The Invisible Wall

by Harry Bernstein

  Perhaps if she hadn’t said that she would have stood a chance of staying up. My mother was now doubly furious with her, however, and in no uncertain terms ordered her to go up with the rest of us. “I thought I told you not to mention that boy’s name in this house again,” she added.

  Lily said nothing. The rest of us were a bit subdued, seeing the anger on Mother’s face. We did not see it often. She was more likely to be soft and gentle with us, but when the anger came it was always respected.

  In silence, we all began to troop up the stairs. As we did so my mother called out, “Don’t forget to throw your clothes down.”

  This was a ritual that we went through every night. My poor mother, though it would mean staying up longer to wash and mend the dirty torn clothes we would throw down, had made a game out of it for us, to give a little touch of fun to the bedtime hour, and perhaps to serve as a bit of an incentive to this least happy of all our moments. She was already regretting her anger; there had been too many outbursts from her that day, and she wanted to make up for it.

  It worked that night, as it always did. We scampered up the stairs and to the bedrooms, took off our ripped, dirty trousers and shirts, our evil-smelling socks, and clad in our underwear made our way back to the landing with the bundles of clothing in our arms. She was standing waiting for us at the foot of the stairs.

  “Are you ready?” she called up to us.

  “Yes,” we shouted back to her, giggling with excitement and anticipation.

  “All right. One, two, three.” She counted slowly, and our giggling grew louder. “Go!”

  We hurled our clothes down on her simultaneously, and screamed with delight as they fell on her. Some she managed to catch with her open arms, others rained down on her head, hit her in the face, or scattered on the floor around her feet. After gathering them, she sewed and mended and washed under the gaslight until late in the night.

  As for us, we scampered off to our beds, the two girls to theirs in one room, the three of us to the one we all shared in another room. It was not comfortable sleeping, especially for me, because my place was at the foot of the bed, where their feet stretched out and often caught me in the face. There was a lot of wriggling and twisting and shouts of protest before we finally settled down to sleep.

  That night my brothers fell asleep quickly, but I remained awake, still excited by the events of this strange night in my life. They passed through my mind as I lay there in the darkness, all those kids playing out on the street, running from one spot to another, jumping and shouting and running, the hopscotch game in front of the Harris’s house, that face at the window and the finger beckoning to me, my slipping into the house, the lavender scent that came from Sarah’s bosom, my crossing over to the Christian side and seeing crosses on the walls, the Gordons’ shop and the argument between Freddy and his sister, and finally Mrs. Turnbull, her boarders, and the sweets. Suddenly I remembered my humbugs. They were in the clothes I had hurled down the stairs at my mother. Instantly, I shot up in bed. Luckily, I was on the outside of the bed, and did not have to step over one of my brothers. I got out swiftly and padded out of the room. I went past the bucket placed on the landing for nocturnal use, down the stairs, and into the kitchen. I halted for a moment in the doorway.

  There she sat, her back toward me, at the table under the gaslight, the mantel turned down low to save on gas, the light so dim I don’t know how she could have seen. She was surrounded by the clothes we had thrown down, her head bent over them, her right arm going back and forth with the needle. She had not heard me coming down, and did not know I was standing there. Nor did I give her a chance to find out. I dashed forward suddenly, and began tearing at the pile of clothes, scaring her so that she jumped violently and put a hand to her heart.

  “’arry!” she gasped. “What are you doing here? What is it? What are you looking for?”

  I was tearing madly at the clothes, throwing them aside, scattering them in all directions, trying to find what I wanted. “I’m looking for me trousers,” I said.

  “Well, don’t throw everything about like that,” she said. “I’ll find them for you. What do you want them for?”

  “I’ve got something in them,” I muttered.

  “All right, here they are.”

  She had found them without any difficulty, handed them to me, and watched curiously as I dug into pockets, the first one empty except for a rusted nail I had been carrying around for several days, and then the other with the bag of humbugs. I pulled it out quickly, and would have turned right around and gone back up to bed with it if my mother hadn’t stopped me.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  I showed it to her, opening the bag for her to peer in. “Why, they’re humbugs,” she said in surprise. “Where did you get them from?”

  “I bought them in Mrs. Turnbull’s shop.”

  Her eyes widened. “Where did you get the money?”

  “Sarah gave it to me. She gave me a penny for running the errand.”

  “Oh!” She was not altogether displeased, which was a relief to me. I had somehow felt that she might have objected to this as much as she had to the errand itself. Instead, she even seemed interested in the contents and kept peering down at them. “Can I have one?” she asked.

  “Yis.” I let her take one, then asked, “Can I have one too?”

  She hesitated a moment. “You should be in bed sleeping, not sucking on humbugs this time of the night, but I don’t suppose you’ll be able to sleep until you do have one. Go on and take it, and I’ll let you sit with me for a while until you’ve finished it.”

  The first one I’d swallowed down in such a hurry had long since been digested and forgotten, and I was good and ready for a second one. I dipped into the bag eagerly. The next half hour or so was memorable, not only for sucking on a humbug late at night, but for being alone with her, and having her all to myself for once. How often did that happen in our busy household with her love shared among five of us? She let me sit on her lap too, and went on sewing as we sucked on our sweets and talked of various things.

  I told her of my trip to the Gordons, and how I’d stumbled in front of the Green’s house and nearly broken the bottle. I didn’t tell her anything, though, about the strange things Freddy had done with the piece of paper, and the quarrel between him and Florrie. I don’t know why. I hadn’t forgotten it, but somehow I felt that I should not mention it.

  My mother smiled, and paused in her sewing for a moment to stroke my hair, and said, “You’re getting to be a regular big boy now. And soon you’ll be going to school.”

  “When?” I asked, not too sure that I wanted to go.

  “In the fall,” she said. “In September.”

  “Will I go to St. Peter’s?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t want you to go there. They have too many little batesemas in St. Peter’s.” We called the rough and more openly anti-Semitic Christians “batesemas,” a name that has no origin in any other language and that Lancashire Jews must have coined. “I want you to go to a better school,” she said, “and I’m going to try and get you into the one up the park, the big one called the Hollywood Park School.”

  I listened to her open-mouthed. It was the first time I’d heard of her plan, and my feelings were mixed. I would much rather have gone with my brothers and sisters, yet I’d heard so many stories of the beatings they and the other Jewish children got from the ragamuffins—the batesemas—who went to St. Peter’s that I had been dreading it also.

  “Who’ll take me there?” I asked.

  “I’ll take you,” she said. “I’ll take you every day until you learn to go by yourself. I’ve already spoken to the headmaster there. He’s half-promised to take you in, though he says they don’t take in many Jews. He warned me that you’re going to have to wear nice clothes, and that means you’re also going to need a pair of shoes.”

  “Can I have clogs?” I asked eagerly. I’d always wanted a pair of clogs, the kind the Ch
ristian boys wore, the same as their parents wore, wooden with iron soles that could make sparks fly up into the air if you struck them across the cobblestones. How I envied them!

  My mother shook her head firmly. “No, clogs are for batesemas. Jewish people don’t wear clogs, even though they’re much cheaper. No, I’ll have to get real leather shoes for you, and I don’t know where I’m going to get the money from. I suppose I’ll have to ask your father.”

  An unhappy look spread over her face as she said this, and she seemed preoccupied with her sewing once more. Watching her, I knew of the thoughts crossing her mind, and the worry she felt over having to ask my father for money. I’d heard her trying often before, and I’d shivered at the repercussions.

  Yes, clogs were for Christians only. Jews considered it beneath them to wear clogs, and I was the one exception that my mother reluctantly made, chiefly because she had no choice and clogs were better than nothing. The shoes my brothers wore were those handed down from my father, save for the rare times when my mother could scrape together the money to buy new ones. The more children that came, the less money there was to scrape together, and I was last in line.

  Just as I was thinking of this, I heard the sound outside, the heavy footsteps on the street, the halt at the door and the temporary silence before the faint clicking came of a key being fitted into the lock. She heard it too, instantly put down her needle and thread, and pushed me off her lap.

  “Go upstairs, ’arry,” she whispered. “Go to bed.”

  I didn’t have to be told twice. The fear had rushed through me at those very sounds, and I dashed up the stairs once more and got into bed.

  It didn’t take long before I knew he was in the house. I heard the rumbling of his voice, then the faint pleading sounds of my mother’s voice. She would be asking him about the shoes, I thought. The rumbling grew louder, and louder, and erupted into violent roars and curses.

  The trembling went through my body. I did what I always did during these moments. I pulled the covers over my head to shut out the sounds.

  Chapter Two

  OUR HOUSE WAS ON THE CORNER AT THE BOTTOM OF THE FIRST SHORT ROW of Jewish houses, where Brook Street came to a cul-de-sac at our street. Like all corner houses it boasted a front hall, with a door leading to the front room that was empty and unused most of the time. Now and then it became a playroom for us, especially for Rose, who was next to Lily in age, and who often created fantasies about the room, turning it into a fancy drawing room, and herself into a duchess, and acting out scenes in which we became her servants, and she would order us about in a haughty, aristocratic voice. “Do tell the coachman to prepare the horses and carriage. I am going to a ball.”

  When brought out of her dream world to wash windows or sweep a floor she would fly into a violent rage. I think my mother understood how she felt and felt sorry for her, and would try to comfort her by saying, “Someday, we’ll have a real parlor, with proper furniture in it, and you won’t have to just pretend.”

  “Yes, when?” Rose would say, bitterly, only half believing her.

  “Yes, when?” we’d all demand, because it was something we all wanted and yearned for, a parlor like the Harris’s, red plush furniture, and red plush carpet. Perhaps even a piano, like the Blanks had. “Yes, when, Ma?” we’d nag.

  She would say confidently, “Someday.”

  I think she meant it. She had her dreams, too. Her one big dream was to go to America, where we had relatives. She wrote to them often. She herself could not write, but she had one of us do it, and her letters always asked the same thing, steamship tickets for all of us, and when their letters came, far less frequently than hers went to them, they were filled with optimism about the future, but there were no steamship tickets and nothing was said about them.

  Still, my mother continued to hope, to write, and to wait anxiously for the postman to knock on the door. After a while, she came to have another dream, about which we knew nothing for a while. She kept it secret from us all.

  In the meantime, she struggled to make ends meet. My father didn’t earn much money at the tailoring shop. Well, none of them did. Nor did the others at the mills. It was the one thing the two sides of our street had in common, the poverty. When the landlord came to collect his shilling rent on Sunday afternoon there was panic on both sides. He owned all the houses on our street. A shrunken little man with a yellowish mustache, he tapped on each door with the end of his pencil, a formidable sound. In his other hand, he carried a notebook, in which he recorded each transaction.

  I can remember how, as soon as she heard the rapping come closer, my mother used to start searching in her apron pockets, and then under the oilcloth on the mantelpiece where she kept an odd copper or two sometimes. Finding none anywhere one day, she gave me a little push, and said, “Go to Fanny Cohen’s and ask her if she can lend us a shilling for the rent.”

  I ran at once. Halfway up the street I met Philly Cohen coming toward me. He was a little redheaded boy about my age, and my friend. We both stopped, and eyed each other silently for a moment, like two puppy dogs meeting nose to nose.

  Then I asked, “Where you off to?”

  “T’yours,” he said. “Me Mam sent me to borrow a shilling for th’ rent. Where you off to?”

  “T’yours,” I said. “Me Mam sent me for a shilling for th’ rent, too.”

  “Then I’ll see you later,” he said. “Ta-ta.”

  “Ta-ta,” I said.

  Off we went in opposite directions, too innocent to realize the futility of our respective errands. My mother and his mother were also close friends, and later when they met and discussed this episode, they burst into gales of laughter, doubling over until tears came to their eyes.

  It was strange how they could laugh over their misfortunes, and yet they did often, but just as often they wept. I know my mother did. Never in front of us if she could help it. But I sometimes saw her surreptitiously wiping her eyes. Perhaps she was a little worse off than some of the other women, because my father gave her only a small portion of the little he made. The rest went for drink and gambling. He gave her only a little love, as well.

  HE WAS A STRANGE MAN, not at all like other Jewish men, who rarely drank or gambled or swore as he did. He was like a boarder in our house. He came and went. He was big and dark and surly, and always wore a cap pulled low over his brow so that you could hardly see his face. He left early in the morning to go to his tailoring shop, came back late in the evening, and ate his supper alone at the table with his head bent low over his plate, never saying anything to us. When he spoke it was only to my mother, and always with savage curses.

  Barely had he finished his supper than he pushed his chair back with a scraping sound and was off in such a hurry that one sleeve of his coat was left dangling behind him. He fumbled for it as he rushed out. When the door closed behind him, with a bang, we were all relieved. He was off, to a pub or some card game, and would not be back until late.

  We always fought with one another when it came to taking his tea in the afternoon. This was a daily routine among all the Jewish children on our street. The Christian children did not have to do this. The mill workers were not allowed to take time off to have tea. They had no union as the Jewish tailoring workers did. About four or five o’clock you would see a long line of boys straggling along Brook Street in the direction of Daw Bank, where the workshops were located, all of them carrying steaming cans of tea and little packages of bread and butter, enough to tide the men over until they came home for supper. The other boys went eagerly, glad for a chance to see their fathers, but in our family there was a constant battle over who would go. We hated the job because we feared being with the man who was our father even for the few moments it took to deliver the tea. We sometimes cried and pretended to be sick, and indeed my mother herself would often have to go, tearing herself away from her numerous other chores to rush to the shop.

  Now that I was grown up I had to take my turn. I always we
nt shivering with apprehension, tagging along after the other boys, and as we approached Daw Bank my fears grew. It was a disreputable neighborhood to begin with. The rows of houses, probably built long before ours, were in a tumbledown state, doorways leaning, windowpanes missing. The middens were in the front here, giving off a foul stench that sickened us the moment we turned into the street.

  Worse than anything else was Old Biddy, a huge slattern of a woman with stringy unkempt hair dangling down the sides of her face. She came out of the dark hole where she lived, looking like a huge bear emerging from hibernation, glaring at us as we came along with our tea cans, and muttering, “Bloody Jews.”

  I would never have dared go by there alone. I was terrified of this woman, and I clung closely to the others, who were just as afraid as I was and hurried by quickly.

  The Jewish tailoring shops were at the back of these houses. They were flimsy wooden structures built on stilts. A tall, narrow flight of rickety steps led upward and into them. We tramped up these steps in single file, holding onto the handrail with one hand. We entered into a roar of machines, the thin wooden floor vibrating beneath our feet. The men, bent over their machines, feet treadling, looked up and gave little cries of relief at the sight of us. The treadling stopped, and the room grew quieter, save for the noise of the men greeting their children.

  How they ran toward their fathers, sometimes throwing arms around their necks and hugging them, and how I envied them! I myself had simply halted, and waited a moment, trying to pluck up the courage to go up to my father. He was the only one among them who had not stopped treadling, and his machine alone still hummed and clattered, as he bent over it with his dark, glowering face.

  I went up at last, and timidly placed the can of tea and the package of bread and butter on the machine beside him. He said nothing. He did not look at me. I turned away and went back to the door to wait for the others. It would not be for too long. The men were not given much of a respite for tea. Yet the boys could not tear themselves away from their fathers and clung to them as long as they could. My envy grew as I watched them sitting close to their fathers, laughing and talking with them, and occasionally helping themselves to little bites of the bread and butter and sips of the tea.