The Golden Willow Page 10

  She had to stop then because she was weeping so hard, and her voice broke down completely. I comforted her as best I could, and she was able to go on after a while. “I couldn't believe it at first. It just didn't seem possible. There had to be some mistake. I wanted to call up the publisher and ask whoever was in authority there. But I thought I ought to get Jerry's permission first. I knocked on his door and he didn't answer. I opened the door and peeped in, and then I saw him. …”

  She simply could not go on, and I did not urge her to do so. There was no need to. I knew now what she had seen, and I knew why it had happened. The newspaper account, which I read later in the library, did not give that explanation for his suicide, but merely said that he had been despondent and had been suffering from depression for some time.

  Before I left, Jerry's mother insisted that I take the manuscript of his novel and see for myself whether it was not the work of genius that she still insisted it was. I was curious enough to want to read it, and I took it home with me in the wrapper of the publisher that had sent it back to him. And I did read it, or as much of it as I was able to.

  If I had been a reader then, as I was later, for motion picture companies, reading all sorts of manuscripts—book, plays, stories, a wide variety of stuff—for consideration as movies, I might have been less puzzled than I was with Jerry's book. Much of what I later had to read was what you might call literary junk, but I don't think anything I ever read was as puzzling as this one.

  Perhaps I can best describe it by comparing it to an abstract painting where the colors are vivid and dramatic but the meaning, if any, is clear only to the painter. The sentences in Jerry's book were clear enough and well written, but there was no connection between the sentences, and collectively they made no sense. It seemed like a lot of gibberish to me. There were over five hundred pages of this confusion to the manuscript, and I could struggle through only ten of them before I gave up.

  And it was for this, I thought, that Jerry had hanged himself. But how many more were there like him? Not all of them had hanged themselves in frustration and deadened hopes, but their lives had been soured by the efforts and disappointments. I could think of any number of them besides Jerry. There was Thelma, comfortably married to a doctor, the mother of a young boy, who gave it all up to come to Greenwich Village to write; she failed, but she could never go back to her husband and son. There was Fred, a pharmacist who gave up his job to come to the Village to work as a janitor in an apartment house where he could get free rent and write. There were people who made all sorts of sacrifices to become writers but did not succeed and could never adjust to the conventional life of just an ordinary person.

  I was one of them myself. But my suffering was less than any of theirs because of Ruby. She made my life so pleasant and so easy to bear that nothing else counted. Now Ruby was no longer with me, however, and I buried myself in my writing once again. Only this time it was not the all-consuming thing it had once been; it had served as therapy and to some extent gotten my mind off my grief. Once The Invisible Wall was finished, I remembered my past efforts and those of people I had once known, including the tragic figure of my ex-schoolmate who had hanged himself, and I questioned whether it was worth once again going through all that struggle to find a publisher, a process with inevitable rejections and bitter disappointments. Let well enough alone, I told myself. Be satisfied with what you have accomplished. You are emotionally better off than before. You can think of Ruby without choking up. Get busy on another book. There is plenty more to write about. I told myself all that, and let my finished manuscript lie on my desk untouched for several weeks.

  Then one day I went out for a walk around the lake, the walk Ruby and I had taken every day, hand in hand—only now I discovered something new about myself and what it was like to be in my nineties.

  Chapter Thirteen

  2004

  FOR THE GREATER PART OF THE YEAR WHILE I WAS WORKING ON MY book I had been sedentary, sitting at my desk most of the time pounding away at my typewriter, so I had no inkling that anything was wrong until I went out to take my walk around the lake. It was spring, beautiful weather. The trees were budding and early flowers were beginning to show, the crocuses and the hyacinths peeping up out of the earth and the yellow forsythia already blooming in clumps here and there.

  I felt a burst of energy as I stepped out of the house, and looked forward to a good long walk. I only wished Ruby were with me. But there was no use wishing that. It could never happen. I felt a certain stiffness in my legs as I crossed the street and went down to the lake, but I thought that was simply due to lack of exercise and after a while the stiffness would ease up. It didn't, however, and as a matter of fact only grew worse, and very soon I had to sit down on a bench. I rested a few minutes, then got up to try again, and this time as I did so I lost my balance and fell. Luckily, it was grass I fell onto, so there was no serious injury, but I had a great deal of trouble getting up onto my feet.

  There would be quite a number of falls after this, and I would learn eventually that the best way to get back up was to turn onto my stomach, then get on my hands and knees and straighten up bit by bit. This is one of the many tricks the nonagenarian has to learn in order to cope with the inevitable muscular weakening that takes place in all of us.

  I learned that from my doctor. I had gone to him after my first fall, and he explained it to me, and also advised me to start using a cane when I walked.

  “In fact,” he said, “you might also start thinking of getting a walker.”

  I laughed, and very emphatically I said, “Oh, no!” I'd seen old people—I always called them that—creeping around bent over and holding on to one of those things on wheels that looked like baby carriages. “That's not for me,” I said. Even then, well into my nineties, I still could not picture myself being that old and decrepit.

  He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, then asked, “How long do you think you have to live?”

  I thought it was a peculiar question, and did not know how to answer it for a moment. Finally I said, “Shouldn't you know the answer to that better than I?”

  “Sometimes,” he said, “when patients get to your age, which is ninety-four, they know the answer better than I do. I can guess in some cases, but in your case, I wouldn't want to do that. You're in reasonably good health, you have no observable life-threatening diseases; you could go on for quite a few years. But I do know that this weakening of the muscles that you have will not go away, but will in fact increase in different parts of your body. So don't turn your nose up at a walker. If you want to live, it will help you do so. Just thank your lucky stars it doesn't have to be a wheelchair. A lot of people your age have to settle for that.”

  He was absolutely right. The fall I had suffered that day was only the first of several that followed in the succeeding months, and two or three of those times I had to be taken to an emergency room to have torn skin stitched and X-rays taken. I was luckier than most elderly, to whom a fall meant a fractured bone, particularly the hip. I got away with minor injuries, but I also came to the realization that I needed help of some sort in walking. I could no longer walk around the lake, and that was a serious blow to me. It had meant so much to me, the one thing Ruby and I had always done together but which I could do alone, always accompanied by memories of her and her hand in mine as we walked.

  And yet I still resisted the doctor's advice to get a walker. I was not ready for it yet, even though I began to find it difficult merely to stand on my feet, and had to grasp hold of something to steady myself.

  It was my son and his wife, Marcy, who took matters into their own hands and presented me with a walker as a surprise gift, assuming that I would welcome it.

  I didn't. I was furious. “Who needs that?” I said. “Take it back to the store.”

  They didn't argue. But they left it there with me to think about, and I glanced at it now and then with dislike but growing interest. I had seen walkers before, with
old men and women crouched over them, but they were nothing like this one. This was the latest thing in walkers. It had a seat on which you could rest when you got tired. The seat lifted up and inside there was a pocket for storing things such as refreshments or groceries if you went shopping. It also had a brake. I began to test it out, and eventually I found myself using it without feeling self-conscious in public, pleased with the mobility it gave me.

  Today, it is an indispensable part of the equipment for my nineties, which includes a variety of canes, a pair of crutches just in case, a bathtub seat, an alert button that will bring aid in case I fall and can't get up, and a first-aid kit.

  But I was less prepared for emergencies at the time I finished writing my book, even though I was already ninety-four. I was in good shape physically. People refused to believe my age when I told it to them. But I had spent months indoors working on the book, and it was not until I got outside and began to move around that I noticed the change that had taken place in my physical condition. Perhaps that contributed to the feeling of gloom and discouragement that came over me after I had finished my book. Quite clearly I had only a limited amount of time left. That was what the doctor had been hinting at. So what difference did it make if I sent the book out and it got kicked back to me? What difference did anything make?

  So it was with this attitude that I started sending The Invisible Wall out to publishers, trying to tell myself that no matter what happened, I didn't give a damn.

  Chapter Fourteen

  1949

  THE POLITICAL CLIMATE HAD CHANGED CONSIDERABLY IN THE United States since the war ended, and the Soviet Union, once our ally in the war against Hitler, was now considered the enemy in what was called the Cold War. Right-wing thinking was prevalent throughout the country, and because the famous African American singer Paul Robeson was an outspoken advocate of the Soviet Union, he was regarded generally as a Communist and one of the enemy. Reactionary groups such as the Ku Klux Klan joined forces with veterans' organizations in Peekskill, New York, to prevent a planned concert for Robeson from taking place, and when the first attempt was made on August 29, 1949, to hold the concert they disrupted it with a violent attack on the audience, and a riot followed that lasted several hours with many cars smashed and people injured.

  The supporters of Robeson, who included Communists, Socialists, liberals, and union members, refused to give up, and a second attempt was planned for a week later, the first Sunday of September. It was to this concert that Ruby and I were invited to attend with our friends, Fred and Myra, a couple we had known since our days in the Village, both of them writers and both liberals. They assured us that this was not a Communist affair, knowing how opposed Ruby and I were to the Communists, but was being backed by all Americans who believed in freedom of speech, and this meant many thousands. Further, they assured us, there would be adequate police protection this time to prevent what had taken place last time.

  It seemed safe enough to us, and we could hardly miss an opportunity to hear Paul Robeson sing. There would also be Pete Seeger on the program, a favorite folk singer of ours. Just the same, we stuck to our decision to not take the kids along, and they would be well taken care of by Aunt Lily.

  Sunday, September 3, 1949, began as a beautiful bright, sunny day. Ruby and I were up early. It had been decided after much argument that we would drive up to Peekskill in Fred's car. I had wanted to use mine, but Fred was insistent, so I let him have his way, and that meant Ruby and I would have to take a bus and then a subway into New York. It made little sense, but I would find out later why Fred was so insistent on taking his car. I would also find out the true reason why he asked me to bring a baseball bat along. He'd told me the concert was being held out in the open on some picnic grounds on the outskirts of Peekskill, and it would be part picnic, with a lunch Myra was packing, and there might be a chance of getting a baseball game going.

  It was not that at all, but then I never even suspected anything else, and I had to ask Charlie if I could take his baseball bat along. He seemed surprised.

  “I thought you were going to a concert,” he said.

  “We are,” I assured him, and then explained what Fred had told me.

  “Then why can't I go?” Charlie asked.

  It looked as if we were going to have a bit of trouble. There was nothing Charlie liked better than to go someplace. But fortunately, Aunt Lily arrived just then and told them she and Peo were going to take them to Jones Beach, and that settled it. Charlie loved to swim and there was no more fuss. Later on I realized how close I had been to giving in and how disastrous that would have been.

  But there was little thought of disaster when the four of us started out from Greenwich Village, where Fred and Myra still lived. We were all in high spirits. Fred's car was an older-model Plymouth that had lost most of its green color, and it was not as comfortable as mine would have been. Fred and Myra sat in the front, Ruby and I in the back on seats that were dented and hard. With the baseball bat and the packages of food both Myra and Ruby had brought, there wasn't too much leg room for me, but I didn't mind. It was such a beautiful day, and we were looking forward to hearing Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson—especially Robeson. We talked about him as we drove. Myra had met him one time when she was interviewing him for a magazine she once worked for. Turning around in her seat, she told us of the wonderful experience it had been for her meeting this giant of a man whose singing had always captivated her, and hearing from him the story of his life.

  It was not at the start very different from the life of any black man in America at this time, a time when segregation was legal in America and black people were being lynched by white mobs, especially in the South. Paul Robeson was born in Princeton, New Jersey, the youngest of five children. His father was a runaway slave who went on to graduate from Lincoln University, his mother a Quaker who fought for the abolition of slavery, and so it was a family that suffered hardship but with a determination to rise above it.

  “And Paul certainly did,” Myra told me. “In 1915 he won a four-year scholarship to Rutgers University, and there he also excelled in sports, and despite all the violence and racism that came from teammates, he won fifteen varsity letters in sports, baseball, basketball, track, and he was twice named to the all-American football team. And he was Phi Beta Kappa.”

  She shook her head, still in wonder with all this, and Ruby and I, hearing it for the first time, felt the same way as she did. But how had he come to be a singer? we wanted to know.

  Music, she explained, was still far from his mind when he came out of Rutgers. He planned to become a lawyer, and entered Columbia Law School, where he met and married Eslanda Cordoza Goode, who was the first black woman to head a pathology laboratory. After graduation he took a job with a law firm but left when a white secretary refused to take dictation from him. It was then he decided to leave law altogether and use his artistic talents and his fine deep baritone voice to promote African American history and culture. This eventually led to his triumph in such operas as Emperor Jones and Othello, and especially with the black spirituals that had been virtually forgotten until he resurrected them on the stage.

  There was one other thing that meant more than anything else to him: the struggle for freedom by the black people. This is what he said to Myra that day, “The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”

  “When you think of all the success he had as a singer, and how comfortable his life could have been and the wealth he could have had,” said Myra, “you've got to admire him for sticking his neck out in the struggle for freedom the way he did, and for daring to say that there was more freedom in the Soviet Union than there was in the United States. You know about that, don't you?”

  “Who doesn't?” murmured Fred at the wheel.

  Yes, who didn't know that Robeson had said it? It was for that reason many people had come to believe that he was a Communist, and in turn ma
ny of his concerts had been canceled and much of his once worshipful audiences had turned against him. It was because of this also that residents of Peekskill were opposed to his giving a concert there, and rednecks and Ku Kluxers, taking advantage of the situation and with the local press encouraging them, had formed the mob that prevented the previous week's concert from taking place.

  It had been in all the newspapers all over the country, with editorials supporting the rising tide against the black singer. Ruby and I had read about it and couldn't help but be influenced by it, though not completely. It did look to us as if Robeson, if not a Communist, was a sympathizer, and we had no love for Communists and couldn't agree with Robeson's assessment that the Soviet Union had greater freedom than the United States.

  How could anyone say that? We had discussed it between ourselves. Russia was under the rule of Stalin, as cruel a dictator as Hitler or Mussolini, and it could not be compared to the United States, despite the fact that we knew the blacks had never been treated fairly here. People here were at least allowed to say what they wanted about things, just as Myra was doing now, but in the Soviet Union they could be sent to prison for speaking openly about anything they disagreed with.

  Yet listening to Myra now, Ruby and I began to feel uncomfortable. We wanted to contradict her, but we knew that would spark a political argument, and we did not want to spoil our day. It was bright and beautiful and there was much to look forward to, so we remained silent, and soon anyway the topic changed to something else, and perhaps also Fred and Myra knew how we felt. We'd had discussions before on similar subjects concerning the Communists and there'd been some very serious arguments. They were not, as they assured us, Communists themselves, but they felt there were ample reasons to side with them at times.