Inventing Memory by Erica Jong

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.
    The morning he was to greet me at Fontana di Luna—which was Lucretia's family's palazzo—he apparently had one of the worst of these spells. He soaked his nightshirt back and front, wet the rug, and found himself unaccountably on his knees like a dog, coughing and sputtering and gasping. He thought that if I could see him this way I would loathe him.
    "Weak, weak, weak!" he railed at himself when he found his voice. His father had been contemptuous of his asthmatic wheezing, and Sim's nursemaid had tried to hide these fits from Father when the boy was small. The fact that he was still visited by them seemed to Sim proof of his undeservingness. He had the feeling that I could fill his lungs with breath.

    When I awoke in the cottage, sunlight was streaming in my window and I was troubled by