The Golden Willow Page 7

  She asked for volunteers to give examples, and there was an instant response, all seeming eager to talk. One woman said it was her faith in God that kept her going. She prayed daily. Another, a man, said he was a trumpet player and told how he coped with his grief by going to his wife's grave every day and playing her favorite songs on his trumpet. Another, a woman, said that volunteering at the hospital where her husband died and helping sick patients gave her a feeling of comfort.

  I left as soon as the meeting was over, though others stayed on for the coffee and cake and to chat with one another. I wanted to be alone to think over what I had heard. As simple as what I'd heard in the meeting had sounded to me, I realized there was much common sense to it also. And I was thinking of what way to express my grief could fit me.

  There was only one answer, and it came to me immediately. There was my writing. Nothing could absorb me so completely as when I sat down at my desk to put words to paper, however badly I might write. I'd known that a long time ago. So why not now? Why was I hesitating? Perhaps it was because my writing had caused me grief of another sort. There had been nothing but one bitter disappointment after another. Did I want to get into that sort of thing again? I had practically given it up these past few years, busy enough and happy enough with Ruby not to mind or even think of past failures. It seemed that I would do well to think of something else that would fit.

  But then there were the nights, and the nights had a lot to do with my decision to find the escape from the present I was seeking in writing. It had a lot to do also with what I wrote about.

  Chapter Nine

  1940

  YES, THE KIDS WERE GROWING UP, AND ALONG WITH THAT WERE THE problems that come, I suppose, to all parents. Fortunately, we did not have to deal with the sibling rivalry that often comes when a firstborn child is displaced by a newborn member in the family. Charlie seemed to welcome the arrival of Adraenne as much as we did, and indeed, as she began to grow and mingle with other children, he assumed a watchful and protective attitude toward her and seemed always anxious about her welfare. He was the perfect big brother.

  Shortly after the arrival of Adraenne, when Ruby had to go back to work, this time as a secretary in one of the local grade schools, one fortunately nearby, there was still another addition to the family in the form of Edna, our new housekeeper. We could not have made a better choice. She was a jolly, good-natured black woman. Her laughter brightened our household, her cooking was good, and her care of the baby passed Ruby's closest inspection.

  I myself remained watchful. I still read manuscripts when Edna first came to us, and my room was upstairs in the finished attic that had made our house so desirable when we first bought it. However, despite the privacy it gave me, I could still hear noises from downstairs, and one morning, shortly after Ruby had left the house and Charlie had gone to school, I heard the baby crying, and immediately I rushed down to find out what was the trouble.

  For the first time I saw anger on Edna's face as she turned from the baby toward me.

  “Mr. Bernstein,” she said, putting her hands on her hips, “we might as well understand each other right here and now. Either I'm in charge of this child or I'm not, and if I am, I don't want you or anybody else interfering. And if you can't trust me, then I'll be packing my things and be on my way.”

  It was the last time I ever did that again. Edna was faultless, the best of all the housekeepers and maids we'd ever had, and there had been several before her. But she could only be with us, we soon discovered, for relatively short periods at a time. Her home was in South Carolina, where she had a husband and children—she never told us how many she had—but when she got tired of her home, she came north to make a little money and to have some fun, as she confided to us.

  There was no question about the fun. She had friends in Harlem, and one of them frequently called for her at our house. He was a tall, amiable black man, and he came in a very large, fancy-looking car that he parked in front while he came calling. They were soon gone, the two of them, Edna waving a cheerful good-bye to us and grinning widely. She came back the next morning, always on time, looking a bit tired and sleepy, but as cheerful as ever.

  I suppose she got tired of the fun too, eventually, and of us also, I guess, and so back she went to South Carolina. For several years she came and went, her return always welcomed by us.

  During her absences Aunt Lily often pitched in to help with the children. She and her husband had rented an apartment in a house owned by friends of ours in the neighboring town of Rosedale, and it was a ten-minute walk to us, making it easy for her to come and go. Both Adraenne and Charlie grew fond of her, and for her they might have satisfied her own yearning for the children she'd always wanted but never had.

  For Ruby and me, she gave us the chance to break away from the house and our responsibilities and visit friends or go places, while knowing that the kids were well taken care of. Ruby and I had almost forgotten what it was like to be alone together, so immersed had we been in all the changes that had taken place in our life. So it was good to be together again and have a taste of what it had been like when all we had to think about was ourselves and no responsibilities hung over us.

  Thanks to Aunt Lily we were able to take a trip to England, to see the town where I had been born, and about which I have written in my book The Invisible Wall. I told how we arrived one rainy afternoon to find the street on which I had lived in the process of being torn down to make way for a public housing project. We stood under our umbrella for a while, looking through the drizzle at a deserted street, the two rows of empty houses without doors and windows, feeling depressed and disappointed. It was a Sunday, so there was no work being done, and the people I had hoped to see were no longer there, except one.

  Yes, there was one, and she came running out to greet us, having recognized me from her window in the one house that was still occupied. It was Annie Green, whom I remembered so well as a young woman then, now an old woman, bent over, huddled in a shawl that covered her head and showed fringes of white hair, and a toothless mouth that shouted warm greetings.

  Annie took us into her house and served us tea and biscuits and an abundance of information about the people who had once lived here and what had happened to them in all the years since I had gone away. Ruby and I came away refreshed and warmed, glad now that we had come.

  A week of sightseeing in London and Paris followed, and by that time we were eager to get home and be with our kids again. Perhaps until then we had not realized how important a part of our life they had become. To be sure, we missed the lazy Sunday mornings when we could loaf in bed as long as we liked and spend all the time we wanted over breakfast with the Sunday Times scattered about us, the ease of not having to take care of anyone but ourselves, the untroubled days when we did not have children with their noise, their constant demands, their fevers and sore throats, and the worry over their school grades. But the pleasure we derived from seeing them grow and develop, and the love that came from them, made up for all that.

  FROM THE START, we realized that our two children were almost exact opposites, two separate individuals with different characteristics and personalities. Charlie was outgoing; he made friends easily and had lots of them—too many, we often thought—and his mind was more on having fun with his friends, less on schoolwork. He was big for his age. Before he was twelve, when he was still in grade school, he towered over all his classmates.

  Ruby and I collaborated on an article about him that was published in Parents magazine. “Big for His Age” was the title, and we told how it could be as much a disadvantage to a boy as an advantage. It could command the respect of other boys, but if he got into a fight with one who was his age but much more normal and smaller in height, he would be called a bully, and if he turned away from it, as he did sometimes for fear of hurting the other one, he would be labeled a coward. He was handy around the house for Ruby when it reached a point where he was taller than she was and she had
to reach up for something on a shelf that was too high up for her; he did it for her with perfect ease. But generally, we pointed out in the article, far more was expected of him than he was capable of doing.

  However, he weathered the period until his peers caught up with him in height without any bad psychological effects, and he grew into his adolescence as cheerful and outgoing as ever, with an abundance of friends that soon began to include girls, and with that he paid less attention to his schoolwork than ever.

  “Charlie, did you do your homework?”

  I can remember that remark coming from both Ruby and myself almost without fail every day. The reply was generally no. He was always truthful. I once thought his inability to tell a lie was due to lack of imagination, but I was being unjust to him. He was simply a straightforward, honest kid who could not lie to us, and it often brought on difficulties for him and for us. He could be on his way out, all dressed up, his long hair slicked back, on his way to a party or to some other kind of pleasure, and we'd stop him and ask the question: “Have you done your homework?”

  “No,” came the reply.

  “Then do it.” Ruby was the disciplinarian. I was inclined to be more lenient, and I would have let him go. But Ruby was firm, and there was good reason for it. She more than anyone could appreciate the value of schools. She'd had to wait until she was eleven years old before she could go to one. She'd come from Poland, where she was born, at that age, and there had been no schools for poor people in Poland. So, at eleven in the United States, she had to catch up with her own age group, together with learning the English language, a tremendous job, and yet she did it in one year. Now she spoke English without any trace of an accent.

  She reminded Charlie of all that, and so did I, but despite our efforts to get him to follow in her footsteps, he could not work up any enthusiasm for school. His grades were low. He was bright, the teachers assured us, but he couldn't seem to pay any attention to the classwork. And then he stopped going to school at all. We knew nothing about this for a week before we received a telephone call from the principal telling us he'd been absent all that week.

  He didn't deny it. He was George Washington again—he couldn't tell a lie—and we were at our wits' end as to how to handle the situation. Grounding him or taking his bike away were stopgaps, not a solution. There was counseling. We tried that, hiring a college student who was majoring in psychology, a pleasant young fellow who we thought might also serve as a role model for our son, something I should have been myself but obviously wasn't.

  His name was Jud and he came twice a week in the afternoon, and he and Charlie would go upstairs to the finished attic that had become Charlie's bedroom in addition to being my office. I left the room when they came and transferred my work to the basement, which I had finished off and turned into a playroom. It seemed to be working out quite well. Charlie came out of the one-hour sessions with Jud looking quite pleased, and he seemed to have benefited from the counseling. His work at school improved a little. Ruby and I were quite pleased. Then one afternoon, after the session had begun, I found it necessary to go upstairs in order to get something there I needed. I went up the stairs quietly so that I shouldn't disturb them, and suddenly heard giggling. Puzzled, I tiptoed the rest of the way up. The door was partly open and I peeked in. They were both sprawled on the floor side by side chuckling over a comic magazine.

  So this was the psychological counseling my son had been getting for the past few weeks. I'd been paying good money to have him read comic magazines.

  I burst in on them shouting, “What the hell's going on here?”

  Charlie looked as if he wished he could drop through the floor and disappear. Jud, however, took it quite calmly and said comic magazines were part of the method that he'd been taught at City College.

  And I said, “You're full of it. Now get the hell out of here.”

  “Do you mind giving me my pay first?” he asked calmly.

  “I do mind,” I said, but I gave it to him anyway.

  He left, and that was the end of the counseling.

  Looking back now, I wonder if perhaps Jud was right and comic magazines were the best medicine for what ailed Charlie. Either that or simply time and patience were the only things that could solve his problem and the many other problems that assail children while they are growing up.

  With Adraenne, it was another matter, and altogether different from the problems we had with Charlie. She could not get enough of school. She was at the top of her classes, and soon had skipped two grades, so she was sixteen when she graduated from high school and entered college.

  She was the opposite of Charlie in other ways too. She was shy and introspective, and she could spend hours alone in her room reading or writing poetry. She did not go to parties very much, and she was very select in the friends she chose. Nor did she have boyfriends calling on her, though she was pretty from the time she was a child.

  Charlie could not wait to become a Boy Scout. He wore his uniform proudly, he worked hard to get his merit badges, and he was happy when he went off to Boy Scout camp for two weeks in the summer. But Adraenne, on the other hand, resisted becoming a Brownie, and only agreed reluctantly after much urging on our part because we thought Brownies and then Girl Scouts later would serve to bring her out of her shell a little.

  After considerable persuasion, we talked her into going to a Brownie camp for a week. We saw her off at the bus packed with eager, excited young girls, all anxious to get to the camp except Adraenne, who clung to us tearfully until the last moment, and Ruby and I turned away feeling sad but certain we had done our duty in forcing her to go.

  Two days later came a telephone call from her. She was weeping. Could we come and get her? Immediately, I raced down there in the car, and she was waiting for me and practically flew into my arms.

  So we let her drop out of the Brownies and take piano lessons instead, and she was happy with that. We invested in a baby grand that took up half the living room. It was not new, and one leg needed a bit of fixing and it was badly out of tune, but these matters were soon taken care of and Mrs. Daly came into our lives. She was the piano teacher, a solidly built woman of around forty with a breezy manner who came bursting into our house every Saturday morning to give Adraenne her lesson, and for an hour commanded in her loud voice, without ever illustrating with her own playing what she was instructing. I don't think we ever once heard her play the piano, and we were never sure that she knew how. But she had been teaching the children of Laurelton for years, and Adraenne emerged from several years of her instruction knowing at least how to play the Beethoven bagatelles.

  Saturday was music day in our house. Every Saturday I drove Charlie into Manhattan to the Henry Street Settlement, where he was being taught to play the clarinet. We had been determined that our children should learn to play some instrument, and at first with Charlie it had been the violin, chiefly because I owned one from a period in my life when I attempted to learn to play it and then, having failed, had put it away in a closet. But now I brought it out, dusted it off, and gave it to my son to carry on where I had left off.

  There was an orchestra at school, and at the head of it was a poor devil of a man who not only conducted but undertook to teach the students various other instruments of which he knew little. The man was half crazed with his efforts and the results he got, and sometimes he completely lost control of himself and beat the young would-be musician over the head with whatever instrument the child happened to be playing. I know Charlie got it several times with his violin, and I had to do some repair work on the fiddle.

  But without ever really learning how to play his violin, Charlie was admitted to the orchestra, and a mishap took place the first day. He should never have started to learn to play this instrument in the first place because he was left-handed, and his partner in the orchestra was on that side, and when Charlie drew his bow his left elbow went into the eye of the kid beside him, knocking his eyeglasses off and almost costi
ng him an eye. Charlie was thrown out of the orchestra at once, and the enraged conductor sent his fiddle flying after him.

  We put the fiddle away for good this time, and to this day it still resides in my closet gathering dust. It shall never be played again.

  But eventually Charlie's fancy turned to the clarinet, chiefly because he had seen Benny Goodman play in a movie and was inspired to follow in his footsteps. I had no objection, even though the clarinet cost me a hundred dollars. A friend steered me to the Henry Street Settlement, where they had competent teachers for all instruments and where lessons were cheap. But we had to be there by eleven and it took an hour of driving in the car to get there. That meant I had to leave no later than ten, and on this particular Saturday morning at ten Charlie was not back yet from wherever it was he had gone on his bike. I was furious. I stood outside and looked this way and that, and Ruby did some telephoning of neighbors to find out if he was with one of them.

  Finally, he came tearing down the street on his bike. He was sorry. He was always sorry, abjectly. I resisted clouting him on the head and told him to get into the car, and he did. I blame myself for what followed, though it really wasn't my fault. What happened was that I raced to get to Manhattan on time, and in my rush I went through a red light and was stopped by a cop and given a ticket.

  We got to the Henry Street Settlement later than ever, but at least there was still time for the lesson, and I had to be satisfied with that.

  “All right,” I said roughly to Charlie. “Get going.”

  He was still sitting in the seat beside me, not moving. “Dad,” he said, “I can't.”