The Golden Willow (16 page)

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.

I had found it hard throwing them away. I hesitated over each one before putting it in the garbage bag. They seemed to have a rightful place with us and to still belong in our life. But I consoled
myself, thinking that our old life was over and we were beginning a new one.

I think Ruby was feeling the same way I was. She too had glanced behind her as we drove off and had seen that mountainous pile of black bags. Her hand reached out and touched mine on the wheel, and I took it in mine and pressed it.

As we were driving away, I was still looking through the rearview mirror at the pile of garbage we had left behind, and I saw Mr. Way come hurrying out of his house, dressed in his World War I khaki uniform. He came to a halt and stood looking in our direction, standing at attention, then saluted us. I don't know if he saw me, but I saluted back to him, and it completed our departure.

I'
D HAD ONE OF MY BAD NIGHTS BEFORE THE CALL CAME
. I
HAD NOT
been able to fall asleep and lay in the darkness thinking of all sorts of things of the past, some of which I had written about in my book, an assortment of episodes, faces, voices, little snatches of vignettes, all of them disconnected, passing fleetingly through my mind. Then I got to thinking of Ruby and a time shortly after we were married when we went on a walking tour through New England. We had joined an organization called the American Youth Hostel Association. They would map out an itinerary for you, and there were hostels in farmhouses where you could stay for twenty-five cents a night and get a meal there for very little money.

We had a gay time of it. We both loved walking, and we loved the hills and mountains that we went through, and we loved the hostels that we came to at night, even though they were sometimes
beds in haylofts, the sweet smell of hay all around us. And we loved each other. There was a sweetness about all this that made me cling to the recollection for quite some time.

But then, suddenly, my thoughts made an ugly turn, and I began to think of what we had done to Ruby when she had died. She had wanted cremation, but neither she nor I had given any thought to what that really meant. It meant burning her, destroying her until there was nothing left but ashes, and horror came over me as I lay there thinking of it. How could I have turned her lovely body over to be thrust into an oven of flames?

But what else was there? Was burying her under the ground and letting her rot slowly away any less barbaric? But why think of either alternative? What difference did it make? She was gone, and that was all that mattered.

So once again I found myself back in the misery of wanting her, missing her, and crying for her, although perhaps it had never left me. The year I had spent writing my book had been temporary forgetfulness. I thought I had made things worse now by sending my book out to publishers and adding the bitter disappointment of failure. I berated myself that I should have known that would be the inevitable result. I had brought it on myself, and perhaps I deserved what I was getting now.

It was in this black mood that I got up next morning and began stumbling through making my breakfast. I had been clumsy before under ordinary circumstances, but now I was doubly so. Things fell out of my hands, toast burned, I knocked over a glass of orange juice, and I did a lot of cursing. I was in this state when the telephone rang.

On top of everything else! I stood with a mop in my hand, about to wipe up the spilled orange juice that covered half the kitchen
floor, wondering who the hell could be calling me at this time of the morning. My daughter reminding me to take my pills? My son asking if I needed anything?

With one hand still holding the mop, I lifted the receiver of the phone with the other hand, put it to my ear, and said “Hello” in a voice that could not have sounded pleasant to the other party.

A woman's voice answered, “Is this the residence of Harry Bernstein?”

“Yes,” I barked, deciding now that it was a saleswoman, and getting ready to bang the receiver down.

“Are you the author of
The Invisible Wall?”

This was something else. I felt my heart give a jump.

“Yes,” I said in a much more careful tone.

“I'm Kate Elton,” the voice said, “an editor at Random House, and I'm calling from our office in London to tell you that I've read your book and I like it very much, and I'm prepared to make you an offer.”

What could my reaction be to that? What could be the reaction of anyone who has spent his lifetime trying to write a book that would be published, and finally in his ninety-fifth year has succeeded in doing so? What came to me then was skepticism. Although my heart started beating violently, I became cautious. This was a young voice, and young people didn't make offers to publish books.