Inventing Memory by Erica Jong Read Free Book Online Page A

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