The Dream (21 page)

We lost no time getting undressed and into bed, and I think all of us must have fallen asleep immediately. I think, too, all of us must have awakened at about the
same
time. It was around the middle of the night. Half in my sleep still, I had felt the itching. I scratched and tried to go back to sleep, but then I felt the crawling on my body and sat up quickly to find Sidney doing the same thing, scratching himself vigorously and complaining, ‘There must be bedbugs here.’

My mother was awake also and scratching herself. She got out of bed and turned on the light. We looked at our beds and gasped. They were bedbugs all right and they were swarming all over the two beds. Sidney and I got out of ours too and we all stood helpless not knowing what to do.

‘We can’t sleep here,’ my mother said.

‘Shall I wake up the landlady and tell her?’ I asked.

She hesitated. ‘What can she do?’ she asked. Bedbugs were no strangers to her. We’d had them in England, but my mother had fought them vigorously, using a candle flame to burn their nests in the springs, finally getting rid of them. But it took time and effort, and here we were in the middle of the night. What, indeed, could the landlady do? And yet there was no one else to turn to. ‘Go and tell her,’ she said finally.

I went to the door of the other bedroom and knocked. It took several knocks to rouse her, and she finally opened the door and stood blinking sleepily at me in a bathrobe. I told her.

She seemed surprised. ‘Bedbugs?’ she said. ‘I never had bedbugs in my house. What bedbugs are you talking about?’

‘Come and see,’ I said.

She followed me to our room and looked at the bugs crawling about on both beds. She was shaking her head.
‘I
never had them before,’ she repeated. ‘You must have brought them with you.’

My mother became angry. ‘In my house in Chicago there were no bedbugs,’ she said.

The woman became angry too. ‘So go back to Chicago,’ she said. ‘And take the bedbugs with you, because they’re not mine.’ Then, without further argument, she shuffled off in her slippers to her bedroom and slammed the door shut after her.

Certainly, she had none of the goodness and hospitality of her sister. But what could we do? Go back to bed and try to sleep? We shuddered at the idea. What else was there to do? Go back to the Alters’ apartment and wake up Joe and tell him? But what could he do in the middle of the night? Only one thing seemed certain: we had to get out of there before our own luggage became contaminated.

We packed up. I grabbed the suitcases and we left. We went down the stairs and out into the street. It was still dark. The sky was clear and stars showed. It had been a warm day, but the air was cool now and we shivered a little as we stood there uncertainly, not knowing how to proceed further.

My mother decided. ‘We’ll wait here,’ she said, ‘until it’s morning and then we’ll go to see Joe. There’s no use waking him up now. He couldn’t do anything. We’ll just have to wait.’

It seemed the wisest course. We sat on the stone step and huddled close together for warmth. Sidney and my mother soon began to nod and then were asleep with their heads on my shoulders at either side of me. I remained awake. I was troubled. What had I done? I’d
pulled
her away from a good home that was as close to her dream as she would ever get and brought her into this misery more because of my hatred for my father than anything else. I had no right to do it. And Sidney too. He would have to start all over again in a new school, make new friends, get adjusted to new surroundings.

And on top of all that I had to tell her that her daughter had died and that alone was enough to destroy her. She would have to go through sitting shiveh, the Jewish ritual of mourning for the dead. It would be the second time. How could I forget that? The first time had been in England, when Lily had married Arthur Forshaw and for which, according to Jewish law, she was considered dead.

I remember it vividly, all of us sitting in our stockinged feet in the darkened room saying prayers for the dead. And I remembered how Lily had come bursting in protesting that she was not dead, but very much alive, and how my mother had pretended she did not hear her. I remembered all that, and thought how could she go through the ritual once more, except that this time Lily would not be here to protest. If at least my mother remained in the comfortable surroundings of her home in Chicago it would have been more bearable for her.

So I sat there all through the night with their heads on my shoulders, shivering in the cold and dreading the morning that would soon come.

It came with a gradual fading of the darkness, the stars disappearing as pale light spread across the sky. The street began to awaken slowly, with a few people coming out of houses, a few cars starting up their motors, a truck going by and lights appearing in windows. Once the door behind us opened and a man came out. He made a
grumbling
noise at the obstruction we formed sitting on the step, and my mother and Sidney awakened and we all three stood up to let him pass.

We remained standing there, shivering, and afraid the door would open again to let somebody out, and we looked at one another wondering what we were going to do, since it was still too early to go and see Joe. In my desperation I thought we should go anyway, even if we had to wake him up, and I was about to say that when a car drew up suddenly at the kerb in front of us. We looked at it, not thinking it had anything to do with us. The driver, a young man, got out and came towards us, and even though the early morning light was still dim, my mother recognised him immediately and she let out a cry that was a mixture of surprise and joy: ‘It’s Saul!’

Chapter Seventeen

BROWNSVILLE, BROOKLYN IN
those days was a huge ghetto composed largely of Jewish immigrants who had fled the anti-Semitism of Poland and Russia and other parts of Europe to find refuge in America. It had once been farmland, but with the extension of the subway to that distant region, development quickly took place to accommodate the influx of immigrants, and block after block of big, ugly tenements went up and were soon packed with families.

Pitkin Avenue was the main thoroughfare that ran through the area, and it swarmed with people day and night, brilliantly lit at night, its stores, many of them displaying kosher signs, constantly busy, its theatres with glittering marquees offering movies, vaudeville, Yiddish plays, adding still more to the crowds. There were shuls, big ornate ones and small, cramped ones, everywhere. And it was towards one of these that Saul was heading that morning when he accidentally stumbled on us.

He saw us from the distance, he told me later, the three of us huddled there on the steps, and could not
believe
his eyes. He thought for a minute he was back in the hot desert out West where he had once trekked in his wandering travels, seeing a mirage, as had actually happened to him. But as he drew closer it became real and then he stopped and jumped out.

How long had it been since we had seen him last? We too might have thought we were seeing a mirage. It was three years since he had run away from home and this was the last place on earth we might have expected to see him again.

So much had happened to Saul since that day when he walked from his job at Sears Roebuck to the freight yard and slipped into a boxcar. He had travelled all over the United States, in boxcars, hitching rides on highways, walking. He had seen the beautiful Rocky Mountains that had first caught his attention on a postcard when he was working in the mail order house. He had feasted his eyes on them for days and could hardly tear himself away from their beauty. He had met hunters and had learned to eat the animals they killed, deer, elk, rabbit, despite the fact that they weren’t kosher and were forbidden by Jewish law. But he would have starved if he hadn’t eaten them. He drew the line at wild boar, however. He could not bring himself to eat pig. Not even when he was in jail.

I was shocked when I heard that he had been arrested once for vagrancy. It was in a small Virginia town, when he had come back East. He was sentenced to two months in jail, but it was a strange sort of incarceration. He was the only prisoner there, and he was well treated by the chief constable and his wife. They liked him and he liked them, and he was almost sorry when the time came for him to leave.

Gradually, he made his way to New York. He had thought of coming home to us in Chicago, but had decided that he would rather make something of himself first. Through all those three years of tramping about he had lost none of his religious beliefs and he still wanted to become a rabbi. But he was now twenty years old and it was late for him to start the studying that was required, and besides, a seminary cost money that he did not have.

He found that out when he arrived in New York. He had gone immediately to the Jewish quarter on the east side and made enquiries at a seminary there. They must have felt sorry for him. They saw a skinny, not too well-nourished young man, wearing a tallith and a yarmulke, and obviously an orthodox Jew, who wanted to become a rabbi, a highly commendable ambition, but one they could not assist. He was poor and homeless, and he had little education, judging from what he told them about his English background. He’d attended a school called St Peter’s, no less, a Christian school, and he’d gone there as far as the seventh grade. It was no recommendation, but they’d have been willing to overlook that if he’d had money at least to pay for seminary costs. But he had nothing. He was penniless. His family, he said, was in Chicago, but he hadn’t seen them in two years. What had he been doing during that time? He was vague about that; he didn’t seem to want to talk about it.

So they sent him away. But they didn’t forget him. One of the people who had interviewed him, a woman who was active in synagogue affairs, thought about him constantly and one day she heard of an opening for a young man of strict orthodox upbringing in the recently
formed
Union of Orthodox Rabbis. It was just perfect for him. If he couldn’t be a rabbi himself he would be among them – the next best thing.

He had left her the address where he was living, a cheap hotel in the Bowery where you rented a bed not a room, the bed costing fifty cents a night. Fortunately, he had been able to find a job: stock boy at Gimbels Department Store. It was a dull, poorly paid job, much like the one he’d had at Sears Roebuck, and when the offer came through this woman he jumped at it. He was elated. No job could have suited him better.

The office of the Union was located then in Brownsville and he moved to Brooklyn immediately, finding a room in the apartment of a Jewish family. He liked his job more and more each day, and they liked him. A good deal of it was clerical work, but it also involved soliciting funds to help build up the new organisation and he was especially good at that. He joined one of the small shuls that proliferated around Pitkin Avenue, and he was quite content and beginning to think of getting in touch with us in Chicago and perhaps even going there to visit us.

He knew nothing of Joe’s presence in New York, even though they lived only a few blocks away from each other and must have passed one another in the crowds on Pitkin Avenue often without noticing. Then there came that morning. Part of his job was driving visiting rabbis to various places in the city. He had been taught to drive the organisation’s beat-up old car and this morning, after services at shul were over, he was to meet a rabbi from Cleveland at Grand Central Station and drive him to Brownsville. And it was while he was on his way to the
little
shul for early morning services that he saw us.

There was something fantastic about it. I remember thinking I must still be asleep and this was all a dream. I heard my mother distinctly cry out his name. The shock must have been great for her. She ran towards him, and he met her halfway to the steps and they embraced. When he broke away from her he went up to me and then to Sidney, and he took hold of both our hands. He seemed bewildered himself. He kept looking from one to the other of us, as if he could not believe our presence. Then he said, ‘I don’t understand. What are you all doing here?’

Well, there was a lot to tell him. I blurted out as much of it as I could. My mother added some and Sidney chimed in with a little more, and eventually, still standing there on the sidewalk in front of the house, we were able to fill him in with everything that had happened. And I had been able to take him aside and whisper to him the news of Lily’s death. He had listened attentively to all the other things without much expression on his pale, ascetic face, and it was hard to judge if he thought we had done the right thing in leaving my father. But this about Lily clearly shocked him, and then there was something else flashing across him, and I knew what it was, the realisation that we were late for sitting shiveh, the mourning for the dead that was so important to him.

He swung into action immediately and there couldn’t have been a better person to help us. He knew all the social workers, the Jewish benevolent associations, the people whose business it was to help those in need.

It did not take him long to find us a place to live, an apartment on the top floor of a two-family house on a
quiet
street, to assemble enough furniture to make the place habitable and to stock a refrigerator with food.

Nor could there have been a better person to break the news of Lily’s death to our mother. It was a blow to her, a terrible blow that halted everything else with her grief. But Saul managed to soothe her and to guide her mind towards the ancient ritual of mourning for her dead daughter.

I don’t know if my mother realised this would be the second time she was going through it, that once before we had sat in our stockinged feet in a darkened room with prayer books in our hands, mumbling prayers for the dead. I had thought of that last night when we were sitting huddled together on the step, and it had occurred to me then that I was no longer the young boy I had been then and my feelings about religion had changed: I no longer believed in all this or its meaning and would not want to go through it a second time.