The Golden Willow (2 page)

“What are we doing?” Ruby whispered, looking around, fearful that some of our neighbors might be watching.

I didn't answer. I knew what I was doing. I tried to lead her in. “Come on,” I whispered back.

“Are you crazy?” she said.

“No, I'm not,” I said. “Please come in with me.”

“Do you realize,” she said, “you're ninety years old?”

“Yes. That's why I want to go in.”

She came with me into the tree. Perhaps I had been thinking also of trying and failing to blow out those candles on the birthday cake. Perhaps some of the sting had remained. But I think it was more than that. It was the moonlight too, and the recollection of that night in Central Park. Our bed was as soft as the one there. Many years of rotted branches and leaves had accumulated, and the loamy smell was strong in our nostrils. We slept afterward, close together, our arms wrapped around each other.

A
LOW GROWL OF THUNDER AND A FLASH OF LIGHTNING WOKE US UP
. We scrambled quickly to our feet, ducked out of the tree, and ran for the house, reaching it just in time as the first drops of rain began to fall.

We were laughing and happy at our escape because the storm came in full force soon after we had entered, with crashes of thunder and violent streaks of lightning. We wasted no time getting into bed. It was a good chorus for sleep and I think we rather enjoyed it, lying there once again close together listening to the thunder and seeing the lightning zigzag across the sky through the window. Then after one bolt of lightning there was a sudden crash of something heavy falling.

“What's that?” Ruby whispered.

“I don't know,” I whispered back.

I was not inclined to go and look, and we both gave up worrying and were soon asleep.

It was quiet and sunny when we woke up the next morning. It was a day similar to the one I had awakened to twenty-four hours earlier, the morning of my ninetieth birthday. I was ninety and a day, I reflected, yawning. But the storm was over, and I wondered how much damage it had done.

Ruby was the first out of bed. I was still lying there when I heard her cry out, “Oh, my God.”

“What's the matter?” I shot up in bed.

“Come take a look!”

She was standing looking through the window, horror on her face. I quickly joined her at the window, and I gave a cry myself. Our beautiful golden willow was lying stretched out full length on the ground in a mass of golden leaves and branches, its roots torn out of the earth and protruding upward with lumps of dark earth clinging to them. It lay there like a fallen giant killed in battle.

That tree had meant so much to both of us, and I could see that Ruby was in tears. I put my arm around her and tried to comfort her. “You'll get over it,” I said. “After all, it's only a tree.”

But as far as she was concerned, it could have been a person. “There'll never be another one like that tree,” she said. “Can we plant another one?”

I laughed. “Ruby, darling,” I said, “I could no more replace a tree as beautiful as that one as I could you.”

“I love your compliment,” she said, in a muffled voice and holding a tissue to her eyes, “but are you sure we couldn't plant another?”

“I'm quite sure,” I said. “You know how long it took for us to get that one to grow. I've almost forgotten. About thirty years? Maybe forty? But don't worry,” I hastened to add, “we've got lots of time left for both of us.”

“Have we?” she said, but she spoke absently, as if her mind had struck something else.

“Yes,” I said confidently, “lots of it, lots and lots.”

It seemed that way for two more years, with Ruby's anemia that had recently begun, apparently under control, enabling her to continue teaching her yoga class every Wednesday morning at the clubhouse, looking as lithe, slender, and shapely as ever in her leotard, even though she had joined me as a nonagenarian. The two of us enjoyed life together, even making two more trips to Mexico, which had been our winter home for years.

She was ninety-one and I was ninety-two when we decided to celebrate our sixty-seventh wedding anniversary. Our children, Charlie and Adraenne, got together and arranged it for us at their expense, an anniversary gift that couldn't have been better for us: a two-night stay at the Plaza Hotel in New York, close to Central Park, where we had spent our honeymoon, and near where we had lived for the first few months of our marriage; orchestra seats for
La Bohème
, our favorite opera, at the Met; and a string quartet concert at Carnegie Hall. What more could we have wanted?

We drove to the Plaza in our car for the two nights of luxury and found ourselves immediately in a world we'd never known before: a uniformed concierge to greet us, a bellboy to take our keys and park the car, another bellboy to take our bags, a thickly carpeted lobby to cross on our way to the desk to register, then an elevator up to our room, and what a room! It was large and handsomely furnished, and yes, it overlooked the park, a perfect view that drew our attention immediately. But not as much as the canopied bed. This fairly made us gasp. We had seen canopied beds before only in movies. Our kids had thought of everything.

The next two days went by too fast for us. We could easily have overcome our awe and adjusted very nicely to life at the Plaza: people waiting on us hand and foot; sumptuous meals in a restaurant where two or three waiters, including a wine steward with a large key dangling around his neck, hovered over us; a stroll in the park, a wonderful opera at night, and a string quartet the following night— all of this we could easily have embraced for the rest of our lives.

But before it was over we gave ourselves another treat. We would go back to West 68th Street and see the old brownstone where we had lived for several months after we were married. It would make a perfect ending to our anniversary celebration.

Fortunately, the weather had been good to us during these two days, warm and sunny, as pleasant as we could have wanted it. It was like that when we set out on the pilgrimage to our former home. Years ago it would have taken us just a few minutes to walk from 59th Street to 68th, and it would have been nothing at all. But these were different, older years, and we went slowly, and soon had to rest on one of the benches that lined Central Park West. We had already discovered in our strolls through the park that we were no longer able to walk at a brisk pace and had to have frequent rests, so this came as no surprise to us, and we were grateful for the benches that were so plentiful.

But at last, perspiring a good deal from the sun that was less pleasant than when we had started out, we passed the big white stone building of the Ethical Culture Society, where we had spent many Sunday mornings listening to Algernon Black preach and lecture, and came to 68th Street.

We smiled at each other as we turned into it. The street was much the same as it had been sixty-seven years ago, with the two rows of brownstones all exactly alike facing each other across the
street, their high stoops slanting down uniformly to the sidewalk. Nothing seemed to have changed, and we were glad of that. When you go back into the past you want everything to be the same. Nostalgia came over us as we walked slowly up the block, looking this way and that for familiar things: the flower boxes that some of the houses used to display at windowsills, the dentist's sign in the dusty window at number 42. Well, there had been changes. The flower boxes were gone, and so were the For Rent signs that used to appear in so many of the windows, and there was no more dentist sign nor he himself, an elderly, frowsy man who'd seemed to spend more of his time puttering around the place fixing his decaying property than he did at dentistry. We'd rarely seen patients going into his place, and the sign in the window had been curled and yellowed with age, like the dentist himself.

We came to our house finally, close to the end of the block, near Columbus Avenue, and our hearts beat a little faster as we saw it, still standing there, the same house we had come to that spring day carrying our two suitcases that contained all the belongings we had in the world. Two young people, very much excited with our new life, very much in love. As we mounted the steps I imagined I saw our landlady looking at us through the window of the ground-floor apartment where she lived with her daughter. Her name was Mrs. Janeski, but we had already dubbed her Madame Janeski because of the haughty, aristocratic manner she affected when we came to rent the room, informing us that she took in only the “best” kind of people. Her sharp scrutiny had indicated that she was not at all sure about us yet.

But Ruby and I were thinking of something else as we stood there looking at the house. It was Ruby who spoke first.

“I wonder if the plumber ever came,” she said.

“I wonder,” I said, and we both laughed.

I had been thinking of exactly the same thing, and this wasn't surprising. It had been on our minds often during the time we had stayed at Madame Janeski's place, the only fly in the ointment. It was a lovely room as furnished rooms went in those days. It was just perfect for us, but it lacked one thing—a shower. There was a bathtub, a quite nice one, but that one all-important attachment, the shower, was missing, and it was essential to both of us.

Madame Janeski had seemed shocked when we brought it up to her, as if she had not known until then that there was no shower in the bathroom. She would attend to it right away, she said. She would call her plumber and have him come and install one.

The plumber had not come, and Madame Janeski had a ready excuse: his daughter had suffered an accident, and he'd had to rush to the hospital where she'd been taken. But he would come next week. And the next week, when the plumber still failed to arrive, it was because he had fallen down the church steps and fractured a leg. Her excuses were endless, and we finally realized that if the plumber really existed, the reasons for his failure to show up were the products of her imaginative mind.

All of that came back to us as we stood there in front of our former home, and we were laughing over it when the front door opened and a short, rather stocky man wearing blue jeans and a checkered flannel shirt came out. He had been watching us through the window, the same one through which Madame Janeski used to observe us suspiciously as we went in and out, and he was curious.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked courteously.

Ruby and I looked at each other. The same thing was on our minds. We would have liked to go in and see our old room. I explained to him why we were here, to pay a sentimental visit to the first place in which we had lived together, and that it was our sixty-seventh
wedding anniversary. He was understanding and quite pleasant about it. He was the new owner of the house, a fairly recent purchase. He was also, despite the jeans and flannel shirt, a professor of economics at New York University, and it would be no trouble at all to show us the room.

“Although,” he explained, “we don't call it a furnished room anymore. It's a studio apartment.”

We smiled and thought it probably rented for ten times or more what we'd paid for it. Fortunately for us, the person who had the studio apartment was away for the weekend. We followed the man into the house, and everything was familiar to us: the hallway, the little table where the mailman used to leave the mail (with my returned manuscripts among the letters), the carpeted stairs. It was not as spic and span as when Madame Janeski ran the place, however, and the banister did not shine with polishing.

We went up the one flight, and there we were, and the landlord was fumbling in his pocket for the key. He opened the door and stood aside to let us in. We both hesitated. A recollection had come to us of how I had carried Ruby over the threshold, and I think we both wished we could do it again. But it would have been a bit too much in front of this man who was waiting for us to go in, and I doubt if I would have had the strength to pick Ruby up and carry her in.

We entered, and it was an emotional moment for both of us as we stood there looking around at what had once been our first home. It was the same as it had been then, sun-filled, the two windows looking out onto the garden below and the row of backyards with lawn chairs set out for loungers, and clotheslines strung across on which I used to hang out my wash, surreptitiously, keeping watch for observers.

There still was the little alcove with the dressing table that Ruby had treasured so much, a touch of elegance that rarely came with a furnished room. Over the dressing table was the mirror that I'd had Ruby look into while I distorted her features and told her that was how she might look when she got old, but I'd love her as much as I did in our twenties. And there was the bathroom.

We looked at each other. Did we dare?

“May we go into the bathroom?” I asked the landlord.

He nodded, but I think he was startled when both of us went in together. Even the most intimate of couples rarely go into a bathroom together. We did, however, and it was not to use it but to look. We looked, and there was no shower—just one of those portable attachments that you buy in the drugstore.

“The plumber never came,” I said.

Ruby started to laugh, but I shushed her, and we went out to face the still-puzzled landlord. I said, “There is no real shower in there still. We never had one.”

“Oh, didn't you?” he said. “Well, I just took the place over and I haven't got around to making a few improvements. But I expect a plumber in a week or so to put the shower in.”

After thanking him for letting us see our old place, out on the street Ruby and I exploded into laughter so hysterical we had to hold on to each other. People stared at us, thinking probably we were drunk.

Well, that was our sixty-seventh wedding anniversary, a happy one, as happy as every day had been in all those years.

And then, one week after we had returned home, we woke up one morning and found blood on Ruby's pillow.

A
T FIRST, WHEN WE WERE MARRIED
, I
HAD NO JOB, AND
R
UBY DID ALL
the supporting, working as a secretary in the office of Brentano's bookstore on Fifth Avenue. It was 1935, the height of the Great Depression. Luckily, after a few months, I was able to get a job with MGM reading books and plays submitted for movie consideration, and it was then we decided we could afford a place where we had more space and a proper kitchen and bathroom—with the shower that we did not have in the furnished room on West 68th Street. We found an apartment on Bleecker Street, on the top floor of an old tenement house that had just been renovated. Everything was new and fresh and still smelled of paint, and to us, our apartment was the height of luxury and represented a step up in the world. The three-flight climb was nothing to us. We were young and healthy and we could take the steps two at a time.