that could be harnessed to the backs of humans. At the root of it all was a sad wooden village, with skinny goats and hollow-eyed children and tumbled houses arranged around mud ponds. It could have been Sukovoly.

His masterpiece was the huge oil painting he was doing of heaven and hell. All of heaven was made of rosy, creamy clouds encircled by the arms of a rosy-cheeked, white-bearded God, whose body also seemed to be composed of fluffy clouds. His eyes followed you wherever you moved in the room. And below his realm, hell began: demons climbing tenement buildings, hanging from the teeming summer roofs, from fire escapes, from careening streetcars, leaping on people who walked in the streets, dragging them down through manholes into a darker realm—a realm of sewage pools and flesh-denuded humans who crawled on what was left of their knees and howled for mercy. It was the Lower East Side, transformed into a vision of hell!

"A Michelangelo I could be," he said, not without bitterness. "But that's no way to get rich in America. To get rich you have to skim the fat of other people's bones, multiply your hands, and lose your heart. To mine opinion, you have to be a
boss
. And a boss can't be an artist. When the Messiah comes to America, he should come in a private railroad car like Mr. Frick or Mr. Rockefeller! Who would listen to what he would say otherwise? No one! America only listens to what the rich have to say. And to get rich in America, you have to use other people as if they were animals, beasts from burden. One man's hands and heart will not make you rich in America—that's the truth of it, the
emis
."

I sensed that his bitterness had something of rationalization in it, as if there were a fear inside him that he was not good enough, or that by painting and drawing he would raise
dybbuks
and affront the Almighty. For a Jew to paint in those days was to rise in rebellion. Books we were allowed—books we worshiped—but images always smacked of the devil for us. The Jew who painted was always torn, whether Chagall or Pascin…or others I came to know later. But I held my tongue. I needed the job I had so audaciously demanded, and I was not about to block my own way.

Better to be Levitsky's slave than Chaya's. Better to be Levitsky's slave than a Sidewalk Susie or a white slave in a brothel. The streets of the Lower East Side were full of Jewish girls who made their living on their back. They strolled the streets wearing nothing but their vivid kimonos, flashing a bit of breast or lewdly propositioning potential customers. They lived—if you could call it that—in storefronts, in tenements, in shacks behind tenements, and they charged fifty cents a night at a time when you could buy something for a penny—a lemonade, say, or a hot dog, or halvah covered in powdered sugar. Their pimps were as brazen as the girls. Some of these men became song pluggers or Second Avenue producers or later even Hollywood agents. A man who can figure out a way to get paid for what a girl does in bed with another man can figure a way to get paid for
anything
. In Yiddish, we call such a person a
dreyer—
a smooth operator. As Shakespeare said,
chutzpah
is all. On the Lower East Side,
chutzpah
was meat and drink and a roof against the rain.

Once I began working for Levitsky, I had no time to mope about the family I left behind—neither the living nor the dead. Now I was running at double speed, like some heroine in a picture show. Levitsky was a ferocious taskmaster, driving his ghost painters on to greater and greater feats of productivity. First he had to conquer the catalogs, then he became fascinated with the possibility of making animated cartoons, and he would sit day and night drawing twenty or thirty pictures of the same horse, but slightly different in the legs, sewing them into a booklet and flipping the pages until the horse seemed to move. At such times he was so engrossed that I feared bringing him anything, even a cookie or a glass of tea. Sometimes he would show me what he was doing. And sometimes, when I expressed greater interest, he would draw suggestive female figures, again with slightly different motions of legs and arms, and flip them for me until I blushed. And he would laugh raucously, delighting in shocking what he presumed was my innocence.

As for that commodity, I both was and wasn't innocent.
Wasn't
because I had borne a child.
Was
because I had never known the love of a man. Perhaps that was why it was so simple for me to decide that if I was going to work for Levitsky, I would sleep with him too. There was no sense in being coy, I told myself. Men were men, and if you couldn't celebrate the Sabbath in America—Saturday was a work day in America then—you might as well give up all your other illusions about virtue. But Levitsky was a funny man. He would not
let
me into his bed, saying (in Yiddish) that when the cock stood up, the brains lay in the ground, and that he would rather have my help than my distraction. Sometimes he would stroke my hair or put his arm around my shoulder, but that was all. Nor did he visit the whores. He spat at them when they importuned him in the street, saying, "Go to the
mikveh
" or "
Shande! Shande!"

"You're a nice piece of goods," he used to say to me, "but go to your own bed."

And I would obey, thinking him the most peculiar man I had ever met.

"Better an honest smack in the face than a false kiss," Mama would have said.

Oh,
Mamenyu!
Where are you? It seemed to me I needed my mama now more than I ever had. I carried my little mama with me in my head and heart every minute of every day. Sometimes I even spoke to her as if she were in the same room.

"What's wrong with Levitsky, Mama?" I asked. And: "Will I ever see the
shaygetz
from the ship again?" And: "Will
he
reject me also?" For I hardly knew then how attractive men found me. I was like catnip to them, but I did not know yet what sort of power that was.

The
shaygetz
from the ship was in my mind as much as Mama, if the truth be told. I kept hearing her say in Yiddish: "
Dray zakhn ken men nisht
bahaltn: libe, hustn un dales
." (Three things can never be hidden: love, a cough, and poverty.) Those pale-blue eyes had betrayed love as insistently as a consumptive's cough foreshadows his death.

I am speaking of my first year in America, when everything was fresh and new and had a halo around it like the ring around the moon on a frosty winter night. For a stranger who walks alone in a foreign land, every ordinary thing pierces the heart. Every policeman is fearsome. Every encounter may change your life for better or for worse. Every man you meet is a door into comfort or disaster.

As a little girl, I used to fear the outhouse in our back courtyard. When I had to make caca in the middle of the night, I imagined invisible demons who would rise up from the stinking pit beneath the hole and drag me down into their hellish realm. Sometimes I would use the chamber pot or else hold everything in all night, tossing and turning, unable to sleep till the dawn came. But if I was sick in my
kishkes
, I had no choice but tiptoe out to the hell gate of the privy. What terror there was in creeping outside in the cold, hanging my little
tush
over the entrance to the underworld while the demons prepared God only knew what tortures for its sweet pink flesh.

Being in America alone was a lot like going to the outhouse at night in Sukovoly. No wonder Levitsky became mother, father, brother, comforter, to me. I clung to him as I would have clung to my mother had she braved the perils of the outhouse with me (which she only did when I was feverish and sick). If you wonder, as this story proceeds, how I stayed with a man whose very claim to manhood was so uncertain, remember the story of the outhouse. I stayed with him because he stayed with me in the dark night, when the
dybbuks
howled under the privy's hole.

Meanwhile, what was Sim doing? I found out only much later. Sim returned from Europe to his digs on what I thought of as Medicine Avenue (did only doctors and apothecaries live there? I wondered), to find himself obsessed and distracted by dreams of the goddess he had met on the ship. The goddess! That was me! How different I seemed from the women he knew in New York, he said. I was alive, and they seemed like walking corpses. Even before I could express much in English, I had said more to him than any other woman he had ever met. Or so he claimed.