The Invisible Wall Read online

  The kids were having a great time, running wild on the street around the table, yelling and screaming, wrestling with one another, both Jewish and Christian kids playing together for the first time that I could remember.

  The gramophone continued to make itself heard over the din, and then came a lively tune that made one of Mrs. Turnbull’s boarders get up and do a clog dance. He was a tall, thin fellow wearing gaiters and corduroy britches with a fancy handkerchief wrapped around his neck. His clogs rattled over the cobblestones with his quick, agile movements, throwing off sparks, while everyone roared applause and clapped hands in time with the music.

  There was more dancing after that by other people, and lots more drinking. By this time Mr. Forshaw was too unsteady on his feet, and too deeply immersed in his own drinking and his newfound companionship with my father to be able to pour beer into mugs. My father, who was in a similar state, would never have offered to help anyway, so Florrie took over the bartending.

  Florrie had put on considerable weight in the past few years. She was no longer the attractive, well-shaped blonde I could still remember, but a heavy, double-chinned woman with large, jouncing breasts that seemed to drag her down. She was still unmarried, the salesman from Birmingham long since forgotten. Despite all her heaviness, though, she handled serving the beer well, keeping up with the almost ceaseless mugs being thrust at her for refills.

  “And one for me too, lass, if ye don’t mind.”

  This from Mrs. Green, who was a scarecrow beside her, thinner than ever and stooped with a grinning, toothless mouth and witchlike hair scattered around her shawl. She was the only women among them wearing a shawl. The others all wore their Sunday best. It would be talked about later. What else would be talked about was the way everyone watched, wondering if something was going to happen, and how nervous Annie looked.

  Mrs. Green’s tone couldn’t have been more polite, but people could not forget the fight she and Florrie had had several years ago and the hostility before and afterward. In fact, until today, until that moment, not a word had been exchanged between them. So we watched and held our breath a little, because both women were hottempered, quick to act on impulse. Florrie could very well have given Mrs. Green the beer she asked for right in her face. It wouldn’t have surprised anyone if Florrie had done so. Mrs. Green would have gone right for her with both claws, and the party would have turned into a real donnybrook.

  But it did not happen. Florrie was, in fact, quite nice about it, even smiled a bit, and made sure the mug was filled to the brim.

  And Mrs. Green said, “Ta, Florrie. But if ye don’t mind, I’d like to drink a toast to ye. So ’ave one with me, will ye?”

  “Why not?” Florrie said, and filled her own mug, and they toasted each other.

  Everyone watched in astonishment. These two mortal enemies had once fought in a way that would have been to death if others hadn’t pulled them apart. Now they were drinking a toast to each other.

  “T’yer good ’ealth,” Mrs. Green said, raising her mug of beer.

  “T’yers,” Florrie said, raising hers.

  That wasn’t all. Mrs. Green sought reconciliation elsewhere. She tottered over to my mother, beer in her hand, and said, “Now, me good lady, if you want me to do yer fire for yer, just you send ’arry out to call me, and I’ll come quick and on th’ double, and if I can’t come fer being crippled or some’t else, then me Annie would come, and you never got to worry about yer fire, I promise you that. And I tell you something else. You didn’t kill Christ. I know who did but I’m not telling. But you didn’t and anybody says you did’s a liar, and you just send ’im over to me and I’ll give ’im what’s what.”

  Afterward, my mother and her friends would have a good laugh over this in the shop, but at the time she just smiled and nodded. Seeing the condition Mrs. Green was in, she just agreed with everything she said. I think, too, it must have added to the satisfaction she felt about the entire day. It was not that it had brought the two sides of the street together in a way that would last for quite some time, but it had brought Lily back to her. Lily was a living creature, and she had added to her life with another life, and that’s what completed the day.

  I think I must have felt something of that myself. I know I was aware of a sense of peacefulness and contentment as I lay in bed that night. The party was not yet over for a few of the men, who lingered over what was left of the beer. They were laughing and talking and occasionally broke out into song. I did not mind their drunkenness. My father would come stumbling in later, but I would not mind that either, and I would not have to pull the sheets over my head to blot out the noise.

  Eventually, the street grew quiet. The last of them had gone in. The last door had banged shut. The lights in all the houses had gone out and the street was in darkness, save for the pale green light thrown by the gas lamp on the upper corner.

  It was very still in our house and I soon fell asleep.

  Epilogue

  WE LEFT ENGLAND IN THE SUMMER OF 1922, A YEAR AFTER OUR BIG STREET party. My mother’s dream had finally come true. Unbelievably, the tickets had arrived. We lost no time in making our departure, one hot July day, all of us trailing down the street carrying our torn luggage that my mother had bought cheaply in a secondhand shop. She carried Sidney in her arms as we left, and people from both sides of the street sood on their doorsteps waving to us and shouting, “Ta-ta! Good luck in America!”

  But I never really left the street. It was always there in my mind through the years that followed, with vivid memories of the people who lived there, and its two sides facing each other, sometimes like two enemy camps, and close friends at other times. I longed to go back and see the place again, but I was busy growing up in America, first in Chicago, then New York, going to school and getting a job and getting married and having children, and lots of things.

  Forty years had passed by the time it was possible for me to go. Perhaps I might have gone sooner if the ones I was so desperately anxious to see were still there. But the three of them, incredibly, were gone. First, it had been Lily, a heart attack only five years after her marriage to Arthur, and then Arthur himself not more than two years later. Jimmy had been brought up by Arthur’s parents, with whom we had been in correspondence for a long time, and it was through them that we learned that Jimmy had been killed in the war.

  All of this did much to destroy my mother, in addition to the fact that the poverty she had fled in England pursued her to America, and her dream never blossomed into its fullness of the wealth and luxury that were supposed to be part of America. Her life ended on a cold winter day in a dark, unheated, small tenement flat in the Bronx. My father was drunk on that day, and after the funeral I never saw him again.

  With all this unhappiness, together with the death of my brother Joe from cancer, I had little appetite for pleasure travel anywhere. But all these things passed, and the thought of the street persisted constantly, and at last I was ready and able to go, with my wife, of course.

  I had told Ruby much about the place already, and had written a series of sketches for a magazine about the street and my life there. She was familiar with it and just as eager to see it as I was.

  We left our two children in competent hands, and flew to London. After one night at the Cumberland, recovering from jet lag, we boarded a train for Manchester. We could have traveled there much faster by plane, but I wanted to see the countryside for the first time in my life. We had never been able to afford trips of any sort the twelve years I had lived in England, and I had seen very little of the country.

  I feasted my eyes on everything I saw through the window of the train. My only regret was that a misty drizzle had begun to fall. It was still drizzling when we got to Manchester. Fortunately, I had brought an umbrella along, and we got under it as soon as we stepped out into the street. We were able to get a taxi immediately, and the trip by taxi to my town took less than half an hour.

  I had told the driver to let
us off at Mersey Square, the center, so that I could walk the route to the street and see all the familiar places I had passed on my way to and from school. When we got out of the taxi, however, we had to stand for several moments under the umbrella while I looked around. I was lost. I did not recognize anything.

  Gradually, it began to come back. There had been some changes. The tram station was still there, but had been rebuilt and converted into a bus station. There were no more horses and carts. There were swiftly moving automobiles and rattling trucks and big lumbering buses, all in a ceaseless, heavy flow of traffic that swirled about us.

  Perhaps the biggest change was the river. It had disappeared, along with the bridge on which we had paused as we came home from school, peering down and watching the gray water rats climb up the walls of the cotton mills that lined the riverbanks. All that had been covered over, turned into a wide concrete promenade.

  Everything else was becoming recognizable. I had my bearings now. With Ruby’s arm tucked in mine, and the two of us close together under the umbrella, we started out, I excitedly pointing out familiar landmarks.

  Across the street was the jam works, with the same sweet smell of strawberries that used to torment us as we came home from school, hungry. And there were the Devil’s Steps we were always warned against. First was the smell. Both men and women used it as a toilet when coming out of the pub right next to the steps. You could also never tell who might come pouncing out of them at you.

  We went past the steps and under the old Roman viaduct onto Daw Bank with its ancient crumbling houses still there and the middens in front of the houses still overflowing with garbage. You held your nose as you went by. Old Biddy was no longer there, of course. I had written about her in my sketches, how she used to glare at us and mutter evil words as we went by. Something else was also missing.

  The row of Jewish tailoring shops built on stilts behind those ancient houses was no longer there. I led Ruby over to where they had once been, and we both stared aghast. In place of them was a huge hole. A man passing by told us that they had been destroyed in an air raid during the war. In that angry moment, I wondered, perhaps unreasonably, if the workshops had been singled out by German planes because they were Jewish, and with uncanny precision they had managed to make a direct hit on them. Another thought troubled me even more. What about our street? Had that been hit as well? The man did not know. Many places had been, but it was the mills and the engineering works they were after mostly.

  We hurried on, faster now than before. We turned onto King Street, still a busy little thoroughfare of shops of different kinds. I would have liked to linger, but we were in a hurry. Still, I managed to catch a glimpse of shops that I had known before and that were still there—Kemp’s fish and chip shop, Owen’s bakery with its delicious assortment of vanilla cuts and custard tarts displayed in the window, and Hamer’s shoe shop where I had bought my clogs.

  I would come back later, I thought, and would go into Kemp’s and buy all the fish and chips I had once dreamed of, and then I would go into Owen’s and buy the vanilla cuts and custard tarts that I once could only look at through the window with the saliva running from my mouth and the warm smell of the bakery in my nostrils. But there was no time for that now.

  Now we were on Brook Street, and the next street we would come to would be ours—if it was still there. My heart pounded as we approached, and my footsteps quickened still more, and Ruby barely managed to keep up with me, though she understood how I felt.

  We went past the backs, where we had played our games of soccer and cricket, and then reached the corner and our house. The street was still there, and I gave a great sigh of relief and joy. It was there intact, with its two rows of houses facing each other across the cobblestones, and the roofs shining in the rain. But as we stood there with the rain drumming on the umbrella over our heads, I sensed immediately that there was something wrong.

  The street was empty, devoid of any signs of life, and there was a deep silence broken only by the sound that the rain made. And as I looked up and down the street I saw that the houses were empty too. There were no curtains at the windows, no blinds of any sort, and there did not seem to be any smoke coming from the chimneys. What about my house, in front of which we stood?

  I had wanted so desperately to be able to go inside and see the place, but it too was obviously empty. I tried the door. It was locked. I looked through the window where my mother used to display her faded fruits and vegetables, with the bad parts turned around from view. I could see the room that was supposed to have been our parlor and became a shop instead. It was bare and empty, the wallpaper was peeling, and the fireplace did not even have ashes.

  I was filled with disappointment, and totally perplexed. What had happened here to make everyone leave? Then Ruby pointed out something at the top of the street that I had not noticed. In the first few houses there on both sides doors and windows had been pulled out and were leaning up against the walls. Slates that had obviously come from the roofs were stacked against the wall also.

  “It looks as if they’re starting to tear the place down,” Ruby said.

  She was right. I saw it now, and my disappointment was complete. Yet, as she pointed out, it was a good thing that we had come now before it disappeared altogether. And a good thing too that it was a Sunday when the workmen were not busy with the demolition.

  There didn’t seem to be any point to lingering further, and we were about to turn away when the door in the house directly opposite us opened, and someone came running out calling my name.

  “’arry!”

  I stared at the woman running toward us. She wore a black shawl and came out of the house that belonged to the Greens, and I could have sworn it was Mrs. Green. The same thin, bent figure that used to come to do our fire on Friday nights and Saturdays. As she came closer I could see the same toothless mouth. She finally reached us, breathless.

  “Oh, ’arry, I saw you through the window, and I knew it was you right away. I’m Annie. Do you remember me?”

  Of course it was not her mother. I didn’t tell her the impression I’d had. “Of course I remember you, Annie,” I said, shaking her hand. “I’m so glad you’re still here.”

  I introduced her to my wife, and explained to Ruby that Annie and her mother used to be our fire goys, a term that Annie understood and made her laugh, exposing her toothless gums still more. I asked her if any other houses were lived in.

  “No,” she said. “I’m the only one left. I’m not supposed to be here either, but they gave me a few more days till the wreckers get to this part of the street. They’re tearing it down, you know, to make way for a public housing project.”

  She added sadly, “The street’ll be gone forever. Things’ll never be the same.”

  So that was it! That was what all the emptiness was about. I was shocked at first. And disappointed. But then I wasn’t sure. Perhaps, putting sentiment aside, there was something good in all this. Perhaps tearing this place down wasn’t such a bad idea.

  But before I had time to think about all this, Annie was urging us to come into her place and get out of the rain and have a cup of tea. I looked at Ruby and she gave a quick nod of assent. She was as anxious as I was to get out of the rain, but especially to be able to see what the insides of these houses looked like.

  We followed Annie across the street and into her house, and as I entered a wave of nostalgia struck me, for it was the same as the house in which I had once lived, the same square wallpapered room with its shabby furniture and the blackened fireplace occupying most of one wall, and a fire glowing in the grate. The only difference between this and ours was the large crucifix on one wall.

  And as I glanced around at all its meaness, I thought, the one thing that has not changed here in all these years is the poverty. My eyes caught sight of the framed photograph of a young soldier on the mantelpiece. I guessed who it was. He had been a child when I left, still her great shame, supposedly the son of
Freddy Gordon. But I wanted to be sure.

  “Is that Peter?”

  “Yis.” She was busy, bustling about, preparing tea, putting cups and saucers on the table and a plate of biscuits. Ruby and I sat down.

  “How is he doing?”

  “Peter’s gone. He was killed in the war.”

  She had her back to me, putting the kettle on the fire to boil. I couldn’t see her face, but I could tell that this was something she didn’t want to talk about.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and Ruby murmured the same thing.

  Annie went on to talk of other things. There was so much to tell me, and she had kept abreast of everyone who had lived on the street, even those who had gone elsewhere to live, to other cities and other countries. In some cases she had kept up a correspondence. I imagine it did much to ease the loneliness she had felt after her mother’s death, and then her son’s, and when people she had lived with all her life were gone—everyone gone, except Annie herself.

  She spoke with the broad Lancashire accent that I myself had once possessed and that had become a strange language to me. I had to strain to follow her, and I’m sure Ruby was having the same difficulty. We both leaned forward at the table as she spoke with dropped aitches and words slurred together, but we managed to catch most of it. This one I had known had died, that one had died, and this one had moved here, and that one had moved there. Obviously there had been a lot of changes on the street after I had left with my family, but it was clear also from what she had said that the configuration had remained much the same, with the Jews on one side and the Christians on the other. If one Jewish family moved out, another came to take its place, and it was the same on the other side.