Inventing Memory by Erica Jong Page A

the shreds of a dream. In the dream, Sim Coppley and I had to meet the President of America, but when I looked down at my shoes I saw that both they and my stockings were unmatched. One shoe had a strap across the instep and one did not. One stocking was brown and one was green. How can I meet the President like this? I asked Sim in a panic. And then I thought of what Mama would say: "Even a prophet's dreams are not always prophetic."
    There came a knock at my door, and a serving maid in a ruffled cap arrived to bring me my breakfast in bed.
    The dream of unmatched shoes disappeared with the first sight of the breakfast tray. The white linens, the silver cutlery, the basket of hot cross buns, the tea in porcelain cups as thin as eggshells, the little pot of amber honey, the fresh country butter, the brown-speckled eggs in their cup and cozy, the sausages under their silver chuppah . So transfixed was I that I never wondered if the sausages were trayfe ! And there, neatly folded, was the Berkshire County Eagle.
    I am still amazed to inhabit a world where some people pick food out of the garbage and some eat on silver trays. The first time I had white bread at Ellis Island, it seemed like cake to me. Do all Americans eat like this every day? I wondered. But my first breakfast tray at Fontana di Luna was an absolute marvel: a whole little universe of silver and porcelain and creamy linen. What effort had gone into this breakfast alone! How many cooks and craftsmen had labored to make the breaking of bread into a work of art! Even though I believed in the brotherhood of all men (no one mentioned women then), I knew I could get used to breakfast in bed in the wink of an eye!
    This is what memories are made of: the first breakfast tray, chalk letters on the rejected at Ellis Island, a private railroad car clacking along the Housatonic Railroad line, a dream of unmatched shoes.
    To travel backward in time a century or so—you're not going to trap me into saying how old I am!—and re-create these early days is not easy, but it is always the smells and the objects that take me back.
    What I remember from that weekend: the ladies in their pastel frocks and parasols playing croquet on the lawns of Fontana di Luna, the paneled library with thousands of leather-bound books, the trellis of white roses trained into a living, fluttering canopy, humming with bees.
    At that time, the worst thing on earth was to be a greenhorn—a greener , as we used to say on the Lower East Side. Embarrassed about my accent, my uncertainty about which fork to use, I hid behind my sketchbook and spoke as little as possible. What if I should mispronounce something!

    When Sim came to fetch me that morning, having first sent maids to fit me with new clothes—a mutton-sleeved, high-necked linen waist, a blueand-green tartan skirt with matching fitted jacket, a wonderful green hat with parrot feathers and swaths of green veiling—he found me admiring my green suede high button boots with scalloped edges.
    "Oh, what I dreamed!" I said.
    "I dreamed of you," said he, "all night long."
    "And what was I wearing in your dream?" I asked.
    "Nothing at all," said Sim, blushing pink as a marzipan pig and starting to cough in nervousness.
    He brought me pastels and paper and an ingenious French folding easel which could be unfolded and placed on the grass. It even had its own parasol to shield me from the sun. He carried this folded contraption as he took me on a tour of the grounds and showed me the beauties of the Berkshire countryside.
    The "cottage" was immense—fifty rooms or more—and was perched whitely on the hilltop. With its gabled windows and many chimneys, and its terraces of Italian gardens, sundials, fountains with rearing horses, it seemed a place of enchantment, such as I imagined Versailles—which I had seen in pictures. My job was to memorialize the weekend with my pen. The house, the gardens, but most particularly the guests…all these I was