The Golden Willow by Harry Bernstein Read Free Book Online

our two children as they grew up she was their favorite aunt.
    My mother had died soon after Charlie was born, so she never got to see the house in Laurelton, but for the others in my family it became a popular place to visit. After all, it was out in the country, with a farm right across the street. My brother Joe and his wife, Rose, and their child, Rita, came, as did my brother Saul, wearing his yarmulke and tzitzit, with the fringes sticking out from the top of his pants, and with him his tall, cigarette-smoking wife, Estelle, and their son, Irwin. My sister Rose came too, still wearing her haughty expression, accompanied by her good-natured, perpetually smiling husband, Jim, whom you would have seen on weekdays in the window of a restaurant on Sixth Avenue wearing a chef's white uniformand tall white hat and carving a large, juicy roast beef with deft movements of the knife.
    Included in the gatherings were my kid brother, Sidney, and his wife, also named Rose, and their son, Ted. Sidney, the baby whose cries had awakened me once when I was ten years old and had stirred in me some small understanding of the mystery of birth, had grown to be a six-foot, hulking man and was a successful magazine publisher.
    I had built a grape arbor over the driveway in front of the garage, and it was here in the summertime that our family gatherings took place, with bunches of grapes of all different varieties hanging over our heads, and the aromas in our nostrils. It was pleasant, and there was much laughter and there was a good deal of reminiscing about the old days in England and Chicago, and soon I would be busy with the barbecuing of steak and hot dogs, and Ruby would be cutting up the cherry pies she had baked with the sour cherries I had pulled from the cherry tree in our backyard, and the coffee was brewing, and in the meantime a bottle of whiskey was being passed around, and Rose was casting warning looks at Jim because he was helping himself too often to the bottle and a flush was coming on his face.
    One time, I recall, when we had one of these gatherings, Jim suddenly disappeared. No one noticed it for a while, then Rose suddenly became aware that he was no longer sitting beside her, and she got up to look for him. We all joined in the search, and finally located Jim behind some bushes at the front of the house on his hands and knees searching for something. It turned out he had gone out there to get rid of the liquor he had consumed, and in doing so had lost his set of false teeth.
    We all began looking for them and eventually found them, and learned for the first time that Jim's engaging smile displayed teeth that were not his own.
    And yet it was Jim who, for the most part, watched out for Rose at our gatherings, and who cast warning looks at her when the topic Ruby and I dreaded came up: politics.
    Before these gatherings took place Ruby and I consulted with each other as to how we might prevent such a topic from being discussed, knowing quite well from past experience what such a topic could lead to. There were some sharp divisions in the family, ranging from extreme right-wing conservatism to left-wing radicalism. Rose had not given up the Communist beliefs that had cost her a job in Chicago. She was still an ardent Communist, and two of my brothers, Joe and Sidney, were violently anti-Communist, while the third was concerned only with religion.
    It was Aunt Lily's husband, Peo, however, who clashed most frequently with Rose. He was generally a silent man. He had been a construction worker once, a lather who was part of the process of building a plaster wall, and during this time he had been an active member of the IWW—Industrial Workers of the World—the most radical of all radical organizations. However, there had been vast changes in his life. There had been a revolution in the building industry that virtually did away with plaster walls, replacing them with drywall or Sheetrock, as it was called. Peo's trade became