The Invisible Wall (27 page)

I nodded. But I was a little bewildered by it all, and something else hadn't been explained. “But aren't you going to America?” I asked.

“No.” She shook her head. “Mam will know that I'm not going.”

Arthur came over to us. “Everything all right?” he asked.

Lily nodded. “'arry understands. It's a bit of a shock to him, I think, but he'll get used to it, and so will they all.”

“I'm sure of that,” said Arthur. “Can we get married now? They're all waiting for us.”

Lily rose, and I got up with her and followed them. The wedding took place there on the lawn in front of the Seventeen Windows. There was nothing religious about the ceremony. The man who performed it was an official of the Socialist Party, a short, stocky man with red hair, and the words he spoke bore little resemblance to those of any ordinary marriage ceremony. Arthur and Lily stood in front of him, holding each other's hands. They made a lovely couple, Arthur so tall and handsome in his white flannels and Lily in her beautiful white dress and dark hair flowing behind, everyone gathered around them silent and still, and in the background, as the red-haired man intoned the words that were to unite the couple, came the sweet, faint sound of birds in the trees, and the rich scent of flowers all around us.

There was something very beautiful in the setting that has always stuck in my mind, and when it was over the silence broke suddenly as everyone swarmed around the couple to congratulate them, and then bursting into the Internationale, singing it in hearty voices. Much laughter followed, and Mrs. Fogg's waitresses began bringing out refreshments and drinks. Then it began to rain, and there were little screams and shouts as everyone rushed inside to keep from getting drenched.

The rain was heavier than before, but didn't dampen spirits. Inside, everybody crowded around the tables that had been pushed together to make a long one. Lily and Arthur had me sit right near them, and she made sure that I had plenty of Mrs. Fogg's watercress and cucumber sandwiches. These were being served along with her custard tarts and scones, and pots of tea, and glasses of champagne and stout and porter. I had never eaten so much in my life, and my face grew red and swollen with contentment. All around me there was talk and laughter and singing, mostly revolutionary songs, and one irreverent piece I have always remembered:

“Long-haired preachers come out every night,

Try to tell us what's wrong and what's right.

When you ask them for something to eat,

They will answer in voices so sweet.

You'll get pie in the sky when you die.”

I heard that sung by the red-haired man who had married them, with all the others joining in toward the end, accompanied by much table thumping. It was over at last, for me, that is. Lily thought I should start back before it got dark. Arthur said he would walk me part of the way to the tram. We set off together, after Lily had kissed me and hugged me and wept a little and told me again to tell Mam how happy she was. She would see her tomorrow, Lily said, and talk to her then about everything. Mam was not to feel too bad about Lily not going to America.

Arthur had to pull me away from her, otherwise she might have held me still longer. I had to trot to keep up with his long stride. He seemed anxious to get away from the inn, but I think it was chiefly because he had something to say to me. The rain had stopped, and the sun had come out again, though it was low in the sky. You could hear the dripping from the trees as we climbed up the hill, and a fresh, sweet smell rose from the grass.

Arthur began talking when we were halfway up the hill. “'arry,” he said, “I can't tell you how happy I feel today, how good everything seems, and how right. But I know it must be very strange to you. Especially to a lad from our street, where there's two sides, and each is supposed to be different from the other. That's how we grow up, isn't it? That's how it used to be with me when I was your age. But it's all wrong. It isn't like that at all. We're not very different from one another, not different at all, in fact. We're all just people with the same needs, the same desires, the same feelings. It's a lie about us being different. It's something they cooked up so we'd be fighting one another instead of them, the ones who keep us down and make their fortunes off our labor, the same ones who send us off to war when they get to fighting among themselves over the spoils. You'll find that out someday. They'll be calling on you to go to war for them, you can be sure of that, because there's going to be lots more wars in the future. I got in one myself, as you know. I saw men getting killed and wounded and crippled, and I must have killed a lot of men myself, and I'm just sick every time I think of it.

“Why? Because we were fighting one another instead of those who'd sent us out there. Oh, they're clever, those capitalists. It's hard to beat them at their game. They've got us fooled with words like patriotism and duty and honor, and they've got us divided up into classes and religions so that each one of us figures he's better than the other. But it'll all change, 'arry. Believe me, it will. People get smarter. The human brain has a potential for development. Someday it will grow big enough so that everybody will see and understand the truth, and then we won't act like a bunch of sheep, and then that wall that separates the two sides of our street will crumble, just like the wall of Jericho. Maybe Lily and I gave it a little push today. But one day you'll hear a trumpet blow, and then it will be all gone. Oh yes, 'arry, we're going to have a better world. Things won't always be the way they are now. There'll be good times for all of us, not just a few. Mind what I say now. I promise you, there'll be a better world than the one we're living in today.”

He was drunk. He had one arm around my shoulders, and leaned down to speak to me, and I could smell the champagne on his breath as he spoke. But he was drunk with happiness as well. I had never heard him speak so much and so rapidly without a pause. I had not said a word the entire time.

Before we knew it, we were at the tram stop. Arthur came to with surprise. “I never intended to go this far,” he said. “But I did, and now I'll say so long and you can get on the tram, and don't you be afraid, 'arry of what you have to say when you get home. Your mother will listen to you. She's a good woman, your mother. I like her a lot, and respect her, and you can tell her that if you want.”

I sat on the top deck of the tram going home. It started to rain again and I was all alone up there. When the conductor came up to get my penny he grumbled and asked if the bottom deck wasn't good enough for me, and he muttered something under his breath I managed to catch. “You Jews are all alike.”

It was still raining when I got off at Mersey Square, and by the time I got home I was soaked. My mother looked at me in consternation, and said, “I told you to take an umbrella, but you didn't listen. Where's Lily?”

I told her.

DEATH WAS DARKNESS
. I had learned that already in the one or two funerals we had had on our street, one during the war when Sam Harris was killed and the Harrises sat shivah and my mother took me in there to sit with them. So I already knew. Window shades were all drawn down. Any mirrors that might have caught a gleam of light from somewhere were covered with dark cloth. Everyone sat in the darkness in their stocking feet.

And now I sat in my own house in my stocking feet in the darkness, with my older brothers beside me, and Rose next to them holding my baby brother, and my mother and father on the other side of her. Other people, neighbors, sat about the room, some on upturned orange and apple crates, because there were not enough chairs. Everyone was very still, my mother especially. How terribly silent she was, with her head bent to the floor. I kept looking at her, wishing she would move or say something.

My father, who sat beside her, seemed fidgety and uneasy. He was not accustomed to sitting in a room with his family and with all the other people from our street around us. He had not been allowed to shave, because that too was part of the ritual of mourning, and he kept running a hand over the bristle on his chin.

The neighbors had all glanced at him first, some seeing him in the house for the first time. All of them were a little afraid of him, and only dared glance sideways at him and then away. Yet he would have been glad if someone had spoken to him; it would have relieved some of his tension, and for once he might have been polite.

People kept coming and going softly, and in the darkness you hardly knew who it was. I recognized old Mrs. Harris, though, with her wig plastered tightly over her forehead, and a shawl over her head. I saw Mrs. Mittleman, too, and Mrs. Jacobs, weeping and rocking to and fro as she sat down, though it was altogether possible that inwardly she was exulting, as she had done after Sarah and Freddy had been discovered.

“My son is not good enough,” she would be saying to herself. “A goy they consider better.”

Fanny Cohen sat straight in her chair, her face stolid. She had come alone, without any of her children. She had left her recently born baby in the care of the older ones. She had been here all day, loyal to my mother, refusing to leave her side. She had tried speaking to her, but my mother had not answered her either. She spoke to no one, not even to us, not even to the baby, who tried to climb up on her lap and had cried when she ignored him. Rose had then picked him up in her arms and cradled him in her lap. How strange she too had become, all of a sudden passionately devoted to the child, a mother all at once.

She clutched him tightly, rocked him, whispered to him, kissed him. I had never seen such emotion from her before and stared at her.

But mostly my eyes were on my mother, anxious. I wished she would say something, do something other than just sit there. It was as if she had died. Perhaps that fear struck me, that she would die if she continued to sit there like that.

It had begun after her shriek, that fearful, penetrating cry she had let out after I had told her the previous day. It struck terror in me, in everybody in the house, even my father, who was there at the time, and everybody on the street, because they had all heard it too. On both sides people came to their doors to see what had happened, heads stuck out of windows, women came rushing to our house, surrounding my mother, who was tearing at herself with her hands. I remembered in my shock seeing Mrs. Harris do the same thing on the street years ago.

Now it was happening to my mother, always so gentle, so quiet, now transformed suddenly into a madwoman trying to destroy herself. They forced her hands behind her back so that she could not harm herself further. Gradually, her struggles had ceased and she had lapsed into this deadness.

The day wore on. It was a Monday, and I could hear children coming home from school. I heard their shouts and cries and laughter, and I was envious of them. I wished I could be with them, not sitting here in the darkness mourning my sister Lily, who was supposed to have died because she had married a Christian.

As soon as they heard the children coming home, many of the mothers who were with us got up and left, and for a while there were very few in the room other than ourselves, and it was lonelier than ever. But others were coming to fill their places. The front door had been left open, and the newcomers walked directly into the lobby, and we heard their footsteps as they approached. Then the two of them entered the room, and all our eyes went toward them, and remained there.

It was Lily, and behind her was Arthur. He was hesitating, obviously afraid to come in, hanging back a little. But Lily herself came straight toward my mother.

She saw the condition my mother was in, with her head sunk on her chest, and became distraught immediately, fell on her knees before her, and took both my mother's hands in hers. “Mama, what's the matter? Are you ill? Look at me, Mama. This is Lily, your daughter. I'm not dead, Mama. I'm not dead. Look at me, Mama. Talk to me. Say something. Oh Mama, Mama.”

Lily burst into tears then. She might just as well have been talking to a wall for all the response she got. Nothing showed on my mother's face, no sign of recognition, no acknowledgment of the voice. Lily kept pleading with her, begging her to listen, to say something. We all sat numbly, too frightened, and too shocked ourselves to be able to do or say anything.

Lily grew still more distraught, and Arthur came up to her and put his hands on her shoulders, and tried to get her to leave. “Your mother's ill, Lily,” he said. “We'll come another time. Let her alone now.”

But Lily shook his hands off. Her eyes would not leave my mother, nor would she give up trying to reach her. “Mama, Mama, look at me,” she kept repeating. “I am Lily, your daughter. I'm not dead, Mama. I'm alive. I'm married, Arthur is my husband now. We love each other. We're both very happy. I came here tell you that. I want you to be happy too. Mama, lift up your head and speak to me. Please, please. Speak to me. I love you too, Mama. I don't want you to be angry at me. Oh, Mama, please, please.”