Authors: Rosemary Friedman
Kitty, belonging to the “pull yourself together school”, had never held any truck with illness which was psychosomatic – she had had long arguments with Patrick about it – but she had to admit that from the moment Maurice had announced his intention of taking her back to England, her symptoms, headaches, fatigue and listlessness, had disappeared like magic. She told herself that it was because she had something definite to do, something on which she must concentrate her mind, but she knew that it was not really so. On the morning following Maurice’s announcement – his welcome wedding present – she had woken early but her dawn alertness held a different quality to that which she had been experiencing since her return from Florida. There were plans to be made about which they had talked long into the night. The move was to be permanent. Maurice was to sell the apartment, wind up his affairs, pull up his post-war roots such as they were, for Kitty.
That it was a considerable sacrifice she knew. Having been the victim of one catastrophic upheaval in his time, it was not easy for him to start again. “A new life at my age,” he had said, and when Kitty told him how much she appreciated his decision to take her back to England, to relinquish such semblance of belonging that he had created in New York, Maurice had replied that “Nothing was written in marble or in stone.” He would miss his friends. Despite their apparent dissimilarities, Maurice and Herb and Ed and Mort had forged a relationship, an interdependent quartet which, beneath its flip exterior,
Kitty found touching to behold. The three of them had at first been disbelieving.
“I’ll keep an eye on the place for you, Mo, while you’re away,” Herb had said.
“I’m not coming back.”
Kitty could see that Maurice was choked, perhaps had not realised until that moment the robustness of the bond that existed between the members of the poker game.
“I have to see my grandchildren,” Maurice said.
It was the most beautiful thing Kitty had heard.
“So what about the game?” Mort said. “What about Tuesday and Thursday nights?”
Maurice had not answered. There had been nothing to say. Kitty could see how hard it was for him. In the weeks that followed, Herb and Ed and Mort had stood around – watching Maurice pack and dispose of his superfluous possessions – humming defiantly as if what they could see before their very own eyes was not really happening, or looking on helplessly, their hands in their pockets, like lost souls. That they revered Maurice was obvious to Kitty, who had not really thought about it before. Although none of them said anything, they made her feel guilty as she read the hurt, the silent accusation, in their eyes.
“You’ll write?” Herb said.
He was addressing Kitty and from the tone of his voice she realised that in her short time in New York, she too had somehow become important to the poker game and that in her turn she was going to miss the “boys”.
“You must all come and see us,” she said brightly, knowing full well that the bond forged in Maurice’s apartment was unlikely to survive, transplanted to England.
“Sure”, Herb disappeared into the kitchen, “sure”.
Bette Birnstingl took the announcement of Kitty’s impending departure as a personal affront.
“You’re making a big mistake,” she said when Kitty told her of Maurice’s decision. “He’s not going to like it.” She had put her finger on the very thing which had been worrying Kitty. Suppose Maurice were miserable in England? Suppose he hated the people, the way of life, the climate? Suppose he could not paint? She weighed it against her own happiness, her craving for her family – to have those about her whom she loved – and decided that it was a chance she would have to take.
“I’m going to miss you, Bette,” Kitty sighed. And it was true. Tuesday nights not spent gossiping with Bette in her apartment with its “disappearing” closet and “floating” staircase would not be the same.
“Why don’t you marry Ed?” she asked, realising with amusement that her own romance had exercised Bette when she first came to New York and that now the boot was on the other foot.
“Ed’s a great guy,” Bette said. “We have a real fun time, but I couldn’t say he’s my ideal.”
“I sometimes wonder whether one shouldn’t think so much about ideals but consider available alternatives,” Kitty said.
Bette stared at her friend.
“You know, Kitty, that’s the wisest thing anyone’s ever said to me? What will I do without you?”
It was strange, Kitty thought, how the depth of their mutual understanding had little to do with the duration of their friendship. Leaving Bette was going to be a wrench.
“We’ll write,” she said pragmatically.
Bette smiled. Kitty read her all the letters from England. “I won’t have you to share the letters with.”
“Marry Ed,” Kitty repeated. “It’s no good being on your own.”
Maurice packed his books personally – the surrogate family through which he had managed to keep sane over the years – not trusting them to the shippers. Already Kitty was planning how to accommodate them in her flat. He refused to take his paintings, the dark and personal prisms through which he had expressed in a black catharsis of oils his past life.
“I’ll start again,” he said.
And when Kitty looked at him doubtfully as he placed only his easel, some empty canvases, his palette and his paints into the chest left by the removal men, he put his arm around her reassuringly.
“It’ll be a new beginning. Michelangelo, Goethe, Rembrandt, Victor Hugo, Titian, Kant, Rabelais, all did their best work well after middle age.”
He packed his portrait of Kitty and the record collection to which they had done their courting. The more cheerful Maurice was as he went about his arrangements the more Kitty, who was not deceived, realised how much her husband was giving up for her.
“What news of your mother?” Herbert said. He lay in bed while Rachel, painstakingly knitting a grubby white vest, kept him company.
Apropos of the state of Rachel’s wool which snaked over the carpet Herbert had already told her the story about the textile showroom where in the men’s room there was a large notice: “Please wash your hands before touching the pastels.”
The boss had surprised one of his employees coming straight out of the toilet and into the showroom. “Moishe,” he says, “you didn’t see the notice? ‘Please wash your hands before touching the pastels’?”
“Who’s touching the pastels,” Moishe says, “I’m going to have my lunch!”
“She’s coming home,” Rachel said, unable to keep the triumph from her voice.
“Did you hear the one about the husband who came home and said to his wife, ‘If you only learned to cook we could sack the housekeeper,’ to which his wife replied, ‘And if you only learned to make love we could sack the chauffeur.’”
Rachel smiled. It was no worse than the rest of Herbert’s jokes on to which she realised now he displaced his anxiety over his heart condition. Putting down her knitting she retrieved his eiderdown from where it had slipped on to the floor, and adjusted the pillows behind his head. His normally ruddy face was overlaid with a greyish pallor.
“Comfortable?” She sat down again heavily in the chair and picked up her needles.
“I make a living.”
When he realised that his father’s condition was not improving, Patrick, considering it unfair to Rachel, had offered to take her to the Putney flat. Paradoxically she, who had never cared for life in Winnington Road, had opted not to go.
“Your father likes to have me around,” she said. And it was true. Although her relationship with Hettie was still abrasive – there being no aspect of child care on which they agreed – she had grown fond of Herbert with his addiction to the news on the television at the foot of his bed, every bulletin of which he would scan for its Jewish content, his bottomless fund of stories which were frequently neither topical nor particularly amusing. Together, while Hettie was out – glad to have Rachel to keep her husband company – they commiserated with each other over Israel.
“When the good Lord said, ‘I will give the land unto your seed’, unfortunately he didn’t provide a timetable.
Tell me, Rachel, how is it that what is so obvious to you and me is to so many others like a closed book? Even Hettie only pretends to go along with me because she’s afraid I’ll have another heart attack.”
“What most people don’t realise,” Rachel said, “is how tiny Israel is, no bigger than Switzerland, smaller than Wales. They’re absolutely amazed when you bring it to their attention.”
“It’s hardly surprising,” Herbert said, “when you think of all the confusion there is over Northern Ireland.”
“Have you told him?” Alec said to Jessica, meaning her husband as he joined her in the newly painted
drawing-room
of the Queen Anne house.
“What do you think of these for the conservatory?” Jessica said, offering him a copper tile.
“I don’t give a damn,” he said, capable of thinking of nothing but their future life together, how it would be. “When are you going to?”
“When he comes back from Bahrain.” Jessica, on her knees, studied a sample of material, peacocks and exotic flowers.
“You didn’t tell me he was away.”
“I must have forgotten.” She held the fabric at arm’s length, her head tilted to one side.
“Look, Jess” – Alec pulled her to her feet – “you’re not changing your mind?”
Jessica leaned back in his arms and caressed his hair. He pulled her hand away.
“I’m not one of your horses.”
“I say beautiful things to my horses…”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“I stroke them when we’re alone, like this, and like this…”
“Jessica!”
“I run my hands along their flanks, feel the muscles beneath my fingers…”
“Jess…”
“Put my face close to theirs, whisper in their ears…”
“Be serious for a moment.”
“I’ve never been more serious. Shall I tell you what I say to them, in the mornings, just the three of us, standing on the straw, nobody there? Come closer and I’ll tell you, oh, the secrets, Alec, the wonderful secrets, the ineffable mysteries I share with my horses…”
Alec knew that no matter what the obstacles he would never give Jessica up.
In Kitty’s flat, with Carol and the children, the situation seemed less straightforward. It was as if he were two different people, with two different lives and no way he could reconcile them. Debbie, her arms round his neck, pulling at his heart strings, Lisa’s lisping account of school, Mathew’s plea from the floor for assistance with his Action Man, fogged the image of Jessica, muted her ever present voice. Face to face with Carol things were harder still. She tried to keep him away from the twins as if by looking at Poppy and Sara, holding them in his arms, he would contaminate them.
“I wish I was dead,” Carol said.
And Alec’s heart went out to her, once so particular like her mother about her appearance, now so untidy, so unkempt.
“You mustn’t say things like that.”
“There’s nothing to live for.”
“How about the children?”
“What do you care about the children?”
“I care,” Alec said.
And he did. There was room in his troubled heart still for Carol and his children but his feelings for Jessica, the passions which had blinded him, a sudden and total eclipse, consuming and possessing him, had effaced them all.
“Are you going to meet your mother at the airport?” Sarah said to Josh who was reading a letter from Rachel.
“My sister’s mad,” Josh said. “She accuses me of implying that there is a comparison between the actions of the Nazis and those of the Israeli government.”
“Did you?”
“Not at all. I did refer to ‘Ayatollah Begin’…”
“Josh!”
“It was a joke.”
“It’s not a joke to Rachel.”
“She says that I’ve taken it upon myself to preach Christianity to the Gentiles and turn the other cheek but that if the Jews want to preserve their independent state they have to fight for it…”
“‘Even the High Priest Phineas took a spear in his own hand and personally struck down evil doers.’ Is Rachel going to the airport?”
“Not if I’m going.” Josh put the letter back into its envelope. “She says I’m an antisemite!”
Rachel was alone with Herbert Klopman when he died. He liked her to sit with him. He did not care for Hettie’s fussing and the presence of old Mrs Klopman, who still treated him like a small boy, made him agitated. Rachel, with her knitting, did not bother him.
“What time does your mother arrive?”
“Eleven o’clock.”
“A man goes to a restaurant and he’s forgotten his watch. He calls a passing waiter and asks him the time. ‘Sorry, sir,’ the waiter says, ‘you’re not my table!’”
“Josh is going to meet her.”
Herbert raised his eyebrows.
“I’m not going. Not if Josh is. He still refuses to put blame where it belongs…”
“I see that Reagan’s going to rebuild and train the Lebanese Army so that it can maintain internal security… You can bet your bottom dollar they’ll be at each other’s throats again as soon as the Israelis pull out.”
Rachel concentrated on her needles. She was looking forward to seeing Kitty – although she was not so sure about Maurice – but she was not going to the reunion dinner that Carol and Sarah had planned. She would see her mother tomorrow, on her own, preferably without Maurice. It was quiet in the house. Despite the central heating, the room in the winter light seemed chill.
“It’s cold outside,” Rachel said. “Would you like me to shut the window?”
“Will that make it any warmer outside?” Herbert said, with no enthusiasm, putting a hand to his head.
Rachel closed the window, looking out on to the grey street, the neo-Georgian mansions on the other side reflecting the Klopmans’ own. “Are you all right?” She adjusted the rug over her father-in-law’s feet, which were always cold these days, and sat down on the bed with her knitting, casting off the stitches on a navy-blue bootee. She would ask Hettie to buy her some scarlet ribbon.
“A bit faint,” Herbert said. “Which reminds me. There was this woman fainted at the theatre. ‘Get me a doctor!’ she moans from the floor. A doctor, a
good-looking
fellow, rushes over to help. He’s just feeling her pulse when the woman sits up and beams at him: ‘Oy, doctor,’ she says, ‘have I got a girl for you!’ Rachel?”
“That’s me.”
“Did I ever tell you the one about the Jap who was walking and down down Fifth Avenue trying to find Tiffany’s?”
“No,” Rachel lied.
“There was this Japanese man walking up and down Fifth Avenue looking like crazy for Tiffany’s…”
Rachel severed the navy-blue wool with her teeth.
“…He stops this little old lady…”
She was quite proud of her bootees, even if one had turned out to be slightly larger than the other. They were not at all bad for a beginner.
“…and says, ‘Excuse me, Ma’am, I wonder if you’d be kind enough to assist me? I’ve been up and down this street a hundred times but I can’t seem to find Tiffany’s…’”
Rachel thought she would make a vest next with the rest of the navy-blue wool. She was really getting the bug.
“…the little old lady pokes the Jap in the stomach with her umbrella…”
He had embellished the story since the last time.
“… ‘Tell me young man,’ she says…”
Rachel put the bootee in the supermarket carrier which served as a knitting bag.
“…‘Pearl Harbour you found’…”
Rachel waited for the punchline.
“‘How come you can’t find…’”
Rachel waited.
“Tiffany’s,” she prompted.
Herbert’s lips did not move.
“‘How come you can’t find Tiffany’s?’”
His hand was very cold.
Rachel had the impression that the room was suddenly empty. She stood up and as she did so a headache, worse than any she had had before, gripped her skull, lights flashed, brightly, painfully in her eyes and her stomach knotted tightly with pain.
The last thing she remembered was old Mrs Klopman, with her bent head, coming into the room.
Kitty, who had always been terrified of flying, was becoming a seasoned traveller. The fact that she was not consumed with terror as she had been on her first trip to Israel – which seemed a lifetime ago – was due, she felt, not so much to the flying hours she had put in as to the presence of Maurice by her side. He was such a safe man somehow, so certain of everything, but of course, after what he had been through there remained very little for him to be afraid of. As she looked at him in the aisle seat next to her, felt his warm hand on hers, she thought that his confidence was catching and that she had already, although she was still in mid-air, come home.
Exhausted as she was from the last minute hassles entailed in the giving up of Maurice’s apartment and the social whirl of the past week, she was wide awake as
those around her slept with the excitement of being reunited with her family. Herb and Ed and Mort and Bette and even Joe, who unable to speak had watched Maurice’s departure with tears in his eyes, had not wanted to let them go, clung on to them as long as possible. Bette had thrown a party for them in her apartment at which Maurice, surprisingly, had been the life and soul, and Kitty thought what a pity that they were leaving just when he and Bette looked like becoming friends.
Herb had prepared a farewell dinner for them in Maurice’s kitchen, serving, to Kitty’s amusement, her own chopped liver recipe (now included in his culinary repertoire), followed by Breast of Chicken Sauté à la Herb (sherry, palm hearts and shallots) accompanied by a Marbre de Legumes which had entailed a labour of love to do with layers of zucchini and kohlrabi and small leeks and little green beans and red peppers and beef bouillon (painstakingly made with beef shank and vegetables), assembled in a mould and refrigerated overnight, followed by the Pecan Pie with Caramel Sauce which was his pièce de résistance.
Mort had treated them all to the best seats at “42nd Street” and Ed – at ridiculous expense, Kitty thought – had taken them to dinner at Laserre at which he had announced his engagement to Bette Birnstingl. It had been a night to remember, the apotheosis of her stay, during which she realised with surprise what a good time she had had in New York, about which she had at first been so apprehensive, and how very much she was going to miss her transatlantic family.
By the day of their departure the elation engendered by the celebrations had subsided. Herb and Mort, and Ed with Bette, had wandered miserably among the packing cases and while she and Maurice nervously put together their last minute things the conversation was desultory.
Mort produced a bottle of whisky and dispensed it into the rinsed out breakfast cups.
“To good times,” he said, raising his to his lips.
“Bon Voyage,” Herb said.
“Auf Simchas.” Ed looked at Bette.
“Le Hayim!” There was a break in Maurice’s voice. Kitty did not underestimate how much he was giving up for her. She had had a taste in the past months of what it meant to uproot yourself.
As she put her coat on, Bette had shed a tear. She handed Kitty a package. “To remember me by.”
“Did you think I’d forget?” Kitty said as they embraced. Bette’s gift-wrapped parcel lay on her lap together with the In Flight magazine at which, too busy with her thoughts, she had not even glanced.
She untied the ribbon, took the small box from its paper. A piece of costume jewellery, two entwined hearts in gold, winked in the reading light.
Kitty put the brooch in her lapel and Maurice, who she had thought was sleeping, fastened it for her, brushing her face with his lips before leaning back in his seat.
There was no sound in the side-room they had given Rachel. Her body was weightless, seeming to be one with the mattress. She was not dead. She noticed her hand on the counterpane and that there was something strange about it, then that it was not her hand that was unfamiliar but the fact that the bedclothes, the thin cotton hospital blankets, lay flat. There was no bump. She turned her head, half a turn. A cradle, sloping, at an angle. Her absent thoughts made a halo outside her head. One by one, with difficulty, she gathered them in. There was one to do with Tiffany’s, and Herbert – such an old joke, she must have heard it a hundred times – and old
Mrs Klopman. An ambulance siren. Her nephew Mathew had referred to the sound as the “nee-naw” when he was an infant, running in fear whenever he heard it to bury his head in Carol’s lap. Nurses with wavy faces, advancing and retreating. Pre-eclampsia. They kept repeating it. Pre-eclampsia. And caesarean section. She’d tried to tell them that her name was Rachel Klopman – waiting for the reaction – that her notes quite categorically stipulated natural childbirth to the accompaniment of “Ten Green Bottles”, encouraged by Patrick, her labour partner.
Patrick had come. And gone. She did not remember any “Ten Green Bottles” yet she could see her toes beneath the counterpane. The cradle. Beside the bed. Belonged to her. Mrs Klopman. Mrs Klopman. You have a beautiful daughter. Ridiculous. You couldn’t call a girl Sydney. What then? The decision entailed more than the bestowing of a name. It included the act of creating images and symbols, interpreting perceived reality, telling a personal and communal story. The cradle was still. Quiet. Panicking, Rachel raised herself on her elbow. Her stomach was stiff, sore. There was a bundle. Gritting her teeth, she lifted it onto the bed.
A great delirium consumed her. An almost embarrassing ecstasy as she looked for the first time at her child. Daring, she raised the bundle to her face, kissed the cheek, the long eyelashes – Patrick’s – unfolded the minuscule fingers with their papery nails, looked for the first momentous time into the speculative eyes of her daughter. It was a moment of understanding: that every mother contains her daughter in herself, and every daughter her mother, and every woman extends backwards into her mother, and forwards into her daughter. In that instant she understood Kitty utterly for
the first time, and knew exactly – for her womb contracted achingly – how she would feel when her daughter left, unthinking, with her knapsack on her back, for the world. Life, Rachel thought, was spread out over generations. She would call her daughter Rebecca, after the matriarch Rebecca, Sidonie (for her father), Hephzibah, “My pleasure is in her”, as she recognised with every fibre of her being, every nerve ending, that it would be.
Putting her child to her breast Rachel realised, with sudden clarity, that there were decisions to be taken, choices to be made, and that life as she and Patrick had known it would never be the same again.
In the Visitors’ Room – the dog-eared magazines long time expired, Maurice motionless by the window – Kitty, still in her travelling clothes, waited to see Rachel. For the umpteenth time she went over in her mind the jumbled events of the past hours. As soon as she had seen Josh’s face as he waited by the barrier, hemmed in by the airport crowds, she had known that something was wrong. They had come straight to the hospital. Maurice had been wonderful. He had explained to her about
pre-eclampsia
. Kitty bombarded him with questions. Could it have been avoided? (She blamed herself for going to New York.) Should Rachel have eaten better? Shouldn’t the doctors have spotted it sooner? Maurice said that as far as he knew – and he was not an expert – the condition had to do with the body’s immune system, and that the word itself meant “before a fit”, which was what, as far as Kitty could in her jet-lagged mind make out, had happened to Rachel at Hettie Klopman’s. The swollen legs had been a precursor.
Kitty blamed herself. She had told Rachel enough times to be sensible like Carol, to put herself in the capable hands of Morris Goldapple. It wouldn’t have made any difference, Maurice said, but Kitty had had her own theories. Anyway, thank God, everything had ended well and she had a new granddaughter whom, when they had once more checked Rachel’s blood pressure, she would be allowed to see.
She had come home with a vengeance. The shock about Rachel – her heart had turned over – then the news about Herbert Klopman. The reins of her life were in her hands before she had had time to pick them up. There was so much to do. Rachel would need looking after now; a Caesar was no joke, you needed time to recover, and she could hardly go back to Hettie’s. Poor Hettie. Kitty knew, too well, what it meant to be a widow. Glancing at Maurice to reassure herself, she determined that she would slowly, gently, when she had got over the first shock, take Hettie – giving her the benefit of her own experience – in hand.
Then there was Beatty. She had had her mastectomy, and every day, according to Josh, asked when Kitty was coming. Beatty was a shadow of her former self, he had said, and Kitty had understood that he was preparing her. Beatty would have to be encouraged, nourished, nursed back to whatever health was available to her.
Josh’s own baby was due next, the son who was to be born in his mother’s bed. Kitty didn’t hold with that and doubted whether Sarah’s mother – assuming she could tear herself away from Leicester – was going to be much help. She knew very well who it was who was going to do all the shopping and cooking and running to and fro.
After that there’d be the twins, Carol would need some help, and Alec, perhaps her biggest problem. The interior decorator had taken off for Los Angeles permanently with her husband, but Carol was adamant:
she would not take Alec back. There was a situation which had to be handled with the tact of a Habib, the diplomacy of a Kissinger. Kitty saw no reason why, given time and the right handling, Carol and Alec shouldn’t eventually be installed in the Queen Anne house with their growing family round them. Alec was a broken man, Josh had told her, but he would get over it. It wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened. It was Carol who would need all the reassurance, all the love and support Kitty could muster.
It was as if her time in New York, the honeymoon in Florida, had never been. As if it had been a dream and, like a dream, was fading. She had to force herself to think of Maurice’s apartment, her ordeal at the hands of her assailants in the graffiti-covered street, of her surrogate family, Herb and Ed and Mort and Bette. As soon as everything calmed down (if it ever did), as soon as she had dealt satisfactorily with her quiver full of problems, she would invite Bette to stay with her, show her London – which she scarcely knew herself – as Bette had shown her New York.