The Invisible Wall (10 page)

The first thing we did when we came home, bursting into the house in our usual fashion, was glance at the sofa, as if expecting to find him still there. Seeing it empty, its old familiar self again, the bedclothes gone, the white wadding sticking out of the torn parts, hope rose in all of us. The first words our mother spoke dashed that hope.

She had seen where our eyes had gone, and knew what we were thinking, and she said, “He'll be back tonight with your father. He went to work in the tailoring shop. But you mustn't worry. He's a very nice man. I had a long talk with him after you left this morning. He's been all over the world. He's worked on ships and he's been everywhere, even to America. He has no home of his own, and no relatives, nobody at all.” Her voice had softened and taken on a sympathetic note. Of course, she would feel that way about someone who was alone in the world, like she had once been. She went on. “He promised not to be a bother. So you must try to be nice to him. He might not stay long—I don't know—he never stays long in one place.”

Then, almost as if she had forgotten something, she said, “Oh yes, I should tell you this, and you must try not to be upset. We can't let him sleep on the sofa. It wouldn't be right. So I gave him the girls' room, and the girls will sleep in the boys' room. You'll have your own bed, of course, and I managed to borrow a cot from Fanny Cohen for him in the little room.”

There was a shocked silence after she spoke. Then a scream. It came from Rose.

“I told you,” she cried. “I told you she'd do this. She'll do anything for money, even turn her own children out of their beds.”

“I'm not turning you out of your bed,” my mother said. “You're going to have your own bed to sleep in.”

“Oh, you witch!” Rose went on, screaming. “You're just an old witch, and I'm not going to stay in this house a minute longer. I'm getting out of here.”

She ran out of the room and we heard her clattering up the stairs. We all stood there looking at each other.

“She'll be all right,” my mother said. “She'll get over it.”

Then Lily noticed something. Her eyes had gone to the mantelpiece. “Where's the permit slip?” she asked.

My mother smiled. “I gave it to Larry,” she said.

“Who?”

“That's our boarder's name,” she explained. “I told him all about the exam you want to take, and how it's necessary to have the slip signed, and the trouble I'm having asking your father to sign it, and so he offered to ask him for me. So I gave him the slip.”

Lily looked worried and uncertain. “What makes you think he'll be able to do it any more than you?”

“Your father seems to like him. It isn't often your father likes anybody or has a friend, but he seems to have taken to Larry. Maybe Larry will be able to get him to do it. At least he can try.”

Just then we heard Rose coming down the stairs. She was walking very rapidly. She did not come into the room, but passed the door and seemed to be heading for the front. My mother quickly ran to intercept her, and we followed.

“Rose, where are you going?”

She stopped at the door. She was carrying a small bundle wrapped in an old shawl that my mother had given her once, and had been used as an ermine cloak in her duchess roles. She spoke curtly over her shoulder. “I'm leaving home,” she said.

My mother went up to her and put an arm around her shoulders. “Now stop being silly,” she said. “Come back in the kitchen and I'll give you a nice cup of cocoa and a biscuit.”

Rose shrugged her arm off and snapped, “I don't want your cocoa and your biscuit. I hate you.”

She went out, slamming the door after her.

Joe said worriedly, “You'd better go after her. She might really leave.”

“She won't leave,” my mother said, confidently.

But as the afternoon passed and it grew dark and time for supper, my mother began to look worried. It was raining outside, and Rose was still not back. After setting the table, she suddenly put on her shawl and picked up an umbrella.

“I'll soon be back,” she said.

“Can I go, Mam?” I begged.

She didn't answer, so I went along with her, walking close to her so that I could share the umbrella. The rain was coming down heavily, and it drummed over our heads. My mother seemed to know exactly where to go. We climbed the brew that ran alongside the iron rail of the park, and then turned into the park itself…as close as Rose could get to her dreams, I suppose.

There she was, sitting forlornly on a bench in the rain, with the little bundle beside her. She did not resist when my mother drew her up and firmly led her away, holding her hand on one side, mine on the other. She was soaked and shivering with cold, and obviously had been crying.

Not a word was spoken on the way home by any of us, and not a word again after Rose had changed her clothes and joined us at the table.

         

HE COUGHED ALL NIGHT
. He coughed and spat. My mother had taken the precaution of spreading newspaper on the floor beside the bed, and from then on it would be a daily routine for one of us to pick up those newspapers and take them out to the midden. Afterward, we didn't mind so much.

We did at first, though. We minded his coughing at night and especially his spitting. We minded being in the same room, the two girls in one bed, the three boys in the other, all of us so terribly close together, while he occupied the other room.

The change began not more than three or four days after he had come to live with us, the night we came home from cheder, Joe, Saul and I hurrying into the house and pausing shocked when we heard a man singing. It came from the kitchen, and we went through the hall cautiously and stopped again in the doorway leading to the kitchen.

A strange sight met our eyes. We had never heard a man singing in our house before, but much less had we ever seen a man at it sitting before the fire with Rose sitting opposite him and actually laughing, and Lily laughing too, with her books in front of her at the table, and my mother opposite her with her sewing, laughing.

The song was one of many comic songs that Larry would sing for us on those winter nights, and I have never forgotten it:

“Me father bought some cheese,

Me mother began to sneeze,

The cat had a fit in the cellar,

The dog had the same disease….”

It went on, verse after verse, Larry singing lustily in a hoarse, cracked voice, with a smile on his pasty face, a cigarette in his hand, a cough interrupting now and then, a spit into the fire making the red-hot coals hiss.

Seeing us standing there, he halted, and cried out, “Well, well, here's the men of the family. Come in, lads, and join the fun.”

We did. We soon learned the song and sang with him. We all did. We sang and laughed, and whatever hostility we had felt toward him before this vanished that night. Even Lily took time off from her books to join in, and Rose—all her coldness had gone and her thin, pinched face was alive with happiness.

But Lily, especially—her eyes were shining and she seemed almost intoxicated. I found out why when the evening came to an end, and we were all ready to go upstairs to bed and were saying goodnight to Larry. Lily flung her arms about his neck and kissed him, and said, “Thank you so much, Larry. Thank you.”

My mother was smiling. Rose knew already, but we didn't. Seeing that by the puzzled looks on our faces, my mother said, “Larry got your father to sign Lily's permit for the exam. So you see, he isn't such a bad fellow, after all.”

Yes, it was done at last, thanks to this man who had brought new life into our house. After that night we couldn't wait to see him again. We hurried home from cheder, hoping this would be one of the nights when he preferred to stay home with us to going out to the pub with our father, and we could sit by the fire with him and sing his comic songs, or listen to him tell us about his travels to Australia, India, America, all over the world.

I think, if he'd had his way, he would have stayed with us every night, and indeed, as time went on, it was almost every night. Larry had brought a lot of joy into our lives, but we had given him something, too. We were the closest thing to a family he'd ever had, and he clung to us as much as possible. I suppose my father began to resent it.

It was a strange thing, his feeling toward Larry. I don't think he'd ever had a friend before. He was a loner, a man completely isolated from everybody else, shunned by the Jewish men on our street because of his drinking and violent temper, and not too welcome by the Christians in the pubs that he frequented. His accidental meeting with Larry in a pub one night had brought him the only man he ever knew who would tolerate him, and talk to him, and even seem to like him.

Larry told us about his meeting one night. It wasn't easy, he said. He saw him sitting alone at a table, and went over and introduced himself as a fellow Jew.

“Bugger off,” my father growled.

Larry laughed, telling us the story. “I didn't bugger off. It was the first time anyone had ever said that to me, and I decided I was going to see this through. So I stuck it out.”

By persisting he gradually got around my father, and after a few drinks they were pals, and my father began to talk.

“He told me the story,” Larry said to my mother.

He spoke to her in a low voice, thinking perhaps that we weren't supposed to know. My mother understood, and said calmly, “They know.”

For that matter, a lot of the people on our street knew the story. They would have had to, because they were living on the street at that time. We ourselves had heard it from our mother, and she had told it to us in the hope, perhaps, that we would understand him a little better, and perhaps be more tolerant and kinder toward him.

It began in Poland, where my father was born, the oldest in a family of ten unruly children. I still have a picture of them all, taken after they came to England. It is one of those old sepia photos on hard backing that has endured throughout the years without fading, a credit to early photography. It shows them in three formal rows, my father at the far end in the back row, a sullen look on his face. My grandparents are in the center, my grandfather looking very distinguished with a Van Dyke beard, wing collar, Ascot tie, and silk top hat, clasping a silver-knobbed cane in between his knees, my grandmother big and thick-lipped and bosomy and much bejeweled, with bracelets and necklaces and earrings dangling.

My grandmother was the matriarch of the family. My grandfather, for all his distinguished looks, made his living by mending roofs, and he was known to sing popular songs while he was perched aloft doing his work, with an appreciative audience gathered below. My grandmother ran the household with an iron fist, her loud, harsh voice commanding, along with her blows, usually gaining obedience from all, except my father.

He was the unmanageable one. He had been sent out to work at five, and he had worked long hours at the various jobs he'd had, and had been beaten and kicked by his various masters. It had left him sullen and embittered and violent and difficult to get along with. At twelve he was already a heavy drinker, coming home often blind drunk at night, and when he was drunk he terrorized the family. My grandmother was at her wits' end. Her husband was of little help to her. She had to solve the problem herself, and she finally hit on the solution.

My father came home from work late one night and found them all gone, the house stripped of furniture. They had abandoned him, gone to England, leaving him to shift for himself. He may have gone mad then. He roared and raged. He beat his head against the wall until he collapsed senseless, and terrified neighbors called the police, who carted him off to a hospital.

After he had recovered and was released, he set out in search of his family, determined to find them and insist on his place among them, whether they liked it or not. It would be his way of wreaking vengeance. Slowly, bit by bit, working his way across Europe to finance his passage, he made his way to England. In London, he learned of the new big, growing Jewish colony in Manchester. He went there, but arrived too late. They had only recently moved to the smoky little mill town a few miles away, but he had their exact address now.

It was late at night when he arrived at our street. My grandparents and their family were living in the same house that we were to inherit later. My father, tired and worn—he had walked all the way from Manchester—knocked loudly on the door. He knocked several more times before my grandmother's head appeared at the window above.

“Who's there?” she called down.

“It's your son,” he shouted back. “Let me in.”

A pause. Her heart must have stopped beating then. After a moment, she said, “Go away. You are not my son. Go away or I'll call the police.”

“Old witch,” he shouted back. “Open this door or I'll break it down.”

By this time the whole street had awakened. Heads were popping out of windows. Lights were being turned on. Voices murmured.

Desperate, unable to make up her mind what to do, my grandmother acted on impulse. She did what only she could have done. She went to the landing and picked up the bucket that had been well used through the night. It was almost full to the brim. She carried it to the window, and poured its contents down on the head of the intruder.

He let out a yell, and shook himself like a wet dog, and cursed and pounded on the door so hard that finally it had to be opened for him.

There are many people who have considered the story to be apocryphal, but its truth has been confirmed by my mother and the aunts and uncles who were roused from their beds that night and saw and heard what went on.

Furthermore, that wasn't the end of the story by any means. The vengeance that my father had sworn to get came down hard on their heads. Now, more than ever, he terrorized them, with his drinking, his cursing, and his fists. Those who lived on our street in those early days remembered the constant bedlam that went on in the corner house, the shouting and shrieking and fighting, worse than anything that went on in the Finklestein house.