The Golden Willow (19 page)

“Then quit the goddamn job.” How often had I said that in my imagination? How often had I argued in there and pulled her by the arm and told her she was quitting the goddamn job?

She stared at me. “Darling,” she whispered, frightened a little, “what's the matter? What's happened?”

“What's happened,” I would say next, “is that I'm going to have a book published.”

And she would stare at me, her mouth open a little, not quite believing what I had said. And then gradually it would register with her, and her expression became transformed into one of great joy and she would throw her arms around my neck and kiss me, with all the other employees and some customers staring at us.

Yes, I'd gone through that fantasy many times before, dreaming of having a book published and becoming a famous author, seeing my book displayed in bookstore windows, being interviewed by reporters, being asked for my autograph.

What wonderful things dreams are! They can make you be anything you want and take you anyplace in the world. And some of them can actually come true, as this one had for me. In the meantime, I sat on that bench near the lake wishing it had all taken place in the past, and creating fantasies about how my book was published when we were still living in one of Madame Janeski's furnished rooms on West 68th Street, and how my book enabled us to move into a fantastic big apartment, a penthouse with a view of the Manhattan skyline, not the two-room place on Bleecker Street that we
did finally move into after I got my job as a reader for a moving picture company.

How wonderful all that would have been for us then, when we were both young and able to appreciate all the exciting things that can happen to a famous author. Well, it was too late now. Ruby was gone and I was alone. Yet there was a lot in store for me that I had missed before but could still appreciate and enjoy.

But first, before all this could happen, there was the book to get published, and it did not take me long to discover that there was more to publishing a book than simply writing one. My editor was Anna Simpson, a young woman with a gentle voice that came often over the telephone, but sharp eyes that ferreted out every little mistake in spelling, punctuation, grammar, or inconsistencies in the story that I had not been aware of. Revisions had to be made, proofs corrected, book jackets to be approved, bios and condensations of the book to be written for the publicity department.

I was kept busy with the various communications— e-mail, regular mail, FedEx, telephone—and I delighted in all of it. Nor did I mind going back over a book that I had already spent more than a year writing in order to correct the proofs.

Yes, there was a good deal more work than I had expected, but it was all pleasurable work, and for the first time in my life I felt what it was like to be a published author. My ego swelled further when I learned that photos of my family were to be used to illustrate the book. I had dug into albums and boxes where photographs had been stored from the days in England, and came up with a gem that showed my mother and the children in the family gathered around her with me an infant sitting on her lap. It had been taken in front of the house where we lived, on the street that I had written about. It
was a picture that would be seen often, not only on the jacket of the book but in the reviews and articles that would be written later and published in newspapers.

Some inkling of the interest in my book had already been generated at the London book fair, where
The Invisible Wall
had been introduced, and to add to all my joy several foreign publishers had bought rights to publish in their countries. This was a totally unexpected bonanza. I'd had no idea that you could sell your book to more than one publisher, and it meant money that was badly needed.

I was two years older than when I'd first started writing my book, and my physical condition, though considered quite good for someone my age, had deteriorated to a point where I was having more and more difficulty getting around. I could not walk now without the aid of a walker, and I was finding it almost impossible to take care of myself. I needed someone to cook my meals, to shop for me, to do my laundry. My daughter came once every two weeks and did what she could to help me out, but she was too tied down to her job as a nurse practitioner and her own household to do more. My son also had little time to spare, and so I was alone most of the time, and I struggled to keep alive. Occasionally in trying to do some household work, I stumbled and fell and hurt myself, often badly.

Hospital emergency rooms are filled with elderly people brought in bleeding or with fractured bones resulting from their falls. I was lucky. I had several visits to the emergency room of our local hospital, but always with minor cuts and bruises. How long that luck was going to last was questionable. I was badly in need of a caregiver in my home, but I was unable to afford one until my book was sold to foreign publishers. The money came as an advance long before any
royalties were paid to me, and nothing could have been more welcome. And with it came Bette.

I saw her ad in a small newspaper that was thrust into my mailbox once a month. It was in “Situations Wanted” and offered health care services. I answered it immediately, and very soon the woman I had spoken to arrived, and when I saw her for the first time it was with a shock. Her face was swollen and a mass of scars. One of her eyes seemed to be missing. She was about fifty, heavy and dressed in ski pants and a jacket. The one good eye looked back at me defiantly, as if aware of my reaction and daring me to remark on it.

I got over it in a moment and said, “Come on in and sit down and let's talk.”

Her first name was Bette and the rest of it was Italian. She told me everything about herself. Several years ago she had been sitting down to breakfast with her husband when they got into an argument over some trivial matter that she didn't want to talk about. It was one of the few times they'd ever argued. Ordinarily, he was a quiet, well-behaved man, a mechanic of some sort. He was her second husband and a good father to the two children, a boy and a girl, she'd had with her first husband, whom she had divorced. But that morning something happened to him and he went wild, and before she knew it he was slashing at her face with a knife.

He ran off, leaving her unconscious and bleeding on the floor. Eventually, they caught him and put him in prison with a fifteen-year sentence. She herself spent months in the hospital, and it would take months more of plastic surgery for her face to become normal again.

In the meantime, she had been having difficulty finding work to support her children, both of whom were still in school. She had
been a secretary before all this took place, but her disfigurement prevented her from getting a job. She tried everything, even the most menial kind of work that was available, but prospective employers shrank from her appearance. She told me all this quite calmly. There was nothing emotional about her. In fact, she seemed almost amused at her plight. But I couldn't help being touched by it, and somehow I couldn't help feeling that we had something in common. Wasn't age a disfigurement to many people? Age, with its bent figure, wrinkled face, and crippled crawling movements, turned people off. I had seen it in faces that looked at me.

I was more fortunate than others. I had written a book and gotten it published. But that didn't make any difference to the eyes that looked at me. I was an old man, and I remember how I myself used to feel when I was young and looked at old people. It was in the days when I still lived in England, and there was Old Biddy, as we used to call her and whom we dreaded meeting on our way through Daw Bank, one of the more run-down sections, where the middens were in front of the hovels there and overflowed onto the sidewalk. Old Biddy would come out of one of the hovels looking like a bear that had just been aroused from its winter hibernation, a slightly dazed look on her wrinkled face but the eyes glaring at us fiercely, the voice muttering something indistinct. We believed she was a witch, and we ran from her in terror.

Any old person could arouse such fear in us, for we believed they were all witches, some with toothless, grinning faces who could easily cast a spell on us. But there was one I recall for whom we felt pity. This was old Bubba Frank, as she was called,
bubba
meaning “grandmother.” She was bent over almost double—like a hairpin—with what was undoubtedly osteoporosis, still unknown to the medical world. She came often into my mother's faded fruit and vegetable
shop to pass the time, to sit with the other women and gossip while they sat around the counter and sipped the glasses of sour milk that my mother made and sold at a farthing a glass. She talked about herself and often wept over the misery of her life. Her care was being divided between two married daughters, the Blanks and the Londons, and the two sisters often quarreled over whose turn it was, neither one wanting her and each accusing the other of cheating on her turn. It was a common sight to see one of the daughters leading the old woman determinedly to the house of the other and then to hear them arguing on the doorstep while the old woman stood helplessly at one side waiting for the outcome of the argument and to know where she would be living for the next month.

Now I have overcome much of the prejudice directed at older people by writing a book, but I also have detected a note of skepticism in some people's voices, as if they might suspect that a doddering old man like me could well have made it up. I have noticed even slight amusement on others' faces, as if the idea of a ninety-plus-year-old man writing a book was akin to some sort of a circus stunt.

Nevertheless, I was an author and my book was in the process of being published, regardless of what anyone thought, and even before the publication date came about I was thinking of a second book that I would write, a sequel to the first one. But I pushed that aside for the time being, discouraged by the agent I had acquired in London. When I told him about the second book and had asked if he'd like to see an outline, he'd written back, “No, thanks. Be satisfied with what you've got, and remember, it isn't often that a publisher will take a chance on a first book by an author in his nineties.”

I thought perhaps he was right; perhaps I was getting a bit too big for my britches. One day I heard the doorbell ring. I went to answer it. A FedEx deliveryman stood there with a large package in his
hand. I took it from him, signed a sheet of paper, and took the package in. When I opened it I was staring at my first published book, ten of them neatly packaged. I took one off the top of the pile and held it before me, looking at it the way you would a newborn child—with awe, with joy. The cover, a greenish color, read:

THE
INVISIBLE
WALL

Harry Bernstein

There was a picture of a ragged young boy, who might have been me but wasn't, standing in front of a brick wall on a street a bit like mine. Turning to the back of the dust jacket, I saw a picture of my family in England, in front of the house where we had lived. My mother was in the center with me, about two years old, on her lap. To her left was my sister Rose on one side and Lily on the other. In front of them were Saul and Joe, my brothers.

I opened the back cover. There on the back inside flap was the author—me. It was a snapshot that my son had taken of me when I was visiting his summer home in Cape May.

I held the book in front of me and gloated. It was similar to the way I'd felt when I sold my first story to
The Chicagoan
. I was about seventeen, still in high school, and the check they had sent me with the acceptance was for ten dollars. I'd held that check up in front of me then the way I was doing with the book. It would take another eighty years before that same euphoria came back. But this time there would be a whole lot more to add to it.

T
HE WORLD IN WHICH
I
WAS LIVING WHEN THE BOOK WAS PUBLISHED
was vastly different from the one that I had written about. It was, after all, nearly a hundred years later. Advances had been made in every field—science, medicine, industry, transportation. We were enjoying greater material comforts in life, and we were experiencing greater longevity, so people like myself could be in their nineties and still function in as normal a fashion as young people, and even write books. But there were some things that hadn't changed, and one of them was human nature and the wars that it brought on.

A war was raging now in, of all places, Afghanistan and Iraq, with American troops combined with token British troops fighting there for reasons that were not quite clear. Regardless, the fierce action and the casualties that kept mounting higher each day filled the newspapers and the TV screens, exciting everyone's attention and
occupying their minds, so I wondered what chance I had to distract them from all this with a book about a little cobbled street in the north of England where Jews lived on one side and Christians on the other, and all the things that happened there while I was growing up.

It looked as if there was little chance of my book getting any attention, and yet it did. It received a starred review in
Publishers Weekly
, and it got excellent reviews in all the leading papers in both England and the United States. The reception was just as enthusiastic in the various foreign countries where it had also been published—Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Italy.

I was elated. I couldn't have been happier, especially when the
New York Times
published my picture on the front page. It showed me sprawled out in my reclining chair with a wide grin on my face. A
New York Times
photographer had taken it when he came with a reporter for an interview. It was one of many pictures to be taken and one of many interviews that followed in the weeks after publication. They came from abroad, too, from England, Norway, Sweden, Germany, and Italy, the last accompanied by a television crew. My phone rang often, and I gave interviews over the phone as well as at my house. At one time, when I was being interviewed by
USA Today
, a telephone call came from the London
Times
. They wanted an interview right then and there, and so I conducted two interviews at one time. And I received calls often from Sarina Evan, my publicist at Random House, asking if I would be available for this or that, perhaps a book signing, or a talk somewhere.