The Dream (24 page)

‘Ma did.’

‘She let him in?’ This was even more incredible. After all we had gone through, after what he had done to her stealing that money, she had let him in? ‘She couldn’t have done that.’

‘He was crying,’ Sidney said. ‘I was there when he came. He knocked on the door and I answered it, and he was standing there, and it gave me a shock. I didn’t know what to do or say, so I called Ma and she came to the door, and when she saw who it was she tried to close the door but he wouldn’t let her. Then he started to cry and beg her to let him in, so she did, and they went in the
front
room and I didn’t hear any more until Ma came out and she was crying too. And she said she was going to give him another chance and he’d be staying with us, and I wasn’t supposed to tell you while you were in the hospital.’

Sidney told me all that and I listened, growing more and more sick. After all we had gone through, after all that had happened before, and all the misery he had brought us, she had taken him back. She was giving him another chance. I couldn’t wait to talk to her.

She came, finally, and no sooner had she sat down beside the bed than I launched into the subject. ‘Sidney tells me you’ve let him come back.’ I could never get myself to say ‘Father’ or ‘Dad’. It was always ‘him’ or ‘he’.

She nodded, looking sad and perhaps guilty too. ‘What could I do?’

‘You could have kicked him right out,’ I said angrily. ‘We had enough trouble getting away from him. I wouldn’t want to have to go through it again, but I’m afraid we will.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think so. I think he really means what he says, that he’ll behave, he’ll never act the same way again, he’ll stop drinking.’

‘That’s a lot of baloney,’ I said bitterly. ‘And you know it. You’ve made a big mistake.’

‘Harry,’ she said desperately, ‘what could I do? He cried. He cried and cried, and he reminded me of my promise.’

‘Oh, that,’ I said, remembering now. ‘He was just conning you, Ma. Grandpa told us it was something he made up and the real story was they’d wanted him to go
but
he didn’t want to go, so they left without him.’

But Ma was shaking her head and saying, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ and she was looking very troubled, as if she really did not know who was telling the truth. But whether it mattered or not is something else. Her heart had been touched then, just as deeply as it had been the first time. And there was something else.

He had a job. He was working in a tailoring shop. He had told her that, knowing how hard pressed we were for money. I myself was in the hospital unable to work, and the little that Sidney brought in selling ice cream did not help much. Perhaps this too had been in the back of her thoughts when she gave in to him.

There was nothing I could do, and the same misery that I had felt all my life came back and washed over me, driving me into a feeling of deep despair.

I no longer wanted to go home. I could not bear the thought of going back there and seeing him again, hearing his voice, listening to his roars and the sounds he made when he came home drunk late at night.

Why didn’t he die, I wondered. I envied the other fellows I had known whose fathers had died, some from sickness, some in the war. He had escaped the war. I remember the time he went with a group of men from our street in Engand to the town of Chester to take his physical exam when they had all been drafted and he came home smelling of the whiskey he’d drunk on the way back to celebrate his freedom. He’d been rejected because of something that he never talked about. He was smirking at his escape, and his eyes fell on me and he saw the unmistakable disappointment on my face, for I had been indulging in some wild dreams of his being
taken
off to war and killed by a German gun. I am sure he knew exactly what had been going on in my mind, for he laughed and sneered, ‘Better luck next time. Maybe the Germans will come over here and kill me.’

I didn’t say anything. I said very little more to my mother now. Perhaps I could not blame her. Perhaps if I had been well and working she would not have done what she did. I lay in my bed, plunged into the worst sort of gloom. And thereafter when the doctors made their rounds and asked how I felt I did not answer eagerly and tell them I felt fine and ask when I could go home. In fact, I said just the opposite, and when the time came to get off the bed and test my fractured leg to see how well I could walk, I limped badly and said it was still very painful. I had become another of the faking malingerers, the homeless men who clung to the hospital because it was so much better than the doorways and gutters from which they’d come.

And with most of my pain gone, and able now to get around on crutches, staying there wasn’t too bad for me either. Welfare Island was situated on the East River, and I could go down from the ward and sit on a bench and read or watch the boats and barges go by. I’d come up and have my lunch, then there might be some sort of entertainment in the recreation room, or a movie, and in the evening there was the companionship of other patients who were my age, and we could sit around the ward and tell dirty jokes and have a few good laughs before we went to bed.

No, it wasn’t bad at all, but they caught on to me finally and I was discharged. Another patient leaving at the same time gave me a lift home in his car, I hobbled
my
way up the stairs to our apartment, was greeted tearfully at the door by my mother and went inside with her.

He was home. The job he was supposed to have had had turned out to be part time, three days a week, and this was one of the days when he was not working. I saw him from the distance sitting in the front room. His back was towards me and he was listening to the radio. My heart sank immediately. It was as if a dark shadow had fallen over me.

He turned his head round. We stared at one another. Neither one of us said anything.

My mother had been watching us anxiously, perhaps fearful of some outburst, and there was relief on her face when nothing happened.

‘I’ll get you something to eat,’ she said. ‘You must be hungry.’

Chapter Nineteen

‘ON OUR BLOCK’
, I wrote, ‘there is this row of sad-looking old frame houses, half buried among the towering cliffs of Bronx apartment houses, a lost relic of a past when all this area was country, with rolling hills and fields and woodlands, with here and there a trickling brook shining in the sun. Somehow, as the change took place from country to city, this block of houses had been overlooked by the developers.

‘The houses’, I continued, pecking away at my tiny typewriter that I had bought in a second-hand shop for ten dollars, ‘were all alike and built close together with porches that slanted downward with the weight of their age. There were three apartments in each house, and ours was the one in the basement of the house in the middle of the block. The rooms were dark and had a musty smell …’

I remember it was a Saturday when I wrote this story, which would be published in one of the ‘little’ magazines called
Manuscript
, and the reason I remember that day is because it would prove to be a momentous day in my life before it was over.

If I had known then how it would turn out I would have felt less gloom than I did when I came to a halt halfway in my story, unable to continue any further writing about surroundings that only added to my depressed state. Besides, it was evening, and it was getting too dark for me to see well, and we were stinting on the use of our electricity and not at all sure how we were going to pay the electric bill this month – or the gas bill, or the rent.

The Depression was in its fifth year and there seemed to be no end to it. There had been a surge of hope when Franklin Roosevelt had been elected President, but so far we had heard nothing but a lot of fireside chats and some fine speeches, one of which told us that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself.

But the apple pedlars on street corners had grown in number, and the crowds in front of the agencies on Sixth Avenue were thicker than ever, and the breadlines in front of the Salvation Army headquarters longer, and I had virtually given up all hope of finding a job. I don’t know how my mother managed with so little coming into the house – a little from my father, a little from Sidney, and now and then from me when I managed to sell an article to some magazine. In desperation I had even tried my hand at writing scripts for comic magazines and sold a few at $10 a script. The publisher finally went bankrupt, owing me $50.

In the meantime we had moved from one place to another, always seeking an apartment that was cheaper than the one before, until finally we landed up in the Bronx, in the block of old frame houses, where our rent was $10 a month. It was the cheapest so far, but we were
soon
behind on that and haunted by the fear of being evicted by our landlady, a fat, slovenly woman who shuffled about in carpet slippers and wore the same torn dress every day that had slits in the sides showing white underwear.

She had been pleasant and cordial at first. She lived in the apartment above us and she would come down to knock on our door to ask if we needed anything. She lived alone, a widow, and was obviously quite taken with us. Her other tenants, who lived on the floor above her, a family of six people and very noisy, received much less attention. But it all disappeared when we fell behind with the rent and there were no more knocks on the door, and dark looks were cast at us when she saw us.

Evictions were common in those days. Often as you went by on a street you saw furniture piled on the pavement and stricken families huddled around not knowing what to do. We saw it coming to us.

It was about this time that I cooked up an article about the profession of bodyguarding, telling mostly from my imagination how bodyguards were trained to protect their gangster employers. I had sent it in to
Popular Mechanics
magazine and had heard nothing from them for about three or four weeks, when one day there was a knock at the door. It was our landlady and she was holding an envelope in her hand. All her hostility had vanished, and in its place there was fear and abject apology. She handed the envelope to me saying in a trembling voice that although it was addressed to me she had opened it by mistake. By mistake! It wasn’t likely, but I took it from her and opened it.

Inside was a check for $30, the stub stating that it was for ‘The Profession of Bodyguarding’.

While I stared at it with the euphoric feeling that only an author can get from an acceptance, the landlady was stammering, ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you were one of the boys. You must forgive me. I don’t want trouble. My husband, he should rest in peace, he was a friend of Al Capone …’

I realised then that she thought the cheque I had received was my salary for bodyguarding ‘one of the boys’. I didn’t clear it up for her. I let her go on thinking what was terrifying her. After that there was no longer any danger of eviction. Not for a while, anyway, not until we fell behind again and again, and some of her fear wore off.

Things only got worse for us and that basement apartment did not help. It was always so dark and airless there, and the musty smell never left the place no matter how hard my mother scrubbed and cleaned. For her, it could have meant the end of her dream. Even in England the house had been more tolerable: lighter and above ground, and with two floors. There was no sign of happiness in her any longer.

Perhaps, though, I am forgetting one thing. There was my father and the change that seemed to have come about in him. I don’t mean that he had given up his drinking. He still drank, and seemed to have found a place downtown on the east side where he had cronies who treated him to drinks – or so he claimed. He still went out nights, but not every night. Remarkably, he stayed home on some of the nights and there were fewer outbursts from him. I don’t know if it was my presence
or
if he was somewhat afraid of me, but he seemed subdued and once, astonishingly, I even saw him help my mother wash the dishes.

And he gave her money regularly every week, on a Friday, and he gave it to her mostly in small change. The boss at the place where he said he worked one day a week insisted on giving it to him that way, lots of change along with a few dollar bills.

A suspicion once came to my mind when I was thinking of all those coins he brought home. I did not speak to him, nor he to me, but I asked my mother, ‘Does he go to see his father?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But why do you ask?’

I shrugged. I didn’t want to tell her what I was suspecting; she had enough trouble and I didn’t want that planted in her mind. ‘I was just wondering’, I said, ‘if the old man is in New York.’

‘Where else could he be?’

‘He could have gone back to Chicago?’

‘I don’t think he’s been back since the wedding.’

‘How do you know that?’ I asked.

‘I just guessed,’ she said. ‘He was so mad at your grandmother for not having told him about the wedding that it wouldn’t surprise me if he never went back.’

‘It wouldn’t surprise me either,’ I said. ‘I think it was a damn shame.’

It was odd that we should have been talking about my grandmother that day, and the following week news came that she had died. It was a bit of a shock to my mother and I heard her asking my father if he was going to the funeral. Some of the roughness came into his tone when he answered no. Why should he go? What the hell for?

‘She’s your mother,’ my mother answered.

I heard him give a snorting sort of laugh and a single word came out of him contemptuously: ‘Mother!’

There was some talk later of money she might have left. My father brought it up. He was suspicious. She’d always had money. My grandfather saw to that. Even after the break with her at the wedding he had been sending her money. So what had happened to it? He wrote to Uncle Saul enquiring, and Saul’s answer came back promptly telling him there was no money left. Grandma had used it all up on doctors and hospitals before she died.

‘The lying bastard,’ my father swore. He was like his old self, the voice roaring, his inflamed eyes bulging. Now he would go back to Chicago. He’d face them all, hold each one by the throat, make him tell the truth. Where’s the money? But he did no such thing and it died down; he seemed to have forgotten all about it and he sat home with my mother listening to Eddie Cantor sing ‘Happy days are here again’.