The Golden Willow Page 6

  Sitting in the dentist's office waiting my turn, I took a magazine off the rack to read. It was called Your Dream Home, and it was the thinnest magazine I had ever seen. The front cover featured a picture of a modern ranch house with a builder's name underneath, and on the back cover were the magazine's only advertisers, their names and addresses enclosed in uniform rectangles, and all apparently were subcontractors.

  The whole thing puzzled me. What the hell kind of magazine was this? Or was it simply a mailing piece to promote the services of the builder on the front cover? I looked for the masthead. There was none, but in tiny print at the bottom of a page was a publisher's name and an address in northern New Jersey. I tore it out and put it in my pocket just as the dentist's nurse came out for me.

  Regardless of what kind of magazine it was, it looked like an easy market for me. The articles I read in its eight pages were badly written, and I knew I could do better. I wrote one on the beauty and durability of maple furniture and sent it in to them. The reply came much sooner than I had expected, and it was in the form of a telephone call.

  A man's deep, gravelly voice spoke to me, introducing himself as Myron Hallerman, publisher of Your Dream Home, saying he'd read my article and had been impressed with it. He was sending me a check for a hundred dollars, and would I care to have lunch with him and discuss the possibility of doing further work for his magazine?

  I was stunned. A hundred bucks! It was three times what any of the bigger magazines had paid me. And would I have lunch with him? Yes, I said, and did everything I could to keep my voice steady.

  Fortunately, we had a car then, a 1950 Studebaker Champion that we had treated ourselves to before the collapse of the movie industry, and I was able to drive out to New Jersey. I was in for a surprise. Considering the skinny little bit of a magazine that I had become involved with, I expected a cubbyhole of an office. Instead, it occupied an entire floor at the top of a five-story office building. And there were quite a number of girls bent over typewriters clattering away, a receptionist, everything.

  Myron Hallerman's private office was large and impressive, with paneled walls, a comfortable black leather sofa and chairs, and an enormous glass-topped mahogany desk behind which he sat in a high-backed carved chair that was like a throne. He was a big man, about my age, heavyset, with an aggressive, rather swarthy face and a hand outstretched to welcome me. “Glad you could come. Sit down. Have a drink?”

  There was a liquor cabinet behind him—well stocked, I would discover later. But that time I shook my head and said, “No, thanks. It's a bit too early for me.”

  It wasn't for him, but he didn't drink that time. We chatted for a while, I telling him about myself, my wife and children, my job as a reader for fifteen years, he telling me about himself, he too married with two children, boy and girl, which gave us something in common to start with.

  We hit it off at the start, but even more so in the restaurant, where he seemed to be well known. We were seated in a booth and well tended by an attractive young waitress who smiled a lot at him and didn't mind when he patted her buttocks. I had two martinis and he two Scotches before steaks were served, and we talked a lot, he telling me that he'd graduated from an ivy league school, but instead of becoming the doctor his parents wanted him to be, he'd become a salesman, selling every goddamn thing there was to sell, as he put it in the gravelly voice. He loved selling, especially when it involved the challenge of selling things that people didn't want and he was able to talk them into buying. And then finally he hit on the toughest of all things to sell: a magazine.

  The postwar building boom had given him the inspiration. He'd just come back from the war with a bit of money in his pocket that he'd won at crap games, and was looking for a business of his own. He devised Your Dream Home, a magazine that a builder could send out to prospective home buyers to whet their appetite for a home still further and lure them into the builder's office. It would appear to be the builder's own personal magazine, with his name on the front cover and all sorts of advice inside on how to decorate and furnish the home.

  “And it doesn't cost the builder a dime,” Myron explained to me, leaning forward across the table and tapping my arm to emphasize this point. “Not a goddamn dime.”

  “Then who pays for it?” I asked, aware that he wanted me to ask this question.

  “The guys on the back cover,” Myron said, grinning a little. “They're his subcontractors, and they'd better come across or else they can look for work elsewhere. Although,” he added, perhaps seeing me wince, “they get their money's worth in the business the magazine brings. And it only costs 'em ten dollars a month for the ad, which is peanuts compared to what they get back. It works for everybody, including me, of course.”

  “How many of these builders do you have?” I asked.

  “It started out with one a year ago,” Myron said. “I ran around the country selling my head off before I got that one, and then it took off like a rocket, and I've quit selling myself and I've got two dozen salesmen doing it for me in every part of this goddamn country. We're up to six hundred services—that's what we call 'em, services—a month, each one bringing in an average of two hundred dollars.”

  I did some mental arithmetic, and whistled inwardly. Two hundred a month times six hundred came to over $1.4 million a year; there were thousands more builders to sell to, and the business was only a year old. I stared at him, and he laughed back at me. He knew what I was thinking. Then he became serious. He leaned forward and tapped my hand again.

  “This is where you come in,” he said. “Editorially, I've not been doing as well as at sales. I've been relying mostly on freelancers, and they all stink. I need a bit more class in the writing to get this magazine to where I want it to go. And that's the top. I can beat Henry Luce, Hearst, any of 'em. But first I've got to get myself an editor who can turn a rag into riches, and I think you're the man for it. I knew that the minute I read that article of yours. It had the class I was looking for. Would you be interested?”

  It took me several moments to collect myself. This was more than I had expected, much more. I was being offered a job. “But I've never edited a magazine before,” I found myself saying.

  “That's all right,” he said. “I've never published a magazine before and I'm doing all right.”

  We both laughed. He ordered another drink for me. The steaks had come. We ate heartily, I more from excitement than hunger. We chatted some more.

  “How would a hundred a week be to start?” he asked. “And you can be your own man. Come when you want, go when you want. No nine to five.”

  A hundred a week! I'd been making thirty-five a week tops as a reader. The steak went down inside me in lumps. I was muddled with everything—the offer, the martinis, the sudden, swift change in my life. I think I said something. I'm not sure.

  I DROVE HOME in a daze. Just the same, I managed to keep my eyes on the road and drive slowly since I had a lot to live for now. Through my muddled mind I went over the offer I'd been made. My conscience was troubling me. I wasn't sure how ethical this business was. Were these subcontractors being blackmailed into advertising? Did I want to get mixed up with this sort of thing?

  Then I began to think of Ruby, and how long I'd burdened her with my lack of money, and the lean contributions I had made to the upkeep of the home when I did have a job of sorts. Wasn't it time I brought her some good news for a change and pitched in with some real money? This was my chance.

  It tipped the scales in favor of pushing my scruples aside and telling her only what I wanted her to hear and keeping the rest to myself. And it was well worth it when I saw her face light up and her eyes widen when she heard the salary I'd been offered. Like me, she had expected the meeting to be simply to arrange for more freelance work. But this came as a delightful surprise.

  She threw her arms around my neck and kissed me. “I knew somebody would recognize your talents sooner or later,” she said.

  “It's kind of lat
er,” I said a bit grimly.

  “No, it isn't,” she said. “You're still my strong, young, handsome hero. And lover,” she added.

  “That part I like,” I said, and kissed her. Now, having thought it all over, I believe she would have said the same thing if there had been no job, no hundred a week.

  We were both pretty happy that day, but just the same I kept my fingers crossed about that job and about Myron Hallerman himself.

  I WOULD BE with Myron Hallerman for the next twenty years, and during that time, the publishing company grew to six magazines, not all in the building field and not all as successful as Your Dream Home, but moneymakers enough to enable Myron to erect his own building in New Jersey, where he also lived, and to put in his own printing plant.

  I was editor in chief with a private office, a private secretary, an assistant editor, an artist, steady increases in salary, and a bonus at Christmas. Yes, sir, I was doing great. But I was paying a price for it. I had discovered almost immediately that Myron Hallerman needed more than an editor. He needed a confidant, a pal, and I was it. He thought nothing of interrupting my work and calling me into his office so that he could unburden himself of his troubles, of which he had plenty.

  If it was not the salesmen who were giving him headaches, with their eternal requests for advances on commissions or money to fix a broken car or to bail them out of jail for drunk driving, then it was his wife, and she gave him the biggest headache.

  His marriage was not like mine. I gathered that as I listened to him during those sessions in his office when he called me in to chat and perhaps have a drink, and he poured out all his troubles along with the liquor—sometimes at ten in the morning, and perhaps when he'd just come in after a quarrel with his wife. She was a neurotic woman and gave him no peace in the house; the office was no escape from her either because she came in quite often. She was a tall, thin woman with haggard features that had long since lost what attractiveness they might have once had. She would barge right into Myron's office regardless of how busy he might be, and though the door was closed, the entire office would soon hear them quarreling.

  She was a wild spender of money, Myron told me, even though she had come from a poor family where every nickel counted. She was forever refurnishing the house. No sooner had they bought new furniture than she tired of it and decided to redo the house again. And now she was tired of the house itself and was after him to build another one, this time according to her specifications, which would cost a fortune. They quarreled often, and sometimes when they did, she went out to a jewelry store and bought some expensive diamond ring or bracelet just to spite him.

  Myron was a very unhappy man despite all his success in publishing. And I felt sorry for him. But what advice could I give him? My own family was altogether different from his. My wife was absolutely perfect, at least in my eyes. What could I say to him? I simply listened and sympathized.

  Perhaps that was all he wanted—someone to listen, someone to whom he could pour out all the things that were tearing him apart.

  Chapter Eight

  2002

  I CANNOT REMEMBER MUCH OF WHAT HAPPENED AFTER RUBY DIED. Everything seemed vague and shadowy. I was conscious of people around me, voices whispering, almost like a dream. They were my children and grandchildren, the grandchildren grown up now, the five of them who had once played so happily around our golden willow tree now adults, some still in college, some working and on their own. They had all come to see Ruby while she was in the hospital during those last few days. They had loved her too, and they were still here now to be with me—not in my house, but in Adraenne's apartment in Brooklyn Heights or Charlie's house in Pennsylvania. They did not want me to go home yet and be alone there.

  But sooner or later I would have to face the emptiness of the house without her. I knew that as I began to emerge from the fog I was in, and those terrible moments of realizing that she was no longer alive, and the uncontrollable fits of weeping. They were afraid of my being alone and wanted me to stay longer, but although I dreaded it, I felt a strong urge to be back there and be by myself, however terrible an ordeal it would be.

  I said good-bye to all of them. Charlie drove me home. He wanted to come in and stay with me for a while, but I told him no, I would rather be by myself. I waited until he had gone, and then unlocked the door and stepped inside. I closed the door behind me and stood still for a moment in the deep silence of the house. My eyes went around the living room, and they fell on the book that was open on the large coffee table next to the couch. I remembered that she had sat there reading on the last night she was here, and the book was open at the page where she had left off.

  A lump came into my throat as I saw it. I knew the book. It was one of Doctorow's, a favorite author of ours. She'd had difficulty tearing herself away from it that night. I stood for a while longer, afraid to venture farther into the house. My eyes swung around. Everything I saw reminded me of her: the chairs, the tables, the paintings on the walls, things we had bought together, the good times we'd had buying them. I began to wander through the house, going from room to room and seeing the things that reminded me of her.

  In the kitchen I saw her apron draped over the back of a chair. She had been in a hurry to get to her book and had forgotten to hang it up. In the bathroom was her toothbrush, the dental floss beside it on the shelf over the sink, and I remembered how diligently she would floss her teeth after every meal.

  The bedroom was hard to take. The bed was still unmade, everything the way we had left it that morning when we had hurried her to the hospital. I stood there for a long time looking at it, thinking.

  I was ninety-two years old. How much longer could I possibly live? Even the most optimistic of statistics would have said not much longer. Perhaps it could be any day. So what would be lost if I hastened it just a little? Even if I did not believe in a hereafter, a life after death, I would no longer have to suffer the misery of being without her.

  Such was my reasoning, and with the deepening of winter, the bitterly cold weather that kept me locked in the house for days at a time, and the loneliness, my depression grew, and I kept thinking of the ways and means by which people took their own lives, and what method I could use for myself.

  I brooded over it constantly, and finally decided to get some information from my daughter, putting it to her obliquely. A nurse practitioner, she worked in a hospital that specialized in cancer and where deaths were frequent. She came to see me regularly every two weeks, making sure that I was being properly cared for, and preparing enough meals to last for a few days.

  On one of these visits I asked her, trying to sound casual and merely curious, if there were not ways doctors used to end the suffering of a patient and speed up the process of dying. She was not fooled. She did not answer my question, but took hold of my hand, looked directly into my eyes, and said something that I would not forget.

  “Dad, you have lost a wife you loved very much, but we have lost a mother we loved just as much. You are all we have left, and we need you now more than we ever did.”

  It struck home. Not until then did I realize that they were going through the same suffering I was, and it awakened me to the sense of responsibility that I'd always had toward my son and daughter from the day they were born.

  It drove away all thought of suicide. It did not end my grief; that might never totally happen. But it gave me a reason to want to go on living, no matter how little time there was left for me, and to be able to function in a more normal fashion. In order to do that, I needed help, and I turned to what had been offered me before but which I had refused.

  In the hospital there had been a palliative group that went among dying patients and offered counsel and comfort to the relatives gathered around the bedside. They came into Ruby's room one morning while Adraenne and I were there and Ruby lay in a morphine-drugged sleep, breathing heavily. We were puzzled at first, not knowing who they were. There were three of them, and they introduced thems
elves, the man a doctor, one of the two women a nurse practitioner, the other woman a social worker specializing in bereavement.

  As soon as we learned who they were and what their purpose was, we wanted none of them. We were both resentful and angry, both still clinging to the belief that Ruby was not dying and would recover.

  They were patient with us and tried gently to convince us that this was the end for her. The doctor stood looking down at her and said, “What you are witnessing right now is the soul leaving the body. …”

  I was abrupt with them and made it clear that I did not agree with him and was not interested in his services. In fact, I was furious. I turned my back on him and they left. Now, thinking about it, I wished I had not behaved in that fashion, and perhaps I could have benefited a great deal from what they had to say.

  But there were several similar groups in the area where I lived, which had plenty of retirement communities where deaths took place often among the elderly residents. I chose one group that met at a local hospital. There were about twenty people, mostly women, seated around a long conference table in the meeting room, all having suffered the loss of a loved one, and all, I would soon discover, going through pretty much what I was going through. A young social worker by the name of Melissa directed the meeting, and opened it with a brief talk on grief.

  “What is grief?” She spoke softly, glancing around at each one as she did so. I did not need any definition of grief, but I listened carefully to what she had to say. Grief, she said, was a perfectly normal reaction to the death of a loved one. In some cases it was more devastating and lasted longer than in others. But in all cases, it was an agonizing ordeal.

  Time was the best healer. Eventually time would dim the memories and lessen the pain. In the meantime, there were some practical steps that could be taken for the grief-stricken to find relief. Being with others helped. So did sharing your feelings with others. Nor was it wrong to laugh and have fun. Then she said something that would stick in my mind. “Perhaps the best way to express your grief,” she said, “is the way that fits and feels right to you.”