The Golden Willow

by Harry Bernstein

  But I don't remember glooming over it, and both Ruby and I were quite pleased with Stella. I'm sure she was not more than eighteen, but she took care of the baby while Ruby was away, cooked our meals—quite well too—cleaned the house, and did everything else there was to do, all for forty dollars a month, the going rate at that time for a full-time live-in maid.

  No, there was nothing to gloom over. In fact, we were happier than ever with our baby. Ruby was one of those rare women who enjoyed both her job and her home. She rushed to get to the office on time, walking the distance with the zest she had for exercise, and she rushed to get back to her home and her baby, and she was always cheerful about everything.

  The only thing that troubled us was the soot. It came from all the surrounding factories, and it crept into the house and had to be cleaned off windowsills and furniture every day. Outside it was even worse. When we took Charlie out in the carriage we made sure that we had clean cloths to wipe off the soot that would soon settle on his face.

  I recall one time when I took Charlie out in the carriage on a Sunday afternoon to give Ruby a rest and let her sleep longer, and I sat on a bench next to a young couple with two children. I had seen them before this and had noticed then that they generally sat alone and did not get into conversations with other people. As a result, there was no greeting between us. But when I saw black spots settling on the baby's face I began searching in the carriage for the cloth to wipe his face, and there was none. I had forgotten to take it. The woman saw my problem and promptly offered me a tissue, which I took, thanking her. I did not know their names, and later asked someone who had lived in Knickerbocker a long time what their names were.

  What he said meant nothing to me then: Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. They would be in headlines later in every newspaper in the country, a couple charged with spying for the Soviet Union, found guilty in a sensational trial, and finally executed.

  But it was the soot that finally drove us away from Knickerbocker Village and from the city itself. We wanted fresher, cleaner air, and we would also need still more space for the second child we would have in the future. So after much soul-searching and examination of our finances, and overcoming the fear and responsibility of owning property, we bought a house in the part of Queens called Laurelton. It was a square brick house, very unattractive-looking, the same as all the other houses around it, but it had lots of room, and it proved to be a good home in the years that we would live there.

  OUR FIRST NIGHT IN THE HOUSE was disturbed by a loud voice awakening us, a voice that barked, “Mark time, march! Hup, hup. Forward march! Right, left, halt!”

  Startled, we got out of bed and looked out of the window. A full moon was out illuminating our backyard and the one next to us, and there we saw a short, stocky man dressed in a World War I uniform, marching up and down with a rifle over one shoulder. It was our next-door neighbor, Mr. Way, first name unknown.

  Afterward, we would discover that this same scene would be repeated by the same individual on every moonlit night, and from other neighbors we would learn that this had been going on ever since they all moved into the development a few years ago. No one ever spoke to him, even though he was more normal during the day. But he was always too busy to talk. His backyard was a jungle of tall weeds, and he worked among them on his hands and knees, pulling some of the weeds up and transplanting them in different places.

  At one time his wife and son had lived with him, and during that time there had been the noise of constant fighting, shouting, and screams; several times the police had to be called, and Mr. Way had been taken away. Eventually he returned, and soon the same thing would be repeated. But finally the wife and son left, and there was peace at night save on the moonlit nights when he began his military drills in the backyard.

  So this was the one big drawback to the brick bungalow we had bought. Certainly, however, we could not have complained about other neighbors, who became good friends of ours in the years that followed. Nor could we have found any fault with the scenic view from our front windows. Right across the street from us was a small vegetable farm that gave us an immense amount of pleasure.

  At one time, not too many years before we came there, the entire area had been farming country. Then the developers came along and bought them up one after another. The land was cheap and houses were in demand, and developers lost no time putting up their rows of look-alike brick houses. But the farm across the street remained because its owner, a tall, stooped, taciturn man, was a stubborn Dutchman by the name of Schmidt, who refused to give up what had been in his family for two or three generations. He rarely talked to any of us and I don't think he cared much for our presence, but we certainly liked his, and from our front windows or from the steps of our house we would watch him plowing the land in the early spring. He still used a horse to pull the plow, and when our children were young they delighted in watching him steer the tired old nag from furrow to furrow.

  Then came the pleasure of seeing the thin green shoots come up out of the earth in their straight rows. He had modernized enough to have a sprinkler system put in, so showers of water waved back and forth over the rows of growing vegetables. It was a never-ending feast for the eyes. It made us think that we were out in the country. And soon it was harvest time, and the same groups of foreign women appeared on the scene every year, wearing colored bandanas around their foreheads and dressed in colorful native costumes. They would kneel in the rows and pull out the vegetables, jabbering all the while in their native tongue, which could have been, we guessed, Czech or Hungarian. They laughed often, and they loved their work, we could see that, and they filled truck after truck with lettuce, tomatoes, celery, squash, and all the other things that were grown there.

  And then the earth was bare again, and the farmer came along with his tired old horse and plow and dug it up once more, leaving everything dark and dusty, and the winter would come along and the snow would turn it into a huge patch of white.

  Charlie had turned four and was already playing with other kids on the street when Adraenne was born. It was a cold, blustery February day, and as soon as the call came from the doctor telling me I had a daughter, I rushed to the hospital. Once again it had been a cesarean, and once again Ruby had come through it nicely. Now our family had grown to two children, and that made it complete. There would be no more additions to the family.

  And yet there was, in a way, because with our newborn child, whom we had named Adraenne—a combination of my mother's name, Ada, and Ruby's mother's name, Rachel—there came Aunt Lily again. She had been to see us often after Charlie had been born, and a strong attachment had formed between them. Now with a little baby girl in the family it was hard for her to tear herself away from us, and eventually she found a house nearby to rent. She and her husband became practically part of our family, and to our two children as they grew up she was their favorite aunt.

  My mother had died soon after Charlie was born, so she never got to see the house in Laurelton, but for the others in my family it became a popular place to visit. After all, it was out in the country, with a farm right across the street. My brother Joe and his wife, Rose, and their child, Rita, came, as did my brother Saul, wearing his yarmulke and tzitzit, with the fringes sticking out from the top of his pants, and with him his tall, cigarette-smoking wife, Estelle, and their son, Irwin. My sister Rose came too, still wearing her haughty expression, accompanied by her good-natured, perpetually smiling husband, Jim, whom you would have seen on weekdays in the window of a restaurant on Sixth Avenue wearing a chef's white uniform and tall white hat and carving a large, juicy roast beef with deft movements of the knife.

  Included in the gatherings were my kid brother, Sidney, and his wife, also named Rose, and their son, Ted. Sidney, the baby whose cries had awakened me once when I was ten years old and had stirred in me some small understanding of the mystery of birth, had grown to be a six-foot, hulking man and was a successful magazine publisher.

  I had b
uilt a grape arbor over the driveway in front of the garage, and it was here in the summertime that our family gatherings took place, with bunches of grapes of all different varieties hanging over our heads, and the aromas in our nostrils. It was pleasant, and there was much laughter and there was a good deal of reminiscing about the old days in England and Chicago, and soon I would be busy with the barbecuing of steak and hot dogs, and Ruby would be cutting up the cherry pies she had baked with the sour cherries I had pulled from the cherry tree in our backyard, and the coffee was brewing, and in the meantime a bottle of whiskey was being passed around, and Rose was casting warning looks at Jim because he was helping himself too often to the bottle and a flush was coming on his face.

  One time, I recall, when we had one of these gatherings, Jim suddenly disappeared. No one noticed it for a while, then Rose suddenly became aware that he was no longer sitting beside her, and she got up to look for him. We all joined in the search, and finally located Jim behind some bushes at the front of the house on his hands and knees searching for something. It turned out he had gone out there to get rid of the liquor he had consumed, and in doing so had lost his set of false teeth.

  We all began looking for them and eventually found them, and learned for the first time that Jim's engaging smile displayed teeth that were not his own.

  And yet it was Jim who, for the most part, watched out for Rose at our gatherings, and who cast warning looks at her when the topic Ruby and I dreaded came up: politics.

  Before these gatherings took place Ruby and I consulted with each other as to how we might prevent such a topic from being discussed, knowing quite well from past experience what such a topic could lead to. There were some sharp divisions in the family, ranging from extreme right-wing conservatism to left-wing radicalism. Rose had not given up the Communist beliefs that had cost her a job in Chicago. She was still an ardent Communist, and two of my brothers, Joe and Sidney, were violently anti-Communist, while the third was concerned only with religion.

  It was Aunt Lily's husband, Peo, however, who clashed most frequently with Rose. He was generally a silent man. He had been a construction worker once, a lather who was part of the process of building a plaster wall, and during this time he had been an active member of the IWW—Industrial Workers of the World—the most radical of all radical organizations. However, there had been vast changes in his life. There had been a revolution in the building industry that virtually did away with plaster walls, replacing them with drywall or Sheetrock, as it was called. Peo's trade became obsolete, and he was too old to learn a new one; as a result, he had been out of work for a number of years. To make matters worse, the IWW had fallen into decline and scarcely existed anymore, and Peo sat home most of the time smoking cigarettes. But he had lost none of his belief in the organization, and he blamed the Communist Party for its downfall. They had stolen the IWW's membership, he claimed, and helped the capitalists destroy their most potent enemy.

  It was a charge that Rose violently disputed, and it came up at one of the family gatherings under the grape arbor, with the two shouting at each other. Ruby and I had been helpless to prevent the subject of politics coming up, as it did so often among all people with the threat of war hanging over us and the country divided over our entry into it.

  It had begun with that, and there seemed to be general agreement that Hitler had to be stopped somehow; then Rose began to praise the Soviet Union for what it was doing to battle the Nazi armies, and this brought Sidney into the discussion, saying bitterly that if the Communists hadn't signed their infamous pact with Hitler before the war started there might not have been any war, and Rose telling him angrily he didn't know what the hell he was talking about. Now it was starting, and Ruby and I were casting worried looks at each other. Then Peo came out of his silence to say, “Maybe they got what they had coming to them.”

  Rose flashed an infuriated look at him. “Is that so?” she said. “Is that the official word of the IWW—assuming that organization is still alive?”

  Peo's look at her was equally murderous. “If it isn't,” he flashed back, “it's because you Commies killed it.”

  He'd used the word Commies, which was the worst kind of insult. So they were at it again, and there was no stopping them. They went at it hammer and tongs, only this time it became more than words, and when Rose accused the IWW of being a bunch of stupid bums who couldn't read or write, Peo took the piece of cherry pie Rose had given him before and threw it into her face. There was a violent uproar, with Jim holding Rose back from attacking Peo, and Aunt Lily holding Peo back, and everybody shouting, and the children looking on in fright, and Ruby and me helpless.

  It wasn't long after that day that our neighbor Mrs. Birnbaum came bursting unceremoniously into our house shouting at the top of her voice, “The Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor!”

  Ruby and I looked at each other. The same thought was in our minds: I would be drafted. I was physically fit. It wouldn't be long before even married men with children would be drafted, and I would be no exception. Soon enough all this took place, and to make matters still worse, word came that Ruby's brother, Morris, who had been drafted despite his mental condition, had been wounded in a battle on Saipan.

  When we received the news about Morris, Ruby nearly collapsed. This was the second time I had seen her like that; the first time had been when her mother died suddenly of a heart attack four years earlier. Only this time it was worse because of the shadow that had been hanging over us and the fact that I myself might be called into the army.

  I tried to reassure her. “I doubt very much if I'll be called,” I said. “They rarely take married men with children.”

  But I was wrong. One day a letter beginning “Greetings” came, summoning me to Grand Central Station for my physical examination. I had to be there at eight in the morning. It took an hour to get there, so I was up at six, and Ruby was up with me, and she was trying to hide the way she was feeling. I had been told that if you passed the exam you were inducted immediately into one of the military forces. You did not go home. So this could be the last time I saw her and the children. It was not with pleasant feelings that I ate the breakfast Ruby made for me, and I'm sure she was repressing tears. This could be the first time in our married life that we would be separated for an extended time. The early morning light was thin and gray. I had not wanted her to turn on the light. I did not want her to see my face. She ate a little with me, then it was time to go.

  I went into the kids' rooms. Both were asleep. I bent down and kissed them, and Ruby came to the door with me. I took her in my arms, perhaps for the last time, and felt her warmth against me, and when I kissed her I felt the wetness in her eyes. I turned back once as I walked from the house, heading for the bus. She was still standing there in the doorway. In the thin light her figure was shadowy, but I saw her wave to me and blow a kiss. I blew one back at her.

  THE ENTIRE HUGE WAITING ROOM at Grand Central Station had been taken over by the military for the physical examinations, and it was packed with men when I arrived. Some were already standing in the line that had to pass through a battery of doctors, and they were all naked. I was directed to a room where I could take my clothes off, and then I came out and joined the line at the end, though it was not the end for long. In my hand I carried a form that listed all the various parts of the body to be examined and that would be checked off as good or bad by the examining doctors, who sat at desks in a long assembly line.

  The line moved slowly, and the hours dragged on. I finally reached the first doctor. He tested my heart, my lungs, and my pulse, and he checked these off with one of the two pens he had in readiness. One had red ink, the other blue ink. If it was checked in blue, it was favorable; the red was unfavorable. For the next hour as I moved slowly from one doctor to another my chart showed all blue checks. And then came the eye doctor.

  He couldn't have been much older than I was, and he didn't seem to be in an agreeable mood. He barked, “Look at the c
hart and read it off to me.” I had been troubled lately with watery eyes, and they were watering then, so I was having a bit of trouble reading the chart. I told this to the doctor, but he brushed it aside irritably and said, “Go on reading.”

  I did, stumbling my way through it, and managed to complete everything except the last line, which was in very tiny letters.

  “Keep trying,” he insisted.

  I did, and guessed my way through haltingly. He stopped me and asked abruptly, “What kind of work do you do?”

  “I'm a reader,” I said.

  “A what?”

  I'd had trouble with this before. Who knows what a reader is? I explained to him what I did, reading books mostly for a moving picture company to determine their cinematic possibilities.

  “How many books do you read in a week?” he asked.

  “An average of five,” I said.

  He stared at me. “Five books a week?” he said with a touch of incredulity. “You've been reading five books a week? For how long?”

  “I've been doing it for about seven years,” I said.

  His stare grew wider. He shook his head several times, then bent over my chart with a pen in his hand. The pen that he wrote with was the one with red ink.

  I came finally to the end of the line. It had taken all morning and well into the afternoon to get through all the examining doctors. Now I had reached the desk where the last doctor sat. He was the judge. He read the chart, and we held our breath as he did so. There were two rubber stamps in front of him, one of which would say ACCEPTED, the other REJECTED. Which one would he use? My fate was in this man's hand.

  I watched him as he studied my chart. He seemed to be at it for a long time, as if he could not make up his mind. I saw his eyes fasten on the note in red ink that the eye doctor had scribbled. And then with my heart thumping I saw his hand reach toward the two stamps. It touched one and then it touched the other. He could still not decide. Finally, his hand clasped over the one on the left. He crashed it down on the chart. In big letters it said REJECTED.