To Live in Peace (15 page)

“Cream of rice, Cheerios or cornflakes?” Bette said, her pencil poised to circle Kitty’s choice of breakfast cereal on the hospital menu.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You must eat. I brought you some cookies. Maurice will be along later. He says to call him if there’s anything you want. You want I should call him?”

Kitty shook her bandaged head wishing that Bette, with her bright smile, her tinkling laughter, would go away. She was not ungrateful. Bette had been her lifeline, taking and fetching nightdresses, which she washed and ironed herself, and telephoning and bringing messages from her children. There was a pile of envelopes with their English stamps on her bedside table; they had all written, shocked into unaccustomed confession by what had happened. It was sad that one had to be mugged to appreciate the extent of the regard of one’s nearest and dearest. Rachel’s letter had filled five pages in which she had expressed concern and affection for her mother that Kitty, until this moment, had had no idea that she felt. It was one of life’s ironies. Until death, when it was too late, or at best catastrophe, one remained in ignorance of sentiments one would have liked to hear but which were in the normal course of events never expressed.

She had often discussed the phenomenon with Sydney in the old days when on Friday nights in the shalom bayit of their living-room, the Sabbath peace towards which she worked all week, she had perused the “deaths” in the Jewish Chronicle for familiar names, and had never
ceased to be surprised at the generous sentiments publicly aired.

Had the “wonderful mother, mother-in-law and grandma”, “the incomparable and beloved wife” who would be sorely missed by her heartbroken family and friends in an announcement which filled two columns and ran to twenty-three separate insertions, been aware in the smallest measure of her profound effect upon them? Did the widow of the lifelong companion who “slipped peacefully away after a long illness patiently borne” ever convey to her husband, while he was alive, her appreciation of his “selfless devotion” or give him the smallest inkling that his humour and courage were an inspiration to her? How ironical, Kitty thought, that she had not only to put the Atlantic ocean between herself and her youngest daughter, but to be set upon in broad daylight for Rachel to give voice to the regard in which she held her mother. That there was always a degree of hostility, a certain sense of rivalry between mothers and their daughters, Kitty recognised (she noticed its absence in her relationship with Josh), but underlying this, apparently – she had not known for Rachel had never told her – was an admiration and affection, a yearning and a need, which coming from Rachel, whose pronouncements had always verged on the flippant, had brought tears to Kitty’s eyes.

So moved had she been by the final paragraphs in Rachel’s letter that she had shown them to Bette. Rachel had been reading the riot act to Kitty about the hazards of the New York streets:

Josh’s letter had been more pragmatic and had to do with her insurance claim for personal injury (the wheels of which Maurice had already put in motion) and how she must be sure, if required to identify the criminals, not to point the finger if she was in any doubt. A police detective had already been to see her and she had done her best to describe her assailants although she would rather have forgotten the whole episode, eradicated it from her mind. She was glad he had not been in uniform. The police in New York – unlike the English constables she was used to, who now appeared to be no older than schoolboys – seemed so frightening, and carried guns and a menace in their demeanour of which you couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination accuse the British Bobby. Josh wrote that he felt responsible for having let her go to New York (as if she were a child not capable of deciding for herself) and offered, despite Bette’s relayed protestations, to come and take her home. Neither he nor Rachel mentioned Maurice; it was as if for them he did not exist.

Sarah had added a paragraph hoping that Kitty would be cheered by the fact that she had presented herself before the three dayanim at the Beth Din who had questioned her at length about her knowledge of Judaism and observance of the mitzvot after which, to her great joy and relief, they had congratulated her and accepted her as a fully fledged Jew. All that remained now was the final step of the ritual bath (Mrs Halberstadt was to accompany her to the mikveh) after which she would be presented with the te’udah, the formal document of conversion.

Carol had composed a poem. There was no doubt that she was neither a Sylvia Plath nor an Emily Dickinson but the feelings which shone through the verse had
compensated for its inadequacies. In addition to their letters, Rachel and Carol and Josh had sent a huge bouquet of flowers – carnations, alstroemeria lilies and sweetheart roses – and Bette had arranged them, saying “It’s almost worth getting mugged,” but Kitty knew that what she meant was how lucky Kitty was in her family because it had become evident as their friendship had developed that Bette’s children seemed to want to have little to do with their mother.

Debbie and Lisa had sent letters and drawings. Lisa’s was quite talented (artistically she took after Carol) depicting a hospital ward with her grandmother in it with a bandaged head. Mathew had covered a piece of brown paper with multi-coloured crayoned scribbles (no worse than some of the so-called modern art Kitty had seen with Maurice) and had signed his name, helped by Carol, in wandering letters of irregular height. Alec had sent a note from Godalming in his small precise writing on his practice stationery, telling her how sorry he was about the incident and describing in detail the metamorphosis of the Queen Anne house which was now taking shape, and telling her that the top floor, as well as belonging to the children, would have a guest-room which he hoped that Kitty would feel free to use whenever she wished.

There were a few words from Patrick, wishing her well. He was not a letter writer but the sincerity of the sentiments compensated for the paucity of the text. Mirrie had sent a card: “I hear you’ve had an operation” – which was slightly off the mark – and Beatty had covered three pages of pink notepaper with violet ink mainly about the trouble she was having with her bunions. There was a cable from the Ladies’ Guild and notes from her bridge friends. Word had certainly got around.

“Buttered linguine or asparagus spears?” Bette said.

“What?”

“Lunch.” Bette held the stiff card at arm’s length. “Or corn soufflay?”

The menu read very nicely. Americans were so imaginative about describing the food, but it was so traumatised and treated, so choc-a-bloc with chemicals and preservatives, so frozen and microwaved that it tasted of precisely nothing and sometimes Kitty thought that the food tasted no more delicious than the carton in which it was presented. The hospital tried. It offered diets that were salt free, sugar free, vegetarian, kosher, as well as six varieties of coffee and as many choices of bread. With its Klingenstein Clinical Center and its Guggenheim Pavilion it was one of the oldest and largest voluntary, non-profit, acute care hospitals in the country.

According to the Bill of Rights which her clinical nurse, a Miss Bronstein, had given her to read as soon as she was able, the hospital was committed to providing its patients with excellent care “given in a considerate and courteous manner, with respect for the patient’s individual dignity and privacy”. Like the food, the “quality care”, the “best medically indicated treatment and access to programs without regard to race, color, sex, age, religion, natural origin, handicap, veteran status or source of payment” was better on paper than in actuality. Not that Kitty had any complaints – if she had, a “patients’ representative”, who could be reached by dialling the Hot Line, was there to assist. But despite her “rights” – to complete current information concerning her medical problems, the planned course of treatment, the probable length of hospitalisation and the prognosis or medical outlook for the future in terms she could be reasonably expected to understand – there was a
conveyor belt quality to the place, a soulless efficiency (her clinical nurse looked as if she had stepped straight out of a soap opera) that made her long for England where, in her limited experience, the wards were haphazard but the nurses undubitably human. She shared her room with a grandmother from Alabama who had so many children and was so fat that it was hard to believe her massive body had ever had a shape, a schoolteacher from the Lower East Side who wanted to know all about Princess Diana and Prince Charles (she was amazed that Kitty hadn’t been invited to the wedding), and a walking surgical disaster from the Bronx who had been hospitalised countless times and never wearied of talking about it.

They had not been unkind. As soon as she was in a fit state Miss Bronstein had introduced both herself and Kitty’s room-mates and had explained – in much the same monotone as the New York waitresses enquired “Soup or salad?” then went into detailed and memorised descriptions of the dishes of the day – the safety precautions and meal schedule, the call bell and bed operating systems, the visiting and smoking regulations, the location of bathroom, showers, and lounge, the denture cup precautions and the routine particular to the floor. The visitor limit (two at a time and no smoking) had not been hard to obey. Apart from Maurice and Bette there had only been Herb and Ed and Mort – for whom Miss Bronstein had stretched a point, Kitty being a foreigner – who had arrived together, Ed with books, Mort with cologne and Herb with a jar of chicken soup he had made from Kitty’s recipe in which were suspended kreplach, the small pockets of meat-filled dough, which he assured her he had bought from the kosher counter.

“Lime Jello with vanilla wafer,” Bette said. “You have to circle something. Maybe tomorrow you’ll have
more appetite.” She put on the apple-green gloves which matched her apple-green Bloomingdale suit. “I’m going to be late for work. Maurice will be along soon.”

“Not in the morning,” Kitty said. “He paints.”

Bette stared at her, smoothing the kid over her fingers. “I don’t think you know, Kitty, how much that man loves you.”

When her friend had gone, Kitty closed her eyes, partly to avoid talking about the Royal Family and hearing the ongoing saga of the anaesthesiology and surgical pavilions, the Altran-Berg Laboratories and the Emergency Room, in which her other roommate seemed to have spent half her life. As soon as her eyelids blotted out the four walls with which in the past two weeks she had become familiar, she began to relive the nightmare. She tried to be brave when Bette was there, or Maurice, to shrug the incident off, put it down to bad experience, but she didn’t think she would ever rid her mind of the terror, the sheer horror – which, recalled, now paralysed her legs and caused her arms to twitch involuntarily – of that seemingly endless progression along the wet sidewalk between the brownstone houses. In her dreams and waking moments the street with its corrugated wall, its graffiti, went on forever, the safe and moving traffic of the avenue at its end seeming, as seen through the wrong end of a telescope, to get further and further away.

The images of the three youths grew disproportionately large, disproportionately threatening. She could not purge herself of the mental picture, reliving the events over and over, her heart pounding, its beat increasing in speed and intensity until it seemed it must burst her chest wall. It was no effort to remember the blows – her body was still sore, her head aching. The strange part was that when the deed was
done, no one had come to her aid. She remembered, through a cloud darkly, the police sirens, the whine of the ambulance, yet according to Maurice she had lain in the wet street for almost an hour before she had been noticed.

What happened then she scarcely remembered. Voices: “Stand back” and “No identification”, glimpses of hospital green through her pain and reassuring hands and relief-giving needles. Because of the concussion they had kept her for days in special care, scanning her skull for signs of permanent damage. By the time she opened her eyes to find herself in the four- bedded room, the flowers from the children at the end of the bed and Maurice sitting beside her, her hand in his, willing her to get better, she had been in hospital for a week. To her amazement Maurice was crying. There were definite tears in his eyes.

“I’m all right,” she said.

“I told you: take a cab.”

“I forgot my key. It was raining. It didn’t seem far to walk.”

“You got to know where to walk.”

“I can see that now.”