The Dream

by Harry Bernstein

  I thought of all these things as I sat there staring at the editor, who seemed to be looking back at me with a touch of sympathy in his eyes. I was wondering what I was going to do now, whether I could ever attempt to write another novel, what I could do to take its place, when that look I saw in the editor’s eyes must have given me a burst of inspiration. I was going to tell him that it was perfectly all right, that I appreciated his interest in me and enough of it to actually call me into his office to tell me personally about it, but instead found myself blurting out, ‘Do you know where I could get a job?’

  Anyone who had a job in those Depression days would have been asked that question a dozen times a day. Yet he seemed startled. ‘Are you looking for a job?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, very much,’ I said.

  He thought a moment, then shook his head. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know of any right now,’ he said. ‘But if something comes along I’ll let you know.’

  This was the stock answer I had been getting from people for the several years I had been looking for a job. I gave up. I shook his hand. I thanked him for his interest in me. I said, ‘Goodbye, Mr Fadiman.’

  Just as I reached the door, I heard him call out, ‘Just a minute.’

  I halted and turned round.

  ‘Do you read much?’ he asked.

  Did I read much? I stared at him. Did a duck swim much? ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I read a great deal.’

  ‘Then hold on,’ he said. ‘I might have something for you.’

  He picked up the telephone and a new era began in my life.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  TO READ BOOKS and get paid for it! It sounded like a pipe dream. Too good to be true. I thought of that as I raced up to the story office of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on Broadway, where Clifton Fadiman’s younger brother, Robert, was story editor. There was no time to be lost.

  I got to the building in ten minutes, breathless, went up in an elevator to the twenty-fifth floor, walked along a corridor lined on either side with doors marked with various departments of the movie studio until I came to the one that said ‘Story Office’. Inside, I sat on a bench for a while with several other people until the receptionist told me to go in.

  Robert Fadiman resembled his brother only slightly. He was a fidgety little man with none of the calm, urbane manner and cultured accent of Clifton. Seated at a large desk piled with books and manuscripts of various sorts, some in boxes, some bound in covers of different colours, among them several long, thick strips of galley proofs, he grinned at me and twisted about restlessly, crossing and uncrossing his legs, and speaking to me with a distinctly Brooklynese accent. Once he got up as he spoke, to cross the room and pull the shade down a trifle to keep the sun out of his eyes, then going to the door and speaking to someone out in the corridor, then back to his desk to cross and uncross his legs.

  But however disturbing his restless movements and grinning face were to me, his words soon reassured me. He spoke mostly of what a great firm MGM was and what great actors they had, but he didn’t ask the questions that I had feared while coming here – what experience I’d had reading manuscripts, where I’d worked before this, what college I’d gone to, the sort of things a job applicant for a position of this sort might expect – there was nothing. Perhaps his brother’s recommendation over the phone had been enough.

  In any event, within a relatively short time I found myself leaving his office with a book in my hand – my first assignment as a reader for MGM – and the start of a career that would last for the next fifteen years. I went out in a daze, scarcely able to realise that I finally had what I had been seeking for six years – a job … and what a job! To my ecstatic mind then no job could reach such a high level as editorial. And mind you, I had been willing to take work as a dishwasher and might very well have done so if the Sixth Avenue agency men hadn’t spotted the softness of my hands and decided I was underqualified.

  I walked home that day with my assigned book in my hand treading on air, my disappointment at the failure of Simon & Schuster to accept my novel almost forgotten. Ruby had not forgotten it, however, when she came rushing home, eager and expectant, certain that I would be waving a contract in front of her and there would be another celebration.

  I told her and she did what only Ruby would have done. She flung her arms round my neck and kissed me and congratulated me as if this were even better than having a book published, and we did celebrate with the wine that was left over from yesterday, and with candles lit on the dinner table to give a festive air to the occasion.

  After dinner I got busy reading the book that had been given me.

  I remember that first book. I remember too it was published by a firm named Harlequin, distinguished for its romance novels, and this was a particularly light, feathery romance that ordinarily I would not have allowed myself to read after the first page. But I had to now and it was painful. Reading was only part of the job. In addition to a critique I had to synopsise the book and that was even more excruciatingly painful.

  I got through with it, however, and reported back to the office next day; and reading my critique, which was completely negative, saying what I felt precisely about such novels, Fadiman’s loose, involuntary grin became even more marked. ‘So you didn’t like it, eh?’ he said. ‘Well, I had someone else read it and I got just the opposite report. In fact, it was highly recommended for pictures. I think she was right. I’m going to recommend it myself to Hollywood. One thing you’ve got to learn is to lean over backwards when you’re reading for the movies. Don’t look for Shakespeare. It might be literary crap but it can make a first-rate picture. Want another book?’

  I said yes. I was discouraged for having made such a bad start, but I wanted the job, so thereafter I leaned backwards when I came across a novel of that first sort and swallowed my literary pride. I learned to overlook trash in favour of what the public wanted: sickly sentiment and lots of sex.

  I struggled hard those first few weeks to break myself in to the job. I was what they called an ‘outside reader’. I worked at home and was paid by the book – $5 dollars for novels, $5 for plays, $2 for short stories – and if I could read one book a day I could make $25 and sometimes $30 a week, which was incentive enough to keep me rushing from one assignment to another.

  It went on day after day, night after night. There was little social life for us. Evenings when we might have gone visiting friends or to a theatre were spent with my nose buried in a book and Ruby tiptoeing around the room so as not to disturb me. She was wonderful about the whole thing, never complaining, and if someone should come to visit she’d rush to the door and whisper that I was too busy to see anyone. And when it got late in the evening and I was still immersed in my book she’d soon slip a cup of hot cocoa into my hand and whisper in my ear to take a little rest.

  But there was no time for rest. After I got through with my reading, sometimes late at night, I’d have to get up early next morning to type out my synopsis and critique, with five carbon copies, no less. Then came the big rush to collate the copies, pack them into my briefcase together with the book and get back to the office as quickly as I could. There was a twenty-four-hour deadline for every assignment.

  Arriving at the office I would generally find other readers sitting on the bench waiting their turn to go in to see the editor. They all wore the same tired look that I had, all worn out from the daily grind of reading and synopsising, and the rush to get here. Most of the time we sat in silence, ignoring one another. Nevertheless I got to know some of them. They were like me, failed writers who had never yet given up and were using the reading job as a stopgap until they finally made it.

  But how much time did the job leave us to do our own writing? There was very little. But I always found time, at least once a week in the afternoon, to go and visit my mother.

  I had not forgotten her. I came and sat and talked with her, and I gave her what little money I had, and she was forever grateful for it but especially for my co
ming. I would find her sitting by the window looking out as far as the basement window would permit, waiting to see me coming.

  ‘My eyes were creeping out of my head,’ she would say with a little laugh that did not, however, conceal the tears in her eyes. I always came on the same day, Friday, so she knew when I was coming and had been sitting by the window since the morning.

  She was in her sixties by now, but she looked much older. Her hair was grey and her face was wrinkled, and she had begun to walk with a stoop and an unsteadiness of her feet. Occasionally, I took her for a little walk to a nearby park, and I would hold her arm to give her some support.

  How different this was, I sometimes thought, from other days, and my mind would go back to England, when I was a little boy and she’d take me to the market and I’d have to trot to keep up with her quick stride. There were other times, not too long ago, when she’d be coming from some street market lugging two bulging shopping bags, one in each hand, and her walk still vigorous.

  We did not often go out. It was too tiring for her. On the way to the house I would stop off at a bakery and buy a coffee ring, and she would make a pot of tea, and we’d sit eating and drinking our tea and talk, and a little flush of happiness would come into her pallid cheeks.

  I told her about my job. Her face brightened still more. ‘Congratulations,’ she said. ‘It sounds very important, working for the movies.’

  ‘It is,’ I assured her.

  ‘But you’ve not given up your own writing, have you?’

  ‘Absolutely not. I work at it just as much as before, perhaps more because now my mind’s at ease over not having Ruby support me all the time.’

  ‘Ruby never minded, did she?’

  ‘No, it meant nothing to her and she was only too glad to have me keep on with my writing. She has a lot of faith in it.’

  ‘She’s a wonderful girl.’ She really meant it. She had grown fond of Ruby since the first day I brought her to the house to meet her, and that fondness had increased with every visit since then. We visited as often as we could at weekends and holidays, alternating between visits to her and Ruby’s mother, and whenever she saw Ruby my mother’s eyes would brighten and a slight flush came into her cheeks and she hugged Ruby tightly.

  There was little wonder about this. Ruby showed her affection for Ma in many different ways. She would comb and brush and dress her hair when she came, or give her a manicure, or bring her some kind of gift, showing the attention that my mother had never received from her own daughters. I was glad that I had brought Ruby into her life and she was glad, too. It compensated to some degree for the loneliness and emptiness that she must have felt in those days, for she was by herself much of the time. Sidney was in high school, away most of the day, and he had a job after school delivering prescriptions for a drug store and did not get home until late. As for my father, it was the old story.

  That change in him had not lasted long. He no longer stayed home and helped with some of the household chores, or sat outside with my mother on a Saturday night. That flash of goodness had been brief, like a sun trying to peep out from behind storm clouds. He had reverted to his old ways, coming and going like a boarder, the way it had been in England, and obviously he had money to spend, because he often came home late at night, drunk.

  Where his money came from was a mystery. There was no indication that he had a job, not even the one day a week one he claimed to have had before, although by now I knew the truth about all that. I had never told my mother about my meeting with my grandfather in Union Square and the things he had told me. It would only upset her more than she was already and I had decided it was best to say nothing.

  The mystery was troubling my mother a great deal and it was a good thing that I was able to snatch those afternoons to visit her, for she had no one else to talk to. My brothers were both unable to come very often because of their work, and also because their wives were unwilling to go. My sister and her husband were still in Chicago. There was nobody except me and there was very little I could do or say except try to comfort her.

  ‘Perhaps he does have a job,’ I said. ‘Where else could he be getting money from?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But he leaves the house at different times, sometimes late, sometimes early, and he comes home at different times, and then he goes out again to meet his friends on the east side, some Romanian restaurant, where he does his drinking.’

  ‘Does he give you some of his money, at least?’

  She gave a short, sad laugh. ‘Like he always did. A little bit that he takes out of his pocket, and when I tell him I can’t manage the house on so little he starts to curse. You know how he curses.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘I wish I could do something, Ma.’ I felt sick with pity for her, and the old hatred for my father that I had grown up with flared up again and I felt myself clenching my fists. But I knew I would have to calm myself and keep away from him. She was in no condition to suffer any kind of violence around her. Every time I saw her she had grown more and more feeble, and I knew she spent a great deal of her time in bed. Yet I felt I had to do something to help her. I gave her what money I could, telling her to hide it from him lest he spend that too on drink and, most likely, gambling. But there had to be more than that.

  I didn’t sleep thinking of it. I had trouble concentrating on my work. As for my own writing, that was completely pushed aside. It was a time when the happiness I could have felt being married to Ruby was clouded by worry over my mother.

  Sometimes, when I was with her, I was tempted to tell her of my meeting with my grandfather in Union Square and what he had told me about her early love affair with a man named Samuel, and how he had conspired with my grandmother to trick her into marrying my father instead of Samuel. I had never told her anything at all about the meeting and it seemed to me she had enough heartache in her life without being reminded of Samuel. I felt the same way about it now, but thinking of my grandfather had stirred up a suspicion in my mind as to where my father’s new-found drinking money was coming from.

  I remembered my promise to my grandfather to come and visit him. I had thought of it before from time to time and I had felt guilty about not keeping my promise. But now, I thought, might be a good time to go to see him. I still had the dance ticket on the back of which I had written his address. I had kept it in a drawer of the table in my bedroom that served also as a desk, and I dug it out of a miscellany of items stored there and saw the address on Second Avenue scribbled in my handwriting on the back.

  I waited for a slack day in my reading. I had been given two short stories to read, so I could afford to take a little time in the afternoon to go there, hoping he would be in. It was in an old tenement house in a noisy section of the downtown area. Kids were playing stickball and screaming to one another in the street. Cars were parked bumper to bumper at the kerb. Bedding hung from fire escapes. I entered into a dark, smelly hallway where a row of broken mailboxes lined one wall, with bells equally broken or missing altogether underneath them. I made one out with his name along with several others on it. There was no use trying to ring the bell. This one was half pulled out from its socket.

  I went up stairs whose treads were bent in the middle from years of tramping feet. Cigarette butts and chewing gum wrappers and dust littered the steps. The smells grew worse as I mounted. Some of it was food smell, cabbage predominantly, but there was also a toilet smell mingled with the mixture. At the end of each landing was a door with a red bulb glowing over it. This was the toilet that served the entire floor. I thought of all the money my grandfather had sent to his family in Chicago through the years, of all he had given away only recently, and that he should have to live in a place like this made me shake my head.

  At last I came to the top floor. There was some relief to the darkness in the form of a skylight that brought some daylight on to the floor. I found the door I wanted and knocked.

  It was opened cautiously by an elderly woman in a sl
oppy housedress that showed a sagging bosom. She had a foreign accent. ‘Vot you vant?’ she asked.

  ‘I want to see my grandfather,’ I said. ‘I’m his grandson.’

  ‘You vas who?’

  ‘His grandson.’

  ‘You vas his grandson? Yes, he told me you vould come. Why you don’t come sooner?’

  ‘I couldn’t come sooner. I’ve been very busy.’

  ‘Is Yankel your father?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He come lots of times. But now he don’t come no more. He vos taking care of the funeral.’

  ‘What funeral?’

  ‘Your grandfather’s. You didn’t know?’

  ‘No.’ I was a bit stunned. This was something I had not expected. ‘When did he die?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, veeks ago. A long time now. He die in the night. I don’t know for two days. He don’t let me come in his room. Maybe he got things hid in his bed. Beggars make lots of money. Then I start to smell something bad, so I go in anyway and find him there in the bed. I run and tell your father in the Romanian restaurant where he always goes to drink, and I tell him and he comes here and takes care of everything. He don’t tell you that?’

  ‘No.’

  Why should he tell us? There was money hidden in that room and he took it. Would I tell my mother about all this? My head was in a whirl. I said, ‘Could I see his room?’

  ‘Vot you vant to see his room for?’

  I didn’t quite know myself. But I felt I had to see it. ‘Just let me see it, please,’ I said. ‘I won’t take more than a minute. I just want to see where my grandfather lived.’

  ‘All right,’ she said reluctantly. ‘Come in and see I have no rented it yet, and there are still a few things there maybe you vant to take. Your father, he don’t vant them. He tell me I should go pickle them. He is a bad loudmouth, your father.’