The Dream

by Harry Bernstein

  My mother saw it and she was fearful. ‘You mustn’t look at him like that,’ she whispered when he was not in the house, having clumped out to go to the Romanian restaurant on the west side that he had been frequenting lately and where he could find cronies and cheap moonshine served in teacups.

  ‘I don’t care,’ I said to her. ‘If he looks at me that way I can do the same to him.’

  ‘He’s your father,’ she said.

  ‘He’s no father,’ I said bitterly. I had friends. I visited their homes. I knew what a father was. I added, ‘He’s no husband either.’

  ‘You shouldn’t say that.’

  ‘I should,’ I said. ‘It’s time somebody said that. You know I’m right. Ma, why do you stay with him? I don’t know how you’ve stood it all these years.’

  ‘What could I have done?’ she asked.

  ‘You could have thrown him out,’ I said. ‘Or you could have left him, like I say you should do now.’

  ‘It’s not that easy. I had six children to take care of. Where could I have gone? How could I have lived? Believe me,’ she added sadly, ‘I thought of that many times, but I knew it couldn’t be done.’

  ‘Well, it can be done now,’ I said. ‘You don’t have six children to worry about any more.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s any use,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’

  She was silent for a moment, then: ‘I gave him a promise.’

  ‘What promise?’

  ‘Before we got married he told me all about himself, when they were in Poland, how they’d gone off to England and left him alone by himself. He cried when he told it to me and I felt so sorry for him, and I promised him he would never be left alone again.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ I said irritably and with contempt. ‘I’ve heard that one before. You told us already. After the way he’s treated you, you shouldn’t feel bound to a promise you made when you hardly knew him and what he was. Besides, remember what Grandpa told us. He said it wasn’t true and they wanted to take him but he wouldn’t go. That’s more likely the truth.’

  She was silent again for several moments, brooding, with her head bent a little, then she asked, ‘Where could I go?’

  ‘We can go anywhere we want,’ I said and thought eagerly, if only I could persuade her to do it. Oh God, how wonderful it would be to get rid of him, to live without him. ‘You won’t be alone. I’ll be with you and I’ll bet any money Rose will go too. If she has to choose between you and him she’ll choose you, no matter how she is towards you. And you’ll have Sidney. So what is there to be afraid of? I’ll get a job and you’ll be better off than the way you are now with the stinking bit that he gives you every week.’

  ‘What about your school?’ she said.

  ‘I’ll get a job after school. Anyway, I’ll be graduating soon, and then I can get a full-time job and I’ll bet I can make more money for you than what he gives you.’

  ‘What about college?’

  ‘I can put off going to college until I’ve made enough money to pay for it and leave some for you.’

  ‘No!’ She said this with such emphasis that the plan I’d just conceived was crushed immediately. ‘Your Uncle Saul said that and he’s still a door-to-door salesman. Joe was going to be a journalist and he too is selling magazines door-to-door. You’re not going to be like them.’

  I was silenced for a moment, then I said bitterly, ‘What are you going to do, then, go on letting him treat you like so much garbage? Listen to his shouting and cursing and watch him come home drunk almost every night and throw up in the bathroom and know that what he’s spilling into the toilet is paid for with the money that belongs to you? Is that what you’re going to do?’

  She shook her head back and forth slowly several times, brooding all the while. ‘No, no,’ she murmured. ‘It always made me sick.’

  ‘Then why do you put up with it?’ I wanted to know. ‘I can understand how it was when we were all kids. But we’re not kids any longer and we can help you. Why, why do you have to stay with him?’

  But she still had no answer for it and perhaps I myself did not fully understand, no more than she herself could.

  She did say something finally: ‘Let me think about it.’

  But there were other things for her to think about then and to worry over. There was Rose. Suddenly, inexplicably, her habits seemed to have changed. She no longer came home from work, had her dinner in silence, then locked herself in her room. Nor did she bang away on the piano as often as she had before. Now, there were days when she did not come home for dinner at all, without telling my mother, so that the dinner was left uneaten and wasted. She came home very late, often after we had all gone to bed. She seemed very busy. But with what? We were puzzled and I think my mother was a bit alarmed. What could all this mean?

  Was she going out with somebody? A man? Impossible. One good thing came out of it for my mother. Now that Rose was away so much it gave her an opportunity to go into her room and clean up the place. From the glimpses she’d been able to have of it in the past she knew it was in a horrible mess, with things lying about on the floor, the room dusty, the curtains long since needing to be washed and ironed.

  There might have been an opportunity to go in there and clean it up while Rose was away at work, but she had always kept the door locked even then and had taken the key with her. But now with her new busy life and mysterious absences, she evidently had forgotten to lock the door, so my mother went in one day with a broom and dustpan.

  She was appalled at the condition she found it in, worse than any other time when she had glimpsed it during a brief opening and closing of the door. Everything seemed turned upside down, dresser drawers half opened, with clothes sticking out, things lying about, on the floor, everywhere, as if Rose had been in a great hurry and simply did not have time to straighten these things out.

  I was in the kitchen doing my homework when I heard her call my name. I ran in. She was in the midst of straightening out the mess and had gathered together a pile of books, pamphlets and what looked like leaflets of some sort, and she seemed baffled by them. ‘They were all over the place,’ she said, ‘and I don’t know what to do with them. She needs a bookcase or something. Since when has she started reading books?’

  It was a good question to ask. Yes, indeed, when had she been reading books? I could not remember a time when she had sat with one in her hand. If she looked at anything it had been the weekly magazines we had read in England, the Magnet or the Gem, and it was clear then she had no taste for books.

  I looked at them curiously. One was a large, fat book with worn covers and had evidently come from a second-hand bookshop. It was called Das Kapital and the author’s name was Karl Marx. I knew very little about this kind of book myself, but I had heard vaguely this name being connected with Russia and the revolution there. Then there were some thinner pamphlets bound in paper covers and the word ‘revolution’ was in nearly all the titles. Then I came to a leaflet and I stared at it for a long time, feeling a shock go through me. It announced a talk to be given on the subject: ‘Why I Became a Communist’. The talk had been delivered about two weeks earlier at a well-known radical meeting hall on the west side. It was sponsored by the Communist Party of America and the speaker was Rose Bernstein.

  For several moments I was unable to speak. I showed it to my mother, then read it to her, and she was as horrified as I was. Perhaps we should not have been so shocked. My sister Lily had belonged to some radical organisation back in England and so had her husband. But not a Communist. Nothing could be worse than that: a Bolshevik, a Russian revolutionist.

  It explained certain things to us, however: her mysterious comings and goings, her change of habits. But how had this come about?

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ my mother said, worried and perplexed. ‘How could she have got mixed up in such a thing?’

  Yes, how was it possible for someone who had once pretended to be a duchess, who had lived in a dre
am world of being aristocratic, who had refused to work in a dress shop that catered to the lower classes, suddenly to become a member of a party that wanted to do away with the rich and the entire upper class?

  Well, we would not know the answer to that for a little while longer, but in the meantime my mother had the satisfaction of cleaning up her room. She even did a little decorating, putting a new fancy bedspread over the bed, adding a vase with artificial flowers on the dresser and straightening out the books that had so puzzled her, and me too.

  She gave it a last look of pleasure as she left the room and said, ‘I hope she’ll notice the difference when she comes home tonight. I hope she’ll like it.’

  But Rose didn’t come home that night. This had never happened before. But in view of all the strange things that had been surrounding Rose lately it did not frighten my mother so much as when Saul had disappeared. But she did not tell my father for fear he would run to the police station as he had done that other time. And if the police got involved they might discover that Rose was a Communist. And then what?

  To her great relief, however, Rose came home in the evening at dinner time and seemed much like her old self, giving no greeting, going right to her room and slamming the door shut, then emerging soon afterwards to go into the kitchen for her dinner. I had already finished eating and was doing my homework, and cast a look at her as she came in. There seemed to be nothing different about her, the same stiff face that ignored me as well as my mother and Sidney who was playing some game on the floor. The same drab clothes that were out of style a long time ago. Skirts had been growing shorter and shorter, and for most women were up to the knees. Hers were close to the ankles.

  She sat down at the table and did what she often did when the chair was a short distance away from the table. Instead of pushing the chair up to the table, she pulled the table up to the chair. She would do that even if other people were sitting at the table, causing much consternation and spilled glasses. This time she was alone at the table.

  My mother served the food to her, then dared enquire, ‘How do you like your room?’

  For a moment it seemed as if she was not going to answer at all, then she asked abruptly, ‘What room?’

  ‘Yours,’ my mother said, and I am sure she was feeling nervous in talking with her, something she rarely attempted, knowing whatever she said would be ignored with silence. ‘Yours,’ she repeated. ‘I cleaned it up for you and made a few changes.’

  ‘Who asked you to?’ Rose said.

  ‘I thought it needed it and I’d save you the trouble of doing it yourself.’

  ‘I hope you like it,’ Rose said.

  ‘Me?’ My mother was surprised. ‘Why should I like it? It’s your room.’

  ‘Not any more,’ Rose said, starting to eat, with her head bent low over the plate, much more like my father rather than a duchess.

  ‘What do you mean?’ my mother asked, startled.

  There was a brief pause. She ate and did not say anything for a moment. Then, ‘I’ll be leaving the house tomorrow.’

  This time genuinely shocked, my mother said, ‘You mean you’re not going to live here any more?’

  ‘That’s what I mean.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  I had felt the shock too. I was waiting for the reply to this last question. Rose took her time answering. When she did I was not sure I’d heard her correctly. It was spoken in her half-choked, haughty, upper-class English accent. It sounded like, ‘I got married yesterday.’

  My mother may have had some doubts also that she’d heard correctly. She was too stunned and bewildered to say anything for a moment, then she said, ‘You got married? Who did you marry?’

  ‘A man.’

  It was a cryptic answer and did not supply much information, but it would have to do for the time being, for she made it plain that was all the talking she was going to do for one day, and as soon as she had finished her meal she retreated to her room once more and shut the door with a bang.

  It only served to disturb my mother still further. For the third time she had been cheated out of a wedding for one of her children. But that was not the uppermost thought in her mind and I have no doubt she spent a sleepless night thinking of the major concern, which was whether this man was a Jew or not.

  She did not have to wait long to find out, for the very day following Rose brought ‘the man’ home with her to help carry her things out that she had packed in two of the much-worn suitcases we had brought from England.

  And the minute he walked through the door you could see the Irish on his long, ruddy face.

  His name was Jim – Jim Morse.

  It was the oddest thing about Jim, the way we took to him right away and the way he was accepted into the family, so different from the time my older sister had married the Christian boy across the street when we lived in England. That had been a calamity. Lily was considered dead, in accordance with Jewish law. We sat shiveh for seven days, the ritual for the mourning of the dead.

  But with Jim it was an altogether different matter. I don’t know if this was because times had changed, or because we were in America where there was such a mixture of all kinds of people. Or was it because of Jim himself and his warm, friendly nature? However, once the introductions were over, made stiffly by Rose – who was on the defensive and prepared for the worst, it was clear to see – we found ourselves chatting with him with perfect ease, laughing with him and liking him.

  He was a tall, lanky fellow, not very handsome, but healthy looking with ruddy cheeks, and large, grey, honest eyes. And his laugh showed big, strong, white teeth. He laughed often and he seemed comfortable with us, including even my father, who was silent most of the time but would have a good deal to say about this later. Jim stretched long legs out before him and clasped hands over a lean stomach, and seemed to be enjoying himself among us, while Rose sat a short distance away from him, silent and probably nervous, and perhaps still fearful of some critical remark one of us might make.

  He came from Arkansas and, although he did not seem to want to talk about it, told us enough to let us know that it was from a large, poor family there. What his father did for a living we never did learn, but Jim, the youngest in the family, had broken away from them only recently and had been in Chicago for just a few months. What he did for a living was something else that he seemed hesitant to talk about and this time it was coupled with a warning glance from Rose.

  We did find out later, however, that he was a sandwich man in a cafeteria. It was not, to be sure, anything to be ashamed of, but neither was it anything to brag about and it was no wonder that Rose wanted it to be kept hidden from us. Certainly, Jim was a far cry from the kind of husband she had pictured for herself in the days when she lived in the world of high society.

  But these were different days for her. She had been proud of working in Madame LaFarge’s exclusive dress shop but that pride began to wear off after several months of working under a woman who could never be pleased and who demanded long hours and gave so little pay that Rose often did not have enough to carry her through the week for lunches and car fare after giving my mother $10 out of her $15 a week salary. The pride turned into resentment, then rebellion, and she was ripe for the recruiters of the then burgeoning Communist Party. It was at one of their meetings that she met the tall, skinny fellow from Arkansas, Jim, who had been recruited by the salad man in the cafeteria where he worked.

  Jim was ripe for it too, but more for social reasons than anything else. He was lonely, he knew nobody in Chicago, and he was tired of going to burlesque shows and movie theatres; when the salad man suggested he come and meet some nice people and learn something about the world at the same time, he went readily … and sat next to a haughty-looking girl who gave him a sense of inferiority and discouraged the looks he cast at her sideways.

  Still, during the intermission they got to know each other and Jim felt happy about having come. He was, however, even more awed by t
he British accent that she affected strongly at these meetings in order to let them know that she was very different from them. Her feelings towards Jim at this first meeting were somewhat uncertain. The discovery that he was a sandwich man in a cafeteria had given her a bit of a shock. She wasn’t at all sure that she wanted to continue with the acquaintance. A sandwich man! Really, now! That went off in her mind. But the sad truth was that Jim was the only man who had ever paid any attention to her in her whole life. And she was getting on in years. She was edging close to twenty-four. This thought too must have gone through her head, and together with that was the matter of her new-found ideals and the fact that she could no longer believe in class distinctions.

  There was something else. The cafeteria where Jim worked was not far from Madame LaFarge’s establishment, and Rose could go there for lunch, and Jim – making sure first that the boss was not looking – would carve a roast beef sandwich for her so thick that she had difficulty opening her jaws wide enough to bite into it.

  And then someone gave Madame LaFarge the leaflet announcing Rose’s talk on ‘Why I Became a Communist’ – the chief reason being her exploitation in the exclusive dressmaking shop. Rose was fired that day, and the following day she and Jim got married at City Hall, with the salad man and a Communist organiser as witnesses.

  That was the day she failed to come home. She came the following day and told us that she had got married – to a man. Then she brought Jim and, after talking with him for a while, I think most of my mother’s fears vanished. When she told my father that Jim was ‘better than nothing’, I don’t think she meant it in a derogatory sense. I think she liked Jim from the start and the fact that he was not a Jew didn’t seem to bother her much.

  There was just one difficult part to overcome that day and that was when the time came for the departure. The two of them stood near the doorway, with Jim holding the two torn suitcases in his hands. We’d had a lot to say before this, but there seemed to be nothing new and an awkward silence fell over us.