Authors: Rosemary Friedman
“They’d be amazed if you told them that in 1947 the United Nations proposed that there was to be a Jewish state and for the first time ever an Arab Palestinian state. The Jews accepted the offer: the extremist Arab leadership wanted all or nothing. It got nothing, and the Palestinian refugee problem was created. That in 1948 nine hundred thousand Jews had their property confiscated by Arab governments and were driven out of Arab countries. That the Palestinian Liberation Organisation has never been used to liberate the Palestinians at all, but to keep them in misery, discriminating against their own people, depriving them of human rights…”
Maurice pressed the button, truncating the newsreader. “Not that I condone this war. It’s doing inestimable harm to history’s impression of Israel which is lying and deceiving for the first time. Frankly,
I think Prime Minister Begin has taken leave of his senses.”
“I’m glad Rachel can’t hear you,” Kitty said. “She gets hysterical.”
“Tempers are running pretty high here. The antisemites – anti-Zionists they call themselves now – are crawling out of the woodwork.” He put a hand on Kitty’s. “War is a terrible thing. But there are worse things. Don’t let’s talk about it, Kit. Tell me how you’ve been.”
Talking to Maurice was like finding sanctuary. In London she had been surrounded by people, but they had their own problems, none of them more than superficially concerned with what Kitty Shelton had on her mind. The children were good, nothing to complain about there, but she was aware of a look, glazed and faraway, that came into their eyes when the conversation got round to topics that did not immediately concern themselves. It was the same with her bridge circle. The four widows brought their own problems to the table and laid them down with the trumps on the green baize
card-tables
in the various flats, but each marched to the music of her own drummer and could not hear the other’s tune. Maurice listened, as he had in Israel when the confidences had come tumbling out. He did not say much but he gave Kitty’s outpourings, trivial as they may have been, his undivided attention, and could, she swore, have taken an exam in the altercations she was having with her landlord who wanted the tenants to pay for the installation of new central heating boilers before the onset of winter; in the state of the portfolio bequeathed to her by Sydney; in Rachel’s refusal either to move from her council flat or to make any practical preparations for her forthcoming child. If Maurice could not provide the solutions to her problems at least he provided the
sympathy. It was what she wanted. What she missed. Everyone needed somebody. She wondered if the yearning for the soul-mate she had lacked since Sydney’s death had been worth the transition to New York.
Her previous impressions of the city had been gleaned from the television – “49th Precinct” and “Starsky and Hutch”. She had been unprepared for the relentlessness and volume of the traffic, dumbfounded by the oscillating mass of multi-ethnic, summer-clad humanity in perpetual motion in the sizzling streets, overwhelmed by the tottering menace of the preposterous buildings, and doubted the wisdom of her decision – despite the comforting presence of Maurice – before she reached his flat. Apartment. She had to remember to say it. There was so much to remember. So much that was new.
She did not know what she had been expecting, she had not really thought about it. As she wrote the address, East 85th Street, on her letters to Maurice, she had not had any clear picture in her mind of where he lived. Seeing the elegant striped canopy which stretched from the doorway of the building, across the wide pavement, to the kerb, Kitty had at first thought that Maurice must be taking her to an hotel. When the doorman, short and swarthy in his neat grey uniform, rushed out to take her cases and greeted Maurice with a “Hi, Doc!” she knew that he had not.
“This is Joe,” Maurice said, introducing him.
“Hi, Mrs Shelton.” Joe proffered a hand. “How y’a doing today?” Kitty was surprised that he had addressed her by name. There seemed no end to the surprises.
“Joe knows everyone on the block,” Maurice said with pride, “including the man who runs the numbers. Anything you want to know about the Yankees or the Mets, ask Joe.”
Kitty had a vague impression of a smart foyer – “All visitors must be announced” – with a red carpet, gilt bamboo mirror, porter’s desk and ornate lamps on either side of a silk-covered sofa.
“I got the bagels,” Joe said, going up in the smooth elevator, “and some blueberry pie.”
It was Joe, who as Kitty was later to learn came from Puerto Rico, who had helped Maurice prepare his studio for her and had carried the melancholy accumulation of paintings to Maurice’s apartment across the hall. The studio consisted of one large white-painted room with polished boards covered with vivid oriental rugs, at one end of which was a low bed with an American Indian throw-over spread, and at the other the pale and gleaming surfaces of a high-tech kitchenette. Louvred doors led off the room to a walk-in closet and a stripped pine bathroom. On a chrome and glass table, which served as a room divider, was an arrangement of flowers in a pottery crock such as Maurice used for his brushes.
Maurice and Joe watched as Kitty picked up the card: “Welcome to New York. And to my heart. Maurice.” She could not say thank you. Could not breathe. She rushed to let some air into the room although it was cool, hammering at the glass.
“Double windows,” Maurice said, “we don’t open them.”
It was one of the things she had to get used to: the fact that she was fifteen floors up with a view only of the apartment building across the street and had to rely for ventilation upon the noisy mechanism of the
air-conditioning
which kept her awake at night; the confines of the studio when she had been used to space; and above all, the heat. You shivered in the buildings and died in the streets. The blistering city was an inferno.
Maurice’s apartment was high-ceilinged, harking back, Kitty thought, with its large dark furniture, its book-lined walls, to central Europe. He had rolled up the rug at the window end where he had placed his easel, and worked surrounded on three sides by his canvases stacked face to the wall.
In the kitchen, with its Bauhaus table, Joe took the bagels from a brown paper bag and, opening Maurice’s cupboard, put them on a plate. He seemed very much at home.
“Coffee?” Maurice, his hand on the steaming glass jug in the coffee machine, addressed Joe.
“I already had.”
Joe set the pie, topped with the dusky blueberries Kitty had never seen before, in its fluted baking-foil case on the table.
“Enjoy,” he said to Kitty, and to Maurice: “You want anything, Doc, you call.”
“He looks after me,” Maurice said when he’d gone. “Anything you need, ask Joe.”
It had all been too quick. That was the trouble with flying. Your body was transported while your grey matter was still packing its bags. Kitty could hear herself speaking to Maurice, answering his questions, filling in the weeks since Rachel’s wedding, but she felt that she was imagining her presence in his apartment and that she would shortly wake up in her own bed to find that it had been a dream. Outside, the orange ball that
was the sun shone fiercely but Kitty’s internal clock told her that it was time for bed.
Maurice took cream cheese and pale Nova Scotia salmon from the refrigerator. Kitty drank the coffee he poured out for her and toyed with the food.
“I can’t believe you’re really here,” Maurice said.
“Neither can I.”
He cut a slice of pie and put it on her plate. “From the patisserie on Madison. People come from all over town.”
He wanted to please her. Had arranged the studio with Joe, bought the flowers and the pie, wanting everything to be nice. He could see that she was dropping.
“You go to bed too early, you’ll wake up too early.”
He turned on the radio, tuning into the news from the Middle East. She guessed that he listened to every bulletin. “…Prime Minister Begin has informed Secretary Shultz that Israel has accepted the proposal for a multinational peacekeeping force to enter Beirut…Shlomo Argov, the Israeli Ambassador to Britain, whose attempted assassination purportedly sparked Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, has been flown home from a London hospital…”
Kitty wondered what she was doing three thousand miles from home sitting next to this strange man. She put her fork down on the blueberry pie and felt her eyes close. Maurice took her by the hand and led her across the hall. In the studio he shut the blinds, fussed with the lights.
“There’s a house phone if you need anything.” He showed her which button to press, “Call any time, I don’t sleep.”
“You’re very kind,” she said, as if to a stranger.
She went with him to the door, with its safety devices and its spy-hole.
“Lock two turns,” – Maurice said, demonstrating. “Use the chain. Don’t open to anyone. And Kitty…”
She raised her heavy eyelids. She must either sleep or weep.
“It’ll be okay.”
She wished she could be so sure.
“In the morning it’ll look better.”
She hoped he was right.
From Maurice’s flat across the hall she could hear the unfamiliar accents of the newsreader: “…an
eyewitness
report…” accompanied by the sound of gunfire and of ricocheting shells.
“Mrs Klopman!”
“Ms,” Rachel said.
“Mrs” made her feel like her mother (of whose present behaviour Rachel did not approve) from whose mould – inadequately equipped to deal with the very different world she found outside – she spent her life, unlike Carol, struggling to escape. As far as Rachel was concerned, Kitty had always been middle-aged, middle class and predictable, occupied with the nurturing of others to the extent of neglecting herself. She had devoted her life to the well-being of her children and supporting the goals and ambitions of a husband (defining herself as relative to him) who allowed her to spend herself in the onerous running of his household while referring to her as his “queen”. Often Rachel had needled her, accused her of never having an opinion of her own, of not thinking for herself; she had hovered around the light of his lamp, a pale shadow of Sydney, treating her husband deferentially and accepting his natural dominion over her.
Kitty’s only interests outside the home and her family had been her charity work – Soviet Jewry and Israel rather than Vietnamese boat-people – about which she had countered Rachel’s allegation that Jews only look after their own with the acerbic retort that when
non-Jews
made such accusations – which Rachel was parroting – what they actually meant was that only Jews look after their own. Her mother was always busy, lame dogs and the less fortunate, preserving the fabric of the family of which Sydney had been the uncrowned king.
Even after his death, her mother’s life had continued along the same lines as before. She had worked for the synagogue Ladies’ Guild, cooked for her nephew Norman and for Josh, providing the time honoured dishes into whose mysteries she was initiating Sarah, knitted for the grandchildren. Maurice had come as a shock. Rachel had seen him as an interloper, disliked him on sight, could not understand her mother’s enthusiasm for the elderly European with his enigmatic demeanour, his foreign accent.
Kitty had dropped her bombshell at the celebration dinner she had arranged for Rachel and Patrick on their return from honeymoon. Carol and Alec had come up from Godalming for the occasion. They had had the pink beach at Skiathos (cicadas in the olive trees, the smell of thyme and warm grasses) and the sunstruck white of Hydra with Kitty’s cold borsht – in which Sydney had always liked her to serve a floury hot potato – and the air, land and naval bombardment of West Beirut over the chicken which had been roasted (the neck stuffed separately and sliced) for family gatherings for as long as Rachel could remember. Over the years the bird had fallen into natural divisions. Rachel liked the leg, Carol the wings, Josh the breast, Sydney the thigh and Kitty disregarding her own preferences, taking what was left with the addition, if she was lucky, of the parson’s nose. Rachel deplored her attitude, as she had her mother’s habit, when her father was alive, of no matter who was at the table serving him not only with the choicest morsels but first.
In his father’s absence it was Josh who took preference, who sat in his father’s place in the walnut armchair with its tapestried seat and ball and claw feet, the seat in which Sydney had been sitting when he’d had
his first fit, precursor of the cerebral tumour which was to kill him.
“The Security Council – has admonished Israel to withdraw her troops to the old lines,” Josh had said, by way of conversation. “I heard it on the radio coming along.”
“Pity,” Rachel said. “They should let them just get in there and finish the job.”
Josh applied himself to his chicken. He felt personally discomforted by what he considered both uncharacteristic and unjustified aggression by his co-religionists.
“What good has it done us? Israel should go to war only when there’s no alternative.”
“You know very well the Israelis were responding to PLO terrorist attacks on civilian targets, which have been escalating since 1968, and their occupation of the Lebanon which they used as a base to attack Israel,” Rachel said.
“Still no excuse…”
“They didn’t try to assassinate the Israeli Ambassador in London?”
“Argov was a pretext. The invasion must have been planned for months.”
“Do you really think Begin wants to put the lives of all those Israeli soldiers at risk?”
“What about the Lebanese? The women and children who are getting killed?”
“If you took the trouble to open your newspaper you’d have seen General Sharon’s statement that no nation on earth, or any other army during a war, had so deeply considered – to the extent of impeding their own progress – the question of avoiding civilian casualties, which was their prime concern. Every one was regretted, every one was a tragedy…”
“Regrets won’t bring a single one of these children back to life.”
“You know very well that most of the casualties occurred because the PLO deliberately put their guns next to homes and schools…”
“Don’t get so excited,” Kitty said.
“…they set up anti-aircraft bases round clinics, put their artillery on the roofs of hospitals, crates of explosives…”
“I’m not denying…” Josh began.
“…and boxes of ammunition in the cellars of blocks of flats, and the people have to sleep on top of all that! If Israel cared nothing for civilian lives they could have finished the job long ago.”
“10,000 dead! 40,000 wounded! 600,000 homeless!”
Rachel put down her knife and fork. “If you’re going to talk rubbish…”
“Rachel!” Kitty said.
“Where does he get his figures?”
“The Red Cross,” Josh said.
Rachel picked up her knife and pointed it at her brother. “I presume the news hasn’t reached Bayswater that those figures came from the Palestine Red Crescent which, by a curious coincidence, is headed by one Dr Fathi Arafat, brother of the celebrated Yasser Arafat, who just happens to be chairman of the PLO you seem so fond of, whose Covenant specifically dedicates it to revolutionary violence, the annihilation of Israel and the Israelis, and of anybody else who gets in the way.”
“For the last time!” Kitty said.
“Let me finish. He knows perfectly well that those figures he quotes have been discredited by both Arab and Israeli sources.”
“That’s enough!”
“There couldn’t possibly have been 600,000 homeless because the entire population of the area which came under Israeli control was only 510,000 and the true figure was nearer to 20,000, all of whom are being cared for and hoping eventually to return home…”
“You’re brainwashed!”
“Shut up both of you,” Alec said, “you’re upsetting Carol. She’s pregnant.”
“We’re all pregnant,” Rachel said.
“I wondered who swallowed that Israeli propaganda,” Josh said.
“If it’s propaganda you’re after what about the PLO, who have hired western professionals specifically to convince reporters that they are a moderate,
non-violent
, reasonable and democratically representative body, and to inflame public opinion by giving the impression that the Israelis are ‘intransigent’, cruel, bigoted, destructive and racist, given to indiscriminate bombing and the killing of civilians in residential areas?”
“Which is precisely what I was complaining about.”
“Those reporters have been selected, paid, seduced and corrupted by the PLO.”
“According to Israel.”
“It’s well known! They bribe them, give them a good time, and provide them with accreditation cards. Those who won’t play are forced to leave or are beaten up. At least two have been murdered.”
“Bullshit!”
Rachel stood up. “I’m going home.”
“Sit down,” Kitty said.
“I’m not saying in the same room…”
“I’ve got something to say,” Kitty said.
Rachel was half-way to the door.
“I’m not telling you until you sit down.”
Rachel glared at Josh.
“Come on Rache,” Patrick said.
Rachel sat down with her back pointedly to Josh. She looked at Kitty presiding over the carcass of the chicken from which Carol, who like her mother had never liked discord, was nervously picking at scraps.
“I’m going to New York,” Kitty said.
“Good idea,” Rachel said. “After all the work you put in for the wedding.”
“New York in August!” Josh said. “That’s when they have the greatest increase in the crime rate. It’s to do with the high temperatures. They all go crazy.”
“She needs a holiday,” Carol said.
“Who said anything about a holiday?” Kitty said. “I’m going to live with Maurice Morgenthau.”
“That old man!” Rachel said.
“You’re getting married again?” Josh was stunned.
“I didn’t say so.”
“You can’t just shack up with him,” Rachel said.
“I thought it was all right these days,” Kitty said, “I seem to remember…” She looked at Rachel and Patrick.
“That’s different,” Rachel said. “You know very well.”
“There’s no explicit prohibition of premarital relationships anywhere in the Torah,” Sarah, who had been studying the subject, said.
“I’m not going to ‘live’ with him,” Kitty reassured them. She explained about Maurice’s two flats and saw her children exchange glances with each other as if she had suddenly become unhinged and must be humoured.
“You’ll be back for the babies,” Carol said complacently, meaning her own, and reminding Kitty of her responsibilities.
“Give it six months,” Maurice had said.
“Have you thought about what you’re doing?” Josh, wearing his head of the family hat, asked.
“That Maurice is on to a good thing,” Rachel said.
They had all tried to dissuade her. Josh with reference to the memory of his late father, and Sarah on the grounds that she depended on Kitty’s support for her continued initiation into the rites of Judaism and her imminent conversion. Alec, on behalf of his wife, that Carol needed her mother and relied upon her; Carol, that her children would be deprived of their grandmother. Rachel herself had been angry with her mother and had not troubled to hide her antipathy to Maurice whom she had only met for a moment.
“He’s after your money,” she said to Kitty.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“How do you know?”
“He’s had a medical practice in New York since he qualified and has no family, he must have plenty of his own.”
“He’s looking for a housekeeper.”
“He’s managed without one until now.”
“What does he want then?”
“Perhaps he loves me,” Kitty said.
Rachel considered the proposition. It was as hard to consider one’s parents in the light of physical desirability as it was to imagine oneself growing old.
“You don’t love him.”
Kitty said nothing.
“Do you?”
“I don’t know,” Kitty said. “I’m extremely fond of him.” She thought of Maurice and his letters which had challenged so many of her previously held convictions. “He has opened up new worlds.”
“If he loves you so much why doesn’t he come over here?” Rachel said. “He strikes me as extremely egotistic!”
“There has to be a break,” Kitty said. “I’m contemplating a new life not simply a continuation of the old.”
“I suppose he doesn’t realise that you may be needed here. That you have three new grandchildren on the way. That Carol’s expecting you to look after Debbie and Lisa and Mathew, that Sarah relies on you. He’s encouraging you to be selfish.”
“To live my own life.”
“For his ends. You’ll be absolutely miserable all on your own in New York.”
“Have I been so happy here without your father?”
“We’ve all done our best…”
“I’m not complaining.”
“I’m only thinking of your own good.”
A phrase from the past came into Kitty’s head: “Paternalism is the worst form of tyranny.” Rachel had used it to her father on more than one occasion.
“I appreciate your concern,” she said.
There had been no moving her. Rachel, unaware of the trepidation with which Kitty regarded the whole affair, had been amazed at both her mother’s apparent firmness of purpose and her own reaction to Kitty’s decision, from the consequences of which she felt she must protect her. Maurice Morgenthau, from what Kitty had told her, seemed a poor candidate, as far as his religious
affiliations were concerned, for her late father’s shoes. If his anchoretic state were to be believed there would be no loving family to replace Kitty’s own waiting for her in New York. Rachel did not acknowledge that the rationalisations with which she so vehemently opposed Kitty’s plans might be camouflaging her own unconscious wish that, when the child she carried was born, she wanted her mother to be there.
The fact that both her sister Carol and her sister-
in-law
Sarah were also pregnant, and that their children were all expected within a short time of each other, did not impress her. Rachel’s world, to her astonishment, had become circumscribed by the unique fruit of her own womb. The embryo, inconsiderately, had materialised four months before their wedding, when she and Patrick had been planning their trip around the world. There was never any question of which should be sacrificed. Deprived of her preoccupations with the travelling plans – they were to have gone overland to India and thence to Australia (where Patrick had a cousin), Africa and Brazil – Rachel’s horizons had become bounded by her own physiology, which was playing such extraordinary and wondrous tricks, and that of her baby.
There was no book on ante-or postnatal care she had not read, no theory she had not examined on the emotional, marital, sexual and social aspects of pregnancy. In the interests of her child’s future health and the ideal structure of his bone formation – which would determine his physical beauty – she regulated her diet (eschewing everything but wholefoods and health foods) and resorted, only when necessary, to
homeopathic
medicines. Her anthropological research had revealed that the majority of peoples gave birth in some kind of upright position, most commonly kneeling, squatting or sitting, and were encouraged to move around
during labour. There was to be no private consultant, such as Morris Goldapple who had delivered Carol’s three children (flat on her back in the “stranded beetle” position) orchestrating her confinement and intervening medically for his own convenience; no home delivery, such as Sarah had opted for, traditional in her family which considered hospital a good place to be only if you were ill. After exhaustive investigation Rachel had discovered a relaxed and compassionate maternity unit which encouraged active birth together with the use of endorphins – the body’s own mechanism for pain relief – had no set rules for conduct during labour and considered every baby a special case. She had elected to give birth vertically with her arms around Patrick’s neck.