The Golden Willow Read online

  It was a long article, and I sent it off to the New York Sunday News magazine. It was accepted immediately, and the News made a big thing out of it. Their photographer spent three days out at Greenbriar taking pictures of the place and even went so far as to rent a plane and take aerial shots of the circular community. They made it their cover story, and the Sunday it appeared on the newsstands is one I will never forget.

  Here in Greenbriar where the residents bought their newspapers, the News was soon sold out, and our telephone had not stopped ringing. There were calls from residents all over the place— and they were angry and abusive. They had found the entire article offensive, particularly the part that exposed the murder. They considered me a traitor and a troublemaker. It went on all day and night. There were midnight calls, anonymous voices uttering threats accompanied by profanity. It went on through the next day. Ruby answered one of the calls, which began with the F-word, only this time the caller was stupid enough to give his name. I reported it to the police, and they arrested the man, charging him with the use of profanity over the phone, a misdemeanor. However, I decided not to press charges after learning from him that he had not read the article but had only been told about it from some other residents. I gathered this was the case with many of them.

  A special meeting of residents was called to discuss the matter, and it was broadcast over the community's closed-circuit TV. It ended with a statement that had been unanimously approved by the residents: “We believe that the Bernsteins would be happier living elsewhere.”

  Ruby was unhappy over the whole thing, perhaps even a little frightened. She thought perhaps we should move out. I refused to do so. On the whole, I don't think I minded the furor. It was a tribute to my writing. Nothing I had done before this had aroused such attention, and it was flattering to find people so stirred up by it. So we stayed, and after a while the whole thing died out and people began to talk to us again and it seemed to be forgotten.

  In retrospect, I can see that I did a wise thing by sticking it out. I would never have forgiven myself if I had allowed them to drive us out. I had done nothing wrong. I had merely told the truth about a community and exploded a false myth of a heaven on earth. I had also won for myself the interest of the magazine's editor, and during the next year I wrote several more articles for him on a variety of subjects.

  But that too died down, and the next years went by peacefully but all too swiftly. Suddenly, it seemed, we were in our seventies. Our friends were growing older with us, and one day we had the kind of telephone call that we were to receive often in the days ahead and that we dreaded. This one was from Nate Milowsky telling us that Esther had died during the night.

  It was our first funeral of Greenbriar friends. It was sad. But sadder yet was the way in the months that followed how Nate tried to make us feel that nothing had changed and the music group still existed. We were all invited to his house as we always had been to listen to his Victor Red Seal records, to hear Caruso sing and Maud Powell and Fritz Kreisler and Mischa Elman play the violin. The music was just as wonderful as it had always been. But it was not the same as before.

  When the time came to serve the refreshments Nate insisted on doing it alone, though there were plenty of volunteers who gladly would have done it for him. He brushed them aside and became angry when they insisted. He spilled milk on the table, the coffee was terrible, the cake he tried to cut fell apart. But no, he must do it all himself.

  I visited his house several times during this period. Ruby urged me to go because she could not bear the thought of his being alone so much. I hated to go because the house smelled and he always had the windows closed even in the warmest weather, and they were so dirty you could not see through them. The rest of the house was never cleaned either, and the smell grew worse every time I went. Then, finally, there was no reason to go. Nate had not been seen for three days, and when people knocked on the door there was no answer. The police were called, and when they broke into the house they found Nate lying on the floor, dead. He had been dead for three days. There was one of his Victor Red Seal records in the player and it was still twirling, though silent, having reached the end, with the automatic stop apparently having failed to work. The record was of Caruso singing Verdi's “Fontainebleau, foresta immense” from Don Carlos. How much of it Nate heard I'll never know.

  Pete Warth was the next one in our group to go. He suffered a stroke and lay in a coma for weeks, and during that time I drove Ann to see him every day since she herself did not drive. I watched her as she went up to the snoring figure in the bed, bent over him, and spoke to him as though he were conscious and aware of her presence, saying, “How are you today, Pete? This is your wife, Ann, and Harry is with me, and we've both come to visit you. Is there anything you need? Tell me, I'll get you anything you want. Would you like some pickled herring?”

  She kept that up day after day, and with it there came a withdrawal from us, from everybody. She began to speak to us as if she did not know us. She spoke strangely of things we did not understand. The only time she seemed coherent was when she was talking to Pete. Then he died, and her son, a doctor in Boston, came and took her away. When we called once to find out how she was, she could not speak to us, and the son told us she no longer knew us or any of the others she had lived among. She too died in a short time.

  Perhaps the death and the funeral that was held that shocked us more than any of them was the one of Phil Frazer, another member of the music group, but a still vigorous and athletic man well into his seventies. He had been a football coach at a high school and still retained his athletic ability, especially in tennis. He played often. Almost every day during the summer you could see him striding off to the tennis court clad in his white shorts and shirts, carrying a tennis racket.

  His wife, Sylvia, didn't play and was nowhere near being athletic. She looked every bit of her age. One day, we learned later from others, she'd begged him not to go to the tennis courts. It was a hot day in July and she felt he ought to stay home with her. He refused and went off with his racket, dressed in white, smart-looking, his hair white too, but making him look all the more handsome, and in the middle of the game he dropped dead on the tennis court from a heart attack.

  It was the funeral that shocked us. The ceremony was held at a nearby funeral parlor—the one that had a full-page advertisement in the Greenbriar Times—and Sylvia was crying bitterly throughout the ceremony. In the midst of it she rose and screamed at the coffin: “So, you had to go and play tennis! I told you not to go! I begged you! But you wouldn't listen! And now look at you. What did you get from your tennis and your fancy white clothes? You couldn't stay home for once? And now what am I to do? What's to become of me? Oh, Phil, you fool, you fool!”

  Somehow they got through with the ceremony and the burial and the rebuke that she kept up to the very end.

  The deaths came one after the other, like leaves dropping off the trees in the autumn, leaving bare skeletons of trunks and branches. The men nearly always went first. There were whole streets where the houses were occupied by widows. Our music group went one by one until there was no one left to listen or to perform except Ruby and myself. We lived, the two of us, among strangers, the new people who had come in to take the places of the ones who had gone, new people who seemed very young to us, who were as young as we had been when we first came here, young in spirit looking forward to the best years of their lives, and never suspecting how short those years would be.

  And yet Ruby and I did not feel lonely among them. We still enjoyed our life because we were together, both of us well and still able to walk around the lake—less briskly, to be sure, as we entered our eighties, but we could walk nevertheless, and we could still drive the car and go places. In fact, we bought a new car in 1994. It was an Oldsmobile, a Cutlass four-door.

  But if we did not go on long cross-country drives by car, we went to distant places by plane. We went to Mexico every winter to bask in its warmth and sun for
three months. It had become a second home to us, the little colonial town of San Miguel de Allende, where the narrow cobbled streets rose until they reached their full height, from which point you could look down and see the entire town, with the tall steeple of the parroquia, the town's most ancient church, dominating the view.

  We loved this place and we could always look forward to a warm welcome from Mucia, the little dark woman who owned the Hotel Quinta Loreto, where we stayed every year, and then for the next three months we would be well fed with her sumptuous meals, well entertained with all the concerts and lectures and art shows that took place in that town, or spend pleasant hours simply sitting in the jardin bathed in sunshine or talking to other Americans.

  Ruby and I passed from our eighties into our nineties never dreaming that all this would be over someday and we would be separated. I think we were closer than ever during those late years, and despite the fact that we had lost not only friends but family members too, we had the comfort of each other to make us feel that we were still part of the world.

  Ruby's mother had died a long time ago, not long after we had been married, in fact, and it had been a terrible loss to Ruby, sending her into a deep depression that had lasted for weeks. When her brother died some years later, she was without family altogether, except for mine.

  But then mine too began to go. My mother was the first, her dream of a wonderful America ending one bitterly cold day in a dark basement flat in the Bronx. As for my father, he remarried twice after that and died peacefully in his sleep one night. My oldest brother, Joe, was the first among us in America to die, at a relatively young age from cancer of the pancreas, and Rose was next, only then finally giving up her pretense of being an aristocratic Englishwoman, succumbing also to cancer in a hospital. Her husband, Jim, whom we all loved for his good nature, had died a short time before her. Then Saul was next to go, and Sidney, the youngest of us all, suffered a stroke and died in his eighties. Thus Lily, the oldest, had been the first of us to die, years ago in England. I was the sole survivor of all my brothers and sisters and my mother, whom I cared for so much.

  So we were alone, just the two of us, finally. To be sure, there were our children and grandchildren; they had not forgotten us, and they came to visit whenever it was possible. But my son lived in Pennsylvania, Adraenne in Brooklyn, both seventy-five miles away, and we did not see them as often as we would have liked.

  Just the same, Ruby and I never felt alone being together, and we were still mobile, still well enough to go places, doing things, enjoying life. Ruby continued to teach her yoga class at the clubhouse every Wednesday morning until she was past ninety-one, and I never ceased to marvel at the slenderness and shapeliness of her figure in her leotard. It lasted until that fateful morning in September when we were in Ruby's room at the hospital and I was standing at the window looking across the street at Central Park and thinking of the days when Ruby and I had spent so much of our time there during our courtship, and suddenly I heard my daughter cry out, “Dad, she's stopped breathing. She's dead!”

  Chapter Nineteen

  2006

  WHEN I HEARD KATE ELTON'S VOICE OVER THE TELEPHONE SAY, “I'VE read your book and I like it very much, and I'm prepared to make you an offer,” a whole new life began for me in my ninety-fifth year. It was a bit like an explosion of fireworks on July 4, one burst after another lighting up the sky in a brilliant display of colors. I felt the same sort of thrill as I would have watching that take place. I had my imaginary celebration dinner with Ruby. I know it sounds foolish, but it was a time to do foolish things. I only wished some of my friends were alive also, especially the ones who had viewed my writing efforts with a certain amused skepticism. The admiration, the awe, and, yes, the envy from the people who know you is part of the reward of being an author.

  The truth is, I didn't quite know what to do after receiving that message from Kate Elton, whom I would always regard with deep gratitude as the one editor out of a thousand who had found my book good enough to be published, and in doing so had made the last years of my life the most productive and exciting of my entire lifetime.

  I wished I could walk, so that I could walk off some of the exhilaration that I felt. But my ability to walk had lessened still further, and about the best I could get out of any doctor was “learn to live with it.” Or did he mean “die with it”? But there was nothing obvious that could be done save make sure that I protected myself from falls and used a cane or a walker.

  I contented myself with being able to make my way across the street to the lake, leaning on my walker, and sit on the bench that Ruby and I used to rest on after our walk around the lake, and in the evenings watch the sun set on the other side of the lake. It was quiet and restful. It calmed me down.

  I thought of her then as I had done so often before, but with even deeper longing than ever, and with such wishful thinking that I began to create fantasies in my mind. I imagined that what was happening now, with my book, had instead happened in the early days, even before our marriage, in the days of our golden willow— our golden boudoir, the lovely tree that had given us sanctuary and such peace and happiness. And I was terribly sorry once again that the one we'd had in our own garden was gone. But the memory was still there, especially of the first one in Central Park and the night we had slipped away from the concert on the mall to discover it, and the days and nights that had followed.

  My wishful thinking, my fantasies, were about all of that, and I would picture myself walking into Brentano's bookstore, where Ruby worked, and saying to her quietly, “Can you take the day off?”

  She looked bewildered. “Why?”

  “I have something very important to tell you.”

  “Can't you tell me now?”

  “No, I'd rather get out of here first.”

  “I can't. We're very busy.”

  “Then quit the goddamn job.” How often had I said that in my imagination? How often had I argued in there and pulled her by the arm and told her she was quitting the goddamn job?

  She stared at me. “Darling,” she whispered, frightened a little, “what's the matter? What's happened?”

  “What's happened,” I would say next, “is that I'm going to have a book published.”

  And she would stare at me, her mouth open a little, not quite believing what I had said. And then gradually it would register with her, and her expression became transformed into one of great joy and she would throw her arms around my neck and kiss me, with all the other employees and some customers staring at us.

  Yes, I'd gone through that fantasy many times before, dreaming of having a book published and becoming a famous author, seeing my book displayed in bookstore windows, being interviewed by reporters, being asked for my autograph.

  What wonderful things dreams are! They can make you be anything you want and take you anyplace in the world. And some of them can actually come true, as this one had for me. In the meantime, I sat on that bench near the lake wishing it had all taken place in the past, and creating fantasies about how my book was published when we were still living in one of Madame Janeski's furnished rooms on West 68th Street, and how my book enabled us to move into a fantastic big apartment, a penthouse with a view of the Manhattan skyline, not the two-room place on Bleecker Street that we did finally move into after I got my job as a reader for a moving picture company.

  How wonderful all that would have been for us then, when we were both young and able to appreciate all the exciting things that can happen to a famous author. Well, it was too late now. Ruby was gone and I was alone. Yet there was a lot in store for me that I had missed before but could still appreciate and enjoy.

  But first, before all this could happen, there was the book to get published, and it did not take me long to discover that there was more to publishing a book than simply writing one. My editor was Anna Simpson, a young woman with a gentle voice that came often over the telephone, but sharp eyes that ferreted out every little mistake in spelling
, punctuation, grammar, or inconsistencies in the story that I had not been aware of. Revisions had to be made, proofs corrected, book jackets to be approved, bios and condensations of the book to be written for the publicity department.

  I was kept busy with the various communications— e-mail, regular mail, FedEx, telephone—and I delighted in all of it. Nor did I mind going back over a book that I had already spent more than a year writing in order to correct the proofs.

  Yes, there was a good deal more work than I had expected, but it was all pleasurable work, and for the first time in my life I felt what it was like to be a published author. My ego swelled further when I learned that photos of my family were to be used to illustrate the book. I had dug into albums and boxes where photographs had been stored from the days in England, and came up with a gem that showed my mother and the children in the family gathered around her with me an infant sitting on her lap. It had been taken in front of the house where we lived, on the street that I had written about. It was a picture that would be seen often, not only on the jacket of the book but in the reviews and articles that would be written later and published in newspapers.

  Some inkling of the interest in my book had already been generated at the London book fair, where The Invisible Wall had been introduced, and to add to all my joy several foreign publishers had bought rights to publish in their countries. This was a totally unexpected bonanza. I'd had no idea that you could sell your book to more than one publisher, and it meant money that was badly needed.

  I was two years older than when I'd first started writing my book, and my physical condition, though considered quite good for someone my age, had deteriorated to a point where I was having more and more difficulty getting around. I could not walk now without the aid of a walker, and I was finding it almost impossible to take care of myself. I needed someone to cook my meals, to shop for me, to do my laundry. My daughter came once every two weeks and did what she could to help me out, but she was too tied down to her job as a nurse practitioner and her own household to do more. My son also had little time to spare, and so I was alone most of the time, and I struggled to keep alive. Occasionally in trying to do some household work, I stumbled and fell and hurt myself, often badly.