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would obey, thinking him the most peculiar man I had ever met.
    "Better an honest smack in the face than a false kiss," Mama would have said.
    Oh, Mamenyu! Where are you? It seemed to me I needed my mama now more than I ever had. I carried my little mama with me in my head and heart every minute of every day. Sometimes I even spoke to her as if she were in the same room.
    "What's wrong with Levitsky, Mama?" I asked. And: "Will I ever see the shaygetz from the ship again?" And: "Will he reject me also?" For I hardly knew then how attractive men found me. I was like catnip to them, but I did not know yet what sort of power that was.
    The shaygetz from the ship was in my mind as much as Mama, if the truth be told. I kept hearing her say in Yiddish: " Dray zakhn ken men nisht bahaltn: libe, hustn un dales ." (Three things can never be hidden: love, a cough, and poverty.) Those pale-blue eyes had betrayed love as insistently as a consumptive's cough foreshadows his death.

    I am speaking of my first year in America, when everything was fresh and new and had a halo around it like the ring around the moon on a frosty winter night. For a stranger who walks alone in a foreign land, every ordinary thing pierces the heart. Every policeman is fearsome. Every encounter may change your life for better or for worse. Every man you meet is a door into comfort or disaster.
    As a little girl, I used to fear the outhouse in our back courtyard. When I had to make caca in the middle of the night, I imagined invisible demons who would rise up from the stinking pit beneath the hole and drag me down into their hellish realm. Sometimes I would use the chamber pot or else hold everything in all night, tossing and turning, unable to sleep till the dawn came. But if I was sick in my kishkes , I had no choice but tiptoe out to the hell gate of the privy. What terror there was in creeping outside in the cold, hanging my little tush over the entrance to the underworld while the demons prepared God only knew what tortures for its sweet pink flesh.
    Being in America alone was a lot like going to the outhouse at night in Sukovoly. No wonder Levitsky became mother, father, brother, comforter, to me. I clung to him as I would have clung to my mother had she braved the perils of the outhouse with me (which she only did when I was feverish and sick). If you wonder, as this story proceeds, how I stayed with a man whose very claim to manhood was so uncertain, remember the story of the outhouse. I stayed with him because he stayed with me in the dark night, when the dybbuks howled under the privy's hole.

    Meanwhile, what was Sim doing? I found out only much later. Sim returned from Europe to his digs on what I thought of as Medicine Avenue (did only doctors and apothecaries live there? I wondered), to find himself obsessed and distracted by dreams of the goddess he had met on the ship. The goddess! That was me! How different I seemed from the women he knew in New York, he said. I was alive, and they seemed like walking corpses. Even before I could express much in English, I had said more to him than any other woman he had ever met. Or so he claimed.
    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