The Golden Willow Read online

  But at last, perspiring a good deal from the sun that was less pleasant than when we had started out, we passed the big white stone building of the Ethical Culture Society, where we had spent many Sunday mornings listening to Algernon Black preach and lecture, and came to 68th Street.

  We smiled at each other as we turned into it. The street was much the same as it had been sixty-seven years ago, with the two rows of brownstones all exactly alike facing each other across the street, their high stoops slanting down uniformly to the sidewalk. Nothing seemed to have changed, and we were glad of that. When you go back into the past you want everything to be the same. Nostalgia came over us as we walked slowly up the block, looking this way and that for familiar things: the flower boxes that some of the houses used to display at windowsills, the dentist's sign in the dusty window at number 42. Well, there had been changes. The flower boxes were gone, and so were the For Rent signs that used to appear in so many of the windows, and there was no more dentist sign nor he himself, an elderly, frowsy man who'd seemed to spend more of his time puttering around the place fixing his decaying property than he did at dentistry. We'd rarely seen patients going into his place, and the sign in the window had been curled and yellowed with age, like the dentist himself.

  We came to our house finally, close to the end of the block, near Columbus Avenue, and our hearts beat a little faster as we saw it, still standing there, the same house we had come to that spring day carrying our two suitcases that contained all the belongings we had in the world. Two young people, very much excited with our new life, very much in love. As we mounted the steps I imagined I saw our landlady looking at us through the window of the ground-floor apartment where she lived with her daughter. Her name was Mrs. Janeski, but we had already dubbed her Madame Janeski because of the haughty, aristocratic manner she affected when we came to rent the room, informing us that she took in only the “best” kind of people. Her sharp scrutiny had indicated that she was not at all sure about us yet.

  But Ruby and I were thinking of something else as we stood there looking at the house. It was Ruby who spoke first.

  “I wonder if the plumber ever came,” she said.

  “I wonder,” I said, and we both laughed.

  I had been thinking of exactly the same thing, and this wasn't surprising. It had been on our minds often during the time we had stayed at Madame Janeski's place, the only fly in the ointment. It was a lovely room as furnished rooms went in those days. It was just perfect for us, but it lacked one thing—a shower. There was a bathtub, a quite nice one, but that one all-important attachment, the shower, was missing, and it was essential to both of us.

  Madame Janeski had seemed shocked when we brought it up to her, as if she had not known until then that there was no shower in the bathroom. She would attend to it right away, she said. She would call her plumber and have him come and install one.

  The plumber had not come, and Madame Janeski had a ready excuse: his daughter had suffered an accident, and he'd had to rush to the hospital where she'd been taken. But he would come next week. And the next week, when the plumber still failed to arrive, it was because he had fallen down the church steps and fractured a leg. Her excuses were endless, and we finally realized that if the plumber really existed, the reasons for his failure to show up were the products of her imaginative mind.

  All of that came back to us as we stood there in front of our former home, and we were laughing over it when the front door opened and a short, rather stocky man wearing blue jeans and a checkered flannel shirt came out. He had been watching us through the window, the same one through which Madame Janeski used to observe us suspiciously as we went in and out, and he was curious.

  “Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked courteously.

  Ruby and I looked at each other. The same thing was on our minds. We would have liked to go in and see our old room. I explained to him why we were here, to pay a sentimental visit to the first place in which we had lived together, and that it was our sixty-seventh wedding anniversary. He was understanding and quite pleasant about it. He was the new owner of the house, a fairly recent purchase. He was also, despite the jeans and flannel shirt, a professor of economics at New York University, and it would be no trouble at all to show us the room.

  “Although,” he explained, “we don't call it a furnished room anymore. It's a studio apartment.”

  We smiled and thought it probably rented for ten times or more what we'd paid for it. Fortunately for us, the person who had the studio apartment was away for the weekend. We followed the man into the house, and everything was familiar to us: the hallway, the little table where the mailman used to leave the mail (with my returned manuscripts among the letters), the carpeted stairs. It was not as spic and span as when Madame Janeski ran the place, however, and the banister did not shine with polishing.

  We went up the one flight, and there we were, and the landlord was fumbling in his pocket for the key. He opened the door and stood aside to let us in. We both hesitated. A recollection had come to us of how I had carried Ruby over the threshold, and I think we both wished we could do it again. But it would have been a bit too much in front of this man who was waiting for us to go in, and I doubt if I would have had the strength to pick Ruby up and carry her in.

  We entered, and it was an emotional moment for both of us as we stood there looking around at what had once been our first home. It was the same as it had been then, sun-filled, the two windows looking out onto the garden below and the row of backyards with lawn chairs set out for loungers, and clotheslines strung across on which I used to hang out my wash, surreptitiously, keeping watch for observers.

  There still was the little alcove with the dressing table that Ruby had treasured so much, a touch of elegance that rarely came with a furnished room. Over the dressing table was the mirror that I'd had Ruby look into while I distorted her features and told her that was how she might look when she got old, but I'd love her as much as I did in our twenties. And there was the bathroom.

  We looked at each other. Did we dare?

  “May we go into the bathroom?” I asked the landlord.

  He nodded, but I think he was startled when both of us went in together. Even the most intimate of couples rarely go into a bathroom together. We did, however, and it was not to use it but to look. We looked, and there was no shower—just one of those portable attachments that you buy in the drugstore.

  “The plumber never came,” I said.

  Ruby started to laugh, but I shushed her, and we went out to face the still-puzzled landlord. I said, “There is no real shower in there still. We never had one.”

  “Oh, didn't you?” he said. “Well, I just took the place over and I haven't got around to making a few improvements. But I expect a plumber in a week or so to put the shower in.”

  After thanking him for letting us see our old place, out on the street Ruby and I exploded into laughter so hysterical we had to hold on to each other. People stared at us, thinking probably we were drunk.

  Well, that was our sixty-seventh wedding anniversary, a happy one, as happy as every day had been in all those years.

  And then, one week after we had returned home, we woke up one morning and found blood on Ruby's pillow.

  Chapter Three

  1935

  AT FIRST, WHEN WE WERE MARRIED, I HAD NO JOB, AND RUBY DID ALL the supporting, working as a secretary in the office of Brentano's bookstore on Fifth Avenue. It was 1935, the height of the Great Depression. Luckily, after a few months, I was able to get a job with MGM reading books and plays submitted for movie consideration, and it was then we decided we could afford a place where we had more space and a proper kitchen and bathroom—with the shower that we did not have in the furnished room on West 68th Street. We found an apartment on Bleecker Street, on the top floor of an old tenement house that had just been renovated. Everything was new and fresh and still smelled of paint, and to us, our apartment was the height of luxury and repres
ented a step up in the world. The three-flight climb was nothing to us. We were young and healthy and we could take the steps two at a time.

  The entire place was occupied by writers, artists, musicians, and dancers, and we felt quite at home among them, except that a singer practicing somewhere in the building, a woman who was studying to be an operatic soprano and who made some awful sounds, annoyed us and probably many others in the building. And there was the modern dancer who lived next door to us and liked to move her furniture around late at night. We never found out why she did this, but the walls were thin and the scraping and thumping sounds of sofa and chairs and tables being dragged across the floor from one place to another came through to us clearly and kept us awake.

  Yet, for all this, we loved our new home, and our brand-new, shiny solid maple furniture gave us a lot of pleasure. It was my job to polish it once every week to keep it new-looking, and I did this religiously every Saturday morning while Ruby was still at work in Brentano's, Saturday being a workday then. We had bought the furniture with the help of a friend who knew the head salesman in a large furniture store that specialized in solid maple, which was all the rage then among young couples. We had to ask for Henry, and to tell Henry that Yetta had sent us, and Henry in turn saw to it that we got a big discount.

  One of the pieces we bought was a large lounge chair. It had soft cushions and maple arms and legs. I had resisted buying it at first because I thought it was unnecessary and too expensive even with Henry's discount. The salesman was a tall, thin fellow with a melancholy look on his face. He never smiled once, and he carried a notebook in one hand and a pencil in the other and jotted down the things as we bought them and made special notes that we assumed were the discounts that he was giving us. When it came to the discussion as to whether we should buy the lounge chair or not, he turned his head aside as if to indicate his neutrality, with the sad look still on it, and I think I heard him give a sigh.

  Ruby and I were arguing, though not as couples usually do. I was telling her that I could well do without the chair, though really I wanted it.

  And Ruby was saying, “No, you can't. This isn't luxury. It's a necessity. You need it for your reading.”

  “Why do I need it for reading?” I asked. “Since when do I read with that part of my body?”

  “Stop being funny,” she said. “It isn't just for when you read. It's for resting too. I'd love to see you sprawled out in that chair.”

  “I could use the bed for that,” I said. “With you on it.”

  “Don't be so funny,” she said. “We'll buy the chair.”

  We did, and I did a lot of sprawling out on it. And I loved Ruby more than ever for thinking of it, the way she often did for me in so many other ways.

  We were a happy couple. We had a good social life in the Village, though it was often halted by my reading. I did all my work at home, and this sometimes prevented us from having people in for an evening or going to their places. Ruby never minded. She read a great deal herself, except that they were books of her choice, and many an evening passed quietly with both of us immersed in our books.

  Still, we managed to visit others, and there were always the soirees at James Deutsch's place on Waverly, the German fellow whom I threatened to kill once when he tried to kiss Ruby at our first gathering there. He had since apologized and become a great friend of ours, and he still was comptroller of a department store by day and a bohemian playwright at night, and held lively soirees—as he preferred to call the gatherings—at night in what he also liked to call his studio, and which could be reached by climbing an iron spiral stairway for three floors. There he drank much Scotch and smoked many cigarettes, and sometimes played Beethoven loudly on his record player and conducted the music at the same time, surrounded by his admirers, who were mostly young females who sat on the floor, watching worshipfully He wore a beret and an artist's smock then.

  There were others we mixed with in the Village. Adolf was a true artist, and a rather good one, I thought. He was perpetually gloomy and could sit for an entire evening with his head cast down, in his hand a glass of wine that he never drank. Perhaps the gloomy state came from his wife, Lucia, a pretty woman with a light complexion that contrasted sharply with Adolf's dark one. Her manner and speech were always theatrical and accompanied by gestures of the hands, and she was forever belittling her husband in front of people with frequent suggestions that he was sexually impotent. Adolf never said a word, just sat there with his head bent and the glass of wine in his hand.

  Lucia frequently gave out invitations to people for dinner, or some other occasion at her house, but few people accepted, and those who did almost never found her home when they arrived. Ruby and I knew nothing about that when we were invited to breakfast. We went and they were home, all right, but fast asleep in their bed, and when we had knocked several times Adolf came to the door in his pajamas and sleepily suggested we come back in an hour or so. We never did.

  And there were the Grossmans, Ben and Germaine. Ben was a lawyer by day and a playwright at night, and having heard that I was a reader for a moving-picture company, he promptly had Germaine invite us to dinner. Ben was doing well as a lawyer, and they lived in one of the more modern apartment buildings on Greenwich Avenue. It had an elevator that took us up to their apartment on the fifth floor, and Ruby and I were impressed. We had visions of a good, hearty meal, and I was just in the mood for it, and perhaps a couple of drinks to go with it. I'd had a rough day with a mystery novel. I hated mystery novels, and this one deserved my disdain because it was long and complex with numerous red herrings and lots of tiresome repetitions of “Where were you the night of. … ?”

  The warm welcome we got as we entered the apartment and the succulent smell of roast beef emanating from the kitchen were promising. Ben shook my hand several times and told me how glad he was to see me, and we sat down in an expensively furnished living room, but no drinks were served.

  “I've got a surprise for you,” Ben said. “Excuse me for a moment.”

  He disappeared briefly and returned holding something in his hand. It was a thick manuscript bound in a purple cover.

  “I gave up writing plays and am trying my hand at novels,” he said. “I just finished this one. It's a mystery novel, and I thought before we sit down to dinner you might want to glance over it and give me your opinion, and maybe if you think it's any good you'd like to offer it for me to the movie company you're with.”

  He plopped it down on my lap, grinning affably. I felt its thickness in my hands, and for quite some time I did not say anything. Ruby was sitting beside me, and out of the corner of my eye I could see her expression, which was probably much like my own—a mixture of many things, but mostly disgust.

  After a few moments had passed, I said, “I'd like to ask you one question.”

  “Yes?” He spoke eagerly, thinking I was interested already and wanted to know more about his transition from playwriting to novel writing, or something else connected with the manuscript.

  I said, “Could you tell me where the nearest hamburger place is to here?”

  A puzzled look now came on his face. “Hamburger!” he said. “What do you want that for?”

  “Because that's where Ruby and I are going to have our dinner.”

  I handed the manuscript back to him. Then I took Ruby's hand and we left.

  I HAVE BEEN ASKED many times by reporters during interviews about the marriage that Ruby and I had. Somehow the idea of a flawless marriage that lasted so many years arouses curiosity in a good many people, if not skepticism.

  One reporter asked bluntly, “Are you sure there were no bumps in that wonderful marriage of yours?”

  I had to say we disagreed at times; what two human beings wouldn't? But it was never anything serious. We had so many things in common—books, music, art, almost everything—and Ruby always maintained an even disposition, a sweetness that never changed, and a smile that was always there. How can one quarrel with a
person like that?

  Yet there was one time when there was a bump, and a rather serious one. It was about having children. I don't know how the topic came about, but it did, and we discovered that we were at odds on the matter. Ruby wanted to have children; I didn't. I'd been brought up in a family of six children where there was constant wrangling and strife. Even at night in bed there was no rest from it. Three of us were crowded into one bed, and I slept at the feet of my two older brothers. We fought for space, and I got kicked many times. No, I'd had enough of children and wanted none of my own.

  With Ruby, it was equally understandable. She had been brought up in a family where there were just two children, and Ruby's younger brother was slightly mentally disabled and was no companion for her. Nor was there a father—he'd died before the two children really knew him. Often, she told me, she envied those of her friends who had large families, and she certainly wanted children of her own—someday.

  Yes, someday. It was early in our marriage when that came up, and we were able to push the subject aside without making the bump a serious one. In the meantime, we were enjoying our life in the Village with lots of friends and lots of places to go—the Civic Repertory Theater on Fourteenth Street to watch Eva Le Gallienne in Chekhov's The Seagull, Tolstoy's The Living Corpse, or any one of dozens of other plays that only this wonderful theater group could put on. For an admission charge of twenty-five cents you could sit in the gallery.