Authors: Harry Bernstein
The Dream (33 page)
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 shortly 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.
I cannot walk much any longer. It would not be possible for me to go round the lake. But I do manage to cross over the street to sit on that bench, alone now, watching the sunset, and sometimes I think that Ruby is still there sitting with me and I can feel her hand, soft and warm, in mine.
I think of many things then and one of them is that all of this might have been what my mother really sought in her dream – just this quiet and peace and these beautiful surroundings, and nothing else.
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781407006758
Published by Arrow Books in 2008
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Copyright © Harry Bernstein, 2008
Harry Bernstein has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. In some limited cases names of people, places, dates, sequences or the detail of events have been changed to protect the privacy of others. The author has warranted to the publishers that, except in such minor respects not affecting the substantial accuracy of the work, the contents of this book are true. Whilst the publishers have taken care to explore and check where reasonably possible, they have not verified all the information in this book and do not warrant its veracity in all respects.
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First published in Great Britain in 2008 by
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099517863
