The Golden Willow (15 page)

I drove back to New York, and since it was so late already, and since we were anxious to get home and clean ourselves up and discard clothes that still contained bits of glass and whatever else had been thrown at us, we left Fred and Myra at their apartment, Fred apologizing profusely for having gotten us into this thing, and I assuring him that we didn't blame him for anything and that perhaps we had learned a great deal from our experience, and that no matter what had happened we had heard Paul Robeson sing, and that really was all that mattered.

I think I meant it. But what really mattered now was to get home, and never had I felt such urgent desire for my home as I did then. It took us another hour and a half to get back to Laurelton, and
Ruby felt as I did—that we couldn't wait to get into that ugly brick bungalow of ours, where we felt safe and comfortable and happy.

The children were in their beds asleep, and Aunt Lily and Peo were sitting waiting for us anxiously. They knew all about the Peek-skill riot—the whole world knew about it by now, as the news had been broadcast over the radio and was in all the late-night newspapers. Lily and Peo had been afraid we might have been caught in it. Well, we had, and we told them about our experience. Lily listened with horror on her face, but Peo's face was an expressionless mask. I knew, however, what he was thinking. He had been through a lot of similar battles in his years with the IWW. If he were to voice his feelings now, it would be in a bitter tone, and he would say, “What else is new in the capitalist world?”

But he said nothing. What a good thing it was we hadn't taken the children to the concert, Lily remarked, and she told us of the wonderful time they'd had at Jones Beach, and how quickly and willingly they had gone to bed, so pleasantly tired they were from their swimming.

As soon as Lily and Peo had gone, and before Ruby and I did anything else, we went to look at our children.

First, Adraenne in the downstairs bedroom next to ours. We opened the door quietly and tiptoed into the room. She was fast asleep with a thumb in her mouth. Each of us in turn bent down and kissed her lightly, then tiptoed out of the room.

Charlie next. We went softly up the stairs and opened the door. You could never tell what to expect with him. No matter how late it was, he could be up and reading a forbidden comic magazine. But no, he was sprawled out in his bed sound asleep, the blanket thrown aside, apparently well relaxed, as Adraenne was, from their swim.
Ruby adjusted the blanket over him, and we both kissed him lightly, then left the room.

We tiptoed down the stairs, and when we got to the bottom I put my arms around Ruby and whispered, “Aren't we lucky?”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” she whispered back.

And then I kissed her, and we both stood there for a few moments, arms around each other, the same thought in our minds: how lucky we were, and how warm and safe the house was, and how glad we were to be in it.

H
ISTORY REPEATED ITSELF AS
I
BEGAN SENDING MY BOOK TO PUBLISHERS
: Each time it was returned with the familiar polite note of rejection. In the post office, however, I was something of a celebrity. The clerk who waited on me the first time I came there to send the book out, a tall, curly-haired fellow with a cheerful manner, asked what the package contained in order to determine the cost of shipping, and when I told him it was a book I had written, his eyes widened.

“Are you a writer?” he asked.

I nodded. I was a writer, wasn't I?

“Wow!” he said. “I've never met a writer before. I always wanted to be a writer.”

I had met others like him before, people who wanted to be writers
but somehow never got around to writing. The postal business was forgotten as we chatted away, with a line of customers waiting impatiently behind me. He told me about himself. He'd been a post office clerk for fifteen years. He was married. He had four children. He'd always sworn he'd quit his job and just write. But he'd stuck it out, and here he was, liking his work really, liking the customers and being liked by them, and not suffering too much from unrequited ambition.

I spoke more sparingly about myself, but I did tell him that I had once worked in the post office in Chicago and had written a story about my post office experiences, and the story had been published in a magazine called
The Anvil
about a million years ago. And once he knew that, he was stunned with admiration and wanted to read the story.

“Wow!” he kept saying. “Imagine that! Imagine writing a story about the post office! Imagine being published in a magazine. Wow!” He was so excited about it he insisted on telling his fellow clerks about it, and they were all impressed.

He begged me to bring the magazine in the next time I came, and I did.
The Anvil
, one of the more prominent little magazines of the 1930s, had long since ceased publication, and the copy I had, which also featured a story by Nelson Algren, was in a crumbly state, its pages turned yellow, but I gave it to him anyway, and I must say he took good care of it, and so did the others to whom he passed it on, and eventually it was returned to me in no worse condition than what it had been before.

But after seeing my name in print, the clerk was doubly excited about my being an author, and so were all the others, and from that time on I was treated as a celebrity. Whenever I came in with a book
to mail there were respectful greetings, and my curly-haired friend hurried to be the one to wait on me and to talk about my latest achievement as a writer.

You see, I never let on that the book I was mailing out this time was the same one that I had mailed the month before. They assumed it was another book, and that I was a prolific writer who turned one out every month or so. It was another department at the post office that handled the book when it was returned from the publisher, so they had no way of knowing, and I saw no reason why I should disillusion them, and perhaps kill my friend's ambition to become a writer. I let him go on saying “Wow!”

Had I been in a better state of mind I could at least have gotten a smile out of it, but I was in no condition to be amused by anything. Despite all my determination not to let possible rejections hurt me, as they had done in my earlier writing efforts, I found they still hurt, and perhaps even more keenly than before because now I had to contend with something that I had not had to deal with before. It was old age.

Old age can be depressing in itself, with all its physical and emotional impairments, and with the knowledge constantly hanging over you that you are approaching the end of your life. My walking had reached the stage where I could not take a step without holding on to something. I was having trouble doing the things that were necessary to keep me alive: cook a decent meal, keep the house clean, shop for groceries, do the laundering. These things had always been done for me, but now I had to do them for myself, and often couldn't. I needed help, but I could not afford a housekeeper. Ruby and I had had a modest but comfortable income. When she died I lost a part of that. I was left with enough for myself but not enough
to be able to afford someone to come in and help with all the things that had to be done.

I had been struggling with all of this ever since I began to live alone. Adraenne came every other week to stay with me for two days, and before she left she cooked enough meals to last for several days. Charles and his wife did much for me, insisting that I stay with them in their home in Pennsylvania for an occasional weekend. But it was not enough, and there were so many things for me to do it's a wonder I had time to write my book. And yet I did, though I did my writing during the night when I was unable to sleep.

And then soon there was another reason for my not being able to sleep: I woke up one night soaking wet. I was horrified when I realized what it was. I could not remember anything like that happening to me before, even when I was a child. Perhaps it had happened then often enough, as it did to all young children, but I could not possibly remember any of it, and I had escaped the miseries of some children as they grew up with bed-wetting.

I recall being so bewildered by what had happened that I simply did not know what to do. I recall getting out of bed and standing cold and shivering and wet, and my gaze fell on a photograph of Ruby that hung on a wall, a photograph of her I had taken from the balcony of a hotel when we were in New Orleans. It had been drizzling that morning, and she held a red umbrella over her head. I remember looking at her and saying miserably, “Ruby, what shall I do?”

So I was in a state a lot of people my age are in, and the continuous rejection of my book did not help. It occurred to me at this time that since my story was set in England, an English publisher might be more inclined to look at it favorably. When my curlyhaired
friend told me what the cost of mailing it to England was, I hesitated. It was an awful lot, and nine chances out of ten it would be sent back and the money would be wasted. Finally, I decided to gamble.

Then one day several weeks later I received a telephone call, and my whole life changed.

T
HESE WERE TURBULENT TIMES IN
A
MERICAN HISTORY
. I
T WAS JUST
after the McCarthy era and the mad hunt for suspected Communists, the blacklisting of famous Hollywood actors and writers, with the Cold War heating up to the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, and then, in 1962, the Cuban missile crisis. The young president John F. Kennedy had said with a smiling face, declaring, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Then the smiling face was blotted out of existence as he and his beautiful wife were driving in an open touring car in a parade through the streets of Dallas, Texas, and rifle shots rang out, and the face slumped to one side and the beautiful wife screamed and tried to scramble out of the car.

Events came one after another in rapid and deadly succession. It was like a roaring sea in a tidal wave that swept over everything on
land, leaving death and destruction in its wake. The Vietnam War was raging, and angry crowds were demonstrating in the streets in protest against the war, and young men were fleeing to Canada to escape being drafted. The new president, Lyndon Johnson, was having a difficult time but stubbornly persisted in his war efforts, until finally he gave up and refused to run for a second term.

And in the election that followed, the assassinated president's younger brother, Robert, came back to political life and ran for the office, only to be gunned down in a San Francisco restaurant. There was no end to all the turmoil. Now it was the sixties, with freedom marches, sit-ins by blacks at restaurant counters demanding to be served just as white people were, and Martin Luther King, Jr. making his great speech in the huge Washington demonstration, “I have a dream …” Then he too was shot and killed, by a sniper hidden in bushes across the street from the motel where King was staying. Riots followed, with buildings set on fire by infuriated blacks.

The whole country, it seemed, was on fire. At the time all these things were happening our two children, no longer children now but a young man and young woman, were in college, Charlie at Boston University, Adraenne at Vassar.

One day I received a telephone call from a man I did not know. He gave me his name, but I had never heard it before.

“What is it you want?” I asked.

“I have a message from your daughter, Adraenne,” he said.

“What do you mean, you have a message?” I said. “Can't she give me her message herself?”

“No, she can't,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because she's in jail.”

I had to pause a minute to take this in. Then I said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“She's been arrested along with a number of others. They were in the freedom march in Birmingham, Alabama, and police grabbed a number of them and put them in jail. I was in the march too, but I was lucky. They didn't arrest me. Adraenne asked me to get in touch with you and tell you what happened.”

I was utterly bewildered at first. My daughter in a freedom march in Birmingham, Alabama, and now in a jail there when she was supposed to be at Vassar College attending classes?

“I don't get this,” I said. “How'd she ever get involved with this business, and who are you, anyway?”

“Adraenne has been a member of the Vassar freedom fighters for some time, and she was in the Vassar contingent that came to the march. I'm a member too, and I'm a student at the University of Chicago.”

So that was it. That was one of perhaps many other things she hadn't told us about. My kids were growing up, all right. I talked with Ruby about it, not knowing what to do next, and she saw no reason to get disturbed over it; she said she'd probably have done the same thing herself at her age if there had been such a thing as freedom marches. Just the same, she thought it would be a good idea to try to get her out of jail as soon as possible.

I called the Birmingham police department, and a gruff voice with a strong southern accent spoke to me. He was Sergeant somebody or other, but he knew all about the arrests of the freedom marchers and made it quite clear that he didn't like any of them. As for my daughter, if she was one of them, she deserved to be where she was, and if I was so concerned over her, why didn't I keep her
home where she belonged instead of letting her come to another city and stir up trouble?

For a few moments, while all this was coming out of him, I could not get a word in, and his gruff voice went on nonstop.

Finally, I was able to say, “All I want is to know how I can get her out of there. If there's bail involved, I'll be glad to put it up.”

“You better talk to your lawyer about that,” he said. “As far as I'm concerned, she's gonna stay here forever.”

It wasn't very encouraging, and Ruby began to feel worried. I did talk to my lawyer, and he in turn referred me to a lawyer who specialized in civil rights matters. Her name was Bella Abzug. I had never heard of her then, but she would be in the newspapers often in the coming years, in the forefront of the civil rights struggle, eventually elected to Congress, and famous for the wide-brimmed hats she wore. At the time she lived in a brownstone house in downtown Manhattan, and it was her office also. I went there to see her, a large woman with a harsh voice that had an East Side accent and a perpetual frown on her not very attractive face.