The Golden Willow (7 page)

Adraenne stayed over with us that night, despite the fact that she had to be at the hospital early the next day. She could barely make it if she took an eight o'clock bus to New York, and that meant getting up not later than seven. But we were awakened even earlier than that by Ruby. She was not feeling well. Once more Adraenne took her temperature, and this time it was 102 degrees, well above normal.

Alarmed, Adraenne called Dr. Silverman. He instructed her to bring Ruby into the hospital immediately. We called Charlie, getting
him out of bed. He lived in Pennsylvania, more than an hour's drive away, but he made it in less time than that. Ruby didn't want to go to the hospital. I remember how she looked up at me as she lay in the bed, her eyes begging me not to take her away, and said in a whisper, “I have a premonition.”

I was angry. “Nonsense,” I said. “You have to go. There's absolutely nothing to be afraid of. You'll probably only have to be there a day or two until your temperature goes down, and then you'll be home again.”

I think often of that morning, of the gray light creeping into the room, and of Ruby there in the bed and looking up at me with that imploring look in her eyes. Had I done the right thing? Would it not have been better to let her stay home and to heed what she was saying? Was there such a thing as a premonition? And why did I have to be so angry with her?

Adraenne and I have talked this over, because we were both conscience-stricken later, but Adraenne has convinced me that what we did was right. Otherwise there would have been no chance at all, and we would not have had the doctors and the equipment and medications that were necessary in the battle that took place to fight the infection that had occurred.

It took ten long agonizing days. I don't know how many doctors came in to see Ruby, to bend over her, to touch her here and there, to ask her where the pain was, which she could never answer coherently. We had a private nurse for her day and night. Nevertheless, Adraenne and I took turns staying with her nights. They had put a cot in the room for us, and we took turns sleeping there. When it was my night off I would go to Adraenne's apartment in Brooklyn Heights to sleep, and then I'd come back early to relieve her so that she could go to work.

For a while, for just one little while, it seemed as if the battle had been won. A miracle had taken place. Her temperature dropped to near normal. Doctors clustered around her, amazed. Ruby was smiling. I bent down to her, jubilant, and said, “Darling, how would you like to go home?”

She looked up at me with hope and wonder in her eyes and said, “Oh, yes, yes, yes. When?”

“Perhaps even tomorrow,” I said.

I was quite serious. I believed then that such a thing was possible. Charlie was there, ready to drive her home. The doctors thought perhaps we should wait a bit longer. And then by nightfall it started to go the other way and our hopes were dashed. The pains had come back, the temperature had risen.

It was a different kind of infection, a new kind in the colon, and they let us know there were no drugs for it. Only an operation on the colon could save her, and an operation was out of the question. Ruby knew little of what was happening. She was in constant pain, and they began giving her morphine, and she slipped in and out of consciousness. I sat there beside her bed holding her hand, barely conscious myself, dazed and not believing what was happening.

Once, during this time, I heard Adraenne talking to the doctor she worked for over the phone. She had stopped going to work entirely and was in the room with Ruby day and night, and now she was trying to explain it to him.

“I can't come,” she was saying, keeping her voice down even though Ruby was in her drugged sleep. “My mother is dying.”

I could not hear his voice, but Adraenne told me later that he said, “I have my practice to think of.”

“I have my mother to think of,” Adraenne said, and hung up. Afterward,
after this was all over and she was able to go back to work, the pressure continued, and she had to resign.

Occasionally, for a brief period, Ruby would awaken, and there was some recognition in her eyes as she looked at me. I was holding her hand and bending close to her, and she whispered something to me. It was barely audible but I heard it.

“Darling,” she whispered, “don't forget to take your vitamin pills in the morning.”

“I won't,” I promised, and forced myself to keep her from knowing I was crying.

These were the last words we would ever speak to each other. She did not come awake again. Adraenne and I both spent that night in the room with her, taking turns during the night to lie down on the cot. The morphine dosage had been increased, and Ruby was in a heavy sleep, her breathing noisy. Both Adraenne and I were awake when dawn came. It was a gray September morning and I went to the window and looked out. Curiously, the hospital overlooked Central Park. I could see the trees and bushes beginning to emerge out of the shadows, and I remembered how much this place had meant to us, and how important a part it had played in our life together.

I was thinking of that when suddenly Adraenne let out a cry. “Dad, she's stopped breathing. She's dead!”

I swung around, shocked and disbelieving, and then I rushed to the bed. There she was, lying very still and white, and I kneeled down and took her in my arms and kissed her and held her.

I was crying hard and didn't want to let go of her when the doctor and nurse came into the room. But they finally made me go out when they came for her with a stretcher. I went into the corridor and stood with Adraenne at my side, both of us crying. Charlie had arrived,
and the three of us watched through our tears as they wheeled her out of the room, her body covered with a white sheet. They went past us and down the hallway to the elevator. There was a pause while they waited for the elevator to come. Then the door slid open and they wheeled the stretcher into it, and the door closed, and that was the last I saw of her.

W
HEN
W
ORLD
W
AR
II
ENDED, BIG CHANGES TOOK PLACE IN THE
country, and these changes affected my life as well as many others. The most noticeable change was in the rooftops of houses and apartment buildings. Suddenly, they began to sprout forests of what might have been modern metal sculptures but were actually antennae for the newfangled television. People were buying sets all over the country, and as a result, movie theaters were practically deserted.

For the first time in its existence, the movie industry was hard hit. Audiences were staying home glued to this new magic form of entertainment, and it was because of this that my long career as a reader came to an end. I walked into the story office at RKO, the company I had been working for during the last four years, and found everyone in mourning. Word had come from Hollywood that
the office was to be closed. Everybody was to be let go, from the editor on down. I was out of a job for the first time in many years.

Only this time I was forty years old. I had two children to support and soon to be put through college. We had taken another mortgage on the house, after the first one had been paid off, to help with mounting expenses. Who would hire me now? There were no more reading jobs. I went from one studio to another. They were all waiting for orders to close up. It looked very much as if the movie industry were a thing of the past. What in hell was I going to do?

“You can write,” Ruby said to me when I told her the situation. She was as sympathetic and understanding as she had always been, and comforting, and with no less faith in my writing ability than ever. “You'll earn some money from your writing, and if you don't, we'll manage. Just don't worry.”

She was right about our being able to manage. She also confessed to me later that she considered what had happened a blessing, as now I could write my own things instead of reading what others had written.

We were not broke. We had managed to save money, and a short time before this Ruby had left her federal job to become a school secretary at a much higher salary.

Just the same, I struggled hard to make my own contribution. I did not want it to be a repeat of the time when we were first married and I was out of work for months. I wrote, but not a novel this time. I wrote potboilers to make quick money, articles for
Popular Mechanics
and the Sunday supplements of newspapers. “What Men Won't Do for a Thrill” was one of my masterpieces; “A Day in the Life of a Strip Tease Artist” was another that I did for
American Weekly
, the Hearst papers' Sunday supplement. I even wrote scripts
for comic magazines, and that made money for me also. But it was a toothache that brought me the bonanza I never expected.

Sitting in the dentist's office waiting my turn, I took a magazine off the rack to read. It was called
Your Dream Home
, and it was the thinnest magazine I had ever seen. The front cover featured a picture of a modern ranch house with a builder's name underneath, and on the back cover were the magazine's only advertisers, their names and addresses enclosed in uniform rectangles, and all apparently were subcontractors.

The whole thing puzzled me. What the hell kind of magazine was this? Or was it simply a mailing piece to promote the services of the builder on the front cover? I looked for the masthead. There was none, but in tiny print at the bottom of a page was a publisher's name and an address in northern New Jersey. I tore it out and put it in my pocket just as the dentist's nurse came out for me.

Regardless of what kind of magazine it was, it looked like an easy market for me. The articles I read in its eight pages were badly written, and I knew I could do better. I wrote one on the beauty and durability of maple furniture and sent it in to them. The reply came much sooner than I had expected, and it was in the form of a telephone call.

A man's deep, gravelly voice spoke to me, introducing himself as Myron Hallerman, publisher of
Your Dream Home
, saying he'd read my article and had been impressed with it. He was sending me a check for a hundred dollars, and would I care to have lunch with him and discuss the possibility of doing further work for his magazine?

I was stunned. A hundred bucks! It was three times what any of the bigger magazines had paid me. And would I have lunch with him? Yes, I said, and did everything I could to keep my voice steady.

Fortunately, we had a car then, a 1950 Studebaker Champion that we had treated ourselves to before the collapse of the movie industry, and I was able to drive out to New Jersey. I was in for a surprise. Considering the skinny little bit of a magazine that I had become involved with, I expected a cubbyhole of an office. Instead, it occupied an entire floor at the top of a five-story office building. And there were quite a number of girls bent over typewriters clattering away, a receptionist, everything.

Myron Hallerman's private office was large and impressive, with paneled walls, a comfortable black leather sofa and chairs, and an enormous glass-topped mahogany desk behind which he sat in a high-backed carved chair that was like a throne. He was a big man, about my age, heavyset, with an aggressive, rather swarthy face and a hand outstretched to welcome me. “Glad you could come. Sit down. Have a drink?”

There was a liquor cabinet behind him—well stocked, I would discover later. But that time I shook my head and said, “No, thanks. It's a bit too early for me.”

It wasn't for him, but he didn't drink that time. We chatted for a while, I telling him about myself, my wife and children, my job as a reader for fifteen years, he telling me about himself, he too married with two children, boy and girl, which gave us something in common to start with.

We hit it off at the start, but even more so in the restaurant, where he seemed to be well known. We were seated in a booth and well tended by an attractive young waitress who smiled a lot at him and didn't mind when he patted her buttocks. I had two martinis and he two Scotches before steaks were served, and we talked a lot, he telling me that he'd graduated from an ivy league school, but instead of becoming the doctor his parents wanted him to be, he'd become
a salesman, selling every goddamn thing there was to sell, as he put it in the gravelly voice. He loved selling, especially when it involved the challenge of selling things that people didn't want and he was able to talk them into buying. And then finally he hit on the toughest of all things to sell: a magazine.

The postwar building boom had given him the inspiration. He'd just come back from the war with a bit of money in his pocket that he'd won at crap games, and was looking for a business of his own. He devised
Your Dream Home
, a magazine that a builder could send out to prospective home buyers to whet their appetite for a home still further and lure them into the builder's office. It would appear to be the builder's own personal magazine, with his name on the front cover and all sorts of advice inside on how to decorate and furnish the home.

“And it doesn't cost the builder a dime,” Myron explained to me, leaning forward across the table and tapping my arm to emphasize this point. “Not a goddamn dime.”

“Then who pays for it?” I asked, aware that he wanted me to ask this question.

“The guys on the back cover,” Myron said, grinning a little. “They're his subcontractors, and they'd better come across or else they can look for work elsewhere. Although,” he added, perhaps seeing me wince, “they get their money's worth in the business the magazine brings. And it only costs 'em ten dollars a month for the ad, which is peanuts compared to what they get back. It works for everybody, including me, of course.”

“How many of these builders do you have?” I asked.

“It started out with one a year ago,” Myron said. “I ran around the country selling my head off before I got that one, and then it took off like a rocket, and I've quit selling myself and I've got two
dozen salesmen doing it for me in every part of this goddamn country. We're up to six hundred services—that's what we call 'em, services—a month, each one bringing in an average of two hundred dollars.”