The Dream (11 page)

Thinking of that now as I wrote what she was dictating – ‘There is no such thing here’ – I was tempted to tell her, but then decided against it. I did not want to spoil the illusion she had. She would soon find out for herself. But at least it was not right across the street from us. The only Polish people around here were our landlord and his family, and we couldn’t have had nicer people for neighbours and the friendship that developed between us lasted as long as we lived there.

A few months after we had settled in our new home, when things were going so well for us, I entered high school. I had chosen to go to Lane Tech, an all-boys school that I had picked because they gave a four-year architectural course. I had decided to become an architect after reading an ad in the back of
Popular Mechanics
that showed a picture of Chief Draughtsman Dobe wearing an artist’s smock bent over a drawing board. The ad offered a free ruler to anyone who sent for information about Chief Draughtsman Dobe’s course in architecture.

I sent for it, received the ruler and the information, and
discovered
it would cost more money than I would ever have. It was a blow for me, but at least I had the ruler. Then I learned about Lane Tech and their four-year architectural course where it wouldn’t cost anything except the daily car fare to and from the school.

I lost no time going to the grimy old red-brick building on a distant part of Division Street, where the school was located in those days, with its mixed smells of baking, machine oil and various other things because it taught other vocations as well, such as bakery, printing, auto mechanics, in addition to the regular academic subjects.

It was a big day for my mother when I enrolled there. ‘Now I feel sure that at least one member of the family is going to become something,’ she said. It was something to boast about and she did to everyone she knew, to our Polish landlord and his fat wife, and to the blind man who lived in the basement apartment, and to all the relatives, and to people in England, to my sister and her husband, to Fanny Cohen, and even to Mrs Humberstone, who lived across the street from us on the Christian side. ‘My son is now going to high school and is studying to be an architect,’ she wrote to each one, her face flushed with pride and excitement as she dictated her letters to me.

They all wrote back congratulating us, but it was my sister’s letter that I remember most clearly: ‘I am so glad to hear that Harry is now in high school and is going to become an architect. I wish I’d had the opportunity that he is having. I almost did, didn’t I? But it didn’t quite turn out for me …’

No, it didn’t. I remembered that terrible time, how she’d won the scholarship, and top of the list too, and
how
she’d got dressed in her pretty white dress to go to the Grammar School for her interview, and how my father had refused to let her go and had dragged her by the hair, screaming, through the streets to the tailoring shop, and how we all stood on the doorstep in horror listening to her voice fading in the distance, screaming, ‘I won’t go! I won’t go!’

I have never forgotten it, and I thought of it when I read her letter and knew how lucky I was. My mother thought so too. Her eyes filled with tears when I read it to her and perhaps it spoiled her pleasure over me for a while.

But she was too elated to let even that sad bit of memory spoil it completely. Besides, she knew that Lily had found a great enough happiness in her marriage to Arthur to make up for everything that was in the past. And so had she herself, through me, and the great future she saw in store for me, found a happiness that made up for all the bitter moments she had endured in the past. That dream she’d always had was surely coming true.

I realised that, and because of it I did not have the heart to tell her of my architectural drawing teacher’s reaction to the first house plan design I attempted. The entire freshman class had been given the assignment, obviously in an effort to ferret out any hidden talent that might exist among them.

We had spent a week working on the drawing, then each in turn went up to the teacher’s desk for his review and criticism. Some came off quite well – especially those who’d had foresight enough to take a book of house plans out of the library and borrow ideas from that. There may also have been some genuine talent among them, and there could also have been inspiration from the fine
houses
some of the wealthier students lived in. It was an all-boys school of mixed classes who came from all parts of the city, the rich ones from the higher class north side, the middle class from the near north side, the poorer ones like myself from the west or north-west side.

And what did I know about houses? I had lived in a row house in England and then in a terraced flat with my grandmother, the horrible leaning house as much a stable as a house, and finally the one we lived in now, which was an improvement over the others but by no means an inspiration to a budding architect.

I had struggled hard over my drawing, depending more on my imagination than anything else, and it was with some trepidation that I approached the teacher’s desk when my turn came. I had always been afraid of him.

He was a sickly-looking man with a pallid complexion and a chronic cough that brought up phlegm that he spat into the wastebasket at his side. He did that now as I waited for him to acknowledge me. He straightened up from the wastebasket, took my drawing from my hands and scanned it slowly. He scanned it for a long time and my heart beat a little fast as I waited.

Finally, he lifted his head from my drawing and spoke. But it was the class, not me, that he addressed. ‘Let me have your attention,’ he said, and they looked up from their drawing boards and gave it to him. He held up my drawing. ‘I want you all to look at this and see something that has never been seen in this classroom before. What you are looking at is the worst drawing I’ve ever had to check in my whole career as a teacher.’

Now he turned to me. ‘Are you planning on staying at Lane for the entire four years?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

‘Well, then, take my advice. When you’re in your senior year, if you ever get there, file an application with the Sanitation Department and get yourself a job on a garbage wagon.’

No, I couldn’t tell my mother that. I never did. But I knew then that I was not going to become an architect. It would have to be something else, but I didn’t know what and I don’t suppose it really mattered.

Chapter Ten

I WAS NOT
quite fourteen when I entered Lane and I still outclassed other freshmen when it came to height. I must have been close to six feet tall. But now I wore long trousers that made life a bit easier for me. I had made friends. I had joined a club of boys and girls in the neighbourhood, and I had discovered girls’ legs and knees. Skirts were getting shorter. I went to parties and played a game called ‘spin the bottle’, which sent me into a dark room to kiss some sweaty giggling girl. I was very busy with my schoolwork and my social life, but not too busy and not yet too old to be going places with my mother, to visit relatives mostly, and to help carry Sidney, who was now well able to walk but preferred to be carried. There were some occasions when my father and my two brothers went along with us.

This would be the times when we all needed haircuts and it would be to visit Aunt Sophie, whose husband Sam was a barber and a good-natured man who didn’t mind devoting his weekend to cutting hair for the relatives, and never was there any talk of payment. Several families in addition to our own would
sometimes
descend on them at one time on a Saturday and on occasion stay overnight, with beds on the floor, and not only would Sam be busy cutting hair, but Sophie would be bustling about preparing the mountains of food needed to feed this army.

There was never any shortage of food. Sam saw to that because he had sufficient forethought every Friday after his week’s work was over at a large barber shop in the city to stop off at a wholesale delicatessen factory and buy several salamis, pounds of frankfurters, corned beef, pickles, rye breads, and bring it home with him in a sack that he carried over his shoulder. He never knew how many people would come or how long they would stay after the haircut, but he took no chance of having a hungry horde on his hands.

Perhaps, if the house that Uncle Sam, Aunt Sophie and their two daughters about my age lived in had been closer to the city it would have been even more crowded at the weekends than it generally was. But it was situated in an area that was difficult to get to, a new development called Elmwood Park, a virtual wilderness in those days. We took a streetcar to the end of the line first to get there, then we walked about five miles before we reached the frame house that had a run-down look to it.

Sam had bought the house sight unseen from a customer in the barber shop where he worked. He had never known such a place as Elmwood Park existed before he bought it and how far it was to the streetcar terminal. But behind all that lies a story that the family never got tired of telling and always with much laughter.

It was chiefly on account of Aunt Sophie that
everything
happened. She was a very beautiful woman, with glowing healthy cheeks and sparkling dark eyes, and a lush figure. Sam fell madly in love with her back there in England, when Sophie lived with my grandmother on our street and Sam was just learning the barbering trade from Mr Dargan, the barber on King Street, who also taught the violin.

But Sophie was quite a neurotic when it came to noises. She couldn’t abide the slightest noise around her. They had already moved from apartment to apartment because of noisy neighbours when they came to one where the people who lived above them practically drove Sophie insane with noises night and day. Sophie had tried talking to them, begging and pleading with them to tone things down and at least to wear slippers when they walked across the carpetless floor. But to no avail. They told her to go jump in the lake. Sophie then, in a great rage, countered with a noise barrage of her own to give them a taste of their own medicine. She placed a tall ladder in a spot that was directly beneath their bedroom, and mounted a portable record player on top of the ladder with a record of a popular song called ‘It’s three o’clock in the morning’ and set it for automatic, so that starting at three in the morning it played steadily over and over, with the volume set at the loudest.

When the upstairs couple complained, Sophie was delighted. She told the woman what she had told her, to go jump in the lake. They then took Sophie and Sam to court, and a judge fined them $150 for malicious mischief.

It was at this point that one of Sam’s customers told him a sad story of needing $1,000 for an operation on his
eye,
otherwise he would go blind and he would lose his job, and his five children would starve to death. His only possession of any worth was the house in Elmwood Park and he had been unable to sell it. Sam was soft-hearted and, even without Sophie’s problem and the fine they’d just paid, he might have done what he did then. Before he had finished cutting the man’s hair he had bought the house. Sophie, he had figured, couldn’t find a quieter place.

They wasted very little time moving out to Elmwood Park and, as Sophie explained later, she had certain misgivings when she saw the wilderness that was spread out before them as they arrived. She wondered then if perhaps there wasn’t such a thing as too much quiet. But nevertheless they began unloading their furniture into the new house and they were busy doing that, and marvelling at the quiet and serenity around them, with no other houses in sight for almost a mile, when suddenly that blessed stillness was shattered by the roar and the whistle blast of an approaching train. It grew louder and louder until it was absolutely deafening and seemed as if it might go right through the house, and when the startled couple recovered from the shock sufficiently to look through a window, they saw an express from the Chicago, St Paul & Minnesota Railroad racing past on tracks not more than fifteen feet behind the house.

The story has it that Sophie went wild with anger and beat Sam with her fists and, afterwards, for a long time, she used to throw stones at the trains as they raced past, and sometimes she hit the engineer in the locomotive and he learned to duck as he went by. But apparently,
given
enough time, you can get used to anything, and Sophie seemed to adjust to the train noise, and when we were there and a train went by and we had to stop talking until it had passed, there was no look of annoyance on her still beautiful face and she even smiled until it was quiet again. She had also developed a friendly relationship with the engineer at whom she had previously thrown stones because for a while he had given several blasts of the whistle as he went by her house instead of just one or two. They now waved to one another.

Altogether, the move to Elmwood Park seemed to have done her a lot of good and she now had a tolerance for noise that she’d never had before. There was plenty of it inside the house when we were all there. The house was nearly always packed with family visitors, there were never enough chairs and people had to stand while they were eating, and there was always eating going on, and mounds of salami and corned beef and pickles and seeded rye bread and plenty of mustard piled on the table, with everyone talking and kids running wildly about. Sophie didn’t seem troubled by that. She loved company. And I suppose Sam did. He was busy the whole time cutting hair. It was like a barber shop with people waiting their turn. And the snip snip of scissors sounded constantly.

We left there with our stomachs full, our breath reeking of garlic and our heads shorn. Among the men the smell of garlic was mixed with that of liquor. Sam always provided a bottle. He knew a good bootlegger and they didn’t have to depend on Abe’s bottle. The only bad part about it was the five-mile trek to the streetcar terminal.

My father once cursed Sam out for buying a house so far from where we got the streetcar. ‘Didn’t you have enough brains in your head to pick out a house where your guests didn’t have to walk so much to get to you and to get away from you?’ he said.