The Dream

by Harry Bernstein

  I was shocked. ‘No, they never told us. When did that happen?’

  ‘Not too long after Grandma died. The poor man. I liked him. He was good to me at the wedding … the wedding that I was not invited to.’ He gave a chuckle that was not amused and looking at him I saw the bitterness in his eyes. He went on, ‘Yes, I liked Phil. He was worse off than any of us, being rich. It’s harder to fall from the top than when you are at the bottom. He lost his business, the Victrollas, the fine office in the Loop. He could not get a job, not even selling Victrollas, his parents wouldn’t help, they had disowned him for marrying into the family. You know where he landed? He became a milkman. Yes, he got up at dawn and delivered bottles of milk to houses.

  ‘But it was too much for him, poor man. One day while he was climbing a flight of steps to deliver some milk he dropped dead from a heart attack. Now your Aunt Lily writes to me. She is crushed by what has happened. She doesn’t know what to do with herself, where to turn, and of course she has no money. Can it be that is why she writes to me now even though before this she never even invited me to her wedding?’ He shook his head back and forth a few times. ‘No, I mustn’t say that. But I have sent her some money and I have told her perhaps she would like to come to New York – and stay with me.’ He chuckled again and this time he was amused.

  I didn’t laugh with him. I didn’t say anything for a while. I was dazed by all I had heard. Vaguely, I was aware of the cacophony of sounds and voices around me: one of the speakers hoarsely denouncing capitalism, the worst evil ever inflicted on mankind … the rumble of trucks and distant honking of horns … and the smell of roasted chestnuts and popcorn in my nostrils. I began to think of something else.

  ‘Have you seen my father?’ I asked.

  ‘Why should he be any different from all the others?’ my grandfather asked. ‘Oh, he’s become a very dutiful son. Yes, I see him. He comes to my room. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Do you give him money?’

  He shrugged. ‘If I have it I give it to him. Business is not what it used to be. These days I have a lot of competition. Everybody is in the business.’

  My suspicion, however, had been confirmed. Now I was certain I knew where he got what was supposed to be his pay every Friday and most of it in loose change.

  ‘I don’t give it to him,’ my grandfather went on. ‘I give it to your mother. Only of course you must not tell her that. I told your father the same thing. She must not know. But it is more than money that I owe her.’

  ‘Why do you owe her?’ I asked. He had said it before and I had been curious then. But now was a good time to find out.

  He patted my knee with his hand. ‘Harry,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to know everything. Or perhaps you do. I hear that you are a famous writer and you are having stories published in magazines.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ I asked.

  ‘Your father.’

  I was a bit surprised. I couldn’t picture him talking about me to someone in the first place, but to be boasting about me and in such terms was a bit hard to believe. ‘He’s exaggerating,’ I said. ‘I’m not a famous writer. I’m just a beginning writer.’

  ‘But you’re a writer.’

  ‘I suppose.’ But this was not a subject I cared to pursue. I was thinking of the one he had started before and then seemed deliberately to avoid and change to something else. ‘You were saying before that you owed my mother more than money. What is it you owe her?’

  He hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘You won’t tell your mother that I told you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She would not like you to know.’

  ‘I promise I won’t tell her.’

  ‘All right, then. You already know about your mother, how in Poland her mother died and her father died when she was still a baby, and how nobody wanted to care for her and she was passed from one to another until when she was sixteen she was able to come to England. You know all that.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard about it.’

  ‘But what you don’t know is about Samuel.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Samuel – Shmuel, they called him.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘He was the man who should have been your father.’

  I looked at him, puzzled. ‘What are you trying to say, Grandpa?’

  ‘Samuel was a young man who loved your mother. He too came from Poland. He worked in a hat factory in Manchester and that’s where your mother found work too when she came to England. They fell in love. There was talk of marrying between them. Samuel – Shmuel I’ll call him like everybody did – was a wonderful fellow, a good, kind, honest young man, and handsome looking, a bit of a dandy, he always dressed so well and he had a moustache …’

  A thought was coming to me. I remembered a photograph in the assortment of photos my mother always kept in a cardboard box in a cupboard. I used to pore over them from time to time and this one always puzzled me. He was not one of the family, as all the others were, and when I asked my mother who he was she would answer vaguely that he was just an old friend she once knew and then did not seem to want to talk about him. Yes, he was a handsome fellow and he did have a moustache.

  ‘I think I know who you mean,’ I said. ‘I believe my mother had a picture of him.’

  My grandfather nodded. ‘Yes, she would. I too have one. He gave one to me. We had become quite good friends while I was doing the roof over in the hat factory. He liked my singing. And we both read the same kind of books – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gorky of course …’

  I was startled and for a moment forgot the subject we had been talking about in this amazing discovery. ‘I didn’t know you read books,’ I said, interrupting.

  My grandfather smiled. ‘Why shouldn’t I read books?’ he asked.

  I almost blurted out what promptly came to my mind, that he was an old street beggar with whom you could not associate reading books of any kind, much less the great Russian masters. But I stopped myself in time and said instead, ‘I just didn’t know, that’s all. But go on, tell me more about Samuel – or Shmuel.’

  And I listened, with a new respect for my grandfather and a much better understanding that had never been there before, as he continued with what interested me still more.

  ‘Yes, we got along quite well, the two of us, and we used to eat lunch together and I got to like him very much, and when he told me of how deeply in love he was with the little sixteen-year-old girl who had just come from Poland, I thought to myself what a wonderful husband this girl was going to get and how well matched they were, for I had met her too and got to know her own sweetness and goodness, and I had learned of her unfortunate and tragic background and thought to myself this would make up for it, a marriage to this man, and what a wonderful life they could have together …’ He paused to pat my knee and say, ‘And what a wonderful father you could have had, Harry.’

  Yes, I thought, it could have been wonderful for me and for all of us in the family, and I felt a deep sense of regret inside me. But I said nothing and sat there thinking about it for a while, and finally said, ‘So why didn’t he become my father?’

  ‘Because I put a stop to it.’

  ‘You!’ I looked at him in amazement. ‘But you just got through telling me you were close friends and you thought so highly of him.’

  ‘Yes.’ He gave one of his chuckles, but it was not the amused kind. ‘Only you can’t trust an old devil like me, a common beggar. I took your mother aside one day when he was not around and told her that he was a scoundrel, a liar, a thief, a fornicator and, worst of all, he was married already and had a wife in Poland with five children.’

  I listened to this, appalled. ‘But how could you say anything like that? After all the good things you told me about him?’

  ‘How could I, eh?’ He gave another chuckle. ‘Well, it was not easy, believe me. But I had been talking to my wife. I had been telling her all those good things. She knew your mother already. She knew all about h
er and she had already decided who your mother would marry. There was our oldest son, a menace to all of us, a terror. She had thought we were rid of him when we left Poland without him. But he followed us, and now she saw another way to do it. This young girl from Poland was the answer. I objected. Yes, at first I objected very strongly. What are you talking about? I said to her. What are you saying? This girl is already promised to Shmuel. They are in love. What has Yankel to do with all this?

  ‘But you must know what your grandmother was like. She was a very strong-minded person. And she could be as hard to deal with as Yankel himself. She told me, never mind this Shmuel fellow. Who cares about him? Let him go to hell. You must go to her, the girl, and tell her he is no good, he is a scoundrel, he has a wife already. Yes, tell her that. He is married and has five children, and he has left them back in Poland.’

  ‘And she believed you?’ I asked, incredulous.

  He nodded. ‘She had never had a father. I was her father. So she believed me. I took her home to dinner and my wife did the rest. So now you know why I owe her. I have never forgiven myself. I do not hate my son. But I know what he has done to her. Do you understand what I mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said and I was dazed by all I had heard. Vaguely, I was aware of the commotion of the square all around me, and I seemed far away from it all and that is what I wanted to be. I had to get away from the old man and be alone. I felt a little sick. I got up.

  ‘Grandpa,’ I said, ‘I have to go. I’ve got an appointment to meet someone.’ I looked at my wristwatch. ‘I’m late already.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry you must go. We don’t meet very often. But perhaps you’ll come to see me.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll do that,’ I said. ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Not far from here. I have a room in a woman’s house. I’ll give you the address. You must write it down. Do you have pencil and paper?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You are some writer.’ He was feeling in his pocket. He came out with the stub of a pencil but no paper. Then he seemed to remember something. He gave a little chuckle and felt in his tin cup and came up with a white ticket. ‘A joker gave this to me. He said, “Old man, I don’t have any money but I’ve got this and maybe you can have yourself a good time or you can sell it to somebody. It’s worth a quarter.” It’s a ticket to a dance tonight. Maybe you can go. But you can also write the address on the back of it.’

  He handed it to me together with the pencil stub and I wrote down the address he gave me, which was on Second Avenue, a few blocks from where we were. And then I said, ‘Goodbye, Grandpa.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘But don’t forget what I said to you. Don’t tell your mother.’

  ‘No, I won’t,’ I promised, and then I turned on to Fourteenth Street and joined the surging crowds there.

  Chapter Twenty

  FOURTEENTH STREET WAS alive with crowds of people heading for the stores, the restaurants and the theatres. The chestnut and popcorn vendors were busy, and knots of customers gathered around them blocking passage on the street. I went past Klein’s, the big bargain store with its endless streams of shoppers coming in and out. Then I came to Irving Place and my footsteps slowed down.

  I was hesitating. I had been heading for the Labor Temple, but the thought of that dance ticket was in my mind. I took it out of my pocket and examined the printed side. The dance was being given by the League Against War and Fascism. It was a Communist front, I knew, but what difference did that make? It could be livelier, more fun than a lecture. And it was in Webster Hall, only a block away. I gave it one last thought and turned to my left. I had been there before. It was well known as a place where many prominent radical leaders had given talks and various left-wing functions were held. It only took a minute before I came up to its grimy, red-brick exterior, with a flight of wide stone steps leading up to the entrance, where the doors were open and a man stood taking tickets.

  I mounted these steps and gave him my ticket, then remembered the address written on the back and asked him if I could have it back for a moment so that I could copy the address – and could he lend me a pencil? Impatiently, he thrust the ticket back at me and told me to keep it.

  I put it back into my pocket and began to climb another flight of steps that led to the dance hall, and as I did so the raucous sound of a jazz band and a voice singing came to me, growing louder as I went up the wooden steps that were littered with cigarette butts and chewing gum wrappers.

  Then I was in the entrance of the dance hall and stood there for a moment taking in the scene before me. The dance floor was crowded with swinging couples and a thick veil of cigarette smoke hung over their heads. On the platform to my right the band blared and thumped, and a huge black woman in a black-sequinned, low-cut dress strutted back and forth with a microphone held in her hand, bellowing out a song, her mountainous breasts that were almost fully exposed jouncing with her movements.

  I turned my eyes back to the dance floor, then to the side where some people were standing, and almost immediately I saw a girl in a two-piece orange-coloured dress – that I would discover later she had made herself – that caught my eye along with the rest of her. She was of medium height, with dark hair. Her back was turned towards me so that I could not see her face, but what struck me most in that moment was the erect posture of her slender body, and though she was standing still there was something vibrant that seemed to emanate from her, and I thought of a bird poised on the branch of a tree about to take off in flight.

  I found myself walking towards her. I was not a dancer. I was clumsy and awkward at dancing, but I knew I was going to ask her to dance, and I did.

  I tapped her lightly on the shoulder and said, ‘Would you care to dance?’

  She swung round and I saw her face for the first time, and I liked what I saw. It was oval-shaped, the kind of shape I always liked in a girl’s face, and she had a smooth complexion with little make-up, and I liked that too. Her large dark eyes were fixed on me with a look of mixed curiosity and interest. ‘Certainly,’ she said and her voice was very pleasant.

  So we danced and I was my usual clumsy self, failing to keep in time with the foxtrot music, but she made me feel that I was doing fine, she leading I suppose. She was a beautiful dancer and she loved to dance, and why she had been standing alone all that time, unasked, I’ll never know. It doesn’t matter.

  The fact is, we spent the rest of the evening together, sometimes dancing, but most of the time sitting at a table in the canteen at the far end of the hall, talking, sipping beer – she very little of it, confessing afterwards that she never drank beer and only did then to be social – talking and talking, and getting to know one another.

  Her name was Ruby and I don’t know of anyone more aptly named. She was a precious jewel in all respects and from that first moment of our meeting she brightened my whole life. All the gloom I had felt before this vanished, and I found myself laughing and talking as I’d never laughed and talked before. We had a lot in common. We were close to the same age, she a bit younger than I was, and we had migrated to the United States around the same time, she from Poland with her widowed mother and younger brother. We both loved the same kind of music – classical, opera – and the same kind of books and authors – Steinbeck, Hemingway, Sinclair, Lewis – and in fact she worked in a bookstore, Brentano’s on Fifth Avenue. We had a lot to tell each other, I about my writing in the little magazines, which impressed her considerably.

  It got close to twelve before we realised how late it was and people were beginning to leave. She suddenly remembered the girlfriend who had brought her here. But the girlfriend had disappeared considerately after seeing her with a man, and she was now alone.

  ‘Could I take you home?’ I asked.

  ‘I live in Brooklyn,’ she warned. ‘And far out in Brooklyn.’

  It didn’t matter. The Bronx, where I lived, was at the opposite ends of the world, but I didn’t give it a thought. We rode out to
Brooklyn on the subway and it gave us a chance to talk some more and for me to be with her. But it was over finally, and we stood for a few moments at the entrance to the apartment house where she lived, both of us reluctant to part. I tried to kiss her goodnight, but she turned her head aside, smiling. However, I’d made a date to see her again – soon, the very next Monday, in fact – when I’d take her to the band concert in Central Park. I left her, treading on air. I was incredibly happy, only to arrive at the subway station to discover that I didn’t have any money left for the fare. I’d spent my last few coins on the beer in the canteen.

  It was one thirty, and there were still a few people coming and going at the station, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask one of them for a nickel for the fare. Instead, after a few moments’ indecision, I decided to walk. Why not? I was a good walker, I loved walking. And it was a beautiful night, the sky filled with stars and a thin crescent of a moon, the air soft and balmy. The distance from where I was in Brooklyn to the upper part of the Bronx was considerable, but that didn’t faze me and I struck out.

  It was a perfect thing to do for the way I felt, heady with love for a girl I had just met. I hardly noticed the dark streets I walked through, their emptiness, the buildings merged in shadow. I thought of her constantly, and walked swiftly with my feet treading on air. It was almost dawn when I reached the Bronx. The sky had grown lighter and the stars had disappeared. I came to my block and saw the old wooden houses still vague in the shadows that were left from the night. I walked down the short flight of steps to the door with my key ready, but found to my surprise that it was not locked. There was a light on in the kitchen at the far end of the apartment and I could see my mother sitting there at the table in her bathrobe.