Whose Truth Is It, Anyway?
The process of writing my blog was not as easy as I thought it would be...
The process of writing my memoir was not as easy as I thought it would be.
Getting real, telling my truth is an arduous business. If I am sugarcoating or trying to make myself into someone I’m not, during my sleep, my unconscious goes to work. It tells it like it is and was.
In the morning, first the deletes then the truth.
This process went on from the beginning of October 2022 to March 2023 resulting in thirty-six chapters.
In the course of 6 months, I wrote the first rough draft of Not Yet by Sally-Jane Heit
It was not easy. Memories are baskets overflowing with emotions and feelings that bring joy, pain, laughs, tears, anger, fear, forgiveness. I can make amends to those still around, but for the many that I crave forgiveness from that are gone, forgiving myself is a bitch.
If I thought writing this saga was difficult, it pales into nothingness next to the editorial process.
Without support and help from Lynnette, utterly impossible. I am so fortunate to have found an excellent editor, Tammy, who I constantly want to make my best friend who thinks every word that I write is a gem. God bless the woman, she resists me at every turn. She has one job and that is not to be my best friend, but to be my best editor. Her edits are funny (have to have funny or I’ll die), insightful, and spare. No is no. Yes is yes. Very few maybes. And worst of all she finishes every edit with the curse of death.
“Ultimately Sally-Jane, it’s your memoir. So you have the final decision.”
Shut Up! Please tell me what to do so later I can blame you for being misguided and just plain wrong.
She never falls into my trap. That’s how good she is.
During this process I have learned that patience is important. Definitely NOT my forte’. Moving forward to make the manuscript ready for agents and publishers and being patient is a high wire balancing act for me.
In the meantime, I want to share with you a chapter that has been deleted from the book… not because it's fake news… but because the information in this chapter is in other chapters. Repetition is the enemy of good narrative, unless you’re Gertrude Stein.
If you feel moved to write to the Pulitzer and Nobel prize committees about my book, please feel free. If not, not to worry, enjoy a trip down my memory lane.
And It begins…
In 1974 my mother passed away. In my heart this was never supposed to happen. Once you have a live mother she is a live mother forever. Right???
My mother, good, bad, indifferent, was going to live forever. She had to.
How could she do this to me?
How could she die before she said to me and to the world around me and most especially to my seven other brothers and sisters, “I love Sally-Jane best of all”?
Talk about life not being fair.
The family gathered at the house I had left to get married in 1954 in Westchester County. Raymond, Allyn, Marilyn, Elliot, Lucille, David and Arlene, seated around the dining room table, began discussion and division of the family booty. To get away from the negotiations, I pulled down the stairs and the light chain and climbed up into the attic. I found boxes of fantastic photographs of my mother’s family dating from the late 19th and early 20th Century. I love history. I settled down to look at the passing parade. Next to the boxes of photos was another box, falling apart from age. Gently, I opened it and discovered a hidden treasure. Letters between my mother and my father during their first year of marriage, 1919. My mother, Anna was 26 and my father, Louis was 25. Not kids. Louis worked for Anna’s father, David, as a “messenger-man” while going to City College part time and aspiring to be an actor. He delivered a message to Anna from her father. One look at the handsome, six footer, and it was all over… for Louis. I think Louis might have thought marrying the boss’s daughter was a good thing. It wasn’t. David, Anna’s father, always thought of Louis as the “messenger-man” who was marrying his “spinster” daughter for her and/or his money. In an attempt to get out from under the thumb and debt of Anna’s heavily Ukrainian accented, rich father and shelving his dreams, Louis found a job in Chicago. There are family myths in every family. I had heard whisperings of our parents' beginnings. These letters provided the details. In his very distinctive handwriting, Louis promised Anna he was on his way to a successful career. He would provide for her and their future family better than her father ever could. Unwritten was the sacrifice of his dream to be an actor. Beware those unwritten, unspoken sacrifices. I can guarantee personally that they will surface at the most inappropriate times and spoil the souffle.
In her very distinctive handwriting, it almost sounded like she wanted to support his promise for their future but couldn’t quite go the distance. She fell back on what was familiar and most secure for her. Giving the appearance of support while she manipulated him. Nothing worse than a mixed message, right? Whichever way you decide to move, you’re wrong.
Anna had lost her mother when she was sixteen. Her only security was the house she had been raised in in Brooklyn. Her father’s house. The deed always remained in my grandfather’s name. That was a minor detail.
After she married, she was still responsible for her two younger brothers. In the olden days you lived at home until you married.
Her father continued to pay all the house bills and utilities. Not a completely generous gesture. Offering free shelter for his family allowed him to move to a Hotel Suite in Manhattan. He was the Ukrainian immigrant playboy with an accent so thick no one understood him. No problem. Money is a great translator.
Anna and Louis, two unrealized souls pretending to be who they were not for the sake of their “love”, were on two separate tracks going in two different directions. My mother’s manipulations were cinematic. She reserved a private room on a train for a quick visit to Chicago. She packed as if she was moving into a mansion and not a rented room at my father's Boarding House. I know this because in one of her letters she mailed him a list of the trunks she had sent ahead and what she had packed in them… linens, sheets, tablecloths, napkins, lace doilies, trousseau.
Previously, they had agreed they would have no children until Louis' success was assured. I swear it’s in the letters. Consciously or unconsciously, she went to Chicago to get pregnant. She succeeded. She returned home. She was shocked when Louis suggested “doing something”. Louis was forced to leave Chicago and return to Brooklyn. He came home to become a father and my mother’s consigliere.
I brought these letters down from the attic. Excitedly, I showed my brothers and sisters what I had found. I wanted to read some of the letters. No one was interested. To this day I do not understand why. Don’t tamper with the family mystique? What mystique? We were a large Jewish family, maybe more dysfunctional than most only because there were more of us to be dysfunctional.
I left with the box of letters which over the years gave me the dimension and detail of a personal and intimate portrait of Anna and Louis. Pure gold.
I didn’t get the chance to talk things out or over with either parent. For me, these letters connected some very important dots. Over the years, with partners, children, friends, I struggled to be heard, to be understood. In this correspondence, I saw a very human Anna and Louis, not the pillars of perfection they pretended to be, struggling to do likewise.
In the middle of the night recently, apparently my best time for rumination, I asked myself, “Hey self, if they were not your parents, would you like to get to know your mother or your father?” Naturally, that question kept me up all night. Damn, the sacrifices I make for art. After a sleepless think here’s my conclusion:
My father would be fun and amusing for the short haul, but it was my mother that really interested me. With Anna, I would be on an endless journey through the caves and caverns of her restless and provocative mind. One didn’t ever ask her a question if you didn’t want to know what she thought. She felt privileged enough to be on the wrong side of many issues. Our family were lifelong Democrats. In 1952, Eisenhower was running for President, Nixon was his Vice Presidential candidate. He was accused of financial improprieties. Duh???? Can you believe how innocent we used to be? Now we have a Congressional Representative who lied about everything he ever was and did. What am I talking about? We might have a President that governs us from his jail cell.
In that Eisenhower-Nixon campaign, Nixon went on television crying and pleading his case. My mother voted Republican for the first time in our family history. She didn’t hide that fact from anyone. She told my father and anyone who would listen. “A grown man that cries is telling the truth. Liars don’t cry.” Apparently she forgot what actors are hired to do.
In her 60’s, after we had all left and married and her husband had retired, her restless mind decided it was time to finally graduate high school. She commuted from Westchester to New York City every day for two years. She wanted to go on to college. Her retired husband said, “Enough!”
Beware those unwritten, unspoken sacrifices.
To answer my question, if I didn’t know her I would have loved getting to know her? Yes. If I wasn’t her daughter.
Like I said, my mother’s death was the beginning of the perfect storm in my life.
I was FREE. She was never going to disapprove of anything I said or did ever again.
This freedom thing is tricky. I can’t believe some of the choices I made. But that was when I was smart and had all the answers. Oh, my friends, in the short term, ignorance really is bliss.
Love, Sally-Jane ❤️
P.S. By the way, I want to say how much I have missed your friendship during this process. Just like Ethel Merman and Bert Lahr.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_t82ir4REQ