The Invisible Wall

by Harry Bernstein

  She went out, slamming the door after her.

  Joe said worriedly, “You’d better go after her. She might really leave.”

  “She won’t leave,” my mother said, confidently.

  But as the afternoon passed and it grew dark and time for supper, my mother began to look worried. It was raining outside, and Rose was still not back. After setting the table, she suddenly put on her shawl and picked up an umbrella.

  “I’ll soon be back,” she said.

  “Can I go, Mam?” I begged.

  She didn’t answer, so I went along with her, walking close to her so that I could share the umbrella. The rain was coming down heavily, and it drummed over our heads. My mother seemed to know exactly where to go. We climbed the brew that ran alongside the iron rail of the park, and then turned into the park itself…as close as Rose could get to her dreams, I suppose.

  There she was, sitting forlornly on a bench in the rain, with the little bundle beside her. She did not resist when my mother drew her up and firmly led her away, holding her hand on one side, mine on the other. She was soaked and shivering with cold, and obviously had been crying.

  Not a word was spoken on the way home by any of us, and not a word again after Rose had changed her clothes and joined us at the table.

  HE COUGHED ALL NIGHT. He coughed and spat. My mother had taken the precaution of spreading newspaper on the floor beside the bed, and from then on it would be a daily routine for one of us to pick up those newspapers and take them out to the midden. Afterward, we didn’t mind so much.

  We did at first, though. We minded his coughing at night and especially his spitting. We minded being in the same room, the two girls in one bed, the three boys in the other, all of us so terribly close together, while he occupied the other room.

  The change began not more than three or four days after he had come to live with us, the night we came home from cheder, Joe, Saul and I hurrying into the house and pausing shocked when we heard a man singing. It came from the kitchen, and we went through the hall cautiously and stopped again in the doorway leading to the kitchen.

  A strange sight met our eyes. We had never heard a man singing in our house before, but much less had we ever seen a man at it sitting before the fire with Rose sitting opposite him and actually laughing, and Lily laughing too, with her books in front of her at the table, and my mother opposite her with her sewing, laughing.

  The song was one of many comic songs that Larry would sing for us on those winter nights, and I have never forgotten it:

  “Me father bought some cheese,

  Me mother began to sneeze,

  The cat had a fit in the cellar,

  The dog had the same disease….”

  It went on, verse after verse, Larry singing lustily in a hoarse, cracked voice, with a smile on his pasty face, a cigarette in his hand, a cough interrupting now and then, a spit into the fire making the red-hot coals hiss.

  Seeing us standing there, he halted, and cried out, “Well, well, here’s the men of the family. Come in, lads, and join the fun.”

  We did. We soon learned the song and sang with him. We all did. We sang and laughed, and whatever hostility we had felt toward him before this vanished that night. Even Lily took time off from her books to join in, and Rose—all her coldness had gone and her thin, pinched face was alive with happiness.

  But Lily, especially—her eyes were shining and she seemed almost intoxicated. I found out why when the evening came to an end, and we were all ready to go upstairs to bed and were saying goodnight to Larry. Lily flung her arms about his neck and kissed him, and said, “Thank you so much, Larry. Thank you.”

  My mother was smiling. Rose knew already, but we didn’t. Seeing that by the puzzled looks on our faces, my mother said, “Larry got your father to sign Lily’s permit for the exam. So you see, he isn’t such a bad fellow, after all.”

  Yes, it was done at last, thanks to this man who had brought new life into our house. After that night we couldn’t wait to see him again. We hurried home from cheder, hoping this would be one of the nights when he preferred to stay home with us to going out to the pub with our father, and we could sit by the fire with him and sing his comic songs, or listen to him tell us about his travels to Australia, India, America, all over the world.

  I think, if he’d had his way, he would have stayed with us every night, and indeed, as time went on, it was almost every night. Larry had brought a lot of joy into our lives, but we had given him something, too. We were the closest thing to a family he’d ever had, and he clung to us as much as possible. I suppose my father began to resent it.

  It was a strange thing, his feeling toward Larry. I don’t think he’d ever had a friend before. He was a loner, a man completely isolated from everybody else, shunned by the Jewish men on our street because of his drinking and violent temper, and not too welcome by the Christians in the pubs that he frequented. His accidental meeting with Larry in a pub one night had brought him the only man he ever knew who would tolerate him, and talk to him, and even seem to like him.

  Larry told us about his meeting one night. It wasn’t easy, he said. He saw him sitting alone at a table, and went over and introduced himself as a fellow Jew.

  “Bugger off,” my father growled.

  Larry laughed, telling us the story. “I didn’t bugger off. It was the first time anyone had ever said that to me, and I decided I was going to see this through. So I stuck it out.”

  By persisting he gradually got around my father, and after a few drinks they were pals, and my father began to talk.

  “He told me the story,” Larry said to my mother.

  He spoke to her in a low voice, thinking perhaps that we weren’t supposed to know. My mother understood, and said calmly, “They know.”

  For that matter, a lot of the people on our street knew the story. They would have had to, because they were living on the street at that time. We ourselves had heard it from our mother, and she had told it to us in the hope, perhaps, that we would understand him a little better, and perhaps be more tolerant and kinder toward him.

  It began in Poland, where my father was born, the oldest in a family of ten unruly children. I still have a picture of them all, taken after they came to England. It is one of those old sepia photos on hard backing that has endured throughout the years without fading, a credit to early photography. It shows them in three formal rows, my father at the far end in the back row, a sullen look on his face. My grandparents are in the center, my grandfather looking very distinguished with a Van Dyke beard, wing collar, Ascot tie, and silk top hat, clasping a silver-knobbed cane in between his knees, my grandmother big and thick-lipped and bosomy and much bejeweled, with bracelets and necklaces and earrings dangling.

  My grandmother was the matriarch of the family. My grandfather, for all his distinguished looks, made his living by mending roofs, and he was known to sing popular songs while he was perched aloft doing his work, with an appreciative audience gathered below. My grandmother ran the household with an iron fist, her loud, harsh voice commanding, along with her blows, usually gaining obedience from all, except my father.

  He was the unmanageable one. He had been sent out to work at five, and he had worked long hours at the various jobs he’d had, and had been beaten and kicked by his various masters. It had left him sullen and embittered and violent and difficult to get along with. At twelve he was already a heavy drinker, coming home often blind drunk at night, and when he was drunk he terrorized the family. My grandmother was at her wits’ end. Her husband was of little help to her. She had to solve the problem herself, and she finally hit on the solution.

  My father came home from work late one night and found them all gone, the house stripped of furniture. They had abandoned him, gone to England, leaving him to shift for himself. He may have gone mad then. He roared and raged. He beat his head against the wall until he collapsed senseless, and terrified neighbors called the police, who carted him off to a hospital.


  After he had recovered and was released, he set out in search of his family, determined to find them and insist on his place among them, whether they liked it or not. It would be his way of wreaking vengeance. Slowly, bit by bit, working his way across Europe to finance his passage, he made his way to England. In London, he learned of the new big, growing Jewish colony in Manchester. He went there, but arrived too late. They had only recently moved to the smoky little mill town a few miles away, but he had their exact address now.

  It was late at night when he arrived at our street. My grandparents and their family were living in the same house that we were to inherit later. My father, tired and worn—he had walked all the way from Manchester—knocked loudly on the door. He knocked several more times before my grandmother’s head appeared at the window above.

  “Who’s there?” she called down.

  “It’s your son,” he shouted back. “Let me in.”

  A pause. Her heart must have stopped beating then. After a moment, she said, “Go away. You are not my son. Go away or I’ll call the police.”

  “Old witch,” he shouted back. “Open this door or I’ll break it down.”

  By this time the whole street had awakened. Heads were popping out of windows. Lights were being turned on. Voices murmured.

  Desperate, unable to make up her mind what to do, my grandmother acted on impulse. She did what only she could have done. She went to the landing and picked up the bucket that had been well used through the night. It was almost full to the brim. She carried it to the window, and poured its contents down on the head of the intruder.

  He let out a yell, and shook himself like a wet dog, and cursed and pounded on the door so hard that finally it had to be opened for him.

  There are many people who have considered the story to be apocryphal, but its truth has been confirmed by my mother and the aunts and uncles who were roused from their beds that night and saw and heard what went on.

  Furthermore, that wasn’t the end of the story by any means. The vengeance that my father had sworn to get came down hard on their heads. Now, more than ever, he terrorized them, with his drinking, his cursing, and his fists. Those who lived on our street in those early days remembered the constant bedlam that went on in the corner house, the shouting and shrieking and fighting, worse than anything that went on in the Finklestein house.

  Once again my grandmother had to think up ways of getting rid of him. It was unfortunate—for my mother, for all of us—that my mother should have arrived on the scene just then, a young, sweet, innocent sixteen-year-old girl just arrived from Poland, without friends or relatives, that she should have boarded in the house of a woman in Manchester, who was a close friend of my grandmother, and that my grandmother should have gone there to visit one day.

  The moment she set eyes on the young girl she knew she had her solution. It must have flashed over her at once, and it was not hard to inveigle the girl into a match that was to bring her nothing but misery for the rest of her life. And no sooner had the marriage taken place than my grandmother announced with suspicious generosity that she was giving over her house to the newly married couple. She herself was taking her family off to America.

  This time it could not be called abandonment—yet I don’t think my father was deceived. His face always turned black at any talk of the relatives in Chicago, and although my mother kept up a steady correspondence with them through the years, he himself never mentioned them.

  With this extra bitterness inside him, it was little wonder he turned away from the world and remained sullen and hostile, a hard man to get along with. Larry understood that, and knew that he was an exception for my father, perhaps the only friend he’d ever had. His conscience must have bothered him a great deal on the nights that he refused to go out with my father and stayed by the fireside with us.

  My father did not take it too well—that much was clear. His face darkened when Larry said he was staying home, and he stormed out with a heavier bang than usual on the front door, and with his sleeve still dangling all the way up the street. Nor was he pleased when he came home and found Larry sitting up with my mother, talking with her while she mended our clothes. He ignored Larry’s greeting and stumbled out into the backyard to use the water closet there, and Larry, after exchanging a glance with my mother and saying goodnight, would quickly make his way upstairs to the little room, where the newspapers were spread out on the floor beside his bed for him.

  We knew very little of this ourselves. It was all told to us later. We did know that we reveled in Larry’s presence, and that he brought a joy into our lives that we’d never had before. Almost every night through that winter we sat with him, singing and listening to his stories, and it was wonderful having said goodnight and getting into bed hearing the murmur of his voice and my mother’s. Perhaps it gave us a taste of what it was like to have a father—maybe that is what made us all, even Rose, feel so happy that winter.

  Then came that last night, the climax to which it had all been building. It was the end of the nights of songs. The final one of the evening was the one we liked best, with all of us, my mother included, singing at the top of our voices. It was a sailor’s song, one that Larry had brought back from the sea, and it went something like this:

  “’earts of oak for our men,

  Jolly tarts for our men,

  We always are ready,

  Steady boys, steady,

  We’ll fight and we’ll conquer,

  Again and again.”

  These last three words were roared at the top of our voices, and were accompanied by a thumping of fists on the table, around which we had been sitting drinking our last cup of cocoa, and with much laughter from everybody, before the goodnights were said.

  But this night, we were just bellowing out the end of the song, and were thumping on the table, making the cups jiggle, when everybody halted and all our eyes went toward the door. We had not heard him come in, much earlier this night than usual, but there he was standing in the doorway, with his cap pulled low over his brow, his face dark, his lower lip drooping the way it had always done when he was in one of his savage moods.

  He was standing there just glaring, and saying nothing. It was obvious to us that he was drunk. We could smell the liquor, and it was hard liquor, not beer, and hard liquor always made him ugly. He seemmed to be swaying a little as he stood there.

  Then it burst from him. “What the bloody ’ell is this, a public ’ouse?” He was looking at Larry as he spoke, and his glaring eyes were inflamed. “You bloody sod, you. I got you a job, I gave you a home, and you turn my home into a bleeding pub, sit up nights with my wife, and maybe think she goes with the deal. Come on, you stinking rotten sod. Come on and show me what kind of man you are.”

  He put his fists up in fighting position, and we all shrank with fear. My mother’s face had turned white. Larry, however, remained calm. He put his smoldering cigarette down on the saucer that served as an ashtray, and got to his feet.

  “Come on, Jack,” he said smoothly, “come on and let’s go outside for a bit and talk this over.”

  He went up to him and put an arm around his shoulders, and my father struck him with a fist straight in the mouth. I’m sure it hurt, there was blood coming from the lip, but it was as if it was nothing to Larry, and he went on trying to calm my father. “That’s no good, Jack,” he said. “We’re friends, and we don’t want to fight.”

  “You’re no friend of mine,” roared my father, still keeping his fists up. “No friend tries to steal another man’s wife and children. You’re a bloody sod, that’s what you are, and you’re getting out of my house. You’re getting out now or I’ll put you in the hospital.”

  He swung again, but this time Larry caught the hand, and held it in a firm grip. “All right, Jack,” he said. “I’ll get out. But let’s go out for a bit in the yard. I think you need it.”

  This time my father let him lead him into the yard, and we heard him vomiting. We ourselves
went upstairs and got into bed, shivering. A bit later we heard Larry helping my father up to his room, their feet mounting the steps clumsily.

  Larry left the next day while we were at school.

  Chapter Six

  WITHOUT LARRY THE HOUSE WAS DEAD AGAIN, AND THERE WERE LONG silences at night in front of the fire, broken only by the rustling of the pages of our books or magazines, and the occasional outbursts of fighting that went on in the Finklesteins’ house next door. My mother sat up alone with her sewing after we had gone to bed.

  We missed him, we missed him terribly. Rose grew sour again, and abusive to my mother with her remarks. Lily was buried completely in her books, studying for the exam. She became irritable when my mother asked her to do something around the house and would want to know why Rose couldn’t do it. Rose would attack her then, with some vicious comment that would show her jealousy and hatred, and then the two would fight bitterly. My mother would have to intervene and do the work herself.

  It was in the early part of January that the exam was to take place at the grammar school, and it was unfortunate that it should have to be on a Saturday. My mother was not sure if she could let her go and break the Sabbath law about writing on this holy day. Lily was furious and screamed that she didn’t give a damn about the Sabbath law. For once my mother grew furious herself and, for the first time I had ever seen her do it, lashed out with the back of her hand and caught Lily on the mouth. Lily herself was stunned, she stared at my mother for a moment with a hand across the struck mouth, and then let out a wild cry and ran out of the house.

  For a while it looked as if Lily would not be able to take the exam, after all. My mother had consulted with Mrs. Harris, an authority on Jewish law, and the old woman had shaken her head and muttered that it would be a sin. She reminded my mother of how she herself had once been tempted to break the Sabbath law, and how she had resisted. It was a story that everyone knew, how coming home from the synagogue one Saturday afternoon, she had taken it into her head to go for a walk through the park—as if the devil had directed her there. The park was empty. As she strolled along she suddenly spotted an umbrella on a bench. It was a beautiful new umbrella, one she would have loved to have, but one did not dare carry an umbrella on the Sabbath. She knew that well enough, and yet she was tempted, and she paced up and down in front of the bench several times, eyeing the umbrella.