The Dream Page 18

  And yet, frantic, I managed to bludgeon my way through to where there was a railing separating everyone else from a fat, unshaven man in shirtsleeves sitting at a desk. He was smoking a cigarette and surveying the mob in front of him calmly. There was a clamour of voices all asking for the clerk’s job. Mine, too. He didn’t seem to hear them. His eyes roved, then they fell on me and my heart jumped.

  He pointed a finger. ‘You,’ he said.

  It was me all right. Delighted, pushing others aside, I went through the gate to the desk. There was a chair.

  ‘You a clerk?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

  ‘Where’d you do your clerking?’

  ‘The Chicago post office.’

  ‘The what post office?’

  ‘The Chicago post office. In Chicago.’

  ‘You mean you was in Chicago?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Whacha do there?’

  ‘I worked in the post office. I was a clerk there.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? Well, I got a job being clerk. It pays twenty a week. You wannit?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

  He scribbled something on a slip of paper, asked my name and wrote that on it too, then handed it to me and I hurried out, pushing my way past disappointed faces and ugly looks from other applicants. I hurried, breathless, triumphant with my luck, to the address that was on the slip of paper he had given me. It was not far away, on West Fifty-second Street, an old building with a creaky elevator operated by an elderly man who wheezed and coughed along with the sound the elevator made as it crawled upwards to the tenth floor. I hurried off along a narrow corridor, checking numbers on doors for 1012. I came to it at last and the name on the door was West Side Garage Owners Association. It sounded big and impressive, and my nervousness grew. I didn’t have the job yet; they might not want me.

  I turned the knob and went in. There was nothing big and impressive about it. There was just an office, most of it empty. There was no receptionist or anything like that, only a desk at the far end of the room and a man sitting there. On the wall behind him were two dirty windows that let in little light. He wore a suit with a tie that didn’t match the colour of the suit and was poorly knotted, and he was smoking a cigar and typing.

  He looked round at me and said, ‘What d’ya want?’

  ‘The agency sent me,’ I said, showing the clip of paper the agency man had given me.

  At first he didn’t seem to remember and my heart sank. Maybe it was too good to be true after all. But then he shifted the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other and said, ‘Oh, yeah, come on over here.’

  I walked across the room to him and handed him the slip of paper. He scarcely glanced at it and threw it on the desk in front of him.

  ‘What kind of work you do?’ he asked.

  I told him about the post office. There wasn’t much to tell, but he seemed satisfied and nodded a few times, then asked a peculiar question: ‘You a regular sleeper?’

  I was puzzled. ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘You don’t have to call me sir,’ he said. ‘I’m Jeffrey, Jeffrey Sugarman. You can call me Jeff. What I’m trying to get at is this. Do you go to bed about the same time every night and get up at the same time in the morning?’

  ‘Just about,’ I said, still puzzled.

  ‘Would it bother you if you had to break that up? I mean, if you had to go to bed later and get up later, break things up so that you sometimes might have to sleep part of the time days and part nights?’

  ‘No,’ I said, willing to say or do anything to get the job.

  He nodded and shifted the cigar again, and once more seemed satisfied. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a job that calls for doing that. What I mean is, you might have to work four hours a day and four nights, or three days and five nights. And no telling what it’s gonna be. I tell you and you just do it. No complaints. No nothing.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I think you might be the right man for the job. When can you start?’

  Elated, I said, ‘Right now, if you want.’

  ‘I want,’ he said. ‘I think you’ve got the right spirit. We’re going to get along, you and me, Harry. How old did you say you are?’

  ‘Nineteen.’

  ‘You live with your parents?’

  ‘With my mother.’

  ‘No father?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Too bad. What happened? He die?’

  I hesitated, then said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’re the breadwinner.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s tough. Well, you’ll be all right here. I pay eighteen dollars a week.’

  ‘The agency said twenty.’

  ‘The sonofabitch lied to you. Eighteen’s all I can do.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said, disappointed but still glad that I had the job.

  ‘OK,’ he said, ‘then let’s get to work. Here’s what I want you to do.’

  Coming home that day I had the pleasure of giving my mother the joyful news that I had a job. But it was a bit difficult telling her that I would have to get up at two o’clock that night and take the subway back into New York and go to a garage located on West Forty-ninth Street and jot down the licence plate numbers of every car going in and out of the garage. I was to do that for two hours, then go to another garage nearby and do the same thing. Then I would go home, get some sleep, and go back to New York about two in the afternoon and repeat the same process for four hours. I would stop off at the office on my way home and leave my lists of numbers there with Jeff, who was the only one I ever saw in that office.

  Such was the nature of my work, a puzzle to my mother and to me. To this day, I have not been able to figure out the purpose of what I was doing, though I suspect that it was part of some underhand scheme for getting automobile owners to patronise garages that belonged to the Association. Whatever it was, I know that my presence outside the various garages jotting down licence plate numbers did not go unnoticed by the garage owners or their managers and employees, and seeing their dark looks cast at me and mutterings going on among them I became conscious of a sense of danger and grew worried for my safety.

  I told Jeff about it, and he laughed and waved the cigar in his hand back and forth a few times and said, ‘You got nothing to be scared of. You’re doing nothing wrong. You ever heard of a law says you can’t write a licence plate number down? There ain’t no such law, so stop worrying. Nobody’s gonna hurt you, and if they do we’ll sue the trousers off of ’em.’

  I was only partly reassured, and for another month or so I continued with the job, but in a sort of haze caused by the odd hours and lack of sleep, together with the fear that haunted me constantly. Under normal circumstances I would have quit the job long ago, but these were times when any kind of job was a precious thing to have, and it was all that stood between us and the dreaded prospect of having to go on Home Relief, the fancy name given to welfare that so many people were on.

  ‘I’ll never do that,’ my mother had said when we talked about it once. ‘I’d rather starve.’

  ‘You won’t starve,’ I assured her and I felt pretty much the same way she did about going on Home Relief.

  It seemed impossible then that I could not find some sort of job and I had proven that after weeks of searching on Sixth Avenue. I could not forget either that I had been singled out from perhaps a dozen others who had rushed up those stairs when the magic word ‘Clerk’ was posted among the job lists. I’d been picked out of all the others, and that could have been another source of satisfaction if not for what took place finally one hot summer night while I was busy jotting down the licence plate number of a big black Packard that had just rolled into the garage I had been watching.

  Suddenly, without warning, the pencil and pad were snatched out of my hands, and four men were surrounding me and clutching hold of me, by the arms, the collar, and the one who had grabbed the pad a
nd pencil was scanning the lists of numbers I had written down, and another was saying, ‘What the hell you doing?’

  I was frozen with fear. The nightmare I had always been afraid of had come about. ‘I’m writing down licence plate numbers like I was told to do,’ I said.

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Jeff.’

  ‘Sugarman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What he tell you to do?’

  ‘Write down the licence plate numbers of every car that comes in or out.’

  ‘Well, you wrote your last one and here’s something to remember it with …’ He smashed a fist into my nose. Blood streamed out and I gave a yell. But that was only the start. Now the other three men pitched in with fists, punching hard at every part of my body, and I was doubled up and yelling, and finally rolled on the ground, and they continued with their feet, kicking, until I lost consciousness.

  I woke up in the hospital. They told me afterwards that I had been found in the doorway of an abandoned warehouse on Tenth Avenue. A passing motorist had seen me and notified the police. An ambulance had taken me to the City Hospital on what was then called Welfare Island. A detective tried talking to me, asking if I knew who’d beaten me, but I was in too bad shape to answer his questions.

  They’d done quite a job on me: broken nose, broken jaw, one eye almost knocked out, broken ribs, and a leg fractured from their kicking. I was in hospital for several months, in a ward that had about twenty-five beds all close to one another. My neighbours on either side of me changed constantly so that I never got to know any of them. But I was in too much pain anyway for socialising and I used that as an excuse for not wanting to talk to the same detective who came again. I had consciousness enough to think back on what had happened and to realise that I had been caught in some kind of gang warfare over control of garages, and the best thing for me was to keep out of it and to say as little as possible.

  The police left me alone after a while. I mended slowly. I was able to talk to my mother and Sidney when they came to visit me. My mother had suffered a terrible shock when the police first notified her I was in the hospital. She had rushed down with Sidney and I could not speak to her then. Afterwards, as I began to recover, I told her everything, and she cried and said I could have been killed.

  Well, I could. I thought of that later when I was alone. I thought of a great many things, lying there, listening to the groans of the other patients around me, the cries of pain, the shouts for a nurse or orderly. This was the accident ward. There were all sorts of accident cases thrown together in the ward, some not so accidental, beatings like mine, shootings that were intended murder, stabbings resulting from fights, and quite a few were homeless men who had been picked up in gutters or doorways after being struck by hit-and-run automobiles. These last were a problem to the doctors and nurses. Not having anywhere to go, they clung to the hospital long after their injuries had healed, and by putting on such a good act of pretending to be lame or still in such pain they confused the doctors and nurses, and the ward was perpetually overcrowded.

  Every so often the staff held what was called a ‘roundup’. Without any warning, patients would be yanked out of their beds and one by one marched before a panel of doctors, whose sharp eyes ferreted out the fake limps and groans, and sent them back on to the street – soon to be hit again by some speeding auto and returned to the hospital.

  I often watched these round-ups with a great deal of amusement, betting with my other legitimate bed neighbours which ones would be caught. I did not know then that the day would come when I would be one of them myself.

  In the meantime, after a month or two in bed, my greatest desire was to get out of there and go home. I was bored with my surroundings, and I worried a great deal how my mother and Sidney were getting along without me. I was sure that by now the money I had hoarded in Chicago had been exhausted. How then were they getting along? I did not dare ask. I knew that Sidney was still in the ice-cream business, with greater skill than before, having learned how to protect his stock against melting. But what he earned could not possibly pay all the household expenses. What then?

  I lay there worrying and wanting to go home, wanting to pitch in and do what I could to make some money. I had a lot of gloomy thoughts then. I was seeing a side of life that I had never known existed before. The homeless men were only part of it. There were others around me who, like the men I had met on Sixth Avenue, had known better days and were suffering severe economic problems. Their stay in the hospital from whatever accident had brought them there only added to the suffering. They were all worrying about the same thing I was.

  It was then that I began writing the short stories and sketches that were later published in the ‘little magazines’ of that day, The Anvil, Story, Literary America, The Hub, Manuscript, and many others that came and went and whose contents portrayed the Depression years with grim, harsh realism – and with a truthfulness that the bigger commercial magazines did not possess.

  There was a lot of good in this for me. I had at least discovered what I wanted to write and was capable of writing, and it pointed an arrow for me in the direction I wanted to go. But I was a long way yet from becoming a writer. I knew that and did not deceive myself. There was still the problem of making a living, and how that was to be done I hadn’t the faintest idea. So I lay brooding a great deal of the time and worrying about the future.

  Then Sidney came alone one day without my mother, bringing the fried fishcakes she had made for me and knew that I liked so well. I was glad to see him. There was a closeness between us that did not exist with my other two brothers. I had been his care giver when he was an infant and growing up, taking much of the burden off my mother’s tired hands. I’d taken him for long walks in the parks and I guess in a way I’d played father to him.

  ‘Where’s Ma today?’ I asked him.

  ‘She’s busy with things in the house,’ he said, then added, ‘He keeps her busy, you know.’

  I was puzzled. ‘Who keeps her busy?’ I asked.

  And then he blurted out something he was not supposed to tell me. My mother had exacted a promise from him, but Sidney could not have kept any secrets from me. ‘He’s back,’ he said.

  I was still puzzled. ‘Who’s back?’ I asked.

  ‘Our father.’

  I stared at him. He was smiling a little. ‘Are you trying to be funny?’ I said.

  ‘No.’ The smile disappeared. ‘He came back a few weeks ago.’

  I still couldn’t believe this. But a sick feeling was beginning to take possession of me. ‘Who let him in?’ I asked, thinking that the only way he could have come back was by forcing his way in.

  ‘Ma did.’

  ‘She let him in?’ This was even more incredible. After all we had gone through, after what he had done to her stealing that money, she had let him in? ‘She couldn’t have done that.’

  ‘He was crying,’ Sidney said. ‘I was there when he came. He knocked on the door and I answered it, and he was standing there, and it gave me a shock. I didn’t know what to do or say, so I called Ma and she came to the door, and when she saw who it was she tried to close the door but he wouldn’t let her. Then he started to cry and beg her to let him in, so she did, and they went in the front room and I didn’t hear any more until Ma came out and she was crying too. And she said she was going to give him another chance and he’d be staying with us, and I wasn’t supposed to tell you while you were in the hospital.’

  Sidney told me all that and I listened, growing more and more sick. After all we had gone through, after all that had happened before, and all the misery he had brought us, she had taken him back. She was giving him another chance. I couldn’t wait to talk to her.

  She came, finally, and no sooner had she sat down beside the bed than I launched into the subject. ‘Sidney tells me you’ve let him come back.’ I could never get myself to say ‘Father’ or ‘Dad’. It was always ‘him’ or ‘he’.

  She nodded,
looking sad and perhaps guilty too. ‘What could I do?’

  ‘You could have kicked him right out,’ I said angrily. ‘We had enough trouble getting away from him. I wouldn’t want to have to go through it again, but I’m afraid we will.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think so. I think he really means what he says, that he’ll behave, he’ll never act the same way again, he’ll stop drinking.’

  ‘That’s a lot of baloney,’ I said bitterly. ‘And you know it. You’ve made a big mistake.’

  ‘Harry,’ she said desperately, ‘what could I do? He cried. He cried and cried, and he reminded me of my promise.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ I said, remembering now. ‘He was just conning you, Ma. Grandpa told us it was something he made up and the real story was they’d wanted him to go but he didn’t want to go, so they left without him.’

  But Ma was shaking her head and saying, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ and she was looking very troubled, as if she really did not know who was telling the truth. But whether it mattered or not is something else. Her heart had been touched then, just as deeply as it had been the first time. And there was something else.

  He had a job. He was working in a tailoring shop. He had told her that, knowing how hard pressed we were for money. I myself was in the hospital unable to work, and the little that Sidney brought in selling ice cream did not help much. Perhaps this too had been in the back of her thoughts when she gave in to him.

  There was nothing I could do, and the same misery that I had felt all my life came back and washed over me, driving me into a feeling of deep despair.

  I no longer wanted to go home. I could not bear the thought of going back there and seeing him again, hearing his voice, listening to his roars and the sounds he made when he came home drunk late at night.

  Why didn’t he die, I wondered. I envied the other fellows I had known whose fathers had died, some from sickness, some in the war. He had escaped the war. I remember the time he went with a group of men from our street in Engand to the town of Chester to take his physical exam when they had all been drafted and he came home smelling of the whiskey he’d drunk on the way back to celebrate his freedom. He’d been rejected because of something that he never talked about. He was smirking at his escape, and his eyes fell on me and he saw the unmistakable disappointment on my face, for I had been indulging in some wild dreams of his being taken off to war and killed by a German gun. I am sure he knew exactly what had been going on in my mind, for he laughed and sneered, ‘Better luck next time. Maybe the Germans will come over here and kill me.’