The Golden Willow

by Harry Bernstein

  “What d'you mean, you can't?” I snapped. “Go on, just go.”

  “I can't,” he repeated, still not moving.

  “Why?” I shouted. “Why can't you?”

  “I forgot my clarinet.”

  This was one of those moments that doctors warn you about, when your blood pressure soars, potentially causing a stroke. I think I may have been very near that. However, I had gone through many trials in my life before this, and I'd learned something about control, which came in handy then. Something else came to my rescue too, after I had arrived home and told Ruby about it. Ruby also was blessed with this same thing: a sense of humor. We both had a good long laugh. But privately, without letting Charlie know.

  THERE ARE MANY OCCASIONS in the process of raising children when a sense of humor is badly needed to save you from bursting a blood vessel. There was one other that I recall. Both my children, different from each other as they were, shared one thing in common, a love of animals, and Ruby and I had catered to that love, believing that the care of living creatures was an important part of a child's upbringing. It was fortunate that we had a house large enough for both animals and humans because in those early years of their childhood it became filled with cats and dogs, mostly homeless ones that the children's soft hearts had led them to pick up and bring home. But there were also parakeets, canaries, turtles, hamsters, and chickens. Yes, chickens. I fenced off a portion of the backyard for them, and we had a mini chicken farm that brought many objections from neighbors.

  Hamsters were their latest craze. Charlie, who was generally in charge of the family pets, had decided he wanted to raise them and sell them to people, so we had a male hamster and a female hamster in one cage. There was either a lack of love between the two hamsters or a lack of knowledge about breeding because the match failed. And still Charlie, with Adraenne always going along with him, wanted a family of baby hamsters to raise, and it so happened that his birthday came along at this time and he asked that for a present we buy him a pregnant hamster.

  How could we refuse? But where could we find a pregnant hamster? I went from pet store to pet store asking for one, but to no avail. I refused to give up. I had promised him I would get him a pregnant hamster, and I was determined to keep that promise. I called pet stores miles away and asked, and at last hit the right one. They had a pregnant hamster. It was far away in Pennsylvania. I drove out there and bought it; there was no doubt of its being pregnant. It was big and fat. The proprietor put it in a box for me and I put the box in the back seat of my car; I remember feeling elated, as if I'd struck gold.

  I'd be just in time. Charlie's birthday was the following day. Meanwhile, the hamster would be safe in the back of the car. Just to be sure, however, I went to look. The box was empty. I was stunned. I looked around the entire car. There was no hamster anywhere. I looked under the seats, even in the glove compartment, but no hamster. How could it possibly have escaped, first from the box in which the pet store owner had put it, then from a locked car?

  It was a good thing I gave a last despairing glance around, for I glanced upward and saw movement in the lining that covered the inside of the roof. Quite distinctly, there was a lump of some sort, and it was moving very slowly. I reached up with a hand and felt it. There was warmth and no longer any doubt in my mind that this was the pregnant hamster. How it had escaped from the box and how it had found its way up there will always remain a mystery, but the next important question was how to get it out of there.

  I realized at once that I could never do it myself, and there was only one place I could take it to get it out: the dealer. I hesitated, and for good reason. I had bought the car only recently but had been back to the dealer with it numerous times and for various reasons, most of which I am sure the dealer considered the imagination of a neurotic customer. They were perfectly justifiable complaints to me—a squeak here, a squeak there, a strange noise in the engine, a stiffness in the steering wheel, a funny sound in one wheel. I was determined to have every little thing satisfied before the warranty ran out. But now I had to go back to him with an entirely new complaint: a hamster stuck in the roof of the car. Little wonder that I hesitated.

  But it was the only way I could get that hamster out of there and to my son for his birthday. And what if it gave birth while it was still stuck up there? The horror of this frightful possibility overcame all the hesitation and embarrassment I might have felt.

  I think they had seen me come so often with my car to the place where I'd bought it that the dealer had posted a lookout to warn him because several of the last times I had been there he'd been out of his office and not to be found. But a few weeks had passed since the last time and I caught him unawares. He gaped up at me from his desk as I marched into his office.

  “What now?” he managed to say.

  “I'm sorry,” I apologized, “but I'm afraid I've got another problem with the car.”

  “What sort of problem?” he asked, looking as if he was about to duck out anyway.

  “I've got a hamster stuck in the roof of the car, and it looks as if you're going to have to take the lining out to get to it.”

  For a moment he didn't say anything. He simply gazed up at me with his mouth open. He was a rather short, fat man with a thick, fleshy face; his wide mouth was open, showing a row of glistening white teeth that were obviously not his own, although that has nothing to do with my story. He finally spoke in a sort of strangled voice: “Will you say that again?”

  I repeated what I had said, suddenly conscious of the fact that he might not even know what a hamster was. He didn't, and I explained it to him and went on further to add that it was pregnant and might give birth to its young ones, and since hamsters could have as many as a dozen at one time they'd be all over the car in various tight places. But I had only worsened things.

  He took all of this in with a hand clapped to his forehead and a despairing look on his face, and then he called for his head serviceman. I knew him, just as he knew me. His name was Shawn. He was Irish. He was tall and lanky with very black hair, and he had a temper. We'd had a lot of arguments before this, and as he came into the office, chewing tobacco as he always did, his eyes told me what he thought of me.

  “Shawn,” the dealer said, “guess what the trouble is now?”

  Shawn shifted the wad inside his mouth from one side to the other and bent his head a little, as if looking for a place to spit. “I'll bet he's got a rattle in the glove compartment,” he said.

  They must have done plenty of talking about me. I tried to smile, but I wished I hadn't come.

  “You mean a rattlesnake,” the dealer said. “No, it isn't that. It's something in the roof of his car. A hamster.”

  “A what?” The mouth opened and tobacco juice dribbled out onto his chin. He wiped it with the back of a hand that was blackened with oil, leaving a dirt mark on the chin. “What did you say?”

  The dealer repeated it and went on. “It's pregnant too, and we've got to get it out fast before it gives birth and scatters its kids all over the car, maybe in the engine.”

  Then Shawn did something I had never seen him do before. He laughed. It was roaring laughter, with him bent over, and the wad of tobacco came out onto the floor. He picked it up and threw it into the wastebasket, still convulsed with laughter.

  There's no need to go any further with the story. They took care of it, and I waited while they did it, and this time it was not covered by the warranty and I could not argue that part of it. I winced when I got the bill. It was heavy, and I think it made up for all the other jobs they'd had to do for me without payment. But the worst part came when they found the hamster and brought it to me. It was no longer moving. It was dead.

  I think for a moment I had some wild thought of taking the corpse to a vet and having him open the creature with the possibility that the young hamsters might be alive. But by that time I was sick of hamsters and I let them dump it into a waste bin.

  It was hard breaking the
news to the kids the next day. Adraenne took it nicely, but Charlie was wild with disappointment and frustration and wept bitterly until I gave him the gift I had bought for him in place of the hamster. It was an electric train set and it made up for his great loss, but not completely, and it never would. I think he still mourns the loss of that pregnant hamster to this day, and right now he's well into his sixties and has five children of his own. He also has a dog and two cats and has lost none of his love for living things.

  Chapter Ten

  2002

  NIGHTS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE FOR SLEEP OR REST OR FOR MAKING love, but for me in those days after Ruby died they were endless nights of torture that seemed never to be over. I would lie awake staring up in the darkness, my mind active and my thoughts driving from one thing to another, mostly about Ruby and the time we'd spent together, and the things we'd talked about and the places we'd gone to. And all the time I was conscious of the emptiness of the bed beside me: When I stretched out my arm onto the pillow her head was not there, nor was there the warmth of her body.

  Even getting into bed was a misery, not finding her there, the bed cold and empty. I could not stop thinking of her and wanting her. One night, though, I must have managed to doze off to sleep, and suddenly I heard her voice.

  “Harry!”

  It came to me clearly and distinctly, and I was convinced it had not been in my sleep. I shot up in bed and listened. There was nothing but that ringing silence throughout the house. I was so sure, however, that I had heard her voice cry out that I got out of bed and began to prowl through the rooms looking for her. I did not turn on lights. I went from room to room searching through the darkness, groping my way like a sleepwalker, although I knew I was fully awake.

  Once, I remember, I called out to her questioningly: “Ruby?” I paused to listen. There was no answer, and I went back to bed, still quite sure that I had not been dreaming when I heard her voice.

  It troubled me for days afterward, and I began to wonder if I was losing my mind. I worried over it, and I thought of it when I lay awake at night in bed. I did not believe in a hereafter. I did not believe that Ruby was up there in heaven, smiling down at me, waiting for me to join her, as some people had said in trying to comfort me for my loss of her. Then what was it that made me feel even days later that I had heard her voice?

  I could not in any way account for it, nor did the voice ever come again, but out of it came the realization that if I did not do something soon to occupy my mind with some useful purpose, I might lose that mind. And once again came the thought of going back to my writing. But write what? I racked my brain for a subject that would interest me—and other people too, should I decide to try to get it published.

  Lying there awake at night, with my thoughts flitting back and forth at random with no particular sequence—an event here, an event there, a place we had been to, people we had met, all racing through my mind helter-skelter, like a film that had lost control in the projector—I found myself thinking at a calmer pace of my childhood in England. The pictures were quite clear, particularly the street on which I had lived with its two rows of sad-looking brick houses facing each other across the cobblestones, with their slanted slate roofs and short, stubby chimneys sticking up into gray skies with smoke curling out of them.

  Why I should suddenly have gone back to that distant point in my life is perfectly clear to me now that I think of it. I was seeking to get away as far as possible from the present with all its misery. I was looking back at a time and place where there had been enough misery in its own right but which had nevertheless been home to me, with my mother alive, and my brothers and sisters too, and friends, lots of them.

  There had been poverty to battle, but something else that was just as bad if not worse, and that was bigotry, for the street was divided into two enemy camps. On one side, on my side, lived the Jews, and on the other were the Christians, and in between them was an invisible wall that kept the two sides from crossing over to each other.

  Yes, I began to think of that, and the film slowed down and everything was clear, and I remembered among many things the dark, sullen, perpetually embittered figure of my father, and the times he came home drunk from the pub at night, the roar of his voice disturbing our sleep, waking us all up with a feeling of terror, and how I used to pull the covers over my head to shut out the sounds.

  I thought of my mother a great deal, and how she used to struggle to keep us alive because my father, who worked as a tailor and made little money, gave her even less of it to feed us and used the rest of it for his drink and gambling. I remembered how one Saturday he'd doled out the pittance he gave her and then had gone striding off to his pub, and she looked at the bit of money he'd thrust grudgingly into her hand. With a sudden resolve she put on her hat and coat and took me with her to the market. There I watched, frightened, as she crawled under one of the fruit stands and came out with her two straw bags filled with half-rotten fruit she'd scavenged from beneath the stall. This rotted fruit became the start of her little shop that she made in our front room, which had never been furnished because there was no money to buy furniture but which my mother had promised us would someday become a parlor with a red plush couch and chairs, a thick red plush carpet too, and even a piano.

  But now it was a shop that sold faded fruits and vegetables. We were bitter and resentful about it, and ashamed of the shop, not realizing that it would save our lives with the little bit of money that came from it.

  It all came flooding back to me, along with how World War I had drawn the two sides of the street together. When Emily, the little telegram girl, came riding into our street perched high on her bicycle and whistling a merry tune, everyone came out onto their doorsteps with hands on their hearts and watched tensely to see whose door she would stop at, taking out of her pouch one of those dreaded telegrams with the black border around the envelope. And upon seeing whose door it was—not theirs, thank God—they would rush to comfort the poor, weeping newly widowed woman. From both sides they came, and it would not matter whether you were Jewish or Christian. There was only one side then.

  And there was love too, tucked away on that street, hidden from view. One of the lovers was my sister Lily, and the other was a Christian boy who lived opposite us. I was their secret messenger who carried notes from one to the other, and I learned too more of the cruel bigotry that existed between us.

  Everything was there in my mind, and perhaps it had been there for a long time, stored away inside me, ever since we had left En gland to come to America to seek a better life. But now it was begging to be written.

  And write it I did. I plunged right into it the very next day, sitting down at my electric typewriter and tapping away at the keys. It was a long time since I had done that, before I'd entered my nineties, and I found things were not quite the same as before. My hands had stiffened. They did not fly across the keys as they had once done when I was younger. They were slow and I made a great many mistakes. Nor could I sit as long as I used to in a chair at the desk. I had to get up frequently and knead my fingers to loosen them, and to walk around a bit to get the blood flowing in my legs.

  That was being ninety. But it did not stop me from writing The Invisible Wall. I had given it that title from the very beginning, and I saw my story then as a microcosm of all the walls that exist in the world today—some of them not as invisible as I portrayed ours, but actual brick or concrete walls that separated one country from another, or one race or religion from another. Regardless of how disturbed and angry all that made me feel, the writing of it did what I wanted it to do. It took my mind off my grief and carried me back into a world that I had once known more happily and where, in retrospect at least, I was comfortable and secure.

  Chapter Eleven

  SUMMERS WERE TRAVEL TIME FOR US WHEN THE CHILDREN WERE growing up. It was mostly for pleasure, and for the chance to be closer to our children than during the rest of the year, when school and work separated us for so many
hours. But it was also for educational purposes. We thought the kids could benefit from seeing the places that had played such an important part in American history. And the kids loved it.

  Perhaps it was for our benefit, too. Ruby and I had both come from poor families where there was no such thing as a vacation. We had never seen much of the world or the country itself outside of the towns where we had been born, Ruby in Poland, myself in England, and then later New York. So we were just as eager as the children to travel and see as much of the entire country as we could.

  Generally, we began our trips in the month of July, and we packed enough clothing and other supplies to last us for a month, never knowing how long we would be gone. We had two cars then, one in which Ruby did her shopping and went to work, a small car that Chrysler had named the Lark, and a larger Buick that I drove to my job editing trade magazines. Naturally, we took the Buick, and we drove off in high spirits, with Ruby sitting beside me and Charlie and Adraenne in the backseat. On the seat with the children were the games and puzzles and books that would come in handy when they grew bored with the long stretches of driving in between destinations and began to carry on a bit in the backseat and annoy Ruby and me, particularly the one of us who was driving at the time.

  We had learned to bring these supplies after long and often bitter experiences. I remember one time when we were crossing the seemingly never-ending miles and miles of Texas wasteland. The two of them got into a scuffle with much shouting and screaming accompanied by slaps. I was driving at the time, and I brought the car to a halt abruptly at the side of the road in a patch of sand.

  “Get out!” I ordered the two of them. They quieted immediately and obeyed, and stood in the sand with the wind blowing hard and raising the dust into their faces. Behind us stretched miles and miles of empty, desolate land with no habitation in sight, not a single person. I pointed it out to them and said, “If I hear one more peep out of you two, I'm going to drop you off here and let you make your way to civilization on foot while Mom and I drive on.”