‘I’m not worried,’ she said. ‘Why shouldn’t you meet some nice girl and get married? But it might happen and I wouldn’t want you to feel tied down to me.’
I understood now what all the brooding had been about. She had been looking ahead, far ahead, and seeing nothing but uncertainty lying in front of her. All her life it had been that way, from the very day she had been born. With both her parents dying while she was still an infant, with poor relatives haggling over her disposition, not wanting to add to their own already crushing poverty, how else could it have been?
My heart ached for her. I drew her closer to me and said, ‘Ma, I’m going to make you a promise. No matter what happens, I’ll never leave you alone. I’m going to look out for you as long as I live.’
She started to cry and stopped herself, trying to smile. ‘It’s good of you to say that,’ she said. ‘But I don’t want you ever to spoil your life on account of me. Just remember that.’
‘All right, Ma,’ I said. ‘I’ll remember it. But right now stop worrying. You’ve done something that should have been done a long time ago, and we’re all going to be happier for it. Oh, what a relief it’s going to be to wake up in the morning and find he’s no longer in the house. How wonderful it’s going to be not to awaken in the middle of the night and hear him coming home drunk. And never to have to see that dark, glowering face and hear his snarling voice.’
She gave a little laugh and wiped her eyes with a handkerchief at the same time. ‘I feel that way too. I should have done this a long time ago.’ Then after a brief pause, she added, ‘It’ll be a big shock to him when he comes home and finds us gone.’
Was she, in spite of everything, worrying about that, I wondered? ‘Let it,’ I said. ‘He’s given us plenty of shocks.’
She said nothing, and the bus rolled on and the landscape flashed past us, and I wondered if somewhere inside her there wasn’t pity for him and a touch of regret about the whole thing.
The first thing I noticed about Joe when he met us at the bus station in New York was that he looked much older than when I had seen him last time. His hair had thinned so that he was partly bald and there seemed to be a worried look etched on his face with several deep lines on his forehead.
My mother must have noticed it, too, because as he embraced her and she kissed him, she looked up at him anxiously and asked, ‘Are you all right, Joe?’
‘Yes, I’m all right,’ he said.
But he wasn’t, clearly. We would not find out until later that there was every reason for the changed look in him. Things were not going well with him. He was having trouble making a living. He had tried various things, even working for his wife’s father, who had bought a gas station in Brooklyn, and he had suffered badly in the attempt to become an auto mechanic. He was clumsy with tools and he wasn’t accustomed to hard physical work. He’d been forced finally to go back to selling magazine subscriptions door to door, but it was not the same as it had been in Chicago. Or was it that times had changed and people did not have the money they used to? He did not know, but it was getting harder and harder to sell, and on top of all that Rose was now pregnant, in her sixth month in fact, and soon there’d be a child to take care of.
At the moment they were living with his in-laws in an apartment in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, and he was going to take us there first before taking us to the room he had rented for us in a nearby apartment that belonged to his wife’s aunt.
But there was something else, something behind that worried look on his face that he could not tell us at the first moment. It was not until the two of us were alone and we had gone to get our suitcases from the check room that I found out what it was and it left me stunned. He whispered it to me even though the one he did not want to hear, my mother, was not there.
‘Lily’s dead.’
I simply stared at him, while an eruption of emotions went on inside me. I could not believe what he had said to me. But it was a cold, hard fact. He had received a letter from Arthur this morning. We had probably received one too in Chicago. Lily had died suddenly of a heart attack. Arthur had barely been able to write this news with all his grief.
It must have been very difficult for Arthur to write this letter. Joe showed it to me afterwards. The pain and grief showed in the unsteady handwriting, and there were damp spots blurring the ink here and there. He could have been crying as he wrote it. He told us something that we knew already, that Lily had had rheumatic fever as a child and that had weakened her heart. She had been ill for some time before the fatal attack came, but they had not wanted to tell us about that, knowing how it would affect my mother. We would learn later that the Forshaws were taking care of the baby.
‘You mustn’t tell Ma yet,’ Joe said.
How could I, if I had wanted to? What would she have done? Gone out of her mind? Somehow, I couldn’t help thinking that she would instantly connect it with her having left my father. Would she think of it as a sort of punishment? God’s punishment?
We got the two suitcases and with Joe carrying one and me carrying the other we went back to where Ma and Sidney were waiting for us. We took the subway to Brooklyn. It was our first ride in one of these underground trains and we sat in a packed car, having been fortunate in finding seats for all of us. It did not, however, take my mind off what Joe had told me and I was in a daze the entire time.
I was not in a much better state of mind when we arrived at the place where Joe now lived with his in-laws, the Alters. I do remember feeling some surprise, similar to the time when we had first come to my grandmother’s flat in Chicago. The Alters were business people, they owned a gas station, they had to be well off. The name Brownsville itself had suggested quiet, pleasant, rural surroundings, but the place was one vast city slum with block after block of tall, grimy tenements. They lived in one of these tenements and Joe led us through a dark, odorous hall and up well-worn stairs to a flat on the fourth floor, just one floor below the top.
And, the moment we entered there were smells and noise and seemingly swarms of children of different ages, from a toddler still in diapers and up to Rose herself, the oldest in this huge family, with her smiling face and swollen belly. Mrs Alter was frying lamb chops, and she lifted a harassed face from the stove and came forward to greet us, holding a frying pan in one hand, welcoming us as best she could.
There seemed to be numerous rooms in the place also, and one of them was Joe’s and Rose’s. He did not offer to take us in there and show it to us, but it had to be small and dark and cramped, and soon there would be another one to occupy it with them. I think my mother was appalled at everything she saw, at knowing this was where her son lived, but she did not give her feelings away and smiled through everything, and watching her I thought, oh God, I have to tell her, and she will not be smiling then.
Despite the noise, the crowding, the surroundings, we were glad to accept Mrs Alter’s invitation to stay for dinner. We had not eaten a good meal in the two days it had taken us to come from Chicago, and the lamb chops she was frying smelled good to us, despite the smokiness that came from them and filled the house. I don’t know how many sat at the table, but our shoulders touched, so close were we sitting to one another. Mr Alter had also arrived, together with the two sons who worked with him in the gas station, all three in grease-stained denims, with smudged faces and blackened hands. We had to wait until they had washed and changed into clean clothes, and then the meal began, and by that time we were starved for it.
We left almost as soon as it was over, thanking our host and hostess for their hospitality, they in turn expressing regrets at not being able to put us up. The regret was genuine, they were nice, kind-hearted people and it gave my mother some reassurance as to Joe’s welfare. There were many things that left much to be desired, but there was no question that he was being well cared for. And on the whole we were glad that there had not been room to put us up. The noise, the crowding, would have been too much for us. We were very tired.
Joe led us over to where we were to stay, only a block or two from his own building and in a similar kind of tenement, this one with two wide steps leading to the entrance. Then up two flights of dark, worn stairs to a door that was opened by a short, squat woman who resembled Mrs Alter very closely. She was her sister, a widow who lived alone in a dark, poorly ventilated and narrow flat that had two bedrooms, one in which she slept, the other rented out to us.
Joe left us almost immediately, but in doing so exchanged a look with me that asked if I had yet told our mother about Lily, and me shaking my head. I was putting it off until what I considered the proper time and I did not quite know when that would be, although I knew for certain this was not the time. We were all worn out and couldn’t wait to get to bed. We had been travelling on the bus for two nights in succession and had hardly slept. Our room had two beds, one a single, the other a double, so the arrangement was simple. Ma would sleep in the single, Sidney and I in the double.
We lost no time getting undressed and into bed, and I think all of us must have fallen asleep immediately. I think, too, all of us must have awakened at about the same time. It was around the middle of the night. Half in my sleep still, I had felt the itching. I scratched and tried to go back to sleep, but then I felt the crawling on my body and sat up quickly to find Sidney doing the same thing, scratching himself vigorously and complaining, ‘There must be bedbugs here.’
My mother was awake also and scratching herself. She got out of bed and turned on the light. We looked at our beds and gasped. They were bedbugs all right and they were swarming all over the two beds. Sidney and I got out of ours too and we all stood helpless not knowing what to do.
‘We can’t sleep here,’ my mother said.
‘Shall I wake up the landlady and tell her?’ I asked.
She hesitated. ‘What can she do?’ she asked. Bedbugs were no strangers to her. We’d had them in England, but my mother had fought them vigorously, using a candle flame to burn their nests in the springs, finally getting rid of them. But it took time and effort, and here we were in the middle of the night. What, indeed, could the landlady do? And yet there was no one else to turn to. ‘Go and tell her,’ she said finally.
I went to the door of the other bedroom and knocked. It took several knocks to rouse her, and she finally opened the door and stood blinking sleepily at me in a bathrobe. I told her.
She seemed surprised. ‘Bedbugs?’ she said. ‘I never had bedbugs in my house. What bedbugs are you talking about?’
‘Come and see,’ I said.
She followed me to our room and looked at the bugs crawling about on both beds. She was shaking her head. ‘I never had them before,’ she repeated. ‘You must have brought them with you.’
My mother became angry. ‘In my house in Chicago there were no bedbugs,’ she said.
The woman became angry too. ‘So go back to Chicago,’ she said. ‘And take the bedbugs with you, because they’re not mine.’ Then, without further argument, she shuffled off in her slippers to her bedroom and slammed the door shut after her.
Certainly, she had none of the goodness and hospitality of her sister. But what could we do? Go back to bed and try to sleep? We shuddered at the idea. What else was there to do? Go back to the Alters’ apartment and wake up Joe and tell him? But what could he do in the middle of the night? Only one thing seemed certain: we had to get out of there before our own luggage became contaminated.
We packed up. I grabbed the suitcases and we left. We went down the stairs and out into the street. It was still dark. The sky was clear and stars showed. It had been a warm day, but the air was cool now and we shivered a little as we stood there uncertainly, not knowing how to proceed further.
My mother decided. ‘We’ll wait here,’ she said, ‘until it’s morning and then we’ll go to see Joe. There’s no use waking him up now. He couldn’t do anything. We’ll just have to wait.’
It seemed the wisest course. We sat on the stone step and huddled close together for warmth. Sidney and my mother soon began to nod and then were asleep with their heads on my shoulders at either side of me. I remained awake. I was troubled. What had I done? I’d pulled her away from a good home that was as close to her dream as she would ever get and brought her into this misery more because of my hatred for my father than anything else. I had no right to do it. And Sidney too. He would have to start all over again in a new school, make new friends, get adjusted to new surroundings.
And on top of all that I had to tell her that her daughter had died and that alone was enough to destroy her. She would have to go through sitting shiveh, the Jewish ritual of mourning for the dead. It would be the second time. How could I forget that? The first time had been in England, when Lily had married Arthur Forshaw and for which, according to Jewish law, she was considered dead.
I remember it vividly, all of us sitting in our stockinged feet in the darkened room saying prayers for the dead. And I remembered how Lily had come bursting in protesting that she was not dead, but very much alive, and how my mother had pretended she did not hear her. I remembered all that, and thought how could she go through the ritual once more, except that this time Lily would not be here to protest. If at least my mother remained in the comfortable surroundings of her home in Chicago it would have been more bearable for her.
So I sat there all through the night with their heads on my shoulders, shivering in the cold and dreading the morning that would soon come.
It came with a gradual fading of the darkness, the stars disappearing as pale light spread across the sky. The street began to awaken slowly, with a few people coming out of houses, a few cars starting up their motors, a truck going by and lights appearing in windows. Once the door behind us opened and a man came out. He made a grumbling noise at the obstruction we formed sitting on the step, and my mother and Sidney awakened and we all three stood up to let him pass.
We remained standing there, shivering, and afraid the door would open again to let somebody out, and we looked at one another wondering what we were going to do, since it was still too early to go and see Joe. In my desperation I thought we should go anyway, even if we had to wake him up, and I was about to say that when a car drew up suddenly at the kerb in front of us. We looked at it, not thinking it had anything to do with us. The driver, a young man, got out and came towards us, and even though the early morning light was still dim, my mother recognised him immediately and she let out a cry that was a mixture of surprise and joy: ‘It’s Saul!’
Chapter Seventeen
BROWNSVILLE, BROOKLYN IN those days was a huge ghetto composed largely of Jewish immigrants who had fled the anti-Semitism of Poland and Russia and other parts of Europe to find refuge in America. It had once been farmland, but with the extension of the subway to that distant region, development quickly took place to accommodate the influx of immigrants, and block after block of big, ugly tenements went up and were soon packed with families.
Pitkin Avenue was the main thoroughfare that ran through the area, and it swarmed with people day and night, brilliantly lit at night, its stores, many of them displaying kosher signs, constantly busy, its theatres with glittering marquees offering movies, vaudeville, Yiddish plays, adding still more to the crowds. There were shuls, big ornate ones and small, cramped ones, everywhere. And it was towards one of these that Saul was heading that morning when he accidentally stumbled on us.
He saw us from the distance, he told me later, the three of us huddled there on the steps, and could not believe his eyes. He thought for a minute he was back in the hot desert out West where he had once trekked in his wandering travels, seeing a mirage, as had actually happened to him. But as he drew closer it became real and then he stopped and jumped out.
How long had it been since we had seen him last? We too might have thought we were seeing a mirage. It was three years since he had run away from home and this was the last place on earth we might have expected to see him again.
So much had
happened to Saul since that day when he walked from his job at Sears Roebuck to the freight yard and slipped into a boxcar. He had travelled all over the United States, in boxcars, hitching rides on highways, walking. He had seen the beautiful Rocky Mountains that had first caught his attention on a postcard when he was working in the mail order house. He had feasted his eyes on them for days and could hardly tear himself away from their beauty. He had met hunters and had learned to eat the animals they killed, deer, elk, rabbit, despite the fact that they weren’t kosher and were forbidden by Jewish law. But he would have starved if he hadn’t eaten them. He drew the line at wild boar, however. He could not bring himself to eat pig. Not even when he was in jail.
I was shocked when I heard that he had been arrested once for vagrancy. It was in a small Virginia town, when he had come back East. He was sentenced to two months in jail, but it was a strange sort of incarceration. He was the only prisoner there, and he was well treated by the chief constable and his wife. They liked him and he liked them, and he was almost sorry when the time came for him to leave.
Gradually, he made his way to New York. He had thought of coming home to us in Chicago, but had decided that he would rather make something of himself first. Through all those three years of tramping about he had lost none of his religious beliefs and he still wanted to become a rabbi. But he was now twenty years old and it was late for him to start the studying that was required, and besides, a seminary cost money that he did not have.
He found that out when he arrived in New York. He had gone immediately to the Jewish quarter on the east side and made enquiries at a seminary there. They must have felt sorry for him. They saw a skinny, not too well-nourished young man, wearing a tallith and a yarmulke, and obviously an orthodox Jew, who wanted to become a rabbi, a highly commendable ambition, but one they could not assist. He was poor and homeless, and he had little education, judging from what he told them about his English background. He’d attended a school called St Peter’s, no less, a Christian school, and he’d gone there as far as the seventh grade. It was no recommendation, but they’d have been willing to overlook that if he’d had money at least to pay for seminary costs. But he had nothing. He was penniless. His family, he said, was in Chicago, but he hadn’t seen them in two years. What had he been doing during that time? He was vague about that; he didn’t seem to want to talk about it.
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