I went in quietly just the same and walked up to the kitchen. She was smiling at me.
‘What are you doing up at this time?’ I asked.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said.
‘You’ve been waiting up for me,’ I accused.
‘You’ve never been out so late before,’ she said. ‘I was worried.’
‘There’s no need to be worried over me,’ I said. ‘I’m a big boy, Ma. I can take care of myself.’
‘Yes, I know. Did you have a good time?’
‘Yes.’ I hesitated. I wanted to tell her about Ruby, but I realised it would not make her happy and stopped myself in time. Instead I said, ‘I met some old friends in New York and time went by so fast I hardly noticed it. But you shouldn’t have sat up for me.’
‘I’m glad you had a good time,’ she said. She seemed satisfied with my explanation and relieved too, I think, and we said goodnight to each other and went off to our bedrooms, I careful not to disturb Sidney who was fast asleep in the bed I shared with him. I couldn’t sleep once I got into bed. I kept thinking of my mother. It had dampened my spirits, finding her waiting up for me, and it had taken away all the joy I had felt on that long walk. I was not angry with my mother. I realised how dependent she was on me, and how much all her hopes and what was left of her dreams were fastened on me. And perhaps, and most important, the protection I gave her against my father. And now there was Ruby.
I was tired from my long walk, but it took me a long time before I finally fell asleep.
Ruby and I saw much of each other that summer. We had developed a routine that brought us together almost every day in the week and certainly at weekends. I would go to Brentano’s and browse among the books there until it was five thirty, and then call at the office where Ruby worked. From there we would walk to the Automat on Sixth Avenue and Forty-second Street, and have our supper of baked beans, a roll and coffee, or perhaps macaroni and cheese and a slice of wholewheat bread and then, holding hands, walk to Central Park; and when we were there and safely concealed among trees and bushes I would give vent to what I had been struggling against from the moment I had seen her. I would take her in my arms and give her a long, passionate kiss.
She no longer turned her head aside smiling when I attempted to kiss her, but responded with the same passion that I gave to her, arms tightly round my neck. And then, satisfied for the moment, we continued along the walk hand in hand.
The park was our playground all summer long. There was outdoor dancing on certain nights and band concerts on others. It was all free. There was no money to be spent except on an occasional soda. We danced in the open air with a starlit sky above us, holding each other closely, and I grew more proficient at it every day and more in love with her.
The band concerts were equally pleasant, sitting beside her in a packed mall, holding her hand, feeling her hair brush against my face and listening to the music that came from the band shell. It was the Goldman band that played and, save for an occasional Sousa march, they played mostly the classical music we both loved. But there was one night when for some unaccountable reason our attention wandered from the music. There was nothing wrong with the performance. They were playing a Mozart symphony and playing it well, and the audience around us sat in deep silence, enthralled. But we were restless. Perhaps it was the kind of evening that had slowly descended on us. There had still been a bit of daylight when the concert started, but now it had grown dark, and a full moon had appeared in the sky surrounded by stars and it shone down on us with a brilliance that illuminated the entire sea of heads in the mall and made the lights of the bandstand seem dull in comparison. There was a touch of magic in the air, and Ruby and I sat close to one another holding hands with the music becoming less and less audible in our ears, and the fast beating of our hearts taking its place.
At last I whispered to her, ‘Would you like to take a walk?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered back.
Fortunately, we were sitting at the end of a row of seats so we did not have to squeeze past other people and disturb them. We made our way out easily and unnoticed, and began our walk along a path that runs round the lake. We walked slowly with my arm round her waist and the moonlight shimmering in the water at our side. We said very little to one another, savouring our relief for a while at having escaped from sitting in the mall.
Then suddenly Ruby let out a cry. ‘Look!’
She was gazing straight ahead at a not too distant spot and I looked there too and saw it. At first it seemed like a huge golden crown in the midst of a thick grove of trees. If there had been no full moon that night it would have been shrouded in the shadows of the other trees, but it was the moon that brought out the rich golden colour of its branches and showed the shape that only a gold willow tree could have, a rounded domelike top that billowed outwards and drooped down on all sides like an old-fashioned ballroom gown. Even from that distance we caught the fragrance that came from its slender leaves.
‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ Ruby breathed.
I felt the same way she did about the tree. I have loved gold willow trees ever since that night, but never so much as then. We went towards it with our eyes glued on its beauty, fascinated.
We halted at last close up to it. Our wonder grew as we took it all in from top to bottom and over again several times. It must have been very old. Its trunk was probably very thick, but most of it was obscured by the curtain of leaves that hung down, some of the branches trailing on the ground and into the lake. The fresh fragrance was even stronger. I went up to it and parted some of the branches that were thin and easy to move aside, and I peered in to the darkness there.
After a few moments Ruby came up to my side and I put an arm round her waist and let her peer in also, and I said, ‘Want to go in?’
‘Is it safe?’ she asked timidly.
‘It couldn’t be safer,’ I assured her.
We both ventured inside and I let the branches drop until we were completely enclosed and in the darkness. I put my arms round her and she put her head on my chest, and we stayed like that close enough to hear our hearts beating. It was very still and we could hear very faintly the band playing in the distance. Once, I looked up and got the feeling that there was a high, vaulted ceiling above us and it made me think of a cathedral. Then all I thought of was her closeness and finding her lips in the darkness and the long, breathless kiss that followed, and sinking slowly to the ground.
There was a thick carpet of dried leaves that must have formed at the base of the tree over the years as they fell from within, and it made a soft bed for us as we lay with our arms wrapped round each other. I could still hear the band playing off in the distance. The only other sounds came from our fast breathing and the thudding of our hearts, and then too there came that one little virginal cry of pain from Ruby, but I was very careful and gentle with her, knowing it was her first time, and after that there was the breathless joy of our lovemaking, and the magic of the night.
Later, when we were lying still and close to one another, I found I could see through the curtain of branches as far away as the lights of buildings on the rim of the park, and they were like a glittering necklace wrapped round the dark throat of the night.
When I got home I found my mother waiting up for me. She had not done that since the first time. And like that time she was sitting in the kitchen in her bathrobe. She looked up at me, silent, and I looked back at her.
Then I spoke: ‘Ma, why are you up?’
She didn’t answer my question. Instead, her lips trembling slightly, she said, ‘Harry, you mustn’t get married.’
It was almost as if she knew what had happened that night and what I had been thinking: that I wanted to marry Ruby. But I said, ‘Who’s talking of getting married?’
‘You’re going with a girl, aren’t you?’ she said.
There was no use trying to hide it any longer. I had been doing that all summer long, pretending that I was staying out late with f
riends. But it hadn’t deceived her and I saw that she was close to tears. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I am seeing a girl. She’s a very nice girl. I’ll bring her here some time to meet you. I think you’ll like her.’
She said nothing for a moment, then asked, ‘What’s her name?’
‘Ruby.’
‘You have a cousin by the name of Ruby in Chicago.’
‘Yes, I know. I’ve met her.’
‘So there’ll be two Rubies in the family.’
‘Ma,’ I said, ‘I didn’t say I was getting married.’
‘You didn’t say you weren’t,’ she said and managed to smile a little in spite of the threat of tears.
I went up to her and put an arm round her shoulders. ‘Ma,’ I said. ‘I’m never going to leave you. I don’t want you to ever worry about that.’
‘I’m not worried,’ she said. ‘But marriage is not good for everybody. For your brothers it hasn’t been good. For your sisters it wasn’t the best. And look at me.’ She managed to smile again, as if this were a joke. ‘I’ve been married since I was sixteen and look at the life I’ve had.’
I thought of what my grandfather had told me about her. I wanted to broach it with her, ask her if it was true or something my grandfather had made up, but I couldn’t. However, I did ask, ‘Ma, weren’t you ever in love?’
She gave me a quick, sharp look, then said, ‘Love? What’s that? Who knows what love is?’
‘I know, Ma,’ I said gently. ‘I’ve always loved you.’
She put a hand on mine and looked up at me with something like gratitude in her eyes. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have said what I did. I know what love is. I’ve loved you and all my children, even Rose.’ She added this last with a touch of sadness in her tone and her head bent. Then she recovered and lifted her head up and looked at me. ‘But for you I’ve always had something special. You’re going to be somebody. You’re different from all the others. So you didn’t go to college. But you’re a writer. You’re having things published in magazines. That’s why I’m so afraid you’ll get married and once you’re married you’ll be like all the others. Like me.’
‘I’m not getting married, Ma,’ I repeated. ‘So please stop worrying.’
She seemed reassured and we both said goodnight – although it was day practically – and went to bed, I to my room and to the bed I shared with Sidney. I was unable to sleep, however, and lay for a long time thinking and worrying over the conversation with my mother. Evidently, one part of her dream remained intact. I was to become somebody. This had not changed, even though the rest of that dream seemed to have dwindled to virtually nothing.
I lay for a long time awake, not noting the thin grey light creeping into the room, nor the heavy breathing of my younger brother beside me, thinking only of the little likelihood there was of my achieving what she expected me to do. But mostly what I worried over was her fear of my getting married and I knew that what I wanted more than anything else in my life was to get married to Ruby. I must have fallen asleep at last.
Chapter Twenty-one
AUTUMN CAME TOO soon. There was no more Central Park for us. The band concerts and the outdoor dancing were over. So long as the crisp, bright, sunny weather stayed we could take long walks as a substitute. We both loved walking. Sundays we’d take the Dobbs Ferry across to the Palisades and hike there, among trees that had changed colour and were masses of brilliant reds and yellows and browns, with the Hudson River glittering below the cliffs.
We’d come back to Manhattan and have spaghetti and a glass of wine at a small Italian restaurant that was cheap and had good food and then, glowing with health and filled with our dinner, we’d go to the free concert at Stuyvesant High School, and I’d take her home and kiss her for the last time and go back to the Bronx, and this was our Sunday.
But then the chill winds came and the rain, and there was no more walking. The trees began to shed their leaves and turned into bare skeletons. We went to see our beloved gold willow one day after a rain, and it too stood stripped of all its glory, with thin branches filled with dead leaves lying in a sodden mass around the base of its trunk. It was the final blow, the end of what we used to call our golden boudoir.
Now we had to rely for our lovemaking on some charitable friends’ borrowed apartment, or Ruby’s home when her mother and brother were not there, with us always fearful that they might come in and interrupt us.
I had already been a visitor in Ruby’s home for dinner several times and had met her mother, a shy, quiet little woman, and her brother, who was equally shy and quiet. I used to catch Ruby’s mother glancing at me with obvious curiosity, and I don’t think that curiosity was ever fully satisfied.
Ruby told me when we were alone that her mother liked me but she could not understand how I made my living. Ruby had told her that I was a writer, but she did not understand what a writer was. And there was something else she had asked – if we were going to get married.
I was silent for a moment. This was a subject I had been trying to avoid. But I asked, ‘And what did you tell her?’
Ruby didn’t look at me as she answered. ‘I said perhaps.’
‘Is that what you wanted to say?’ I asked, knowing that I should not have gone any further, but wanting to hear what she thought just the same.
‘No,’ she said.
‘What did you want to say?’ I asked, persisting in that same direction still.
‘I wanted to say “Yes”.’
Only then was I silent, and I have never forgiven myself for that because it was what I would have wanted her to say, and I should have said it myself. But there rose in my mind all the objections I had been thinking of long before this to getting married. I had no job. I had no way of earning money. I was a long way from being a writer. But mostly it was my mother I was thinking of and the conversation we’d had that night when I’d assured her I was not going to get married.
I had thought of that often and there were nights when I had not slept thinking of it, nights when I wanted so desperately to be with Ruby, and other times when I was with her and so much in love with her and realised how much I wanted to marry her so that I could be with her all the time. Then the picture of my mother would come to me, with her sad eyes and her tears, and her whole unhappy life, and there would be a picture of my father with his dark sullen face and coarse voice, and I would ask myself, how could I abandon her to his mercy?
I was torn between one thing and the other, and that ambivalence continued all through the autumn and into the winter; and when the cold days came along with the snow there was less opportunity than ever for us to be together, and we were both miserable about it.
I remember one day we braved the bitter cold and a strong wind to meet at Brentano’s after her day’s work was over and to walk down Fifth Avenue to our favourite haunt, the Automat. Ruby was wearing her racoon coat that was quite fashionable in those days and I had an overcoat that was about ten years old and thinned out so that it gave little warmth.
We walked huddled close together and swerving every time a cold blast came. It was the rush hour. People were hurrying to get home. We did not notice them. We were busy with our talk. Its subject was marriage. Ruby had brought it up. Her mother was pressing her for an answer.
I saw it all only as hopeless. I didn’t see how we could do it. I repeated what I had said already. I had no job and no prospects of getting one, and if by some miracle I could get one I would have to support my parents.
But Ruby brushed all that aside. ‘Listen, Mr Gloom,’ she said, ‘I have a job and I have some money saved up in the bank and that would do for us, and I could help out your parents too. Believe it or not, I have two thousand dollars saved in the bank.’
‘Great,’ I said with a touch of bitterness. ‘You’re a rich woman. Congratulations. Only I wouldn’t make a very good kept man.’
‘You won’t be a kept man. You’ll be working too.’
‘At what?’
&n
bsp; ‘Your writing.’
I gave a short laugh. ‘The Great American Novel,’ I said with the same bitterness.
‘It doesn’t have to be the Great American Novel,’ she said, ‘just a plain ordinary novel, which wouldn’t be that ordinary, I’m sure, judging from all the encouragement you’ve had from Clifton Fadiman and those letters he keeps writing to you, and the one you got from Edward J. O’Brien …’
This was true. Clifton Fadiman had written me a note reminding me of my novel almost once a month since that first letter had arrived. And the letter from Edward J. O’Brien had further swelled my head. It told me that he had selected one of my short stories for inclusion in the honour roll of his next volume of Best Short Stories, which he published in England.
But my head wasn’t swollen that bitterly cold day and I was in no mood for praise. I wanted a job, not pats on the back. I told her that.
She grew silent for a moment, then said, ‘I don’t think you really want to marry me.’
‘Yes, I do,’ I protested.
‘No, you don’t,’ she said and burst into tears.
I walked along at her side feeling uncomfortable, aware that pedestrians, hurrying past us, were glancing curiously at us and at her crying. I put my arm round her shoulders, drew her closer to me and said, ‘I just don’t want you supporting me and my parents.’
‘That’s a good excuse, isn’t it?’ she said brokenly, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief that fluttered in the wind.
‘It’s not an excuse,’ I said. ‘It’s the truth.’ There was more to it than that, but I had never gone into it with her and I didn’t want to do that now.
The Dream Page 21
