The Golden Willow (11 page)

Why I should suddenly have gone back to that distant point in my life is perfectly clear to me now that I think of it. I was seeking to get away as far as possible from the present with all its misery. I was looking back at a time and place where there had been enough misery in its own right but which had nevertheless been home to me, with my mother alive, and my brothers and sisters too, and friends, lots of them.

There had been poverty to battle, but something else that was just as bad if not worse, and that was bigotry, for the street was divided into two enemy camps. On one side, on my side, lived the Jews, and on the other were the Christians, and in between them was an invisible wall that kept the two sides from crossing over to each other.

Yes, I began to think of that, and the film slowed down and everything was clear, and I remembered among many things the dark, sullen, perpetually embittered figure of my father, and the times he came home drunk from the pub at night, the roar of his voice disturbing our sleep, waking us all up with a feeling of terror, and how I used to pull the covers over my head to shut out the sounds.

I thought of my mother a great deal, and how she used to struggle to keep us alive because my father, who worked as a tailor and made little money, gave her even less of it to feed us and used the rest of it for his drink and gambling. I remembered how one Saturday he'd doled out the pittance he gave her and then had gone striding
off to his pub, and she looked at the bit of money he'd thrust grudgingly into her hand. With a sudden resolve she put on her hat and coat and took me with her to the market. There I watched, frightened, as she crawled under one of the fruit stands and came out with her two straw bags filled with half-rotten fruit she'd scavenged from beneath the stall. This rotted fruit became the start of her little shop that she made in our front room, which had never been furnished because there was no money to buy furniture but which my mother had promised us would someday become a parlor with a red plush couch and chairs, a thick red plush carpet too, and even a piano.

But now it was a shop that sold faded fruits and vegetables. We were bitter and resentful about it, and ashamed of the shop, not realizing that it would save our lives with the little bit of money that came from it.

It all came flooding back to me, along with how World War I had drawn the two sides of the street together. When Emily, the little telegram girl, came riding into our street perched high on her bicycle and whistling a merry tune, everyone came out onto their doorsteps with hands on their hearts and watched tensely to see whose door she would stop at, taking out of her pouch one of those dreaded telegrams with the black border around the envelope. And upon seeing whose door it was—not theirs, thank God—they would rush to comfort the poor, weeping newly widowed woman. From both sides they came, and it would not matter whether you were Jewish or Christian. There was only one side then.

And there was love too, tucked away on that street, hidden from view. One of the lovers was my sister Lily, and the other was a Christian boy who lived opposite us. I was their secret messenger who carried notes from one to the other, and I learned too more of the cruel bigotry that existed between us.

Everything was there in my mind, and perhaps it had been there for a long time, stored away inside me, ever since we had left En gland to come to America to seek a better life. But now it was begging to be written.

And write it I did. I plunged right into it the very next day, sitting down at my electric typewriter and tapping away at the keys. It was a long time since I had done that, before I'd entered my nineties, and I found things were not quite the same as before. My hands had stiffened. They did not fly across the keys as they had once done when I was younger. They were slow and I made a great many mistakes. Nor could I sit as long as I used to in a chair at the desk. I had to get up frequently and knead my fingers to loosen them, and to walk around a bit to get the blood flowing in my legs.

That was being ninety. But it did not stop me from writing
The Invisible Wall
. I had given it that title from the very beginning, and I saw my story then as a microcosm of all the walls that exist in the world today—some of them not as invisible as I portrayed ours, but actual brick or concrete walls that separated one country from another, or one race or religion from another. Regardless of how disturbed and angry all that made me feel, the writing of it did what I wanted it to do. It took my mind off my grief and carried me back into a world that I had once known more happily and where, in retrospect at least, I was comfortable and secure.

S
UMMERS WERE TRAVEL TIME FOR US WHEN THE CHILDREN WERE
growing up. It was mostly for pleasure, and for the chance to be closer to our children than during the rest of the year, when school and work separated us for so many hours. But it was also for educational purposes. We thought the kids could benefit from seeing the places that had played such an important part in American history. And the kids loved it.

Perhaps it was for our benefit, too. Ruby and I had both come from poor families where there was no such thing as a vacation. We had never seen much of the world or the country itself outside of the towns where we had been born, Ruby in Poland, myself in England, and then later New York. So we were just as eager as the children to travel and see as much of the entire country as we could.

Generally, we began our trips in the month of July, and we packed enough clothing and other supplies to last us for a month, never knowing how long we would be gone. We had two cars then, one in which Ruby did her shopping and went to work, a small car that Chrysler had named the Lark, and a larger Buick that I drove to my job editing trade magazines. Naturally, we took the Buick, and we drove off in high spirits, with Ruby sitting beside me and Charlie and Adraenne in the backseat. On the seat with the children were the games and puzzles and books that would come in handy when they grew bored with the long stretches of driving in between destinations and began to carry on a bit in the backseat and annoy Ruby and me, particularly the one of us who was driving at the time.

We had learned to bring these supplies after long and often bitter experiences. I remember one time when we were crossing the seemingly never-ending miles and miles of Texas wasteland. The two of them got into a scuffle with much shouting and screaming accompanied by slaps. I was driving at the time, and I brought the car to a halt abruptly at the side of the road in a patch of sand.

“Get out!” I ordered the two of them. They quieted immediately and obeyed, and stood in the sand with the wind blowing hard and raising the dust into their faces. Behind us stretched miles and miles of empty, desolate land with no habitation in sight, not a single person. I pointed it out to them and said, “If I hear one more peep out of you two, I'm going to drop you off here and let you make your way to civilization on foot while Mom and I drive on.”

It may not have been the best kind of way to discipline children, but it worked for me, and they were as quiet as two little mice for the rest of the trip. After that, however, we were careful to take along enough distractions to keep them occupied, and our trips were conducted
for most of the time with two orderly passengers in the backseat.

We went everywhere. Up in northern New York State we visited Fort Ticonderoga to see where the Revolutionary army had fought the British in a fierce battle, the cannons they used still there. We drove along the East Coast to Plymouth Rock to see where the Pilgrims had first landed, and down to Washington, D.C., to wander about the buildings and monuments of the capital, gazing up and down and all around, and getting so tired we could hardly wait to get into our hotel and into bed.

There was one trip we made to visit Davy Crockett's birthplace that got us into a bit of trouble. Our map led us deep into the backwoods of Tennessee. Unfortunately, we had arrived the day after a heavy rainfall. A stream we had to cross by way of a low, wooden bridge was overflowing, and the bridge was partially covered with water. I was at the wheel and hesitated about attempting to cross over it. Yet there was no other way to get to our destination other than by a long circuitous route.

I decided finally to chance it. I went very slowly. But the water kept getting deeper until I could no longer see the edges of the bridge. My passengers began to guide me, but their instructions soon became confusing.

“To the right,” shouted Ruby.

“No, Dad, to the left,” yelled Charlie.

Adraenne chimed in too, siding with her brother. “To the left, Dad.”

I zigzagged slowly, trying to follow all the mixed instructions, and then it happened. The car suddenly slid and halted. The front wheel had gone over the edge and there we were stuck in the middle of the bridge, perhaps forever. In a panic, we yanked off our shoes
and stockings, scrambled out of the dangerously tilted car, and waded back to where we'd come from, to find a group of natives watching us. Obviously this was nothing new to them. It had been going on all day long, car after car, and there was only one place we could get help, they told us, pointing to a cabin not far away in the woods. In that cabin we'd find a man who would take care of everything.

We found a heavyset man badly in need of a shave seated at a table eating his lunch. Hunched over a plate of beans, he did not glance at us as we came in, but said in a deep voice, “Be right with you.”

He seemed to know already why we had come. He had been hauling cars off the bridge all day long and had been making a handsome sum of money out of it. And it happened after every rainfall. We stood with our wet feet waiting for him to eat his lunch. Soon he was done, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and got up from the chair.

“All right, folks,” he said. “Follow me.”

He hadn't asked anything. He knew it all. We followed him outside, and there was the truck he used, and he drove us in it back to the bridge and we watched as, expertly, he chained his truck to our car and hauled it safely to the other side of the bridge. We paid him the twenty-five dollars he asked for, an awful lot in those days for fifteen minutes of work, and we went on our way.

On the whole, however, our trips went off smoothly, and as the children grew older we ventured still farther west to see the great beauty of America: the awesome Rocky Mountains, the equally awesome Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park with its snowcapped mountains and herds of wild animals and lakes and rivers—things our children, and Ruby and I too, had never
seen before except in pictures in magazines. We drove as far west as California and stayed in San Francisco for two days, enjoying its hilly streets, the mists that came often, and the streetcar ride that was part of the sightseeing. We drove from there to a redwood forest, gasping in amazement at the enormous size of these huge trees.

We felt a deep satisfaction at all of this, and we were glad to have been able to show our children part of the reason why America was such a great country. But there was one thing we did not show them, and that was the ugliness that existed in America also. There was a good opportunity to do this when Paul Robeson gave a concert in Peekskill, New York. Ruby and I were going with friends, and I am glad that we did not take Charlie and Adraenne with us because of what happened at that concert. I will tell you about this later.

I
DON'T REALLY KNOW HOW LONG IT TOOK ME TO WRITE
T
HE
I
NVISIBLE
Wall
. It must have been about a year, but it was finally done, and the next thing was to try to get it published. But did I really want to go into that sort of thing again? I hesitated before sending it out to a publisher. I'd done this hundreds of times before and always met with failure, a polite rejection note, or nothing at all. Was there any reason to think that things had changed?

For quite some time I kept the manuscript on my desk, satisfied with what I'd done, thinking I should leave well enough alone. The writing had done its job. I had been functioning normally. The grief was still there, but it was no longer as acute as it had been before. I could look at one of the photographs of Ruby on a wall or a table without crying. The loneliness and the terrible emptiness would always be there. I knew that would never pass. But why let myself in
for the disappointments that I knew would inevitably come with submitting my manuscript to some editor who would have little interest in my life as a young boy in a Lancashire mill town?

I could never forget those disappointments. They were like wounds inflicted on my body, leaving scars. I think the worst of them all was the time Clifton Fadiman, the editor of Simon and Schuster, had shown some interest in my work after reading one of my short stories in a little magazine and had written me a letter inviting me to submit a novel.

Ruby and I had just been married, and writing and becoming a famous author were matters of life or death with me. I was thrilled by the letter, and I sat down immediately to write a novel that was doomed to failure because I didn't know how to write a novel. Nevertheless, I dashed one off in a few weeks, sent it off to Fadiman, and waited impatiently for the reply, rushing downstairs every time the mailman came to see if there was a letter for me from the publisher. Well, there was one day, and it was from Fadiman, and it asked me briefly to come in and see him about my novel.

I was in seventh heaven that day, absolutely certain that he would not have asked to see me unless it was to tell me that he was going to publish my novel. If it had been turned down, I reasoned, it would have come back to me with the usual polite rejection slip. It was on that positive note I went out and bought a bottle of wine to celebrate the occasion. When Ruby came home and heard the news she was as delighted as I was, and when we sat down to dinner—a meatloaf I had thrown together at the last moment from her written instructions—we toasted my success.