Inventing Memory (5 page)

How would
he
do if deprived of the life he knew and thrown into a whole new world in a teeming metropolis? Not well, he suspected. There was in Sim a black melancholy that was activated by disorder, uncertainty, the upsetting of routine. Even his plunges into the abyss followed a pattern. And now a descending goddess had threatened to throw him into chaos!

"If a man is destined to drown, he will drown even in a spoonful of water," Mama used to say. Was I destined to be Sim's spoonful of water?

Levitsky had no carnal passions, it seemed, but Sim was accustomed to ruling
his
with an iron hand. Only he knew at what great cost he accomplished this. His mother believed he would eventually marry his cousin Lucretia Weathersby. But what the intimidating Mrs. Coppley could not know was that after every extended audience with bluestocking Lucretia, whether in her family's town house on Fifth Avenue or in their bogus Tuscan
castello
in the Berkshires (Fontana di Luna was its ostentatious name), he went immediately to a notorious brothel in the tenderloin and lost a day and a night in the arms of the latest child bride the madam, a certain Mrs. Rottenberg, had found for him. After the debauch, he would carefully lock the memories of those guilty hours in a secret chamber of his brain and throw away the key.

Lucretia was clever, was, God knows, rich. But a stroll with her up Fifth Avenue or through the greensward of her country place left Sim gasping for breath as if he were dying. He suspected that Lucretia felt the same about him, but being a woman and
required
to marry in order to escape her mother and join the world, Lucretia had seized upon him as the least of all possible evils. He was, after all, bookish like her, loved dogs, loved cats, loved horses. But apart from her animal passions, Lucretia was seemingly a disembodied spirit. Sim, however,
had
a body—though he always managed to forget it between trips to Mrs. Rottenberg's. Now, his body was alive all the time.

I am speaking, of course, of things Sim told me when I had been in America so long I was beyond being shocked. He told me later that when he visited Lucretia and watched her pour tea from a Georgian silver pot, he fancied he was sitting opposite "the goddess from the boat." He imagined me pouring my breasts out of the top of my corset and playing with my brown nipples until they were erect. He imagined me throwing my petticoat over my head and inviting him into my moist, warm center.

"How strange you suddenly look," Lucretia had said once to Sim. "What is it?"

And Sim longed with all his heart to tell Lucretia what he was thinking, but he would have as soon put a bullet in his brain.

"How is your research on the Hebrews?" Lucretia asked.

"Far more absorbing and penetrating than I supposed it would be," said Sim.

Lucretia was sitting at the tea table, staring into Sim's blue eyes with her eyes of identical hue. Her bosom was almost nonexistent, even when pushed up by the corset beneath it. She tapped her foot in her delicate black kid boot with its licorice buttons.

"Sim—I want you to take me to the ghetto next time you go. I have to see your beloved Kike Town!" (Though Lucretia's ruling passion would indeed turn out to be her anti-Semitism, in those days terms like "Kike Town" were freely used by all, as if they had no negative connotation whatever. We Jews were too newly arrived to be touchy about names. The same went for the other immigrants who burst the asphalt seams of downtown New York: Wops, Chinks, Guineas…how could they complain? Complaining is the privilege of the secure.)

Lucretia's request to see the ghetto seemed entirely mad to Sim, who could never imagine his cousin Lucretia outside of an environment in which the upholstery and the draperies matched.

"If I were a man," Lucretia said, "I would go on my own."

"Happily, my dear Lucretia, it is impossible to imagine you as a man."

She stamped her licorice foot again. "I
hate
being a girl," she said.

"Surely you can't mean that," said Sim.

"Surely I can," said Lucretia. "And so would you. The clothes alone are enough to drive one mad! If I were a man I would go
every
where
—Kike Town, Nigger Town, Wop Town, Pigtail Town—and you would go with me!"

"Lucretia—such lingo is wholly unbecoming for a lady."

"I don't want to be a lady!" said Lucretia. "I've been a lady long enough!"

Sim was thinking of that odd conversation as he walked the teeming streets of the Lower East Side in search of the woman he had met on the ship. (I had never contacted him.) "
Kreplach
that you see in a dream are no
kreplach
," my mother used to say, and to me Sim was a
kreplach
seen in a dream. It was not for eating. The truth was, I did not
expect
Sim to turn out to be real. I must have suspected even then that he needed his life of luxury: the shafts of light that fell on the silk cushions in the drawing room at Fontana di Luna, the Gothic windows and Renaissance fountains plundered from a different Europe than mine, the gardens made in imitation of eighteenth-century France or sixteenth-century England. But I could not possibly know then that he was even more stimulated by the strong smells of my downtown streets—the sweat of the peddler women with their heaving bosoms, the aroma of pickles and smoked fish, of knishes and blintzes, of beer and ale and strong cigars. Pushcarts overflowing with tumbling tomatoes and staring fish, large barrels filled with pickles, foamy brewed drink tapped from kegs, the wildly bearded men in their bowler hats, haggling and arguing, the women in their kerchiefs, the half-naked children playing in the Rutgers Square Park and scrambling for their piled-up clothes when the lookout boy whispered, "Cheese it—duh cops!"—these were sights and sounds that filled Sim with an excitement he could not find in the purer precincts of his uptown world.

Sometimes he would become so bewitched by the ghetto that he was in danger of being knocked down by a careening horsecar. He went into a trance on Hester or Ludlow or Orchard Street or East Broadway, and he would say to himself that he could never properly write a book about the "Hebrews" (as he called us) unless he rented a flat down here and lived among the tenements and pushcarts day and night. Sim was particularly fascinated by the way whole families came to sleep under the stars on sweltering summer nights, leaving the airless caves of the railroad flats to the roaches, rats, and bedbugs. The roofs came alive with humanity on such a night. And sometimes Sim would wander from roof to roof, gazing down at the sleeping immigrant women, looking everywhere for his "Sophia."

But the goddess from the boat was nowhere to be found.

Oh, he saw women who were as juicily attractive, as full-breasted and full of life, yet their eyes (he later said) lacked the same mischief.

"Mister!" came a call of a peddler with a tower of derbies on his head. He advanced to grab Sim by the lapels and drag him into the darkness of his little hole-in-the-wall: "You need a zoot? A coit? A new pair of shoes?" The man rummaged furiously among an amazing array of goods, then leaped forward, tore Sim's topcoat off his back, and substituted a heavy tweed much too dense for this hot weather.

"
Nu?
" said the man.
"Nu, nu, nu?"
He raised a cracked fragment of mirror. Apparently Sim was so overwhelmed to be interrupted in the midst of his reverie that without even bargaining, he bought the lumpy thing the man had pressed on him.

The peddler was astonished, perhaps even disappointed. He kept throwing in extra goods "at no extra charge" for the sake of sweetening the deal.

"I'm looking for a woman," Sim Coppley said, and the snaggletoothed peddler, as if to show that nothing was beyond his capacities as a procurer of human needs, excused himself, ran up a flight of narrow stairs at the back of his dusty lair, and brought down a dirty young girl with feverish black eyes, a smudged apron, and a nimbus of frizzy hair. She began to whimper pathetically, revealing yellow teeth.

Horrified that even this disgusting peddler knew his predilections (or so he imagined in his guilt), Sim turned and, leaving both his dollars and the heap of clothes, ran down the street, darting and weaving amid the pushcarts. Secure in his escape, he suddenly realized he was wearing the peddler's heavy tweed and had left his own bespoke London topcoat behind.

A few days later, Sim wrote a letter to the column called "A Bintel Brief" in the Yiddish newspaper:

Esteemed Editor:

I hope you will give me advice even though I am a "goy" who has
learned Yiddish from books and dictionaries rather than at the knee of
my mother.

Returning to America from Europe on a ship called
Der Goldener Stern
some months ago, I met a Hebrew woman from steerage whose
beauty, liveliness, and intelligence captivated me. I helped her with
English and she drew my portrait, which I treasure. But now she has
disappeared from my life forever.

Tell me, dear Editor, how shall I find her—or am I insane to think of
making her my wife? I cannot forget her.

I know she is poor, but as the poet says: A pretty face is half a dowry.
I can supply the other half. Please advise your desperate reader.

An uptown man whose heart is downtown

ANSWER:

We cannot advise this writer concerning this matter. Some mixed marriages are happy, some are not. Also, the writer seems not to have considered the woman's feelings. The advice to the writer is: honor the young woman's opinion.

We print this letter in the hopes that the woman will contact him if she has the desire. If she does not contact him, we advise the writer to let the matter drop.

3

Sarah

YENTL
MEETS
THE
AGE OF
INNOCENCE

1906

Darkness, the old mother, has not forgotten my East
Side.

—MICHAEL GOLD

W
hen I saw the letter printed in the
Forverts
, I immediately tore it out and hid it in my corset so that Levitsky would not see it. Somehow I knew that despite his reticence about sex, he would not be happy about the existence of a rival for my attentions. He might be afraid to make love to me himself, but that didn't mean he was not possessive. The territorial drives of men are not only about sex. Possession is a fiercer joy. Levitsky had made my life better, and I had no intention of giving him up.

It was not only the work but the newfound sources of entertainment. He would take me to the Yiddish theater, happy to have a pretty woman on his arm and to have people think we were lovers. At first I was glad to conspire. With the money I was making from my catalog work, I could afford new clothes, and the theater was the place to show them off. Afterward we would tour the Yiddish Rialto on Second Avenue (this was even
before
the Café Royale), and Levitsky would beam with
naches
when all the theatrical riffraff—or slumming Avenoodles—looked hungrily at me.

What myths have grown up about the Yiddish theater! You'd think it was the old Globe itself and that every playwright was Shakespeare. Not that they didn't plunder him—and everyone else they could steal from. Like Hollywood, which it in fact gave birth to, the Yiddish theater stooped to conquer. Respect for the intelligence of the audience was hardly rampant. Everyone went for the cheap laugh, the crocodile tears—and the audience loved it. The audience made more noise than the actors. Still, the Yiddish dramatists stole from the best—Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov. In one offering, Hamlet (played by the great matinee idol Tomashevsky) was a rabbinical student who came home to find that his uncle, the old rabbi, had married his mother and knocked off his father—with a poisoned matzo, no doubt. What
shreiing
there was! Who would have guessed that all of Denmark was inhabited by Litvaks! (Tomashevsky was a rather
plump
Hamlet—not exactly Valentino—but the Litvak ladies swooned nevertheless!)

There was also the Jewish
Doll's House
. (Ibsen, of course, was claimed by all progressive Jews as a landsman.) In the Yiddish version, Nora was called Minna and took in a handsome young anarchist boarder with bedroom eyes who immediately enlightened her and her daughter about female emancipation and woman's suffrage, not to mention the eighthour day. Having renovated their brains, the boarder now commenced to renovate those parts that were sacred to Venus—excuse my French—while the old papa
dovened
, turned a blind eye, and went on paying the bills. Ibsen, meanwhile, rolled over in his grave.

Not so different from show business today, when you come to think about it. My grandson, Lorenzo—God help him—has just produced a gay musical
Hamlet
in which Hamlet and Horatio are lovers, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern run a bathhouse in Wittenberg, and Ophelia and Gertrude are making it in the throne room behind the arras—where they run into Claudius and Polonius doing the same. At first he was afraid to invite me for fear I would be shocked. Shocked! I should only be shocked. In my younger days I saw and did plenty of things that would curl his hair—if he had any.

Lorenzo…I hardly have to tell
you
about your uncle Lorenzo. He was spoiled rotten by my dear daughter, Salome, and fancies himself a producer—a name anyone can assume, talent or not. My deepest wish is for Lorenzo to get his act together, stop plundering Shakespeare and get a job. I should live so long.

Just like Lorenzo, the anarchists of the Lower East Side thought they invented sex. But New York was already Sodom and Gomorrah
before
they got off the boat. Besides the tenderloin and the Dutch village, the Bowery with its bedbug houses and Irish saloons, there were streetwalkers and hoboes, singing waiters who doubled as pimps, second-story men, and girls—plenty of them nice Jewish girls, you should excuse the expression—who started out in the tenderloin and drifted down to Fourteenth Street and eventually to the Bowery, until they wound up in potter's field, the last stop. The whole Lower East Side was a red-light district when I got there, and a house was not necessarily a home.

I may be a Yiddishe mama, but I'm a
red-hot
Yiddishe mama! I knew couples who lived happily with the husband's mistress and couples who invited the male boarder into the conjugal bed. Back then it was done in the name of anarchism and free love. Later it was done in the name of Communism. The intelligentsia always likes to find an intellectual reason for
schtupping
—of that you may be sure. Whatever the excuse,
schtupping
is still
schtupping
. And it is the rhythm that cranks the world on its rusty old axis. Moralists may march, pass laws, blame the Jews for it, but it will never be eradicated. Which reminds me, for some reason—who can chart the vagaries of the ancient female brain?—of white slavery.

The subject of white slavery was all the rage when I came to America. (Black slavery they took for granted.) Havelock Ellis and Emma Goldman got all worked up about what they called the scandal of white slavery. Politicians would denounce it to get elected. Girls at Ellis Island would whisper about it—half in fear, half in titillation. It was said that some girls we actually
knew
were contracted to bawdy houses and compelled to stay there until they paid back their passage or—more likely—came down with disease and died. They never lasted more than two or three years, it was said. Syphilis was the scourge of the ghetto.

But I knew even then that if I had been contracted to a white slaver, I would have got the better of him. Somehow. I had seen too much to be afraid of a penny pimp—you should also excuse the expression. I knew I was alive only because of the hard bargain God had driven. I was borne up by the bodies of babies—Dovie first among them. And I walked with a phantom twin, having to be both girl and boy.

We are all borne up by the bodies of babies, though we prefer not to think about it. I remembered a crying child who tumbled through the ice as we
fussgeyers
crossed the frozen border into Germany. Over the lamentations of the mother, the ice child was left behind in its cold blue cocoon. When you have seen and heard things like that, you either give up and die or become a fighter.

I took the clipping from the
Forverts
from my bodice and made up my mind not to let Levitsky and Coppley meet. Levitsky was my impresario, and he was jealous. Coppley would only make him more so. That much I had learned about men. There would be a time to use this jealousy to my advantage. But the time had not yet come.

Meanwhile, I drew. I drew hats and shoes, petticoats and corsets, money belts and suspenders. I drew overalls and work boots, shirts and waistcoats, coats and trousers and hobble skirts. The more valuable I was, the quicker and better I drew, the more possessive Levitsky became.

And I learned to manage him: to mix sugar and tongue-lashing, to wheedle and seduce, to tease and taunt until I got what I wanted. All my aim in those days was to earn enough to bring my family over from the land of
pogroms
. To this end I saved my money at a Jewish bank. (It went bust in the depression of 1907—another story for another rainy night.)

We made a funny family—Levitsky and I and the few other catalog artists who worked with us in Levitsky's tenement on Rivington.

We had drawing tables and high stools, and sometimes the corsets and shirts and blouses and jackets would be stuffed or hung on tailors' dummies.

Since our place was on the ground floor and since we always had food and drink aplenty, homeless urchins who lived everywhere and nowhere—street Arabs, they were called—used to flock into the studio to beg for scraps. I took to one of these urchins and fed him behind Levitsky's back. The child's name was, he said, Tyke, and he sold newspapers and swept streets; he may also have been a pickpocket. Who knows where he slept? Those homeless boys slept in alleys behind Irish bars or on the steps of wine cellars or anywhere they could till the snow came and froze them out. What they did then, God only knows. But even though Tyke was half black, he looked to me like my lost boy, so I was always glad to see him.

One day, I gave him a little sketch I had made of myself and asked him to bring it to Sim Coppley's house and slide it into the mailbox. I had not put my address or name on it. I meant only to whet Sim's appetite. But apparently Sim caught the boy and bribed him with chocolates until he confessed to my whereabouts.

The very next day, who should come strolling through the doors of our street-level studio but Sim Coppley himself!

He fell to his knees before the stool where I was drawing. "'Thine eyes are as doves,'" he said, quoting the Song of Songs.

"Thy
kopf
is
dumm!
" I said, quoting myself, though my heart thudded in my chest.

It was my good fortune that Levitsky was out delivering drawings when Coppley arrived. "You must never come here again!" I said. "My boss will fire me."

"You don't need a boss, you need a husband," Coppley said.

"A husband
is
a boss!" I said, flaunting my—or Levitsky's—anarchist ideas. "A husband is a form of white slavery!" (I had begun attending radical lectures at the Educational Alliance, and this is the sort of thing I'd picked up. Only six months in America, and I was already a low-rent Emma Goldman!)

"If you were
my
wife, Sophia, I would give you everything you needed and freedom too."

"Freedom cannot be
given
!" I said. "If you think you can give it to me, it shows you don't know what freedom
is
. Besides, I am almost a stranger to you!"

"We have crossed an ocean together," said Sim, dazed with desire. And then, seeing a bowl of fruit on the table, he sighed: "'Comfort me with apples! I am faint with love.'" (Later he would woo me by translat ing Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" into Yiddish: "
Vifiel hob ich dir leib? Loz mir tzelen: / Ich leib dir azoi
tief und breit und hoich / Vie mein neshomeh ken dirgreichen, ven / Zie sucht
dem lebens tachlis und die shchineh
." Oh, he believed that poetry and psalm would cover a multitude of sins!)

Just then Levitsky strolled in, smoking his stinkiest cigar.

"Pfui," I said. Coppley, for all his delirium, had the presence of mind to say: "I greatly admire this lady's work, and I would like to propose a business deal to you."

The word "business" always riveted Levitsky. Business was his religion. I went on coolly drawing a corset as if it would contain Sim's rash tongue. Levitsky and Coppley retreated to a corner to bargain. I heard them haggling in raised voices. Finally they shook hands.

Coppley then came up to my drawing stool and said, "I shall look forward to welcoming you in the country, madame."

And he took his leave.

When Sim departed, Levitsky was excited.

"He will pay us fifty dollars for you to draw pictures of a party in the country. And we are to go this very weekend in a private railway car!"

"
A full pocket will heal the sick
," Mama would have said.

Fifty dollars was a fortune in those days. It had cost me twenty-five to come across the sea. Now I would cross an even wider ocean, into the world of the rich
goyim
. And
they
would pay
me!
Incredible.

Clever Sim, I thought. He had immediately realized that Levitsky's heart was imprisoned in his wallet.

It was on a Friday evening in May that Levitsky and I departed the infernal city in the private railway car, a paradise of
marronglacé
-colored velvet sofas, polished brass, etched mirrors, and velvet easy chairs more embracing than the womb. An ebony butler attended to our every whim. First he brought us cordials and water, then he set a table for dinner with beautiful linens and fresh flowers. Presently he served us foods such as I had only read about in books: terrapin soup, scallops in cream,
coq au
vin
, lemon tarts, French cheeses, coffee, oranges in liqueur, and bittersweet chocolate—all with the appropriate wines.

In an hour or so, I was so tipsy that I fell back in my chair and slept. I did not awaken until we had arrived at a sweet-smelling station in the country, where the summer night was alive with crickets and stars.

We were met by a coachman driving a one-horse shay. The conveyance swayed and bumped over the rutted roads and brought us in some minutes to a grand edifice that the coachman called "the cottage," with a curving tree-lined driveway. There we were put in the care of a housekeeper, who brought us to adjoining rooms with huge four-poster beds, polished pier glasses, velvet chaises, and tufted settees. Flowering branches bloomed in Chinese vases. An applewood fire burned in each hearth, scenting the rooms.

I fell asleep that night watching the flickering fire and knowing that I could never explain to Mama about this or about the other things I had already seen and tasted in America.

"Forgive me,
Mamele
," I whispered, falling asleep. "I did not mean to run ahead of you, but fate presented me with this rolling road."

And I thought I heard Mama say: "
Kayne hore
." (May no evil eye fix you in its gaze.)

Some mornings, Sim Coppley awoke unable to breathe. He would gasp for breath, making wheezing noises in his lungs. The feeling of choking was so real that sometimes in a panic he would wet himself like a hanged man on the edge of death. He would leap out of bed and jump about the room as if that way, somehow, he could pull more air into his lungs. A gurgle in his throat and a shortness of air told him that he was in danger of drowning in his own secretions. He would cough to try to dislodge them, increasing his own panic. There was always a moment when he was sure he would not survive the attack. Then, miraculously, air would return to his passageways and he would know he had been reprieved. When he had these attacks, Sim felt that somehow he was being punished for his lechery and deserved to die. He was always surprised when he was spared.