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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