The Dream

by Harry Bernstein

  I didn’t say anything. I said very little more to my mother now. Perhaps I could not blame her. Perhaps if I had been well and working she would not have done what she did. I lay in my bed, plunged into the worst sort of gloom. And thereafter when the doctors made their rounds and asked how I felt I did not answer eagerly and tell them I felt fine and ask when I could go home. In fact, I said just the opposite, and when the time came to get off the bed and test my fractured leg to see how well I could walk, I limped badly and said it was still very painful. I had become another of the faking malingerers, the homeless men who clung to the hospital because it was so much better than the doorways and gutters from which they’d come.

  And with most of my pain gone, and able now to get around on crutches, staying there wasn’t too bad for me either. Welfare Island was situated on the East River, and I could go down from the ward and sit on a bench and read or watch the boats and barges go by. I’d come up and have my lunch, then there might be some sort of entertainment in the recreation room, or a movie, and in the evening there was the companionship of other patients who were my age, and we could sit around the ward and tell dirty jokes and have a few good laughs before we went to bed.

  No, it wasn’t bad at all, but they caught on to me finally and I was discharged. Another patient leaving at the same time gave me a lift home in his car, I hobbled my way up the stairs to our apartment, was greeted tearfully at the door by my mother and went inside with her.

  He was home. The job he was supposed to have had had turned out to be part time, three days a week, and this was one of the days when he was not working. I saw him from the distance sitting in the front room. His back was towards me and he was listening to the radio. My heart sank immediately. It was as if a dark shadow had fallen over me.

  He turned his head round. We stared at one another. Neither one of us said anything.

  My mother had been watching us anxiously, perhaps fearful of some outburst, and there was relief on her face when nothing happened.

  ‘I’ll get you something to eat,’ she said. ‘You must be hungry.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  ‘ON OUR BLOCK’, I wrote, ‘there is this row of sad-looking old frame houses, half buried among the towering cliffs of Bronx apartment houses, a lost relic of a past when all this area was country, with rolling hills and fields and woodlands, with here and there a trickling brook shining in the sun. Somehow, as the change took place from country to city, this block of houses had been overlooked by the developers.

  ‘The houses’, I continued, pecking away at my tiny typewriter that I had bought in a second-hand shop for ten dollars, ‘were all alike and built close together with porches that slanted downward with the weight of their age. There were three apartments in each house, and ours was the one in the basement of the house in the middle of the block. The rooms were dark and had a musty smell …’

  I remember it was a Saturday when I wrote this story, which would be published in one of the ‘little’ magazines called Manuscript, and the reason I remember that day is because it would prove to be a momentous day in my life before it was over.

  If I had known then how it would turn out I would have felt less gloom than I did when I came to a halt halfway in my story, unable to continue any further writing about surroundings that only added to my depressed state. Besides, it was evening, and it was getting too dark for me to see well, and we were stinting on the use of our electricity and not at all sure how we were going to pay the electric bill this month – or the gas bill, or the rent.

  The Depression was in its fifth year and there seemed to be no end to it. There had been a surge of hope when Franklin Roosevelt had been elected President, but so far we had heard nothing but a lot of fireside chats and some fine speeches, one of which told us that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself.

  But the apple pedlars on street corners had grown in number, and the crowds in front of the agencies on Sixth Avenue were thicker than ever, and the breadlines in front of the Salvation Army headquarters longer, and I had virtually given up all hope of finding a job. I don’t know how my mother managed with so little coming into the house – a little from my father, a little from Sidney, and now and then from me when I managed to sell an article to some magazine. In desperation I had even tried my hand at writing scripts for comic magazines and sold a few at $10 a script. The publisher finally went bankrupt, owing me $50.

  In the meantime we had moved from one place to another, always seeking an apartment that was cheaper than the one before, until finally we landed up in the Bronx, in the block of old frame houses, where our rent was $10 a month. It was the cheapest so far, but we were soon behind on that and haunted by the fear of being evicted by our landlady, a fat, slovenly woman who shuffled about in carpet slippers and wore the same torn dress every day that had slits in the sides showing white underwear.

  She had been pleasant and cordial at first. She lived in the apartment above us and she would come down to knock on our door to ask if we needed anything. She lived alone, a widow, and was obviously quite taken with us. Her other tenants, who lived on the floor above her, a family of six people and very noisy, received much less attention. But it all disappeared when we fell behind with the rent and there were no more knocks on the door, and dark looks were cast at us when she saw us.

  Evictions were common in those days. Often as you went by on a street you saw furniture piled on the pavement and stricken families huddled around not knowing what to do. We saw it coming to us.

  It was about this time that I cooked up an article about the profession of bodyguarding, telling mostly from my imagination how bodyguards were trained to protect their gangster employers. I had sent it in to Popular Mechanics magazine and had heard nothing from them for about three or four weeks, when one day there was a knock at the door. It was our landlady and she was holding an envelope in her hand. All her hostility had vanished, and in its place there was fear and abject apology. She handed the envelope to me saying in a trembling voice that although it was addressed to me she had opened it by mistake. By mistake! It wasn’t likely, but I took it from her and opened it.

  Inside was a check for $30, the stub stating that it was for ‘The Profession of Bodyguarding’.

  While I stared at it with the euphoric feeling that only an author can get from an acceptance, the landlady was stammering, ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you were one of the boys. You must forgive me. I don’t want trouble. My husband, he should rest in peace, he was a friend of Al Capone …’

  I realised then that she thought the cheque I had received was my salary for bodyguarding ‘one of the boys’. I didn’t clear it up for her. I let her go on thinking what was terrifying her. After that there was no longer any danger of eviction. Not for a while, anyway, not until we fell behind again and again, and some of her fear wore off.

  Things only got worse for us and that basement apartment did not help. It was always so dark and airless there, and the musty smell never left the place no matter how hard my mother scrubbed and cleaned. For her, it could have meant the end of her dream. Even in England the house had been more tolerable: lighter and above ground, and with two floors. There was no sign of happiness in her any longer.

  Perhaps, though, I am forgetting one thing. There was my father and the change that seemed to have come about in him. I don’t mean that he had given up his drinking. He still drank, and seemed to have found a place downtown on the east side where he had cronies who treated him to drinks – or so he claimed. He still went out nights, but not every night. Remarkably, he stayed home on some of the nights and there were fewer outbursts from him. I don’t know if it was my presence or if he was somewhat afraid of me, but he seemed subdued and once, astonishingly, I even saw him help my mother wash the dishes.

  And he gave her money regularly every week, on a Friday, and he gave it to her mostly in small change. The boss at the place where he said he worked one day a week insisted on giving it to him t
hat way, lots of change along with a few dollar bills.

  A suspicion once came to my mind when I was thinking of all those coins he brought home. I did not speak to him, nor he to me, but I asked my mother, ‘Does he go to see his father?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But why do you ask?’

  I shrugged. I didn’t want to tell her what I was suspecting; she had enough trouble and I didn’t want that planted in her mind. ‘I was just wondering’, I said, ‘if the old man is in New York.’

  ‘Where else could he be?’

  ‘He could have gone back to Chicago?’

  ‘I don’t think he’s been back since the wedding.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ I asked.

  ‘I just guessed,’ she said. ‘He was so mad at your grandmother for not having told him about the wedding that it wouldn’t surprise me if he never went back.’

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me either,’ I said. ‘I think it was a damn shame.’

  It was odd that we should have been talking about my grandmother that day, and the following week news came that she had died. It was a bit of a shock to my mother and I heard her asking my father if he was going to the funeral. Some of the roughness came into his tone when he answered no. Why should he go? What the hell for?

  ‘She’s your mother,’ my mother answered.

  I heard him give a snorting sort of laugh and a single word came out of him contemptuously: ‘Mother!’

  There was some talk later of money she might have left. My father brought it up. He was suspicious. She’d always had money. My grandfather saw to that. Even after the break with her at the wedding he had been sending her money. So what had happened to it? He wrote to Uncle Saul enquiring, and Saul’s answer came back promptly telling him there was no money left. Grandma had used it all up on doctors and hospitals before she died.

  ‘The lying bastard,’ my father swore. He was like his old self, the voice roaring, his inflamed eyes bulging. Now he would go back to Chicago. He’d face them all, hold each one by the throat, make him tell the truth. Where’s the money? But he did no such thing and it died down; he seemed to have forgotten all about it and he sat home with my mother listening to Eddie Cantor sing ‘Happy days are here again’.

  As for me, I still continued to cook up fantastic articles – ‘What Men Won’t Do for a Thrill’ – and try to sell them to Popular Mechanics and the American Weekly, Hearst’s Sunday supplement, where I had some luck from time to time at $10 an article. But what I called my real writing, my short stories about myself, occupied most of my time. The ‘little’ magazines paid no money, but that didn’t matter to me and I was gaining some attention. I received a letter from Clifton Fadiman, the editor of Simon & Schuster, telling me that he’d read one of my hospital stories and liked it, and inviting me to submit a novel if I had one. I didn’t, but I would. Elated, I started writing one, but it was like so many others that I wrote afterwards, never published. Nevertheless, there was enough encouragement in that letter to keep me writing chiefly about myself and I have done that ever since.

  But on this particular Saturday, in the midst of one story that I was writing about the block of old frame houses where I lived, I was suddenly assailed with such a feeling of gloom that I could not continue. I found myself taking stock of myself. I was twenty-four years old, I had no job and no prospects of getting one, I was still living with my parents, and I was still trying unsuccessfully to become a writer and the best I could do was get published in some insignificant little magazines that only a few people read. Never mind Clifton Fadiman. That was just a fluke.

  I got up from the typewriter and knew that I wanted to get out of this dark, dank hole of an apartment and go out somewhere to meet people; talk with them, laugh with them. I thought of a girl. It was a long time since I had been out with one. But it took money to take a girl out. And I wasn’t dressed properly for it anyway, and didn’t feel like changing out of my unpressed, shabby trousers and not too clean shirt, and shaving. Luckily, I had a few coins in my pocket that would be enough for the subway fare to Manhattan and back.

  I stepped outside and breathed in the fresh evening air. It was always like coming out of a cave when you left the basement apartment. It was early summer and the air was soft and balmy. People were sitting on the porches or on the steps that led up to the porches. The sky was a pale colour of twilight and it reminded me a bit of those summer evenings in England when the sun had set and people sat outside on chairs smoking their pipes or cigarettes.

  I saw my father and mother sitting outside on the two kitchen chairs they had brought out, and it occurred to me how unusual this was for my father to be home on a Saturday night and, what’s more, sitting there with my mother, the two of them side by side. Somehow, there was something reassuring in the sight, and I marvelled a bit at the change that had come over my father but wondered how long it would last. We still didn’t talk to one another.

  He turned his head aside as I came out. But my mother smiled and I saw a certain curiosity in her eyes, which were lifted up to me. I rarely went out these days and she was probably wondering where I was going. She would not have asked, however, and merely waved. I waved back and knew that her eyes were following me as I walked on. I saw Sidney at the corner with some friends, and he waved too and yelled, ‘Where you going?’

  I didn’t answer and simply waved at him. Truth was, I didn’t know where I was going other than Manhattan, but where in Manhattan I hadn’t decided yet. I thought of the Village. It was always lively there, and I might run into some people I knew who lived there. But the Village cost money and I was looking for free. It was for that reason probably that I got off at Union Square, a stop before the Village. It was lively here too, and there were always free lectures at the Labor Temple or Cooper Union, or better yet, the soapbox orators in the square gave talks that you could listen to even if you didn’t agree with what they were saying.

  Yes, it was lively all right, with surging crowds along Fourteenth Street, shoppers streaming in and out of Klein’s, the big bargain store, others heading for the theatres, and the chestnut and popcorn vendors trundling their carts among them with savoury smells trailing after them. But most of the noise came from within the square in the centre of which a tall flagpole flying the American flag dominated the scene. Around the flagpole were the orators of all different brands of radical beliefs – the Stalinists, the Trotskyites, the Lovestonites, the Socialists, the Social-Labourites – all mounted on short ladders, haranguing the crowds in fierce, passionate tones. I shuffled from one to the other for about an hour, then grew tired of it and wandered away over towards the benches that were filled with people.

  I was hot. I was perspiring and wanted to rest. I found a place at the end of one bench and sat down. No sooner had I done that than I heard the sound of someone singing. Singing? It could hardly be called that. The voice was hoarse and cracked, and I recognised it at once. Unmistakably, this was my grandfather’s voice.

  Yes, I saw him in the fading light, making his way along the benches, tapping with a cane, shuffling slowly towards me with his blue glasses shielding his supposed blindness, the tin cup held out towards those seated on the benches, rattling the coins that were in it.

  At last he came up to where I was sitting. He recognised me too with a little start, halting and then, with the familiar chuckle, saying, ‘So it’s you, Harry.’

  ‘Yes, it’s me, Grandpa,’ I said and noted at the same time out of the corners of my eyes people on the bench looking at us. They’d obviously heard me call him Grandpa. I couldn’t help feeling a little self-conscious, but I said, ‘Won’t you sit down, Grandpa?’

  ‘Yes, why not? I could use a little rest.’

  They made room for him on the bench, and I was sure they’d all be listening to us with wide-open ears. But I didn’t care any longer. I didn’t even bother to lower my voice. In fact, I was rather glad I’d met him. I had thought of him often since I’d last seen him.
That was several years ago, and he looked pretty much the same now as he had then. His beard was scraggly, his face weather-beaten and deeply lined. He wore what I suppose was his beggar’s uniform, shabby clothes, torn shoes, an old felt hat with a ragged brim and, though it was a hot day, a long, much-worn overcoat that came down to his ankles.

  ‘So, Harry,’ he said, ‘how are you? How is everybody at home? Your father, your mother, your brothers, your sister?’

  ‘They’re all well,’ I said. ‘About my sister I don’t know. She’s back in Chicago with her husband. We don’t write very much. But the others are all right.’ They weren’t. Both Joe and Saul were having trouble, Joe finding it hard to sell magazine subscriptions these days, and with a baby now, a little girl named Rita, having to borrow money from his wife’s parents to make ends meet, and Saul finding it difficult too to live off the meagre salary the Jewish organisation gave him and with his wife constantly dissatisfied and adding to his misery. As for us, how well could we be? But I didn’t want to go into that with my grandfather. ‘How have you been?’ I asked.

  ‘I am still alive,’ he said. ‘At my age that is good enough.’

  ‘Do you hear from Chicago?’ I asked.

  ‘Chicago?’ He chuckled. ‘Yes, of course I hear, now more than ever that your grandmother is gone. You know about that?’

  ‘Yes, we heard. I was sorry to hear it.’

  He sighed. ‘Yes, I too was sorry. When you have a lot of children with a woman it means there must be some bond between you. I gave her a lot of work to do and I feel guilty about it. The children always depended on her and when they needed something, even after they were married and supposed to be on their own, they went to her. And now that she’s gone they come to me – to the direct source of supply’ – he gave another chuckle – ‘so long as I am not there in person to embarrass them they don’t mind talking to me in their letters. And what do their letters say? One says he needs a set of teeth, another must have a pair of glasses, or they’re short for the rent. One good thing about the Depression, it’s brought families closer together. Even your Aunt Lily has been writing to me. Did you know that her rich husband died too?’