The Dream (15 page)

There were others in the family to give her money. Joe, Saul, Rose, they were all working and earning, and they
gave
her a portion of their wages every week, so she was well supplied with money and was even putting a little aside to pay off the debt she felt she owed to my grandfather. Every week I went with her to the bank and helped her make out the deposit slip, which she handed to the teller together with the one or sometimes two dollars that she deposited. Then, happily, she tucked away her bank book into her handbag.

Yes, she was happy, and in those days it must have seemed to her that everything she had dreamed about America had come true. She not only had enough money to cover the expenses of the household, but to put a little aside – she had a bank account, something she had never had in her life before and that she mentioned proudly in her letters to England. ‘Oh, yes,’ she would say, dictating to me, ‘in case I haven’t told you before’ – she had, several times before – ‘I now have an account in a bank too … Life has decided to be good to us for a change …’

Life was indeed being good for a change, with a nice apartment only a block from a park, where you could hear band concerts in the summer, or go rowing on the lake, or sit on a bench and get a cool breeze, and see green grass and trees and flowers all around you … like living in the swanky houses up the park, Hollywood Park, for instance.

We had a parlour and the furniture was almost paid off; we had a piano, on which my sister Rose played every night after she came home from work, with great thumping sounds that had no melody, but were just simply a lot of noise. But what difference did that make? We had a piano. I was going to high school. I was already in my third year and in another year I would graduate and
go
on to college. Yes, there was another step up in store for us. I had decided on that myself. College was too big a thing for even my mother’s imagination to embrace. But I was getting older and able to make my own decisions. I would go to the University of Illinois in Urbana and study to become something that wasn’t quite yet clear in my mind. But not an architect. That had been ruled out my first week at Lane when the drawing teacher had made his comment about my drawing to the entire class. Perhaps I’d become a writer. I was writing stories for the school monthly magazine, and the English teacher in charge had a better opinion of me than the drawing teacher and thought that I had a lot of talent at writing.

But all that was only part of the shining glory of those days when it seemed that we were so close to the fulfilment of our dream. There was contentment in the household that had never been there before. My mother bought herself a new hat. It had a wide brim and a bunch of cherries on one side. She looked at herself in the mirror and smiled. I had never seen her do that before. I smiled with her. I told her it was very beautiful. She was a little surprised and grateful. Who had ever said that to her before? She looked again in the mirror, adjusted the hat a bit and smiled again.

They were good days for us and in addition to all the luxuries we already had we bought a Victrolla. We bought it from Phil, of course, and he and Lily came over to our house one evening to have dinner with us and show us how to use it, how to wind it up and put the needle in, and how to put the record on and take it off without scratching it. He had brought a record for us as
a
gift. It was a popular song called ‘Yes, we have no bananas’ and we played it over and over, and listened delightedly to it being sung without ever tiring of the repetition.

These were good times for a lot of people. There were more cars than ever out on the streets. New roads were being built to accommodate them and in the Loop there was already congestion. They were buying radios too and you could hardly go past a doorway without hearing the squawking sounds coming from them. And people were packing the movie theatres to hear the new talking pictures that so amazed and fascinated everyone.

My brother Joe and Uncle Saul were having no difficulty selling their magazine subscriptions, and Uncle Saul seemed to have forgotten completely his plan to study law, while Joe no longer spoke of becoming a journalist. The two went from door to door, knocking and telling whoever opened it that they were working their way through college, and – as Uncle Saul put it – their hands grew tired writing orders for
Colliers, Liberty, Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, Popular Mechanics
… you name it we’ve got it, said Uncle Saul, laughing.

Joe bought another suit – he had one already – but he could afford a second one and my mother did not object, although my father grumbled and wanted to know what the bloody ’ell anybody needed two suits for. Joe paid no attention to him. Joe was getting on, he’d soon be twenty, he was smoking a pipe and going out with girls. Then, oddly, he began to take weekend trips to Davenport, Iowa. We soon found out that it was a girl he went out there to see. He had met her through some
friends
when she was visiting them and he was in love with her – and what was more, he was going to marry her.

It came as a shock to my mother. I recall it was an evening after we’d had dinner and he was preparing to go out when he told her this. I don’t think my mother had ever recovered fully from the marriage of my sister to the Christian boy across the street when we were in England, so the first thing that entered her mind should not have been a surprise. ‘Is she Jewish?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ answered Joe.

I saw the relief cross my mother’s face. But, this hurdle overcome, there were other questions to ask. How old was she? What kind of family did she have? What did her father do? Were they rich, poor, or what? Why did they live in Davenport, Iowa of all places? And what kind of place did they live in? Did they have a parlour? Was there a piano in the parlour? How many were there in the family? Oh, there were a million questions and Joe, growing more and more impatient, anxious to get to his friends, tried to answer them all.

Finally, my mother asked, ‘Why don’t you bring her here to dinner?’

Joe hesitated. I know what he was thinking. My father. How would he behave? You never could tell. But reluctantly he said, ‘All right. Next time she comes here to visit her friend I’ll bring her.’

We waited four weeks before that happened and he brought Rose to the house. Yes, Rose. Another Rose in the family. It would make three Roses: my sister, my aunt – married to Uncle Barney – and the new one.

She was shy and rather pretty, with large dark eyes and
dark
hair, and she was wearing a blue dress with short, flouncy sleeves that showed slender white arms. She sat next to Joe at the table and seemed a little afraid of us. My father had barely acknowledged the introduction when she first arrived, and he sat at his usual place at the end of the table and as far away from us as he could get, with his head bent over his plate and silent throughout the early part of the conversation. He soon broke that silence, saying roughly, ‘Pass those pickles.’

His words were addressed to our visitor. The jar of pickles was in front of her. She was startled by the command and the roughness of the voice, and fumbled as she reached for the jar, causing it to tip over and spill juice and pickles over the tablecloth.

Then my father barked, ‘What’s the matter, don’t you know how to pass some pickles?’

Joe became angry and said, ‘You don’t have to speak to her like that.’

‘Who the bloody ’ell asked you?’ my father said, equally angry.

Joe, who was usually in deadly fear of my father, found the courage to speak up. ‘You’ve got no right to talk to her like that,’ he said.

My mother, who had jumped up at once to clear the mess off the table, tried to quieten things down, waving a warning to Joe, but the damage had been done. Joe had answered back and there was no stopping my father now. He sprang up and lashed out with the back of his hand, whacking Joe across the face. Joe let out a yell of pain and jumped up with a hand to his face and ran out. Rose, looking bewildered for a moment, got up and followed him.

My mother was furious and turned on my father immediately, something she never did in front of us. ‘You animal,’ she said. ‘Did you have to do that? Couldn’t you keep your temper in for once? The girl’s your visitor. She’s going to be your daughter-in-law. Did you have to carry on like that in front of her?’

‘Who gives a goddam who she is,’ he shouted back. ‘And who needs her for a daughter-in-law. If she can’t pass a jar of pickles without spilling them on the table she shouldn’t be anybody’s daughter-in-law. Let her stay home. And watch out I don’t give you a crack in the face.’

I have given a lot of thought to that episode and wondered if my father didn’t bring it about deliberately in the hope of breaking up the romance before it reached marriage. I had seen his face tighten when my mother first broke the news to him that Joe was planning to get married. For it would mean a loss of income to the house and he would have to make up for it. I am sure this was in his mind that afternoon and the pickles were a secondary consideration.

It did nothing, however, to break up the romance between my brother and the girl from Davenport, Iowa. But Joe had not told us everything. There was something he had been keeping from us, for my mother’s sake, knowing how it would hurt her. It came out at last.

Rose and her entire family were moving to New York. The father was a self-taught auto mechanic and he had seen great prospects in New York, a city where there were more of these newfangled cars than anywhere else in the world. Henry Ford was turning them out by the thousands every day, and the rich were buying big
limousines,
which broke down often, and men who knew how to fix them were in great demand.

There was no time for a wedding now. Joe would go to New York with them and the wedding would take place there.

Yes, indeed, it was a blow to my mother. Once more she was being deprived of a wedding for one of her children. The first time had been in England when my sister had married Arthur Forshaw in secrecy. And now it was Joe. It would be too expensive for her to go to New York. She would have to be satisfied with photos of the wedding. She got over her disappointment. It would be a good thing for Joe, she thought.

My father, however, cursed. He was thinking mostly of the $10 a week that Joe had contributed to the family. That money would be lost. He called Joe a bastard, a thief, a dog, a piece of dung.

My mother plugged her ears with her fingers and ran out of the room. We had been eating dinner and were at the table. I remained sitting there with my eyes fixed on him and hatred in them. His eyes met mine and the hatred was returned. Neither of us said anything and I got up and left the table.

But my father’s bitterness was not over. There remained still more to deal with, and this time he did not curse and his actions were strange to me.

This time it was Saul. We woke up one morning on a Sunday and he was not in the house. His bed had not been slept in. It was not unusual for him to come home late on a night after we had all gone to sleep. He worked overtime at the mail order house often, sometimes late
into
the night. But he was always there in the morning, saying prayers as soon as he awoke.

‘Where is he?’ my mother asked, perturbed. She had gone from room to room looking.

Even my father, even Rose, were looking, going from room to room futilely, as if he might be hiding under a bed or a sofa.

Clearly, he had not come home last night. He had not eaten any of the food my mother always left for him on those overtime nights. Where, then, was he? She was thrown at once into a frenzy of fear. Nothing could have been more terrible to her than the loss of one of her children. She became distraught and it was then that my father’s actions surprised me. Ordinarily, he would have been totally indifferent to the welfare of any one of us. If it had been a sickness, a mishap of some sort, he would have shown no compassion and would have distanced himself immediately from the situation. But now he was clearly concerned and after our search was over he announced grimly, ‘I’m going to the police.’

It was a logical thing to do and showed some caring within him. Chicago was a city full of crime and for those who were out at night it was especially dangerous. Saul could easily have met with it on his way home late at night. My mother took to weeping. She rarely broke down like that.

Sooner than we had expected, my father came hurrying back from the police station. His face was dark and angry. He had to go back to the police station, but he needed something. ‘Give me one of Saul’s tsitsis,’ he said.

My mother stared at him through her tears. ‘What for?’ she asked.

His anger became directed at her. ‘Don’t ask so many questions,’ he said. ‘Just give it to me, the tsitsis.’ Then he explained. ‘The goddam police,’ he said, ‘they asked me all sorts of questions. How big he was, how old he was, what size shoes he wore, what kind of clothes. And when I told them he wore tsitsis, a prayer shawl, they’d never heard of them – they’re Irish, so how should they know anything? So they wanted to see one and put it in the report they’re making out. So give me the damned thing and let me get this over with. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life on this business.’

Clearly, he had lost much of his concern, and my mother lost no time taking out a fresh tsitsis from the drawer where she kept several of them, all freshly cleaned, folded and put away carefully.

My father needn’t have hurried and my mother needn’t have been so upset. Saul was quite safe, and in these moments while the police were making out their missing persons report – and calling up a rabbi to find out how you spelled tsitsis – Saul was sitting in the boxcar of a railroad freight train heading west, although it wasn’t until we received a card from him that was postmarked Provo, Utah, telling us that he was safe and sound that we knew what had happened to him.

We didn’t know everything. I learned about it from him many years later, when we were both fully grown men and were talking one day and going back over the past with the amused tolerance that age gives you.