Then he spoke thickly: ‘What the bloody ’ell’s going on here?’
Nobody answered him, but Ruby went up to him, put an arm round him and said gently, ‘Ma’s had a stroke.’
He looked at her. He didn’t shake off her arm as he would have with anybody else. He too in his own begrudging way had been captured by her from the very start. ‘What d’you mean, stroke? She’s sleeping. Can’t you see she’s sleeping?’
‘No, Dad’ – she called him Dad, too, and none of us had ever called him that – ‘she’s not sleeping. She’s in a coma. She’s very ill. Come with me.’
He hesitated a moment longer. He looked at my mother again, as if still not believing that it was anything but sleep, then he let Ruby take him into the kitchen, where she gave him some coffee, and though it did little to sober him, he let her lead him into Sidney’s bedroom, and with his clothes on he got into bed and she closed the door on him.
I was never so glad then that I had brought Ruby with me, for only she could have managed a situation that could have ended in violence if it had been left to us. The hatred that I’d always felt for him was even greater that night than any time before and I’m sure my brothers felt the same way.
We all sat up that night, sometimes in the bedroom with my mother, watching her, waiting for what we knew must happen, sometimes wandering into the kitchen to drink more coffee, and the house growing even colder than before, making it necessary for us to wear our overcoats, Ruby her racoon coat and the two of us huddled close together for more warmth, and for the comfort she wanted to give me.
But one time I sat alone beside my mother while Ruby was serving coffee to the others in the kitchen, and a strange thing happened. I kept my gaze on her. The radiator hissed futilely, bringing no warmth into the room. Occasionally, too, it gave a loud clanking sound, as if hammers were banging away inside to get the steam up. I thought, if she were just asleep the noise would awaken her. Then suddenly she seemed to stir a little. To my amazement, her eyes opened wider and she looked at me and smiled.
‘Ma?’ I whispered.
She was awake. She knew me. She whispered back, ‘Harry.’
‘Yes, it’s me, Ma,’ I said, my heart bursting with joy. I wanted to shout it out to all the others. I did. I ran to the kitchen shouting, ‘She’s awake! She spoke to me!’
They all ran back with me. But she was no longer with us. She had sunk back into the coma. I felt bitter disappointment. The others thought I had imagined it and went back to the kitchen. I remained there for a while longer, hoping that she would awaken once more.
I was still there when grey morning came and then I gave up. It would not happen again. But my mother clung to life as tenaciously as she had always done, much as when we were children and she had fought through all her miseries to save us from starving. It was in her yet, despite the crippling blow to her brain, the struggle to survive. She did not die that night, nor the day after, and then another night and day, and on this day Rose and Jim arrived. And with them – a big surprise – Aunt Lily.
She had changed much in appearance from the time I saw her in Chicago, when she was still a radiant bride, slender and with a dark loveliness. She had grown heavy and shapeless, with a double chin and the beginning of a resemblance to my grandmother. With the loss of Phil, and no other means of making a living, she had turned to nursing and it was to be of help to my mother, whom she had always liked, that she had come with Rose and Jim.
They themselves seemed to have changed very little, Jim still warm and friendly, my sister still wearing the haughty expression on her face. But mixed with it, and perhaps what could not have been there before, some concern for my mother, rushing in immediately upon arrival to look helplessly at her mother lying in the bed, a look that contained much of what she still could not allow herself to show. I saw Jim bend over and kiss my mother’s damp brow. Rose hesitated, but she could not follow suit. She turned and went back to the kitchen.
But Aunt Lily took charge immediately. She had changed into a white uniform and she began the tasks that had been neglected until now with my mother, and that Ruby had been unable to do: bathing her and changing her clothes while she still remained unconscious. Dr Schwartz had arranged for an IV to be installed, and Lily knew how to adjust it and see that it was working properly.
She was busy with this and other things when my father came into the room. He had not left the house since the night he had come home drunk, but he had scarcely spoken to anyone and had kept pretty much to himself, sitting in corners, silent, and occasionally going into the bedroom to sit there for a while.
He had been asleep when Lily arrived and his face darkened when he saw her. She belonged to the Chicago family and he had thought he was shot of them for good when he threw Barney out. Perhaps, too, there flashed across his mind the thought that the Chicagoans were after him again about the money.
‘What the bloody ’ell are you doing here?’ he asked.
Lily knew him well. The greeting did not surprise her, nor did it make her angry. She remained calm and even smiled a little. ‘I’m here to take care of Ada,’ she said.
‘Who needs your care?’ he snarled. ‘Go on, pack up and get out of here, and tell them back in Chicago I don’t need help from any of them.’
Lily continued with what she was doing, bathing my mother’s forehead, and watching all this I clenched my hands and got ready to interfere if he tried to do anything physical. I hated him then as I had never hated him before, not even when I was a kid and planned to kill him. In my mind, that he should behave in this fashion at a time like this and in front of his dying wife exceeded any of the rotten things he had done in his life before.
Luckily, it was Lily he was dealing with. She continued to smile and to bathe my mother’s fevered forehead, and said quietly, ‘Yankel, keep your voice down or you’ll disturb her. Even when they’re lying like this in a coma they can sense unpleasant things around them. I’ll leave when it’s time for me to leave. But not now.’
He let out a sudden roar: ‘Get out! Get out of my house!’
It brought the others running into the room and it was a good thing Jim was among them, and Sidney too, for if it had gone any further I would have gone at him with my fists the way I had done once before. As it was, these two were able to get him away from the bedroom and talk him into a calmer mood. But shortly afterwards he put on his overcoat and without saying anything to anyone he stomped out of the house and we heard the door slam shut after him. He had gone probably to his favourite haunt, the Romanian restaurant in downtown Manhattan.
Another day, another night. They all stayed, most of us sleeping on the floor covered with whatever blankets there were and our coats. There was a little warmth in the kitchen with the gas oven lit, but there was not enough room there for all of us and we were forced to use other rooms that were freezing, where the radiators had given up all pretence of bringing up steam with their hissing and clanking for the night.
I had gone up to the landlady to try to get her to give us a little more heat, especially under the circumstances. She still had some fear of me, still thinking I was a gangster, and when she opened the door for me it was only partially and she looked as if she might be ready to slam it shut in my face and dash into the house for protection. She nodded agreement to my request, saying, ‘Yes, yes, yes, I’ll see what I can do …’
But she did nothing, and the radiators continued to hiss and clank and give no warmth, and we sat in our overcoats shivering and taking turns to sit with my mother. I was in there once and I was holding her hand. Lily had told me that it gave her some comfort to feel another person’s hand holding hers, so I had done it gladly. The hand was warm and moist. Her breathing was heavy and accompanied by the faint snoring sound. I looked down at her face. It seemed to me that there was a tightness to it as if she might be struggling to breathe and to live.
I thought of all the times when I was a boy and I had looked at her face and seen the
different expressions there, and so often the sadness when she might not have wanted to live then but had forced herself to do so because of us. And there were times when it had been very much alive, when she was sitting in her little shop surrounded by all her customers, the women who were also her friends, and how it glowed then with the pride and joy that she felt at being a queen among them.
I thought of the anxiety she had shown when one of us became ill, and the same worry that showed on her face when she stood waiting for us to come home from school, shielding her eyes from the sun with the palm of a hand, that we might have been attacked by a band of Jew-hating ragamuffins. And there was laughter too on occasions when she was with one of her women friends and they were enjoying a joke of some sort.
I must have been studying her face closely all those years, because I could remember the different expressions so clearly, especially how it glowed when she talked of her one big dream, going to America. Yes, that particularly, and the joy on it when the tickets came. I could never forget that day when all of us were a little drunk with happiness. For her, and for all of us, the dream had come true.
But had it? I glanced around at the cold, dark room, and at her lying there, and the radiator hissing futilely. Was this where the dream had ended? I didn’t want to believe it.
Lily was moving about softly, doing various things. Then I felt her hand on my shoulder. I looked up at her questioningly. ‘Harry,’ she said quietly, ‘your mother is dead.’
There was the funeral next day. According to Jewish law it had to take place then, not later. Saul took charge of everything. We did what he told us to do. A rabbi came to the house and said some prayers, and Saul did too, then we all joined in, mumbling words that we read in the prayer book he gave us, prayers that were for the dead, for our mother.
It was still bitterly cold and the sky was overcast. We drove out to the cemetery in the limousines the undertaker provided and the cemetery was a forest of gravestones stretching out as far as the eye could see. The graves were so close together that we had to be careful not to step on others as we gathered round the rectangular hole that had been dug for Ma’s coffin. And there were more prayers and we all shivered as the wind struck us with a knife edge.
There were further prayers that the rabbi and Saul spoke as the coffin was being lowered into the grave, and Ruby pressed closely to me and whispered, ‘You mustn’t be afraid to cry.’ I wasn’t. I cried a great deal. So did all the others. I didn’t look at my father.
After the service was over we were all turning away and starting back for the limousines, careful again not to step on graves that were so close to one another they almost touched. Even in death, I thought, there is poverty. Just before we reached the gate of the cemetery something made me turn round and look. My father was still standing there near my mother’s grave. He had his face in his hands and he was crying. I thought if he had ever shown any goodness it was now.
I never saw him again after that day.
Epilogue
NOW THAT I am well into my nineties – a nonagenarian, they call it – I am able to look back on all my life and see the whole of it spread out before me clearly in a huge panorama of events, people, places and everything that happened to me. I am very fortunate. Age is supposed to dim memory, but mine has been sharpened to where I can see things with even greater clarity than when they actually happened.
Of all the things I look back upon, nothing touches me so deeply as the dreams my mother concocted for us, and the way they brightened our lives and gave us hope for the future in those sad days in England when all this was so badly needed. I have compared these dreams to the soap bubbles we used to blow from our clay pipes, sending them floating in the air, beautiful to look at but elusive and fragile. If you reached up and caught one in your hand it would burst and vanish immediately. I suppose that is what happened to my mother with the biggest of all her dreams, the one that brought us to America in the summer of 1922. And to my grandmother’s house in Chicago, where all the relatives had gathered to greet us.
For years before this she had written letters to them pleading with them to send us the tickets that would take us by steamship to America, believing that here in America was the better life she had always sought. Now, at last we were there and I had my first real glimpse of America through the back window of my grandmother’s house, but instead of seeing the mansions, the gardens, the swimming pools, the butlers and chauffeurs and limousines that we had believed everybody had in America, I saw a back alley with garbage cans overflowing with garbage, and a big rat crawling on one of them.
And yet, not even that brought complete disillusionment. After all, this was America, the land of opportunity and times were good, and it brought the large bubble almost within my mother’s grasp. My brothers and sister were working. My father was working and gave her at least a portion of his wages. There was money coming into the house, and we had a house with electric lights and a bathtub and a telephone even, but what was even more important, something my mother had promised us years ago in another dream of hers, a parlour with plush furniture and a piano.
It was almost as if she could reach up and catch the bubble and hold on to it without its bursting. But that didn’t happen. The Depression came and the poverty from which we had fled in England caught up with us there in America. The bubble burst.
The dream came completely to an end for my mother on that cold winter day in the dark basement apartment in the Bronx. It had one bit of compensation for her. It put an end to her suffering also. But for the rest of us it did not end there and there were better times in store for all of us that would have gladdened my mother’s heart had she lived longer.
My oldest brother Joe did not become the journalist that he had dreamed of becoming as a boy, but he did become a successful and profitable owner of a house remodelling business. He and his wife had one child, a girl named Rita. Saul, with his seventh-grade education, wrote two scholarly books on Jewish culture that were published, but his greatest triumph was his wife Estelle, whom he had finally made into a religious woman, observant of all the Jewish laws and customs, attending the synagogue regularly, and considerably quieter in her dress and manner. It had been a difficult task, accompanied by much bickering, many quarrels, a separation of several months once, but Saul had persevered and finally succeeded. They had one child, a boy named Irwin, and the good family life that Saul had always wanted.
My sister Rose never stopped affecting a haughty upper-class British accent, but she had given up her fantasies of being a duchess and seemed quite content with being the wife of a restaurant sandwich man. And although she never fully forgave my mother for taking her parlour away, her attitude towards her had softened considerably in those last few days of my mother’s life.
As for Sidney, he achieved one goal that my mother had for us. He became the only one in the family who went to college. He worked his way through by selling magazine subscriptions. He did that under Joe’s tutelage, but became quite proficient at it, and after his graduation he became an ad salesman for a national magazine, then a successful publisher of his own magazine. But his life grew sad and difficult when his wife developed multiple sclerosis shortly after giving birth to their one child, a son named Ted. Then Sidney found himself nursing a sick woman as he had done with my mother, only this time under even more difficult circumstances because there was a baby to be cared for too. Fortunately, he had the money now to hire a housekeeper, but it was a life filled with constant worry and fear until after ten years of it his wife died.
I suppose I was the luckiest of them all – I had Ruby. People have often asked me what is the secret to my longevity. There is no secret is my answer. There was Ruby and the love and care she gave me in those sixty-seven years of our wonderful marriage. There is nothing else I can attribute my longevity to.
In that time, too, there was added what amounted virtually to another member of our family, Aunt Lily. She came to live in New York short
ly after my mother’s death and after a trip to California where she met and married her second husband, an Italian builder named Peo – a Christian, naturally, and Italian to boot. It meant nothing, of course. He was welcomed as much into the family as Jim. Times had changed since the days of the Invisible Wall and the street in England where we once lived, with Jews on one side and Christians on the other and an invisible wall between us. Even my mother, had she lived, would have liked Peo and accepted him.
They came to live near us when we lived in Long Island, and to our two children, Charles and Adraenne, she was always their Aunt Lil, and since Ruby and I were both then working at jobs, Lily took care of them much of the time.
It was a good life for us and I never gave any thought to the possibility that it might end, even after my children had grown up and were married themselves and out of the house and on their own. It ended for me one grey morning in a hospital room that overlooked, of all places, Central Park, where our love had begun. Ruby died that morning of her leukaemia and I have never got over it.
I live alone now in a house that Ruby and I bought when we retired. It is a quiet place restricted to adults only, and there is a lake just across the street from where I live round which Ruby and I used to walk every day, morning and evening, with her hand in mine. We’d finally come to rest on a bench facing the lake with a tree shading it that Ruby and I had planted years before as a memorial to friends who had died. On summer evenings we’d watch the sun set on the other side of the lake, the trees forming a dark, lace-like covering over the red glow in the sky, and that glow reflected in the water and turning it pink. It was very still and we’d sit there with her hand still in mine, watching the glow gradually fade, and then we’d go home.
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