Authors: Rosemary Friedman
“She’s going to have it standing up,” Kitty said, holding up Rachel’s letter in her hand. “Did you ever hear of such a thing?”
Maurice was painting at his easel, sombre strokes of grey and burnt sienna, slashing at his past with charcoal and with slate.
“It’s the most effective method of pain control,” he said, pausing to half-close his eyes. “The supine position compresses the veins, starves the uterus of blood, makes the contractions more painful and prevents the force of gravity from helping the baby’s head along. It was first used by Louis XIV’s mistress so that His Majesty could keep an eye on the proceedings.”
It was not a topic Kitty could have discussed with Sydney. Maurice went back to his canvas. “Immobilising the mother prolongs the labour.”
Kitty averted her eyes from the painting. She no longer looked. All around the walls, ten deep, were stacked the outpourings of Maurice’s daily therapy in which he was both analyst and analysand. When first she had come to New York – staggering under the August heat, that struck like a cobra as soon as one went outside, and the enormity of her own decision to leave her home and live with Maurice whom she scarcely knew – she had looked, had stood by bereft of words as he demonstrated his obsession.
Canvases in which there was no light and little life; crushing invasions of space as stark forms with the just discernible features of human beings clawed a breathing space on barrack bunks; forced marches, and cattle
trucks in which the beasts were human; the distribution of the bread and the crucifixion on the wire; heads which were all eyes; eyes which were all dead; the grisly ballet of the leaps for air in the ovens; a misery of little children; a landscape of bones. After the first time she had averted her eyes, not focussing on the sludge and the slime of Maurice’s canvases in which he said the things he could not say, which were his mute cry, his silent scream, his unsung song.
He had met her at the airport. All the way across the Atlantic she had been terrified that he would not be there, and so appalled at the temerity of what she was doing, that had she had the power to do so she would have gone into the cockpit and asked the pilot to turn back. The realisation of the step she was taking, and the suddenness with which it assailed her, overlaid her views on flying and to her own astonishment she quite forgot to be afraid. Having had seven hours of voluntary incarceration in which to consider the matter she had come to the conclusion that her arbitrary decision, to leave her home and family for Maurice Morgenthau and New York, had been made on the swell of euphoria which followed Rachel’s wedding and bore no relation to how she might have acted in a more contemplative mood.
To all appearances she hardly knew Maurice. She had met him on holiday in Israel – her first proper trip in the two years that she had been widowed – and between that time and Rachel’s wedding had corresponded with him. Through his letters, poignant and articulate, Maurice had painted his history for her, his childhood in Germany, his existence in the concentration camps which he alone of all his family had survived, his new life in New York as a physician and his retirement since which he had dedicated himself to portraying the unique horror of his wartime experiences in paint. On airmail
paper, the tenuous friendship forged in Eilat had prospered. Maurice for the first time shared his past, and Kitty found the sympathetic ear and practical solutions she had lacked, since Sydney’s death, for the daily problems which beset her. She should, she told herself on flight BA175 to New York, have left it at that.
It was the excitement, she thought, of seeing Rachel off on her honeymoon that had led her to accede to Maurice’s suggestion that she come to live with him in New York. He had two adjoining apartments and he had offered to move his painting into his living quarters, leaving the studio for Kitty. A more permanent relationship had not been discussed. The decision had something to do with her own flat, which seemed so empty when she came home after the wedding, although it was a long time since Rachel had lived there; something to do with her
sister-in
-law Beatty, whose husband, Leon, had died in hospital while Beatty was at the wedding and for whom Kitty now felt herself responsible; something to do with Frieda, her other sister-in-law, and her husband, Harry, who were always ringing her up for one bit of advice or another; and Mirrie, Sydney’s younger sister, who was demonstrating signs of senility; and her nephew Norman, who by the look of things would be getting married soon to the South African Sandra and would no longer be dining with her twice a week; something to do with Carol, who was coming to stay for three months and would be bringing the children and chaos into Kitty’s ordered life while the house in Godalming received its face-lift; something to do with her son, Josh, and his wife, Sarah, who was also expecting a baby and, under Kitty’s guidance, hoping to become a convert to Judaism before the child was born.
Maurice, how romantic he was – Sydney, loving and caring had never been romantic – had tied a knot in the
fronds of the flowers he had sent her when he came to England for the wedding, the Bedouin way of saying: I love you. “Later on, is coming by his very dear one. If she does nothing, she is turning him down. If she opens up the knot…” Kitty had opened up the knot.
The family, horrified, had tried to dissuade her.
“A lot of silly nonsense,” Beatty had said, snivelling into her handkerchief when she got up from her week of mourning. She had visualised a new life for herself in which she would see more of her sister-in-law, Kitty, chumming up – although they had never been close – two widows, for shopping expeditions, and holidays in Bournemouth or Majorca. “Who do you know in New York?” she said.
Her younger sister-in-law had been more honest. “What will I do without you?” Mirrie said. Mirrie had given up work now; sometimes she was unable to remember what day it was, or if she had turned off the gas. Kitty commended her to Beatty who would have time on her hands (although the two sisters had always been at each other’s throats) and to her brother, Juda, who had never been bothered with her but was now the head of the family. Juda had offered to have Maurice “investigated” but Kitty, less than politely (she couldn’t think where she had got her unaccustomed courage from) told him to mind his own business. Carol was put out (“I thought you’d be looking after the children while I had the baby”), and Rachel furious: “That old man!” “You hardly spoke to him,” Kitty pointed out.
The women of the Ladies’ Guild were dumbstruck. She heard them whispering among themselves and felt that they regarded her with new eyes in which there was an element of jealousy, as if she had metamorphosed suddenly into an amalgam of Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia
Loren. They treated her gently, like an invalid. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Kitty dear?”
Of course she did not know. But with the advent of Maurice, a new dimension had come into her life which enabled her, uncharacteristically and late, to step forth into the unknown, to take a chance, to try.
She had waited until Rachel came back from her honeymoon, golden and bursting with Greek food and her child. “You’re being really stupid.” Rachel’s eyes were uncompromising, “You’ll hate it in New York.” Inside, Kitty had found the audacity to laugh at the role reversal. For so many years she had been the parent, advising, cautioning. “He’s probably after your money,” Rachel offered as a Parthian shot.
“It’s time you started living for yourself,” Maurice had said. “The children have their own lives. They can manage without you. Give it six months. We’ll see how we get on…”
She had bought her ticket, packed her case, said goodbye, tearful and choked, to the family who took advantage of her, to the children who liked her to be there, to her friends in the synagogue and neighbours in the flats, and the widows with whom she played bridge and who looked at her with disbelief, and to her grandchildren whose possessive arms almost made her weaken at the last moment.
Josh took her to the airport. The last time they had done that journey was when she had been going to Eilat where she had first met the enigmatic Maurice with his flat cap and zippered jacket. This time it was different. Already the enthusiasm was wearing off. She wondered what on earth she was doing, with not a soul that she knew, sitting down to pass the time with coffee and a
Danish pastry in the early morning tumult of the International Departure Lounge.
In the plane, setting the seal on her commitment, she had altered her watch to New York time as the Captain announced the route – Northern Ireland, Labrador and Boston – that would be taking her to Maurice. Hemmed into the window seat Josh had secured for her, covered with the mauve cellular blanket and, plugged into the red plastic headset, trying to concentrate on the film, she realised how much already she missed her family and how very dear to her they were, the importance of one’s own flesh and blood which was more, so very much more, than the sum of its parts. Several hours later, after she had filled in her landing card and gone with her
sponge-bag
to the confined toilet to freshen herself up for Maurice, the First Officer’s voice – “We are beginning our descent for New York” – brought home to her the significance of the step she was taking. The landing at Kennedy, ill-timed and bumpy, had been the beginning of a dream from which she had still not woken. She did not need telling to remain in her seat until the aircraft had stopped and the seatbelt signs had been switched off; the 747 had become her home, her limbo, and she was terrified of moving.
With one ear on the public address system which announced that she could retrieve her baggage from carousel number five (her lucky number, perhaps she would be lucky), she selected, as she did in the supermarket, the shortest and fastest moving queue for immigration. Standing behind the yellow line until it was her turn to approach the uniformed black woman (“One person or family group permitted in booth at a time”), she peered through the glass, vainly searching the alien faces in the customs hall for the familiar sight of
Maurice. With her passport unequivocally stamped and having lied about the purpose of her visit – which was neither strictly speaking business nor holiday – she had asked a well built man, no older than Josh, if he would mind helping her with her luggage, but he ignored her, as if she had not spoken, and she knew that she was in New York. Having neither contraband, vegetables, birds, nor birds, eggs to declare she had passed, with her swerving trolley, unchallenged through the green channel.
Maurice, waiting anxiously, was in his shirt-sleeves. She hardly recognised him without his flat cap and zippered jacket which was the image of him (despite the handsome figure he had cut in his tuxedo at the wedding) she carried in her mind. The expression on his face when he caught sight of her, as if with his own eyes he had witnessed the coming of the Messiah, dispelled the doubts and the agonies, the vacillations and the weaknesses of the last days. When he put his arms around her and his cheek against hers, wordlessly, she had the impression that for the first time since Sydney’s death, after which she had wandered in the wilderness, she had come home.
For some reason she had not expected Maurice to have a car – MM 200 – certainly not a Mercedes. Sydney, even so many years after the war, would not buy anything that was overtly German. Not because he thought he could achieve anything by boycotting German goods but because he considered it wrong for Jews of his generation, which had suffered so grievously at the hands of the Nazis, to display any symbol so incontrovertibly associated with their martyrdom.
As they adhered strictly to the fifty miles per hour speed limit on the Van Wyck Expressway – eight lanes of traffic – passed Jewel Avenue and Flushing Meadow, which sounded more romantic somehow than Shepherd’s
Bush and Hammersmith, they were overtaken by
blue-rinsed
grandmothers, men in vests, and bearded elders in trilby hats, at the wheels of Chevrolets and Pontiacs and Buicks (which seemed to go on forever), and Kitty tried, so that she could later describe them in a letter to her children, to formulate her first impressions of New York. Beneath the puffed clouds in a turquoise sky they followed the signs, brown on white, to Manhattan. “Welcome to Queens”, and “Liberty Avenue” with its lush trees and clapboard houses, “Soul Food” and “Chicken and Ribs”. “New York City Ice Skating”. Debbie and Lisa would have liked that. “Catch a Hit Yankee Baseball.”
“Yankee Stadium,” Maurice said, pointing out the concrete circle.
At the traffic lights a diminutive youth in a tattered shirt smeared the windscreen with a sponge at the end of a stick. Maurice put the washers on and gave the boy a quarter.
The temperature in the purring car with its tinted windows gave the lie to the fact that outside, according to the latest illuminated sign, it had reached the nineties. The news on the radio broadcast the latest developments in the Israeli siege of Beirut: “…despite calls for a cessation of hostilities Israel has violated the ceasefire and there is sporadic shelling in West Beirut. Israeli Defence Force tanks have moved into the central area close to the Green Line and have prevented UN observers from reaching Beirut.”
“They’ve been cut off for a week,” Kitty said.
“The siege is to prevent food, water and fuel from getting to the strongholds of the PLO. Unfortunately everyone suffers in the interests of nationalism,” Maurice replied. “Flags. Emblems. Passports. Anthems. Israel’s no longer a model for western civilisation, some
sort of wunderkind. She’s just like the rest. ‘If you will it, it is not a dream,’ Herzl said, but I think the time has come to wake up.”
“I keep thinking about the women and children…”
“Israeli planes distributed leaflets urging civilians to leave the area. There are escape routes open. Thousands already have.”
“They don’t tell you that.”
“They’ve got the fire brigade reporting. Kids from the networks with their inevitable sympathy for what they feel to be the underdog, who come crashing in when there’s trouble anywhere, making simple divisions between the ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’. The less informed they are the more sensation and violence minded they become, photographing the same streets of damaged houses which the Israelis were probably not responsible for anyway.