The Dream

by Harry Bernstein

  These were good times for a lot of people. There were more cars than ever out on the streets. New roads were being built to accommodate them and in the Loop there was already congestion. They were buying radios too and you could hardly go past a doorway without hearing the squawking sounds coming from them. And people were packing the movie theatres to hear the new talking pictures that so amazed and fascinated everyone.

  My brother Joe and Uncle Saul were having no difficulty selling their magazine subscriptions, and Uncle Saul seemed to have forgotten completely his plan to study law, while Joe no longer spoke of becoming a journalist. The two went from door to door, knocking and telling whoever opened it that they were working their way through college, and – as Uncle Saul put it – their hands grew tired writing orders for Colliers, Liberty, Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, Popular Mechanics … you name it we’ve got it, said Uncle Saul, laughing.

  Joe bought another suit – he had one already – but he could afford a second one and my mother did not object, although my father grumbled and wanted to know what the bloody ’ell anybody needed two suits for. Joe paid no attention to him. Joe was getting on, he’d soon be twenty, he was smoking a pipe and going out with girls. Then, oddly, he began to take weekend trips to Davenport, Iowa. We soon found out that it was a girl he went out there to see. He had met her through some friends when she was visiting them and he was in love with her – and what was more, he was going to marry her.

  It came as a shock to my mother. I recall it was an evening after we’d had dinner and he was preparing to go out when he told her this. I don’t think my mother had ever recovered fully from the marriage of my sister to the Christian boy across the street when we were in England, so the first thing that entered her mind should not have been a surprise. ‘Is she Jewish?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Joe.

  I saw the relief cross my mother’s face. But, this hurdle overcome, there were other questions to ask. How old was she? What kind of family did she have? What did her father do? Were they rich, poor, or what? Why did they live in Davenport, Iowa of all places? And what kind of place did they live in? Did they have a parlour? Was there a piano in the parlour? How many were there in the family? Oh, there were a million questions and Joe, growing more and more impatient, anxious to get to his friends, tried to answer them all.

  Finally, my mother asked, ‘Why don’t you bring her here to dinner?’

  Joe hesitated. I know what he was thinking. My father. How would he behave? You never could tell. But reluctantly he said, ‘All right. Next time she comes here to visit her friend I’ll bring her.’

  We waited four weeks before that happened and he brought Rose to the house. Yes, Rose. Another Rose in the family. It would make three Roses: my sister, my aunt – married to Uncle Barney – and the new one.

  She was shy and rather pretty, with large dark eyes and dark hair, and she was wearing a blue dress with short, flouncy sleeves that showed slender white arms. She sat next to Joe at the table and seemed a little afraid of us. My father had barely acknowledged the introduction when she first arrived, and he sat at his usual place at the end of the table and as far away from us as he could get, with his head bent over his plate and silent throughout the early part of the conversation. He soon broke that silence, saying roughly, ‘Pass those pickles.’

  His words were addressed to our visitor. The jar of pickles was in front of her. She was startled by the command and the roughness of the voice, and fumbled as she reached for the jar, causing it to tip over and spill juice and pickles over the tablecloth.

  Then my father barked, ‘What’s the matter, don’t you know how to pass some pickles?’

  Joe became angry and said, ‘You don’t have to speak to her like that.’

  ‘Who the bloody ’ell asked you?’ my father said, equally angry.

  Joe, who was usually in deadly fear of my father, found the courage to speak up. ‘You’ve got no right to talk to her like that,’ he said.

  My mother, who had jumped up at once to clear the mess off the table, tried to quieten things down, waving a warning to Joe, but the damage had been done. Joe had answered back and there was no stopping my father now. He sprang up and lashed out with the back of his hand, whacking Joe across the face. Joe let out a yell of pain and jumped up with a hand to his face and ran out. Rose, looking bewildered for a moment, got up and followed him.

  My mother was furious and turned on my father immediately, something she never did in front of us. ‘You animal,’ she said. ‘Did you have to do that? Couldn’t you keep your temper in for once? The girl’s your visitor. She’s going to be your daughter-in-law. Did you have to carry on like that in front of her?’

  ‘Who gives a goddam who she is,’ he shouted back. ‘And who needs her for a daughter-in-law. If she can’t pass a jar of pickles without spilling them on the table she shouldn’t be anybody’s daughter-in-law. Let her stay home. And watch out I don’t give you a crack in the face.’

  I have given a lot of thought to that episode and wondered if my father didn’t bring it about deliberately in the hope of breaking up the romance before it reached marriage. I had seen his face tighten when my mother first broke the news to him that Joe was planning to get married. For it would mean a loss of income to the house and he would have to make up for it. I am sure this was in his mind that afternoon and the pickles were a secondary consideration.

  It did nothing, however, to break up the romance between my brother and the girl from Davenport, Iowa. But Joe had not told us everything. There was something he had been keeping from us, for my mother’s sake, knowing how it would hurt her. It came out at last.

  Rose and her entire family were moving to New York. The father was a self-taught auto mechanic and he had seen great prospects in New York, a city where there were more of these newfangled cars than anywhere else in the world. Henry Ford was turning them out by the thousands every day, and the rich were buying big limousines, which broke down often, and men who knew how to fix them were in great demand.

  There was no time for a wedding now. Joe would go to New York with them and the wedding would take place there.

  Yes, indeed, it was a blow to my mother. Once more she was being deprived of a wedding for one of her children. The first time had been in England when my sister had married Arthur Forshaw in secrecy. And now it was Joe. It would be too expensive for her to go to New York. She would have to be satisfied with photos of the wedding. She got over her disappointment. It would be a good thing for Joe, she thought.

  My father, however, cursed. He was thinking mostly of the $10 a week that Joe had contributed to the family. That money would be lost. He called Joe a bastard, a thief, a dog, a piece of dung.

  My mother plugged her ears with her fingers and ran out of the room. We had been eating dinner and were at the table. I remained sitting there with my eyes fixed on him and hatred in them. His eyes met mine and the hatred was returned. Neither of us said anything and I got up and left the table.

  But my father’s bitterness was not over. There remained still more to deal with, and this time he did not curse and his actions were strange to me.

  This time it was Saul. We woke up one morning on a Sunday and he was not in the house. His bed had not been slept in. It was not unusual for him to come home late on a night after we had all gone to sleep. He worked overtime at the mail order house often, sometimes late into the night. But he was always there in the morning, saying prayers as soon as he awoke.

  ‘Where is he?’ my mother asked, perturbed. She had gone from room to room looking.

  Even my father, even Rose, were looking, going from room to room futilely, as if he might be hiding under a bed or a sofa.

  Clearly, he had not come home last night. He had not eaten any of the food my mother always left for him on those overtime nights. Where, then, was he? She was thrown at once into a frenzy of fear. Nothing could have been more terrible to her than the loss of one of her chil
dren. She became distraught and it was then that my father’s actions surprised me. Ordinarily, he would have been totally indifferent to the welfare of any one of us. If it had been a sickness, a mishap of some sort, he would have shown no compassion and would have distanced himself immediately from the situation. But now he was clearly concerned and after our search was over he announced grimly, ‘I’m going to the police.’

  It was a logical thing to do and showed some caring within him. Chicago was a city full of crime and for those who were out at night it was especially dangerous. Saul could easily have met with it on his way home late at night. My mother took to weeping. She rarely broke down like that.

  Sooner than we had expected, my father came hurrying back from the police station. His face was dark and angry. He had to go back to the police station, but he needed something. ‘Give me one of Saul’s tsitsis,’ he said.

  My mother stared at him through her tears. ‘What for?’ she asked.

  His anger became directed at her. ‘Don’t ask so many questions,’ he said. ‘Just give it to me, the tsitsis.’ Then he explained. ‘The goddam police,’ he said, ‘they asked me all sorts of questions. How big he was, how old he was, what size shoes he wore, what kind of clothes. And when I told them he wore tsitsis, a prayer shawl, they’d never heard of them – they’re Irish, so how should they know anything? So they wanted to see one and put it in the report they’re making out. So give me the damned thing and let me get this over with. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life on this business.’

  Clearly, he had lost much of his concern, and my mother lost no time taking out a fresh tsitsis from the drawer where she kept several of them, all freshly cleaned, folded and put away carefully.

  My father needn’t have hurried and my mother needn’t have been so upset. Saul was quite safe, and in these moments while the police were making out their missing persons report – and calling up a rabbi to find out how you spelled tsitsis – Saul was sitting in the boxcar of a railroad freight train heading west, although it wasn’t until we received a card from him that was postmarked Provo, Utah, telling us that he was safe and sound that we knew what had happened to him.

  We didn’t know everything. I learned about it from him many years later, when we were both fully grown men and were talking one day and going back over the past with the amused tolerance that age gives you.

  He had been thinking of running away from home for a long time, he told me. I did recall that he was generally very silent among us and said little about himself. Joe was always communicative about his life, telling us of his experiences when he knocked on a door or rang a bell, and never knowing who would come to answer it. Once a bulldog leaped at him and would have torn him to bits if the owner hadn’t been right behind to call off the dog. Once a young housewife in a negligee invited him in to have a coffee with her. That was all Joe told us, but it was enough to indicate what had happened after the coffee.

  Saul, on the other hand, never spoke about his work or the people he worked with. It was something that he kept inside himself, tormenting him, the jeers that he got from his fellow workers over the yarmulke he wore and the tsitsis, and how practical jokers would sneak up behind him and pull at the fringes. But worse than all that was the sin he was committing by working on Saturday. Especially that, the day he was supposed to be in the synagogue praying.

  It had been plaguing him the whole time he had been working there, and he kept it to himself until it was no longer possible to do so. He knew as he entered the big grey building of the mail order house that he could not keep this up much longer. The sin of working on a Saturday was in itself becoming too heavy to bear. On these mornings he always entered the plant with a prayer on his lips, asking God’s forgiveness for working on the holy day, but there was more than that troubling him, a premonition almost of something going to happen.

  The day began as all the other days did, with the mail clerk dumping his portion of the orders that had arrived by mail, and had passed through various other hands before reaching his, then the filling of these orders and going from bin to bin and shelf to shelf where the various products were kept, and the wrapping and packing of these goods.

  The work was monotonous and tiresome, and he had developed a strong dislike for it. The hours seemed to drag, and he grew hungry and it seemed as if the lunch bell would never ring. He brought his own lunch from home. He would never have eaten the food in the plant cafeteria, as so many of them did. My mother prepared a sandwich for him that was strictly kosher and that morning, around eleven, that sandwich was very much on his mind and the hunger he felt could very well have contributed to what was soon going to take place.

  It was about this time that he picked up his next order. As a rule, customers sent in their orders on the form that was in the catalogue, but occasionally they came in the form of letters. This one came on a postcard. It was for BVDs, the popular men’s underwear in those days, and Saul was about to fill it when he glanced at the other side. The card was from Colorado and the picture showed a scene of the Rocky Mountains.

  It was a fascinating and awesome sight, and Saul gazed at it spellbound. He had heard of the West and its beauty, and here it was with all its majesty and strength. It carried him away momentarily from the prison of his surroundings and gave him a yearning that he’d never had before, to be in a place like that with all its freedom and beauty.

  Suddenly, he felt a tap on the shoulder. It was one of the foremen who went around checking on the order fillers. ‘What are you supposed to be doing?’ he asked. ‘Working or looking at pictures?’ He was a thin fellow with quick, sharp eyes, and he carried a notepad and pencil around with him and jotted down the names of those he found doing something wrong.

  Saul had never been questioned before and he was in no mood for it now. He snapped back his answer: ‘What’s wrong with looking at a picture?’

  It got him extra punishment. ‘I’m giving you five extra demerits beside the two you got for loafing on the job,’ the foreman said and wrote in his notebook.

  Ten demerits total got you fired. Saul went back to work, boiling with anger, and five minutes later he felt his yarmulke being snatched off his head. This was not the first time it had happened and most of those times it had been Callaghan, a tall Irish fellow with a constant grin on his face who’d been the tormentor. It was Callaghan again with the same grin on his face holding the yarmulke in one hand and about to throw it to someone else, who’d keep on passing it round until Saul was able to rescue it.

  This time, however, he did not go on the chase, but struck out with a fist and caught a surprised Callaghan on the nose. However, he was quick to recover, and the fight was on. They were both swinging fists and there was yelling among the order pickers around them, and foremen were making their way quickly over to the scene with notebooks and pencils poised ready for action.

  The same one who had caught Saul reading the postcard was the first to arrive on the scene. He wasted little time and he didn’t bother to write anything in his notebook. ‘Report to the office,’ he said.

  Saul knew what that meant. He knew also that of the two he was being singled out for extreme punishment. It meant being fired. Callaghan was being let off with five demerits.

  Saul didn’t go to the office. He was burning with resentment and sick of the whole place, and that picture postcard was haunting him. It was still early, but he didn’t go home. He wandered about a bit, trying to pluck up courage to do what he knew he really wanted to do. Then, finally, he headed for the freight railroad yard, which was not far from where he was. And there he was able to find a train that was headed west, and he had no problem boarding an empty boxcar and was soon on his way to a journey that would take him all over the United States and would last five years, during which time among common hoboes and vagrants of all sorts he never gave up wearing his yarmulke and tsitsis, and the fight with Callaghan was only one of many that took place in his wanderings.

  Chapte
r Thirteen

  SO NOW THERE were just three of us left, my sister, my baby brother, who was no longer a baby but a growing kid of seven in the second grade at school, and myself, seventeen, soon to graduate from Lane Tech and go on to college; and of the three of us Rose was the only one working and bringing money into the house.

  She did this regularly without fail, every Saturday, handing a $10 bill to my mother silently, never talking to her, still the embittered girl from England who had been cheated out of her parlour, still filled with hatred. She must have been around twenty-three then, a strange girl whom we hardly knew. She locked herself in her room as soon as she had finished her dinner after coming home from work. Only occasionally did she come out and bang away on the piano for a few minutes, then go back into her room. She had no friends. She knew no one.

  I think my mother felt a great deal of pity for her. She tried hard to break down that wall between them, speak to her, bring her into the life of the family, but always to no avail. Her feelings towards Rose were also mixed with a great deal of gratitude, for she knew that the $10 came out of a meagre salary and left her with very little for herself. Without it she would have had a hard time making ends meet. My father, true to his old self, gave her only a small portion of what he earned, and after cursing both Joe and Saul for what he called abandoning us – ‘those rotten, ungrateful bastards’ – made no attempt to make up the loss of income my mother had suffered.

  She didn’t say anything. She managed with what she had. She knew how to manage. She would walk for miles to find a street market where food was sold at bargain prices and she would come home walking slowly with a heavily loaded bag in either hand.

  The days of ‘wealth’ were over, apparently. But she did not give up. There was still me. And after me there would be Sidney. But Sidney was far off. Here I was about to graduate from high school, then go to college and become something. My father didn’t share that feeling. He saw no reason why I shouldn’t go to work. Right now, when money was needed. Never mind graduations. Never mind college. He glowered darkly at me. But I was no longer afraid of him. I glowered back and, I must say, there was something brewing between the two of us.