The Dream (4 page)

There were three cabins reserved for us by our still
unknown
benefactor, one for my parents and the baby, one for my sister, a third for myself and my brothers, and for the first time in our life each of us had a bed to himself. There were no feet at my head, no wrestling for space, no bumping into one another during the night and angry shouts. There were also startlingly clean white sheets and warm blankets. And then there were meals prepared for us in a dining room, where the tables had white tablecloths for every meal, three times a day, with an extra supper added at night if you wanted it. And there was entertainment, someone playing a piano, couples dancing, a movie once.

‘I’d like to stay here forever,’ I said to my mother.

She laughed. She was very happy herself. Wasn’t this the dream come true? A preliminary taste of what America was going to be like? ‘Wait till you get to America,’ she said. ‘You’ll like it even better there.’

‘Will I?’ I said. ‘What will I be doing there?’

‘You’ll be going to school.’

‘What about Joe and Saul?’ I asked. ‘Will they be going to school too?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘They’re too old to go to school. They’ll have to find jobs. But you’ll go to school and you won’t have to take a scholarship exam. Everybody your age goes to school in America and you’ve got a chance to become something.’

‘What?’ I asked.

‘You’ll decide that when you get older. But you can be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an engineer, or anything you want. That’s one of the reasons I always wanted to go to America, so you could have a chance to become something.’

I remember that talk we had while we were sitting on the deck of the ship, and it was rocking slightly from side to side, but not so that it was unpleasant. The sun was shining, and the sea was quite calm and blue like the sky. We had wonderful weather like that all through the voyage. And I don’t think my mother ever experienced such happiness. What made it still happier for her was, unbelievably, my father. I’d had some bitter regrets about his coming, a decision he had made at the last moment and only after a lot of pleading on the part of my mother, something I had not been able to understand, thinking that she would seize the opportunity to be rid of him. But such was not the case and I could never understand why.

And now he seemed to have changed, and I myself could not deny that, despite the closeness that the trip was forcing on us, his presence every moment of each day. This was something new to all of us, for until now he had always been like a boarder; he came and went, he ate his meals alone, and after coming home from work and eating he rushed out to the pub or to his club for a game of cards. But there was no opportunity for him to avoid us while we were on the ship, so we saw him constantly, and ate with him, and spent the evenings with him, and with a touch of amazement we could see how well he seemed to get along with other people. We had always wondered about that. Was he as much of a loner in the pubs as he was in his home? The answer we got here was no. He was quite sociable with others. And several times we saw him laugh. That was stranger than anything else. We had never seen him laugh before. When he did he threw his head back a little and opened
his
mouth wide so that you could see all his teeth, and the gold one in the centre of the top row.

We knew the story of this tooth. Our mother had told it to us once, somewhat bitterly but with a lot of sadness that I did not understand. She had been suffering from a bad toothache for days before she plucked up courage to ask my father for money to go to a dentist and have the tooth pulled. There was not the slightest sympathy. Instead, he made a joke out of it. Jeering, he said, ‘I’ll make it easier and cheaper for you if you want. I’ll knock the tooth out for you with my fist.’

Several days later, still suffering from the toothache, she heard from people that he’d made a killing on a horse he’d bet on. And then she noticed the gold tooth in his mouth. He’d used his winnings to have a perfectly good tooth extracted and a gold one put in its place for purely cosmetic purposes.

I hated my father more than ever after I heard this story, but I wondered a great deal about the sadness in my mother’s tone when she told it to us. And afterwards why she had urged my father to come to America with us. Why hadn’t she seized the opportunity to get rid of him?

These were things that I did not understand then, but I do know that my own feelings towards my father may have lessened somewhat during the days of our voyage across the Atlantic. And that my mother seemed almost incredibly happy that whole time. Perhaps this was due to the fact that my father scarcely did any drinking, and this was because it was expensive to buy on the ship and he did not have any money, and my mother managed to keep the little she was hoarding away from him.

But then, suddenly, everything seemed to change as the voyage began to come to an end and the ship, pulled by two tiny tugboats, sailed slowly through the St Lawrence River towards Quebec. My father became his old self again, sullen and bad-tempered, cursing, the familiar dark, angry figure we had always known.

The worried look came back on to my mother’s face. The baby seemed to be doing a lot of crying and this added to my father’s vicious temper. ‘Shut that little bastard up,’ he snarled, ‘or I’ll throw him overboard.’

We were standing on the deck of the ship among other passengers getting ready to disembark as the ship approached the landing dock, and I saw heads turn and shocked looks on the faces of people who had heard my father’s outburst. There were also some sympathetic looks cast at my mother, who was rocking the baby back and forth to silence it.

Then, finally, we stepped off the ship and into an oppressive heat that we had never experienced before in the mild climate of England. It struck us like a blow in the face and left us a little dazed. Luckily, we were able to escape the ordeal of Ellis Island, the usual entrance to America for immigrants. The customs and immigration examinations at Quebec were swift and simple, though one officer, half joking, or perhaps seeking a way of showing his thoroughness, pointed to my father and asked me, ‘Is this man your father?’

I don’t know why I hesitated, but I did, and I looked at my mother, as if for the answer.

I saw the look of fury on my father’s face. The officer was laughing. ‘Not sure, eh?’ he said, winking at the other officers, who were laughing too.

‘Of course he is,’ my mother said, speaking up for me at last in an indignant tone.

Our passports were stamped, we were able to leave, out into the heat once more, with all of us sweating and blinking against the blinding sun. We were lucky again in that the railroad terminal was only a short distance away and a train was already waiting there. We checked our luggage and climbed on to it. The seats had high backs and were red plush, and hot from baking in the sun. We would soon find out how prickly and uncomfortable they were. It didn’t take long for other passengers to board and for the train to get under way, and soon the conductor came in and we heard the click of his puncher as he collected tickets.

My mother had bought the tickets for us at the terminal, paying for them out of the purse she kept attached to a string and tucked in her bosom. She was holding the baby in her lap and she gave the tickets to my father. He was still glowering from that business with the immigration officer, and I’ve no doubt he was thirsty and it was no ordinary thirst. He had been without a drink for a week and the heat added much to it.

When the conductor came alongside, my father thrust the tickets at him roughly and they would have fallen to the floor if the conductor hadn’t grabbed them quickly. He gave my father a sharp look, but said nothing. He began to punch the tickets, then halted and asked, ‘Who’s the half-rate?’

My mother answered. She pointed to me and said, ‘He is.’

The conductor looked at me. I was sitting in the seat in front of her with Saul and Joe.

‘How old is he?’ the conductor asked.

‘Twelve,’ my mother replied, rocking the baby, who was crying again. ‘They said it was half-rate for twelve and under.’

‘Son,’ said the conductor, addressing me now, ‘how tall are you?’

I didn’t know. I looked at my mother for the answer. She gave it. She had only recently been measuring me for clothes. ‘He’s five feet six inches,’ she said.

‘And you say he’s only twelve?’

‘Yes. Is there something wrong?’ my mother asked, beginning to worry.

‘Lady,’ said the conductor. ‘If he’s twelve then I’m twelve.’

It was here at this point that my father decided to intervene. I heard a familiar cough from him that always signalled a coming outburst that was still under control. He had risen from his seat and faced the conductor. ‘Are you trying to call my wife a liar?’ he asked.

The conductor looked back at him steadily but coolly. ‘I’m not calling anybody a liar,’ he said. ‘I’m just saying this boy doesn’t look twelve years old.’

‘And who the bloody ’ell are you to know how old he is or isn’t? Are you looking for a fight, because if you are, here I am willing and ready to give you one.’

Other passengers were staring now, and my mother had risen in alarm and was plucking at my father’s sleeve to get him to sit down. He shook her hand away savagely. He was in the mood for a fight. He wanted one badly.

For a moment the two stood eyeball to eyeball, then the conductor punched the ticket he had been questioning, handed the stubs back to my mother and walked on.

My father hitched up his trousers, coughed and returned to his seat, but not before he had cast a glare at me that revealed the hatred he felt towards me, still not forgetting the episode in the immigration office and the question of whether he was my father.

Chapter Five

IT WAS A
long, hot, dusty ride on prickly plush seats that soon became filled with debris from the food we ate, its wrapping paper, the magazines we read, clothing, all sorts of things that accumulated throughout the endless hours and through the night when the seats became our beds. Some time during the night the train halted and we had to get out, dazed and half asleep, and stumble our way through another customs and immigration questioning. It was the American border and there was another train to take, this time on stiff leather seats that were harder than the others and made even worse beds for the rest of the night.

We were tired and worn, and we complained bitterly, to our mother, of course, and she bore with it, patiently assuring us it would soon be over, and she rocked the baby who seemed to cry steadily, and my father cursed.

And loud enough for all the other passengers to hear, he shouted, ‘So you had to come to America. England wasn’t good enough for you? But you see what you’re getting. Wait! There’s worse coming for you and your bastards.’

She said nothing. She kept rocking the baby and speaking softly to it and feeding it with a bottle, and the train swept on, and the seats grew harder and harder, and the landscape flashed by in a never-ending chain of fields and forests and houses and farms, and grit flew in through the open window and got into our eyes, and we complained about this too to our mother, who was so tired herself that she could hardly keep her own eyes open, but did nevertheless to take care of us, and never complained herself and was always patient.

Until at last, finally, thank God, the train began to slow down, and the rails spread out to form a maze of tracks that grew wider and wider with freight cars parked on them and an occasional engine puffing slowly along them, and then suddenly it grew dark and we were in a tunnel, and then there was a long platform sliding past us and the conductors were shouting, ‘Chicago! Chicago!’

We collected our things. We followed our parents. We stumbled off the train, still dazed, still half asleep, hardly knowing where we were or where we were going, but following like sheep. Then we were out on the platform and once more following them, with other passengers surging past us and porters bent over carts filled with luggage, and passing the stilled engine hissing out clouds of steam, and then the baggage room where we picked up our worn, second-hand luggage, each one of us carrying a suitcase, and into the bright lights of the waiting room, and putting our luggage down and standing in a group wondering what next.

It came quickly. From a distant group of waiting people came the shrill cry of a woman: ‘There they are!’

Two people were running towards us, a tall, thin man
with
a grin on his face, and a tall, thin woman who had uttered the cry. I heard my father mutter, ‘The Lovers.’

Everybody in my father’s family had a nickname. That of the approaching couple was more complimentary than the ones given to the others. It was ‘The Lovers’. Theirs had been a forbidden love. They were first cousins. The two families from which they came had tried to put a stop to it. But it was no use. So infatuated with Leah was Morris, one story goes, that once he spent his entire week’s wages riding on the hobbyhorses in Vernon Park with her. His mother gave him a sound beating when he got home payless, and then she went to Leah’s family and did battle with them. But nothing could stop it. The two were married. They had three children now, and I knew them well enough from the letters I had written to them.

My father’s fears over the kind of reception he would get from his family may have subsided somewhat as they descended on us with hugs and kisses and excited chatter. They had been delegated by the family to meet us and there couldn’t have been a warmer greeting, and it included my father as well. He was reassured enough even to joke a little in his jeering fashion, asking, ‘So how’s the hand?’

It was a reminder that went back over the years when my father was still living with his family, and he’d broken Morris’s wrist in a fight they’d had. It had never mended properly, and the wrist was still slightly crooked and he picked things up with it awkwardly.

Morris held no grudge against my father for it. He grinned amiably now and said, ‘It’s doing well.’

‘Well enough to pick a few pockets?’ my father jeered.