Authors: Harry Bernstein
This was true. Clifton Fadiman had written me a note reminding me of my novel almost once a month since that first letter had arrived. And the letter from Edward J. O’Brien had further swelled my head. It told me that he had selected one of my short stories for inclusion in the
honour
roll of his next volume of
Best Short Stories
, which he published in England.
But my head wasn’t swollen that bitterly cold day and I was in no mood for praise. I wanted a job, not pats on the back. I told her that.
She grew silent for a moment, then said, ‘I don’t think you really want to marry me.’
‘Yes, I do,’ I protested.
‘No, you don’t,’ she said and burst into tears.
I walked along at her side feeling uncomfortable, aware that pedestrians, hurrying past us, were glancing curiously at us and at her crying. I put my arm round her shoulders, drew her closer to me and said, ‘I just don’t want you supporting me and my parents.’
‘That’s a good excuse, isn’t it?’ she said brokenly, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief that fluttered in the wind.
‘It’s not an excuse,’ I said. ‘It’s the truth.’ There was more to it than that, but I had never gone into it with her and I didn’t want to do that now.
We were eventually married in the spring of 1935, 3 May. It was not much of an affair. If Ruby and I had had our way there would not have been any kind of ceremony. We would have gone to a justice of the peace and had it done briefly that way. But Ruby’s mother wanted a religious ceremony performed by a rabbi, as did my mother, so for their sake we agreed and on a Friday morning in early May we were in the living room of the rabbi’s home in Brooklyn, with just a handful of people present, my mother and father, Ruby’s mother and brother and her aunt, and the rabbi’s wife and a girlfriend of Ruby’s.
It went swiftly. The rabbi cooperated fully with my request. I had taken him aside before the ceremony and whispered to him that I didn’t want any religious frills, and that Ruby and I wanted to get away as quickly as possible. He was only too glad to oblige. It was Friday, the Sabbath eve loomed ahead. He had many things to do at the synagogue. He was a short, brisk man and he moved about quickly improvising a chuppah – the canopy under which the ceremony was to be performed. He had four poles mounted on stands and he spread a large piece of purple velvet cloth over them. His wife helped and she also put a plate of sliced sponge cake and a bottle of wine on a table for refreshments afterwards.
I saw my father eyeing the bottle with something like disgust. He did not drink wine. It was either whiskey or nothing for him. In fact, I was surprised that he had come at all and whiskey must have been the lure.
The preparations were soon completed and Ruby and I stood under the chuppah close together. She was wearing a yellow dress along with a corsage of gardenias that I had bought for her, with the windfall that had come suddenly just before the wedding, a cheque for $20 from
American Weekly
for an article entitled ‘The Exciting Life of a Fashion Model’. I had given half the money to my mother, and the other half had paid for the corsage and a wedding ring that looked like gold but wasn’t.
Ruby looked very beautiful in her yellow dress and the white corsage pinned below her heart. Her mother had placed a veil over her head, and we smiled at each other, she through the veil, as we stood there close to one another. The velvet top touched my head slightly and I had to bend to avoid it. Obedient to my request, the rabbi
raced
through the ceremony so fast you could hardly make out the words. It was soon over, then I was crashing my foot down on a wineglass, the symbolic gesture that said we were married, and I was lifting the veil from Ruby’s face and was kissing her, and everybody in the room was crying ‘Mazeltov!’ and shaking my hand and kissing Ruby, and the rabbi’s wife began serving the cake and wine, and I heard my father mutter, ‘Bloody cheapskates.’ And saw my mother nudge him in the side with her elbow.
Ruby and I broke away as quickly as we could, but not before I had said goodbye to my mother. All through the time we had been there I had avoided looking at her, but I knew she was not happy. She had sat there quietly at my father’s side saying nothing to anyone. As I went up to her to say goodbye she tried to smile and she kissed me, but I know there were tears in her eyes and it left me with a feeling of heaviness inside that dampened my spirits for a long time after we had left.
I hid it from Ruby, however. We took the subway into Manhattan to go to the furnished room we had rented on West Sixty-eighth Street and soon forgot everything except that we were married, and I kept my arm round Ruby and drew her close to me, and people looked at us and caught the fragrance from Ruby’s gardenia and may have guessed that we’d just been married, and some of them smiled at us and we smiled back.
We were both very happy that day. The cold and blustery winter, the unbearable separations because of weather, the endless longing for one another, the uncertainties of the future when we were together, all were swept aside.
We were married now and on our way to our first home. It was in a brownstone house in a row of similar brownstones on West Sixty-eighth Street not far from Central Park, a place we had always called our second home. We had rented it the day before, after the landlady had given us a sharp scrutiny and informed us in somewhat haughty tones that she took in only the best kind of people. Apparently, we had made the grade. The rent was $7 a week, payable in advance. It was a lot to us; it would consume half of Ruby’s weekly salary. But it was a pleasant room.
As we approached it eagerly that day of our wedding, mounting the tall flight of steps that led to the entrance, I carrying our two suitcases, I saw a face at the window of the ground-floor apartment. It was our landlady, Mrs Janeski, whom we had already nicknamed Madame Janeski because of her haughty demeanour. I waved to her, but she did not wave back and I felt her eyes still on us while we climbed the rest of the steps to the big, heavy door.
Ruby and I went in, past the landlady’s door and up the carpeted steps. There was a fresh, clean smell about everything, and the banister and stair rails shone with their polishing. Our room was on the top floor, another flight of stairs, then I put the suitcases down and felt for the key in my pocket. I opened it wide for Ruby to go in first, but she didn’t budge. She stood there smiling at me. At first I was puzzled, then I understood. She wanted to be carried over the threshold.
‘Somebody’s grown conventional all at once,’ I said.
But I didn’t mind. I stooped and picked her up in my arms, and entered with her into a bright, sunny room
that
was filled with the fragrance of the bouquet of flowers I had ordered delivered earlier. I put her down, and she went over to the flowers and sniffed them, and drew in a deep breath, then came over to me and put her arms round my neck, and we kissed for a long time, and it was all so very beautiful and wonderful.
Our honeymoon lasted three days and it was spent mostly in Central Park. The weather was with us, it was warm and sunny, and we were able to take walks through the park. We visited our gold willow tree and stood for a long time admiring its spring beauty. The golden leaves were just beginning to open and its thin branches had already begun to form the shape of an old-fashioned ballroom gown and were trailing gracefully along the ground.
Only we did not need it any more for the purpose it had been used before. We had our lovely room on the top floor of the brownstone. It served all our needs. It had a tiny alcove with a dressing table, something Ruby had never had before, and it had a makeshift sort of kitchen that was combined with the bathroom, and it had two windows looking out on to a garden below. And it was kept spotlessly clean by Madame Janeski’s housemaid.
The three-day honeymoon was over all too soon, and on Monday morning I escorted Ruby to her job at Brentano’s. I saw the landlady watching us from her window as we left. Apparently, we were still under her scrutiny. I doubted if she kept the same watch over her other roomers. It was beginning to make me feel a bit uncomfortable. But I tried to ignore it as we went out.
It was another beautiful, sunny day and we walked through Central Park towards Fifth Avenue, regretting as
we
walked hand in hand that we could not spend another day together. I left her at Brentano’s with a last kiss, and turned back to West Sixty-eighth Street feeling gloomy without her. As I came back up the high stoop I saw the face at the window once more, but this time as I entered into the hall the landlady’s door opened and she came out.
‘Is there something wrong?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I answered, surprised. ‘Why should there be?’
‘I saw you and your wife leaving for your offices and now you’ve come back. Are you ill?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not ill. I’m quite all right. I don’t go to an office. I work at home.’
‘Oh?’ There was a touch of something else in her voice that might have expressed a certain scepticism. ‘And just what kind of work do you do?’ she asked.
‘I’m a writer.’
Once again she said, ‘Oh’, and this time there was quite clearly doubt. She said nothing more.
I went back upstairs feeling that we were no longer included in her ‘best kind of people’ and were in fact under suspicion from here on. The best kind worked in offices. They left every morning at the same time and came back in the evening at the same time, and that’s what put them into the best class. The ones who worked at home were in a lower class, oddballs, suspicious characters.
I tried to put it out of my mind as I entered the room and got ready to buckle down to writing the novel that Clifton Fadiman wanted so badly. I took out my Corona typewriter from the cupboard and carried it over to the one table we had that would have to serve also as a desk, and immediately saw the note stuck in the roller.
It was a message from Ruby, one that I would see every morning hereafter, and it was typed on one of the Western Union forms that she took from her office at Brentano’s to use for writing notes. It was written as a telegram addressed to me and it gave some instructions for the day:
DARLING, WE WILL HAVE MEATLOAF FOR DINNER STOP BUY ONE HALF POUND OF CHOPPED BEEF STOP ALSO BUY ONE ONION AND ONE CLOVE GARLIC AND ONE EGG STOP MIX ALL INGREDIENTS IN YELLOW BOWL IN BATHROOM-KITCHEN AND PUT IN OVEN ABOUT FOUR PM STOP I SHOULD BE HOME A LITTLE AFTER FIVE STOP BUY CHEESE BUN AT CUSHMANS FOR DESSERT STOP FORGOT TO MENTION WHEN MIXING INGREDIENTS FOR MEATLOAF BE SURE YOU ADD ONE TON OF LOVE FROM ME STOP YOUR OWN DARLING STOP
I grinned as I read it. Ruby had a wonderful sense of humour. We’d had many good laughs. We would have many more in the future. Meanwhile, it drove thoughts of my novel out of my mind and I began to think more of the household duties that were mine from here on.
I was about to tidy up the place when there was a knock at the door. It was the housemaid with her bucket and broom and cleaning cloths. She also dragged in a vacuum cleaner. She was a skinny young girl, with spectacles and buck teeth, and I soon discovered that she was Madame Janeski’s daughter and a brisk, energetic
worker,
who soon had the room neat and shining again.
Before she left her mother arrived, ostensibly to inspect the work she had done and to find criticism of things here and there that did not seem to bother the girl. But I think she was there more to look around the room to see if she might find some things that would bolster the doubts she had about her new tenants.
I saw her sharp eyes swivel from corner to corner. I watched her go into the bathroom and look there. But there was nothing she could have pinned on us – no empty beer and whiskey bottles, no signs of drugs or cigarette burns on the bedspread or tablecloth – and the best she could do was scold the girl for leaving specks of dust here and there.
I was no longer able to settle down to writing my novel. Once the room was tidied up I had my household duties to perform. I went out to do my shopping, carrying out Ruby’s instructions, the butcher shop for half a pound of chopped beef, the vegetable store for an onion and a clove of garlic, the grocery, the bakery; and both times, when I left and when I came back hugging my brown paper bag of food supplies, the landlady’s face was at the window watching me, her suspicions deepened, I’ve no doubt.
I tried to ignore it, but I could never quite get over the uncomfortable feeling of being watched, not only by the landlady but others, and having them know that I was the housekeeper while my wife went to work. Perhaps this was a common enough arrangement during the Depression, but it was still odd enough to attract attention. I felt particularly in the spotlight when it came to hanging out the washing.
The laundry had been a bit of a bone of contention between Ruby and me at the outset of our upside-down marriage. Ruby had wanted to do the washing of our clothes, at least her own things, but I had insisted on doing all of it, pointing out that since she was the breadwinner it was only right that I should do everything that was needed in the house – and that included laundry – all of it. Ruby had given in reluctantly, perhaps with some apprehension.
I did all right with the washing, following her instructions, but when it came to hanging the clothes out on a line I was in trouble. The line stretched from the side of one of my windows to a telegraph pole at the far end of the backyard garden, and that made it easy for me to get to and out of the prying eyes of Madame Janeski, and I did fairly well at the start with my own shorts and undershirts and socks, but when it came to Ruby’s underthings, her slips, her panties, her stockings, I messed up. I wasn’t sure which way they were supposed to hang. But I did my best until I came to the bra, and then I tried various ways, the whole thing horizontally, then vertically, and I still wasn’t sure when a woman’s voice cried out: ‘Try hanging it from the straps!’ With that came a burst of laughter from several other directions.
With a shock I realised that I’d had an audience all this time. There was a row of backyards stretching for the entire length of the block and there were people in them sunning themselves on beach chairs. It was from one of these chairs in the yard next to ours that the voice had come, a woman in a sun suit. The laughter came from other yards.