The Golden Willow (3 page)

The entire place was occupied by writers, artists, musicians, and dancers, and we felt quite at home among them, except that a singer practicing somewhere in the building, a woman who was studying to be an operatic soprano and who made some awful sounds, annoyed us and probably many others in the building. And there was the modern dancer who lived next door to us and liked to move her furniture around late at night. We never found out why she did this, but the walls were thin and the scraping and thumping sounds of sofa and chairs and tables being dragged across the floor from one place to another came through to us clearly and kept us awake.

Yet, for all this, we loved our new home, and our brand-new, shiny solid maple furniture gave us a lot of pleasure. It was my job to polish it once every week to keep it new-looking, and I did this religiously every Saturday morning while Ruby was still at work in Brentano's, Saturday being a workday then. We had bought the furniture with the help of a friend who knew the head salesman in a large furniture store that specialized in solid maple, which was all the rage then among young couples. We had to ask for Henry, and to tell Henry that Yetta had sent us, and Henry in turn saw to it that we got a big discount.

One of the pieces we bought was a large lounge chair. It had soft cushions and maple arms and legs. I had resisted buying it at first because I thought it was unnecessary and too expensive even with Henry's discount. The salesman was a tall, thin fellow with a melancholy look on his face. He never smiled once, and he carried a notebook in one hand and a pencil in the other and jotted down the things as we bought them and made special notes that we assumed were the discounts that he was giving us. When it came to the discussion as to whether we should buy the lounge chair or not, he
turned his head aside as if to indicate his neutrality, with the sad look still on it, and I think I heard him give a sigh.

Ruby and I were arguing, though not as couples usually do. I was telling her that I could well do without the chair, though really I wanted it.

And Ruby was saying, “No, you can't. This isn't luxury. It's a necessity. You need it for your reading.”

“Why do I need it for reading?” I asked. “Since when do I read with that part of my body?”

“Stop being funny,” she said. “It isn't just for when you read. It's for resting too. I'd love to see you sprawled out in that chair.”

“I could use the bed for that,” I said. “With you on it.”

“Don't be so funny,” she said. “We'll buy the chair.”

We did, and I did a lot of sprawling out on it. And I loved Ruby more than ever for thinking of it, the way she often did for me in so many other ways.

We were a happy couple. We had a good social life in the Village, though it was often halted by my reading. I did all my work at home, and this sometimes prevented us from having people in for an evening or going to their places. Ruby never minded. She read a great deal herself, except that they were books of her choice, and many an evening passed quietly with both of us immersed in our books.

Still, we managed to visit others, and there were always the soirees at James Deutsch's place on Waverly, the German fellow whom I threatened to kill once when he tried to kiss Ruby at our first gathering there. He had since apologized and become a great friend of ours, and he still was comptroller of a department store by day and a bohemian playwright at night, and held lively soirees—as
he preferred to call the gatherings—at night in what he also liked to call his studio, and which could be reached by climbing an iron spiral stairway for three floors. There he drank much Scotch and smoked many cigarettes, and sometimes played Beethoven loudly on his record player and conducted the music at the same time, surrounded by his admirers, who were mostly young females who sat on the floor, watching worshipfully He wore a beret and an artist's smock then.

There were others we mixed with in the Village. Adolf was a true artist, and a rather good one, I thought. He was perpetually gloomy and could sit for an entire evening with his head cast down, in his hand a glass of wine that he never drank. Perhaps the gloomy state came from his wife, Lucia, a pretty woman with a light complexion that contrasted sharply with Adolf's dark one. Her manner and speech were always theatrical and accompanied by gestures of the hands, and she was forever belittling her husband in front of people with frequent suggestions that he was sexually impotent. Adolf never said a word, just sat there with his head bent and the glass of wine in his hand.

Lucia frequently gave out invitations to people for dinner, or some other occasion at her house, but few people accepted, and those who did almost never found her home when they arrived. Ruby and I knew nothing about that when we were invited to breakfast. We went and they were home, all right, but fast asleep in their bed, and when we had knocked several times Adolf came to the door in his pajamas and sleepily suggested we come back in an hour or so. We never did.

And there were the Grossmans, Ben and Germaine. Ben was a lawyer by day and a playwright at night, and having heard that I was a reader for a moving-picture company, he promptly had Germaine
invite us to dinner. Ben was doing well as a lawyer, and they lived in one of the more modern apartment buildings on Greenwich Avenue. It had an elevator that took us up to their apartment on the fifth floor, and Ruby and I were impressed. We had visions of a good, hearty meal, and I was just in the mood for it, and perhaps a couple of drinks to go with it. I'd had a rough day with a mystery novel. I hated mystery novels, and this one deserved my disdain because it was long and complex with numerous red herrings and lots of tiresome repetitions of “Where were you the night of. … ?”

The warm welcome we got as we entered the apartment and the succulent smell of roast beef emanating from the kitchen were promising. Ben shook my hand several times and told me how glad he was to see me, and we sat down in an expensively furnished living room, but no drinks were served.

“I've got a surprise for you,” Ben said. “Excuse me for a moment.”

He disappeared briefly and returned holding something in his hand. It was a thick manuscript bound in a purple cover.

“I gave up writing plays and am trying my hand at novels,” he said. “I just finished this one. It's a mystery novel, and I thought before we sit down to dinner you might want to glance over it and give me your opinion, and maybe if you think it's any good you'd like to offer it for me to the movie company you're with.”

He plopped it down on my lap, grinning affably. I felt its thickness in my hands, and for quite some time I did not say anything. Ruby was sitting beside me, and out of the corner of my eye I could see her expression, which was probably much like my own—a mixture of many things, but mostly disgust.

After a few moments had passed, I said, “I'd like to ask you one question.”

“Yes?” He spoke eagerly, thinking I was interested already and wanted to know more about his transition from playwriting to novel writing, or something else connected with the manuscript.

I said, “Could you tell me where the nearest hamburger place is to here?”

A puzzled look now came on his face. “Hamburger!” he said. “What do you want that for?”

“Because that's where Ruby and I are going to have our dinner.”

I handed the manuscript back to him. Then I took Ruby's hand and we left.

I
HAVE BEEN ASKED
many times by reporters during interviews about the marriage that Ruby and I had. Somehow the idea of a flawless marriage that lasted so many years arouses curiosity in a good many people, if not skepticism.

One reporter asked bluntly, “Are you sure there were no bumps in that wonderful marriage of yours?”

I had to say we disagreed at times; what two human beings wouldn't? But it was never anything serious. We had so many things in common—books, music, art, almost everything—and Ruby always maintained an even disposition, a sweetness that never changed, and a smile that was always there. How can one quarrel with a person like that?

Yet there was one time when there was a bump, and a rather serious one. It was about having children. I don't know how the topic came about, but it did, and we discovered that we were at odds on the matter. Ruby wanted to have children; I didn't. I'd been brought up in a family of six children where there was constant wrangling and strife. Even at night in bed there was no rest from it. Three of us
were crowded into one bed, and I slept at the feet of my two older brothers. We fought for space, and I got kicked many times. No, I'd had enough of children and wanted none of my own.

With Ruby, it was equally understandable. She had been brought up in a family where there were just two children, and Ruby's younger brother was slightly mentally disabled and was no companion for her. Nor was there a father—he'd died before the two children really knew him. Often, she told me, she envied those of her friends who had large families, and she certainly wanted children of her own—someday.

Yes, someday. It was early in our marriage when that came up, and we were able to push the subject aside without making the bump a serious one. In the meantime, we were enjoying our life in the Village with lots of friends and lots of places to go—the Civic Repertory Theater on Fourteenth Street to watch Eva Le Gallienne in Chekhov's
The Seagull
, Tolstoy's
The Living Corpse
, or any one of dozens of other plays that only this wonderful theater group could put on. For an admission charge of twenty-five cents you could sit in the gallery.

Then sometimes I would go down to Gray's drugstore in Times Square and get on line in their basement to buy discount tickets for some Broadway show. And we'd walk to the theater from the Village, and walk back again, and once, I remember, I chose to halt our walk and pull Ruby close to me and kiss her, and a passing car filled with young fellows slowed down and a head popped through the window and a voice yelled out, “Why don't you marry the girl?”

Our four years in the Village went swiftly and happily, and there was never any more talk of children. The summers were a bit difficult for me. Our apartment on the top floor became an oven, with
the sun beating down on the roof directly above us. I still read manuscripts for the movies, though I'd changed from MGM to Twentieth Century Fox, and I sweated over the books and things I had to read. When it came to typing out the synopsis that was required, my fingers were so moist from sweat that they slipped on the keys. I worked stripped to the waist, like a stoker in a furnace room, the sweat pouring over my body. I would keep a basin of cold water nearby, and every so often I would dip a cloth into it and run water over my head and face and chest.

One hot afternoon, as I sat at my desk struggling to finish typing a synopsis of the book I had just read, I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. The door was wide open to let in what little air there was, and the sound came to me clearly. I halted my work, thinking it was one of our neighbors on the floor, perhaps the modern dancer come to move some furniture around and bother me still more. But it wasn't a neighbor. It was Ruby.

I gaped at her at first as she came through the door. Then I noticed that her face was pale, and she didn't look well. Nor had she ever come home from the office this early. I jumped to my feet at once and led her to a chair, and she sank onto it gratefully.

“Aren't you feeling well?” I asked anxiously.

“Not terribly well,” she said. “They let me go home early at the office.” And then she added—with complete irrelevance, I thought—“Darling, do you remember that joke James told us last Saturday night?”

“Joke?” I said, more puzzled than ever.

“Yes, the one about the unmarried girl who told her mother she wasn't feeling well and said, ‘Don't worry, Mother. I'm only a little bit pregnant’?”

I gave a short laugh. “Yes, I remember it. So what?”

“Well,” Ruby went on, “that's the way it is with me.”

It took me a half second to catch on, and for another brief moment there was shock. But that only lasted another second, and then I was on my knees in front of her. It was a surprising reaction on my part. We'd quarreled over this once. I was dead set against having children. I hated families. I'd been miserable in one for a good part of my life. It had been a family of bickering and poverty and no father to speak of, and I had made it clear to Ruby that I would never have a family of my own.

But in this moment all that had vanished, and I was on my knees in front of her and holding her hands and telling her how wonderful it was.

She was not sure about me, though. She looked at me anxiously and said, “Are you sure you don't mind?”

“No, of course not,” I said. “This is great, really great. I do mean it.”

I did, without any doubt. And there was something else that had happened once to contradict my feelings about families. It was when I was ten years old. Until then I had been the youngest, the baby in the family. Then I woke up one morning to hear a baby crying in the next room, where my parents slept. My two brothers, who shared the bed with me, woke up too, and they laughed when I asked where the baby had come from.

“He doesn't know anything yet,” Saul had sneered.

“He'll find out one day,” Joe had added.

Of course I hadn't known. I hadn't noticed my mother getting larger and larger, as they had, knowing what it meant. I went into her bedroom later that day and saw her lying there with the baby at her side, and she motioned to me and said, “Come and see your little brother.”

When I looked at the little wrinkled face wrapped in blankets beside her, I'd felt an overwhelming happiness that blotted out all the poisonous feelings I might have had toward this new addition to the family. And it was that same kind of happiness that rose in me to greet the news Ruby brought me that day.

I
T WAS NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT, THE DOCTOR ASSURED US, JUST A
common nosebleed, but our daughter, Adraenne, was not satisfied. She was a nurse practitioner and knowledgeable about medicine, and she knew who were the best doctors. She chose one in New York and made an appointment for Ruby.