The Golden Willow

by Harry Bernstein

  You see, I never let on that the book I was mailing out this time was the same one that I had mailed the month before. They assumed it was another book, and that I was a prolific writer who turned one out every month or so. It was another department at the post office that handled the book when it was returned from the publisher, so they had no way of knowing, and I saw no reason why I should disillusion them, and perhaps kill my friend's ambition to become a writer. I let him go on saying “Wow!”

  Had I been in a better state of mind I could at least have gotten a smile out of it, but I was in no condition to be amused by anything. Despite all my determination not to let possible rejections hurt me, as they had done in my earlier writing efforts, I found they still hurt, and perhaps even more keenly than before because now I had to contend with something that I had not had to deal with before. It was old age.

  Old age can be depressing in itself, with all its physical and emotional impairments, and with the knowledge constantly hanging over you that you are approaching the end of your life. My walking had reached the stage where I could not take a step without holding on to something. I was having trouble doing the things that were necessary to keep me alive: cook a decent meal, keep the house clean, shop for groceries, do the laundering. These things had always been done for me, but now I had to do them for myself, and often couldn't. I needed help, but I could not afford a housekeeper. Ruby and I had had a modest but comfortable income. When she died I lost a part of that. I was left with enough for myself but not enough to be able to afford someone to come in and help with all the things that had to be done.

  I had been struggling with all of this ever since I began to live alone. Adraenne came every other week to stay with me for two days, and before she left she cooked enough meals to last for several days. Charles and his wife did much for me, insisting that I stay with them in their home in Pennsylvania for an occasional weekend. But it was not enough, and there were so many things for me to do it's a wonder I had time to write my book. And yet I did, though I did my writing during the night when I was unable to sleep.

  And then soon there was another reason for my not being able to sleep: I woke up one night soaking wet. I was horrified when I realized what it was. I could not remember anything like that happening to me before, even when I was a child. Perhaps it had happened then often enough, as it did to all young children, but I could not possibly remember any of it, and I had escaped the miseries of some children as they grew up with bed-wetting.

  I recall being so bewildered by what had happened that I simply did not know what to do. I recall getting out of bed and standing cold and shivering and wet, and my gaze fell on a photograph of Ruby that hung on a wall, a photograph of her I had taken from the balcony of a hotel when we were in New Orleans. It had been drizzling that morning, and she held a red umbrella over her head. I remember looking at her and saying miserably, “Ruby, what shall I do?”

  So I was in a state a lot of people my age are in, and the continuous rejection of my book did not help. It occurred to me at this time that since my story was set in England, an English publisher might be more inclined to look at it favorably. When my curlyhaired friend told me what the cost of mailing it to England was, I hesitated. It was an awful lot, and nine chances out of ten it would be sent back and the money would be wasted. Finally, I decided to gamble.

  Then one day several weeks later I received a telephone call, and my whole life changed.

  Chapter Sixteen

  1960

  THESE WERE TURBULENT TIMES IN AMERICAN HISTORY. IT WAS JUST after the McCarthy era and the mad hunt for suspected Communists, the blacklisting of famous Hollywood actors and writers, with the Cold War heating up to the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, and then, in 1962, the Cuban missile crisis. The young president John F. Kennedy had said with a smiling face, declaring, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Then the smiling face was blotted out of existence as he and his beautiful wife were driving in an open touring car in a parade through the streets of Dallas, Texas, and rifle shots rang out, and the face slumped to one side and the beautiful wife screamed and tried to scramble out of the car.

  Events came one after another in rapid and deadly succession. It was like a roaring sea in a tidal wave that swept over everything on land, leaving death and destruction in its wake. The Vietnam War was raging, and angry crowds were demonstrating in the streets in protest against the war, and young men were fleeing to Canada to escape being drafted. The new president, Lyndon Johnson, was having a difficult time but stubbornly persisted in his war efforts, until finally he gave up and refused to run for a second term.

  And in the election that followed, the assassinated president's younger brother, Robert, came back to political life and ran for the office, only to be gunned down in a San Francisco restaurant. There was no end to all the turmoil. Now it was the sixties, with freedom marches, sit-ins by blacks at restaurant counters demanding to be served just as white people were, and Martin Luther King, Jr. making his great speech in the huge Washington demonstration, “I have a dream …” Then he too was shot and killed, by a sniper hidden in bushes across the street from the motel where King was staying. Riots followed, with buildings set on fire by infuriated blacks.

  The whole country, it seemed, was on fire. At the time all these things were happening our two children, no longer children now but a young man and young woman, were in college, Charlie at Boston University, Adraenne at Vassar.

  One day I received a telephone call from a man I did not know. He gave me his name, but I had never heard it before.

  “What is it you want?” I asked.

  “I have a message from your daughter, Adraenne,” he said.

  “What do you mean, you have a message?” I said. “Can't she give me her message herself?”

  “No, she can't,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because she's in jail.”

  I had to pause a minute to take this in. Then I said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “She's been arrested along with a number of others. They were in the freedom march in Birmingham, Alabama, and police grabbed a number of them and put them in jail. I was in the march too, but I was lucky. They didn't arrest me. Adraenne asked me to get in touch with you and tell you what happened.”

  I was utterly bewildered at first. My daughter in a freedom march in Birmingham, Alabama, and now in a jail there when she was supposed to be at Vassar College attending classes?

  “I don't get this,” I said. “How'd she ever get involved with this business, and who are you, anyway?”

  “Adraenne has been a member of the Vassar freedom fighters for some time, and she was in the Vassar contingent that came to the march. I'm a member too, and I'm a student at the University of Chicago.”

  So that was it. That was one of perhaps many other things she hadn't told us about. My kids were growing up, all right. I talked with Ruby about it, not knowing what to do next, and she saw no reason to get disturbed over it; she said she'd probably have done the same thing herself at her age if there had been such a thing as freedom marches. Just the same, she thought it would be a good idea to try to get her out of jail as soon as possible.

  I called the Birmingham police department, and a gruff voice with a strong southern accent spoke to me. He was Sergeant somebody or other, but he knew all about the arrests of the freedom marchers and made it quite clear that he didn't like any of them. As for my daughter, if she was one of them, she deserved to be where she was, and if I was so concerned over her, why didn't I keep her home where she belonged instead of letting her come to another city and stir up trouble?

  For a few moments, while all this was coming out of him, I could not get a word in, and his gruff voice went on nonstop.

  Finally, I was able to say, “All I want is to know how I can get her out of there. If there's bail involved, I'll be glad to put it up.”

  “You better talk t
o your lawyer about that,” he said. “As far as I'm concerned, she's gonna stay here forever.”

  It wasn't very encouraging, and Ruby began to feel worried. I did talk to my lawyer, and he in turn referred me to a lawyer who specialized in civil rights matters. Her name was Bella Abzug. I had never heard of her then, but she would be in the newspapers often in the coming years, in the forefront of the civil rights struggle, eventually elected to Congress, and famous for the wide-brimmed hats she wore. At the time she lived in a brownstone house in downtown Manhattan, and it was her office also. I went there to see her, a large woman with a harsh voice that had an East Side accent and a perpetual frown on her not very attractive face.

  We spoke only for a few minutes in the crowded little room that was her office, with frequent interruptions of the telephone, and she promised to look into the matter and see what could be done to get my daughter released. Before I left she asked for a retainer of two hundred dollars. I wrote a check and left, feeling more uncertain and worried than when I had come.

  “We might have to look for another lawyer,” I said to Ruby. “I'm not sure about this woman.”

  But the next day Adraenne was released, and I'll never know whether it was through Bella Abzug's efforts or it would have happened anyway because the following day all the others who had been arrested were released. But Adraenne was out of jail, and we were relieved. However, it was quite clear to us from that day on that our children were no longer under our control. They were grown-ups, with minds and wishes of their own. As soon as Adraenne had graduated from Vassar, she no longer wanted to live at home, but made a home of her own, a dark little room in a tenement house on the Lower East Side of New York, among noise and filth. We knew little of her life and saw her only occasionally, and later on she moved to California to live in similar surroundings in San Francisco, and we saw her even less often then, until finally she returned to New York to live and become a nurse practitioner, and one day she introduced us to her husband. His name was Walter, and he played the trumpet, and occasionally got a gig with a band. He was about fifteen years older than Adraenne and had a beard that was beginning to show gray; he was African American, and had a good sense of humor and laughed often.

  “It's what she wants,” Ruby said, defending the choice our daughter had made, one that I did not particularly care for. “She's happy with him and that's all that matters.”

  As for Charles, he did not wait long to get married. Before graduating from Boston University he went out to Iowa to take a summer course in photojournalism, and he came back with Ruth and announced they were going to be married. We were stunned: He was too young, he hadn't even graduated from college yet. We weren't even sure we liked Ruth. She was from a small town in Iowa where her father owned a drugstore, and that part was all right, but she seemed cold and distant toward us. Probably this was due to the fact that she sensed our disapproval of the marriage. She stayed with us for a few days, then suddenly one day left, Charlie with her. They got married, and it made us realize even more how little we had to say about our children now.

  But the marriage seemed to work out. Charles graduated and got a job on the staff of a McGraw-Hill trade magazine, and a year later Steven was born. So our family was growing. We now had a grandchild. Two more were added later, though these two were adoptions, a Korean girl named Susan and a little black girl from Harlem, Caroline. The marriage seemed to be lasting until Charlie met Ann at the firm where he then worked as a public relations manager, and soon he and Ruth were divorced and now we had a new daughter-in-law, and from this second marriage came two more grandchildren, Pete and Kate.

  It took still another divorce and a third marriage and divorce before Charlie finally met Marcy, his fourth and last wife, in whom he found the soul mate he had been seeking, an attractive woman with a kind heart and a good sense of humor.

  Throughout all this period of Adraenne's and Charlie's struggles to adjust to the uncertainties and difficulties of life and to achieve what is called settling down, Ruby and I experienced the only upsets in what otherwise could have been a perfect life. But it seemed to be all over finally, and we were now alone in our ugly brick bungalow that had served us so well during all these years.

  We were in our sixties. My hair, what was left of it, was completely gray. Ruby's soft dark hair remained virtually untouched, and her face showed no signs of aging. Not to my eyes. We were as much in love with each other as ever, and perhaps now that we were alone together it was even stronger.

  But I felt a need for change. By this time I was tired of editing Myron's skinny moneymaking magazines and having to listen to his domestic problems. I needed a rest from it all. I was now eligible for Social Security, and with both of us working we had managed to save some money over the years and Ruby would have a pension, all of which would enable us to live comfortably on a modest income if we retired.

  When I brought the subject up to her she seemed unhappy about it. She liked her job; she would hate to give it up. I argued with her. I pointed out that we could sell our house and buy a new one in one of the retirement communities that were springing up everywhere these days.

  But again she seemed troubled, and perhaps this was her major reason for not wanting to agree to my plan: the neighborhood was changing. Many of the old-time residents had left, and their homes had been bought largely by blacks; this was due to a great extent to the blockbusting tactics of Realtors who went from door to door among the old-timers urging them to sell their home before the influx of newcomers would bring real estate values down to nothing. Ruby resented it and refused to be frightened; I felt pretty much the same as she did, and it was for that reason we held out much longer than most people did, until finally we both agreed that retiring would be best for us, along with a change of environment: a new home, a new place, new friends, new everything. It began to seem more and more desirable, and finally we did it.

  We sold our home to a young Haitian couple, who reminded us a little of ourselves when we were their age and bought our first home. They were a smiling couple with one child, and this would be their first home. As they went through the rooms looking here and there, awe and wonder showed on their faces. They saw no ugliness in its architecture, only beauty and probably the fulfillment of the dream we ourselves had once had when we lived in our furnished room.

  Ruby and I felt glad we were turning our house over to them, and in the meanwhile we had been looking for a new place to live. We had scoured all the so-called leisure villages, seeking the one we thought would be best for us. We even traveled to Florida to look at Century Village there, and were tempted by the thought of being able to escape the cold in the winters, but finally were discouraged by the barracks-like look of the house. We drove up to a place in Connecticut. It was built on sloping hilly ground, and the architecture here appealed to us considerably. All the houses were different from what we had seen before, and there was one model in particular that interested me. It had two floors, with the bedrooms upstairs, and I liked that particularly.

  But Ruby had a more practical mind than I and saw things ahead that I failed to see. “Darling,” she said, “don't you think you'll ever get old?”

  I was puzzled. I couldn't see any reason for her asking that. “What's that got to do with the price of cheese?” I asked.

  “A lot. When people get old they might have some difficulty climbing a flight of stairs every night to go to bed. And the terrain of this place is hilly, so if you want to take a walk and you're in your seventies or eighties—if we should live that long—you might have some trouble.”

  She was right. I'm glad now that I listened to her. The two of us lived well past our eighties, and walking was one of the things we enjoyed doing most; the place we finally chose to live in, Greenbriar, was in a flat area that made it easy to walk.

  Greenbriar was in south-central New Jersey, and we were drawn there by the fact that the houses were all separate from one another and were on fairly large plots.
Most of the others we had seen were in attached groups and had an institutional look to them. The Greenbriar houses varied in appearance and gave a feeling of individuality that we liked.

  But what really made up our minds about buying a house there was the fact that all the streets were named after famous writers of the past, and when we were told there was one available on Dickinson Road—named after our favorite poet, Emily Dickinson—we grabbed it.

  So there came a day at last when we locked the door of that ugly brick bungalow for the last time and got into our car to drive to the new home. As we left I could not help feeling a pang of regret. It had served us well in all the thirty-five years we had been there. We had done a lot of living in it. We had raised two children there, and a lot of pets—cats, dogs, chickens, hamsters (including the pregnant one that had only a short life in the lining of my car), parakeets, goldfish, and probably other creatures that I have forgotten.

  As we drove off I caught a last glimpse of the piles of garbage in black bags that we had assembled after clearing out the attic, the basement, the garage, and all the drawers and cupboards, and again I could not help feeling a pang of something deep inside me. Those bags contained the memorabilia, the souvenirs, of all the years we had spent there: the first scribbled drawings of our children, the high school and college graduation programs for both of them, the concert and theater programs that Ruby always took home from the theater and stored endlessly in her dresser drawer, snapshots that had faded, maps that we had used in our travels, bills that were marked paid, pots and pans that we no longer needed or were worn out, and all sorts of things that we had stored for sentimental reasons but now were just garbage and would be taken away by the city garbage wagon and disposed of forever.