The Dream (30 page)

She was in her sixties by now, but she looked much older. Her hair was grey and her face was wrinkled, and she had begun to walk with a stoop and an unsteadiness of her feet. Occasionally, I took her for a little walk to a nearby park, and I would hold her arm to give her some support.

How different this was, I sometimes thought, from other days, and my mind would go back to England, when I was a little boy and she’d take me to the market and I’d have to trot to keep up with her quick stride.
There
were other times, not too long ago, when she’d be coming from some street market lugging two bulging shopping bags, one in each hand, and her walk still vigorous.

We did not often go out. It was too tiring for her. On the way to the house I would stop off at a bakery and buy a coffee ring, and she would make a pot of tea, and we’d sit eating and drinking our tea and talk, and a little flush of happiness would come into her pallid cheeks.

I told her about my job. Her face brightened still more. ‘Congratulations,’ she said. ‘It sounds very important, working for the movies.’

‘It is,’ I assured her.

‘But you’ve not given up your own writing, have you?’

‘Absolutely not. I work at it just as much as before, perhaps more because now my mind’s at ease over not having Ruby support me all the time.’

‘Ruby never minded, did she?’

‘No, it meant nothing to her and she was only too glad to have me keep on with my writing. She has a lot of faith in it.’

‘She’s a wonderful girl.’ She really meant it. She had grown fond of Ruby since the first day I brought her to the house to meet her, and that fondness had increased with every visit since then. We visited as often as we could at weekends and holidays, alternating between visits to her and Ruby’s mother, and whenever she saw Ruby my mother’s eyes would brighten and a slight flush came into her cheeks and she hugged Ruby tightly.

There was little wonder about this. Ruby showed her affection for Ma in many different ways. She would comb and brush and dress her hair when she came, or
give
her a manicure, or bring her some kind of gift, showing the attention that my mother had never received from her own daughters. I was glad that I had brought Ruby into her life and she was glad, too. It compensated to some degree for the loneliness and emptiness that she must have felt in those days, for she was by herself much of the time. Sidney was in high school, away most of the day, and he had a job after school delivering prescriptions for a drug store and did not get home until late. As for my father, it was the old story.

That change in him had not lasted long. He no longer stayed home and helped with some of the household chores, or sat outside with my mother on a Saturday night. That flash of goodness had been brief, like a sun trying to peep out from behind storm clouds. He had reverted to his old ways, coming and going like a boarder, the way it had been in England, and obviously he had money to spend, because he often came home late at night, drunk.

Where his money came from was a mystery. There was no indication that he had a job, not even the one day a week one he claimed to have had before, although by now I knew the truth about all that. I had never told my mother about my meeting with my grandfather in Union Square and the things he had told me. It would only upset her more than she was already and I had decided it was best to say nothing.

The mystery was troubling my mother a great deal and it was a good thing that I was able to snatch those afternoons to visit her, for she had no one else to talk to. My brothers were both unable to come very often because of their work, and also because their wives were
unwilling
to go. My sister and her husband were still in Chicago. There was nobody except me and there was very little I could do or say except try to comfort her.

‘Perhaps he does have a job,’ I said. ‘Where else could he be getting money from?’

‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But he leaves the house at different times, sometimes late, sometimes early, and he comes home at different times, and then he goes out again to meet his friends on the east side, some Romanian restaurant, where he does his drinking.’

‘Does he give you some of his money, at least?’

She gave a short, sad laugh. ‘Like he always did. A little bit that he takes out of his pocket, and when I tell him I can’t manage the house on so little he starts to curse. You know how he curses.’

‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘I wish I could do something, Ma.’ I felt sick with pity for her, and the old hatred for my father that I had grown up with flared up again and I felt myself clenching my fists. But I knew I would have to calm myself and keep away from him. She was in no condition to suffer any kind of violence around her. Every time I saw her she had grown more and more feeble, and I knew she spent a great deal of her time in bed. Yet I felt I had to do something to help her. I gave her what money I could, telling her to hide it from him lest he spend that too on drink and, most likely, gambling. But there had to be more than that.

I didn’t sleep thinking of it. I had trouble concentrating on my work. As for my own writing, that was completely pushed aside. It was a time when the happiness I could have felt being married to Ruby was clouded by worry over my mother.

Sometimes, when I was with her, I was tempted to tell her of my meeting with my grandfather in Union Square and what he had told me about her early love affair with a man named Samuel, and how he had conspired with my grandmother to trick her into marrying my father instead of Samuel. I had never told her anything at all about the meeting and it seemed to me she had enough heartache in her life without being reminded of Samuel. I felt the same way about it now, but thinking of my grandfather had stirred up a suspicion in my mind as to where my father’s new-found drinking money was coming from.

I remembered my promise to my grandfather to come and visit him. I had thought of it before from time to time and I had felt guilty about not keeping my promise. But now, I thought, might be a good time to go to see him. I still had the dance ticket on the back of which I had written his address. I had kept it in a drawer of the table in my bedroom that served also as a desk, and I dug it out of a miscellany of items stored there and saw the address on Second Avenue scribbled in my handwriting on the back.

I waited for a slack day in my reading. I had been given two short stories to read, so I could afford to take a little time in the afternoon to go there, hoping he would be in. It was in an old tenement house in a noisy section of the downtown area. Kids were playing stickball and screaming to one another in the street. Cars were parked bumper to bumper at the kerb. Bedding hung from fire escapes. I entered into a dark, smelly hallway where a row of broken mailboxes lined one wall, with bells equally broken or missing altogether underneath them. I
made
one out with his name along with several others on it. There was no use trying to ring the bell. This one was half pulled out from its socket.

I went up stairs whose treads were bent in the middle from years of tramping feet. Cigarette butts and chewing gum wrappers and dust littered the steps. The smells grew worse as I mounted. Some of it was food smell, cabbage predominantly, but there was also a toilet smell mingled with the mixture. At the end of each landing was a door with a red bulb glowing over it. This was the toilet that served the entire floor. I thought of all the money my grandfather had sent to his family in Chicago through the years, of all he had given away only recently, and that he should have to live in a place like this made me shake my head.

At last I came to the top floor. There was some relief to the darkness in the form of a skylight that brought some daylight on to the floor. I found the door I wanted and knocked.

It was opened cautiously by an elderly woman in a sloppy housedress that showed a sagging bosom. She had a foreign accent. ‘Vot you vant?’ she asked.

‘I want to see my grandfather,’ I said. ‘I’m his grandson.’

‘You vas who?’

‘His grandson.’

‘You vas his grandson? Yes, he told me you vould come. Why you don’t come sooner?’

‘I couldn’t come sooner. I’ve been very busy.’

‘Is Yankel your father?’

‘Yes.’

‘He come lots of times. But now he don’t come no more. He vos taking care of the funeral.’

‘What funeral?’

‘Your grandfather’s. You didn’t know?’

‘No.’ I was a bit stunned. This was something I had not expected. ‘When did he die?’ I asked.

‘Oh, veeks ago. A long time now. He die in the night. I don’t know for two days. He don’t let me come in his room. Maybe he got things hid in his bed. Beggars make lots of money. Then I start to smell something bad, so I go in anyway and find him there in the bed. I run and tell your father in the Romanian restaurant where he always goes to drink, and I tell him and he comes here and takes care of everything. He don’t tell you that?’

‘No.’

Why should he tell us? There was money hidden in that room and he took it. Would I tell my mother about all this? My head was in a whirl. I said, ‘Could I see his room?’

‘Vot you vant to see his room for?’

I didn’t quite know myself. But I felt I had to see it. ‘Just let me see it, please,’ I said. ‘I won’t take more than a minute. I just want to see where my grandfather lived.’

‘All right,’ she said reluctantly. ‘Come in and see I have no rented it yet, and there are still a few things there maybe you vant to take. Your father, he don’t vant them. He tell me I should go pickle them. He is a bad loudmouth, your father.’

I said nothing. She had opened the door wider and I went in. The house smelled of food cooking and it was messy. I only got a vague look at it as I followed her to one of the doors that shut off the various rooms she rented. She flung the door open and let me see the room. It was small and dark, with one window that faced a
brick
wall. I peered in first, then went in. There was a narrow bed, a dresser, a chair, and that was all. And he had lived here in this dark little hole for how many years? I did not know, but it had to be plenty, and in all that time, living virtually in a dark cell, he had never failed to send what must have been the bulk of the money he had made at begging to my grandmother, and after her death to his children, to my father also.

What a strange man he was, I thought, and how little we really knew of him, of the depth of his generosity, the sense of responsibility to his family, the goodness that was in him. There were other things that we did not know about him. He had told me once, much to my surprise, that he read books, but I had forgotten about it until the landlady pointed out a number of books stacked in a corner for lack of shelves to put them on, apparently.

‘He read a lot of books in the night,’ she said. ‘I charge him extra for the electricity. He don’t care. He like books. You like books?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Then you take them. Or I throw them out. I got no use for books.’

I went up to them to examine them, picking up one after the other, and growing more and more amazed as I saw the authors, Dostoevsky, Gorky, Tolstoy, Chekhov … all the great Russian masters, and there were several French: Zola, Flaubert; and English: Dickens, Thackeray. There had been rumours in the Chicago family of the wealth he must have, since he was able to give so much to my grandmother, and to them too, and to send us the tickets to come here. But the real wealth he had left behind was these books. I wanted them.

‘I’ll take them,’ I said to the landlady. ‘Do you have a bag or something I could carry them in?’

She let me have some old brown paper bags and I stuffed the books into them and, after thanking her, left, hugging the bags to my sides, feeling as if I’d stumbled on buried treasure, but once on the subway beginning to think more soberly how I was going to explain all this to my mother, the old man’s death, the money, my father’s part in it, what we had been living on these past few years – this worse than anything else. I worried over the effect it would have on her, especially in her weakened condition.

I didn’t have to tell her. It was told for me.

Chapter Twenty-three

ONE SUNDAY MORNING
, when Ruby and I were still eating our late breakfast and reading the
New York Times
at the same time, with sheets of the paper scattered on the table around us, there was a knock at the door. It was unusual for anyone to knock. There were bells downstairs. I called out, ‘Who’s there?’

‘It’s me,’ a voice answered. ‘Do you need any socks, ties, shirts?’

‘No,’ I yelled angrily. ‘I don’t need anything.’

‘I’ve got some very good bargains and I can let you have ’em cheap. I’ve got a real good buy on undershirts and shorts.’

‘Go away,’ I shouted. ‘I told you we don’t need anything.’

And then I got up and rushed to the door, determined to put emphasis to my words with force if necessary. I yanked the door open and there stood Uncle Barney, the family comedian, the Dwarf, a big five-cent White Owl cigar stuck in his grinning mouth.

‘Uncle Barney!’ I shouted, and we embraced and laughed, and I led him inside and Ruby greeted him
warmly.
She had heard much about the family in Chicago from me and knew how I felt about Barney. She hastened to warm up the coffee and pour a cup for him.

‘What brings you to New York?’ I asked, once we were sipping our coffee.

‘I came to see my father’s grave,’ he said.

‘Then you know he died,’ I said. I had been wondering about that and why none of them had shown up for the funeral.

‘We only found out a week ago,’ Barney said and with a little twinkle in his eyes added, ‘It came over the grape juice vine. A drinking pal of your father’s told us. He was in Chicago on some drinking business, I suppose, and he met one of my brothers in a saloon. So then we all got together and decided one of us should come here at least to pay our respects to the grave, and I was elected. Don’t ask me why they picked me to go, but here I am. I came in by bus this morning and I decided to say hello first to my favourite nephew, and here I am.’