The Dream

by Harry Bernstein

  It was truly a desperate situation for me because the cold weather was coming on and I was already beginning to freeze in the chill winds that came off the lake. Then one day, when I had come home from school with my knees purple from the cold, my grandfather came in carrying a package. He had never been to see us before this, certainly not when my father was present, and his arrival took my mother by surprise. I was surprised too. It was the first time I had seen him since the day I had bumped into him at the L station.

  His face was very red from the wind and cold, but he was chuckling as he greeted us, and he put his package down on the table and said nothing about it, although both my mother’s and my eyes were on it and we were wondering what it contained.

  He had come, he said, to say goodbye. He was going back to New York. My mother made him welcome, even though she may have had reservations about the visit and would have preferred that he had not come. Very little had been spoken about him all these past weeks since we left my grandmother’s house and I don’t think my mother felt comfortable.

  She offered to make him a cup of tea and he accepted with alacrity. He was rubbing his hands to thaw out the cold and he did not take off the worn overcoat that he had on, nor did my mother ask him to. In New York, he said, it was less bitter, but it was cold there too.

  ‘So why do you go?’ my mother asked politely.

  He chuckled, but there was no amusement in it. ‘Why do I go?’ he said and shrugged. ‘What else is there for me to do?’

  The question didn’t seem to require any answer and my mother said nothing. We all knew by now how unwelcome he was among his family. The uncles and aunts had stayed away from my grandmother’s house while he was there, and once they knew that we had discovered the old man’s business they had asked us not to tell their children. They did not want them to know that their grandfather was a street beggar and they were all uneasy while he was in Chicago.

  My mother had made the tea, pouring it for him in a glass and handing it to him with a lump of sugar. He took it gratefully, nibbled off a bit of sugar, took a small sip and sighed with pleasure. He looked across at me and asked, ‘So how is school?’

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  He nodded, holding the glass in both hands and blowing on it slightly. ‘He’ll be a big man some day,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ my mother agreed. ‘He’s doing well at school. He gets good marks. They put him in the top grade and next year he’ll go to high school.’ She spoke proudly.

  ‘You’ll not be sorry that you came to America,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll never be sorry for that,’ my mother said. ‘The only thing I’m sorry for is that you sent me the tickets to come. If I had known who sent them I would not have come.’

  ‘And what is wrong with who sent them?’

  ‘Father’ – it sounded strange to me to hear her call him that, but what else could she have said? – ‘I must tell you, I must be honest, I can’t find fault with you, I know you are a good man, but it is the way you make your money that is not good and I want to tell you that I will pay back every cent of what you spent on the tickets.’

  ‘I can’t help the way I make my money. I used to be a roofer. From the time I was ten years old I mended roofs. In Poland, then in England, then America. I was a good roofer, but no matter how good you are age has the last say. So I fell off a roof and I was in the hospital four months and my roofing days were over. So what was left? My voice was left. I could sing songs. So I sang songs and people liked it and they gave me money. So what’s wrong? People go on the stage and sing for a living. I could not go on the stage, but I could sing, so what is terrible about that?’

  ‘I didn’t know about that,’ my mother said with genuine sympathy in her voice. ‘I didn’t know you fell off a roof and were in the hospital for four months. They never wrote to us about that. You must have been hurt very badly and I’m sorry. But it’s the way you dress up with those blue glasses and pretend you’re blind and hold up a tin cup to them and they toss money into it. That’s begging, Father.’

  My grandfather sipped his tea and thought a moment. ‘So what do people do when they’re on the stage?’ he asked. ‘They dress up in all sorts of costumes and pretend they’re somebody else. Even Caruso puts on a costume.’ He laughed. He could not be serious for long. ‘Of course, I’m not Caruso, although when I was younger I used to think I was as good as he was.’

  But my mother was not laughing. ‘What they do on the stage and what you do on the street are two different things,’ she said.

  He did not argue the point. He thought another moment, sipped a little more, then said slowly, ‘Ada, do you know why I sent you the tickets?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘For years it’s been bothering me, and more and more as I got older. When you get old you look back and see things the way you never saw them before. So now I could see you when you came from Poland, a sixteen-year-old girl, so innocent, with nobody in the world to turn to. And you fell into our hands and that is what’s been bothering me so much, how we caught you like a spider catches a fly, and we married you to my madman son. I could never forgive myself.’

  ‘You shouldn’t talk like that,’ my mother said, speaking softly but, I could see, with a lot of emotion. ‘You didn’t trick me into it. Nobody did. One day we went for a walk. We went to the park. We sat on a bench. There, he told me the whole story. How you went off from Poland and left him behind to be all alone. He cried when he told it to me. My heart broke for him. I promised he would never be alone again. So you see, nobody tricked me into marrying him. I made the decision.’

  But the old man was shaking his head and chuckling. ‘You believed that old story, that we ran away from him and left him there to be alone? Sarah did some bad things with the children. She used to give each one a spoonful of cordial to put them to sleep so she could go out to play cards with the neighbour next door; she taught them to be drinkers before they were five years old. But to run off and leave one behind just to get away from him? No, that’s a bube-meinse – a fairy tale. There were other reasons for leaving, the pogroms especially, and I could get so little work because I was a Jew. The truth is, she wanted him to come, but he wouldn’t. That’s what she told me and I believed her. No, Ada, he lied to you.’

  My mother was silent, and I do not know what she was thinking and whether she believed him or not.

  The old man continued after a moment, ‘So it was bothering me all those years. Then I heard about the letters you had been sending and how much you wanted to come to America. And Sarah, of course, paid no attention and the others, if they felt anything for you at all, never had any money. So I thought maybe this was how I could make up to you for what we had done to you. I arranged with a travel agency in Manchester to send you the tickets, and because I knew you would think it strange if you knew the tickets came from me and you’d start to ask questions, I told the agency not to tell you who sent them.’

  There were tears in my mother’s eyes when he had finished, and she wiped them with a handkerchief and said, ‘It was very good of you to do what you did, but I want you to know that the money has to be paid back, and I’ll do that as soon as they all start to work. If I’d known about it then I would have sent the tickets back.’

  He sighed and said, ‘Well, you must do what you think is best, just as I do what I think is best. But I have to go now.’ He had finished his tea and he rose, getting out of his chair with the slow, difficult movements of an old man.

  ‘You mustn’t forget your package,’ my mother said.

  ‘It’s for you,’ he said.

  ‘For me?’ She was startled. Who had ever given her a package before?

  ‘And for Harry.’

  I was startled too. Who’d ever given me a package before?

  He kissed us both before he left and his beard was rough against my cheek, and he gave me an extra pat on the head and said, ‘You
’re going to be a real mensch.’

  We waited until he’d gone before opening the package. Inside were a pair of thick, woollen gloves for my mother and a pair of knickerbockers for me.

  Chapter Eight

  THE WINTER CAME early that year, and it came hard and bitter, with driving winds off the lake and heavy snows that covered streets and made walking impossible in spots, and freezing cold that nipped ears and stung eyes, and numbed feet and hands.

  It was a cruel experience for us after the relatively mild winters of England and we were totally unprepared for it with our clothes. We lacked the heavy overcoats, the ear muffs, the thick woollen gloves, the galoshes that were so necessary to fend off the sharp thrusts of the freezing weather and to plough our way through the drifts of snow that piled up on street corners.

  We came into the house gasping for breath, holding the palms of our hands against our stung ears, stamping our feet to help thaw them out, and at night we cried with pain from the chilblains that had formed on our toes. We needed warmer clothes and we did not have the money to buy them. My mother was scarcely able to stretch what Joe was bringing in to meet all our needs and so we all suffered that winter.

  I was lucky. I had the knickerbockers that my grandfather had bought me, and my mother gave no thought to refusing them and the gloves he had bought her, ignoring for the time being where the money had come from. But the knickerbockers were hardly enough to keep me warm as I went to and from school. I would rush, ploughing my way through thick snow and getting my feet wet, but forging ahead as quickly as I could in order to get into the warmth of the school. And then do the same going home, and running up the steps of the leaning house to burst in and thrust my hands out to the pot-bellied stove that was red hot from the burning coal and stamping my feet on the linoleum floor, while trying to catch my breath.

  I was luckier than my two brothers, my sister and yes, my father too, who had to be out in that bitter cold: Joe selling magazine subscriptions, the others still searching endlessly for work. Their clothes were not much better. How we managed, how we ever got through that winter I will never know. And yet, in spite of everything, even on those bitterly cold nights, we trudged through the snow over to my grandmother’s house.

  All was forgiven there now that we had our own place, and a truce had been declared between my grandmother and my father. We were invited over there one Saturday night, and we came in shivering and feeling surprise at all the noise that greeted us, and even some lively piano playing together with some other instruments, but especially from where all this was coming.

  Blinking in the lights and stamping the cold out of our feet, we realised that it was all taking place in the front room, a sanctified area usually sealed off from the rest of the house by a sliding door except on special occasions. This room, sometimes called the parlour, contained my grandmother’s best furniture that she considered too good to be sat on, and most treasured of all was a piano, a big, hulking upright that could well have been an antique. I think it was Barney, the humorist, who commented that if she allowed anyone to play on it it was with the understanding that they were to play on the black keys only, since the white keys could get soiled.

  Nevertheless, Uncle Saul had taught himself to play on it quite well, and he was thumping out a jazz piece now, together with Eli, whom we scarcely ever saw, swinging about holding a harmonica to his mouth, and a short, pudgy man with a jolly grin on his face, whom we had never seen before, strumming on a mandolin.

  All the relatives were there, including the young cousins, who were adding to the din by running about wildly and yelling and screaming at one another. But no one, not even my grandmother, stopped them or seemed to be objecting, and there was a general air of gaiety throughout the room.

  Obviously, this was a special occasion of some sort. Was it, perhaps, to celebrate my grandfather’s departure? That did have a lot to do with it, as we discovered later. But there was more to it than that and we learned what that was all about when Uncle Saul crashed out the last chord and the music stopped.

  Then Aunt Lily, dressed as we had never seen her dressed before, in a low-cut black party gown that displayed a bosom we had never suspected existed before in the everyday plain clothes she wore and that gave her a flat-chested look, approached us, leading by the hand the short, pudgy man who had been playing the mandolin. He was still holding the instrument in his hand and the jolly look was still on his face. ‘I want you to meet Phil,’ she said and there was a smile on her face too, and she didn’t look a bit like an old maid.

  Several weeks before we came to America, Aunt Lily was coming home from work in the corset department of Mandel Brothers department store and was stepping off the streetcar in which she had been riding, when she slipped and fell. A car that had been racing alongside the tram screeched to a halt just inches away from where she lay sprawled on the ground.

  The panic-stricken driver, thinking he had knocked her down, rushed to help her. Fortunately, she was not badly hurt, but he put her in his car and drove her home.

  And fell madly in love with her at first sight, and saw her every day thereafter.

  Phil was younger than Aunt Lily by several years, and much shorter, but he was quite a catch. He was in the Victrolla business and had an office and a showroom in one of the skyscrapers in the Loop, where he displayed all the latest models of the new machine that had replaced the gramophone and were all the rage now.

  He was obviously quite well off. He had this business, and a brand-new lemon-coloured sports car, a Nash, and moreover he came from a rich family, the Falks, who lived on the south side among such people as the Loebs and the Leopolds and the Franks, who would become quite prominent in the newspapers in the near future.

  But perhaps this was the only drawback, because when Phil’s parents learned whom he had fallen in love with and planned to marry, a girl who was a corset saleswoman in the Mandel Brothers store – they knew the Mandels quite well also – and who lived on the west side where all the poor Jews lived, they wanted him to give her up.

  Phil refused, so there was trouble between them. They declined to let him bring her to the house to meet them and Phil had to cook up excuses to Aunt Lily for not introducing her to them, especially now that he had proposed and she had accepted and they would soon get married. At the same time Aunt Lily was terrified that Phil would find out about her father and how he made his living. During the time that my grandfather had been in Chicago she had not allowed Phil to come at all, making the excuse that her mother was ill and could not have visitors.

  Now that the old man had gone, all restraints were cast aside and the Saturday night that we came was Phil’s first visit since the ban had been imposed. The family had met him before and liked him. And little wonder. He was a jolly fellow, he could tell jokes and he could play an assortment of stringed instruments, including the violin, the harp, the guitar, the mandolin, which he had just been playing along with Uncle Saul and Uncle Eli.

  He greeted us warmly. He had heard about us and had wanted to meet us before, but Lily had given him the excuse that we were exhausted from the voyage, and wanted to rest and get orientated to our new surroundings before meeting new people.

  ‘And so we finally meet,’ he said, shaking hands and giving a firm grip with me, my brothers and my father, who quickly wrenched his hand away, muttered something indistinguishable and went off to join several other uncles who had gathered at the table in the dining room around the bottle that Abe had brought. Eli had also joined them.

  But Phil never stopped smiling. He kissed my mother, then tried to kiss Rose, but she froze, turned her head aside and immediately went off to the bedroom that she had shared with Aunt Lily when we lived here, and there she shut the door after her and remained for the entire evening.

  The men at the dining-room table called out to him to come and drink with them, but he shook his head, laughing, not wanting to hurt their feelings. He didn’t drink anything except tea. Besides,
right now he had something to do, he told them.

  What he had to do was sweep Aunt Lily up in his arms and kiss her long and passionately, and while he was doing that the men cheered, and others applauded with screams of amusement and much hand clapping.

  It would happen again throughout the evening. Phil would amuse us with his mandolin and his singing, and he could dance too, a Russian dance, with legs crossed and arms folded across his chest, and he would fly about with Uncle Saul playing fast music and all the watchers clapping hands in time with the music. And then, as soon as he had finished his performance, he went up to Lily and once more swept her into his arms for a long, passionate kiss, bending her so far backwards that her head almost touched the floor, with the entire room cheering him on.

  And my father growling, ‘Why the bloody ’ell don’t they go in the bedroom and get it over with?’

  Then there were sudden shouts of protest among the men at the table. My father swung his head round in time to see Eli tilting the bottle to his lips. He was going at it hard, sucking like a baby on its bottle. My father jumped up and swung a fist, knocking the bottle out of Eli’s mouth. Someone grabbed it quickly enough to keep most of the liquor from spilling out.

  In the sacred front room they saw none of this and heard nothing. Phil was performing for them again, to their great enjoyment, this time with his mandolin, strumming and singing a song that was a great favourite all over America. And we joined in, with Uncle Saul grinning, thumping out an accompaniment on the piano. I remember that song:

  Barney Google, Barney Google,

  With the Goo-goo-googly eyes

  Barney Google, had a wife three times his size …

  And now that I think of it, in spite of all the rows, the fierce quarrels that often took place there, sometimes fights breaking out among the men if they were drunk enough, and despite the usual outburst from my grandmother towards the end of the evening ordering them all out, we did have some good times at my grandmother’s house.