To Live in Peace

by Rosemary Friedman

  The “boys”, Ed and Herb and Mort, wearing suits in honour of the occasion, were the first to arrive. They had bought a giant pot of chrysanthemums (she still hadn’t got used to the size of everything in New York) and kissed her, each in turn, Herb awash with aftershave, wishing her a happy New Year. She had a momentary sensation of guilt – of wondering what she was doing so many miles away from home, surrounded by these strange men, when she should have been with her family – which she sent summarily packing, then settled down to enjoy her evening. As they helped themselves to Maurice’s Southern Comfort and juice from the refrigerator, as if it were their own home, she noticed that Ed had had his hair cut and Mort was wearing a new bow-tie, or at any rate one she hadn’t seen before, and guessed that both were in honour of Bette whom none of them had met. When Kitty had broached the subject of inviting her to Maurice, he had said “sure”, not wanting to upset her, but from the look on his face she could see that he wasn’t at all keen.

  Bette herself had been ecstatic and had talked of nothing else but Kitty’s invitation for the past few days. When Maurice opened the door to her, Kitty could see that in preparing herself for the occasion Bette had tried too hard. Herb swallowed, Ed and Mort stared wide-eyed at the apparition in the doorway, and Kitty could hardly recognise her friend.

  “Hi!” Bette breathed, in a passable imitation of Marilyn Monroe, raising one hand in greeting, and it was obvious to Kitty that in her apprehension, before she set out, Bette had made inroads into the gin bottle.

  She was dressed in a silver lamé sheath – the daring décolleté of which revealed glimpses of her bra with its wired under-cups – with silver shoes and, inappositely, had twined a camellia into her newly dressed and heavily lacquered blonde hair. As Bette kissed Maurice, leaving a double arc of vermilion on his cheek, Kitty could see him recoil.

  Determined to put everyone at their ease, although it was clearly she who needed reassurance, Bette, having shed the long gloves beloved of New Yorkers which Kitty privately considered a solecism, went straight to Maurice’s easel and said: “Isn’t that just darling?” when the haunted face of a hungry child cried out from the canvas on which Maurice had been savagely working all day.

  Nervous and overdressed as she was, Ed and Mort took to Kitty’s friend immediately and as they fought to pull out a chair for her at the white-clothed kitchen table, Kitty exchanged an amused and knowing glance with Maurice. This brittle and painted lady was not the Bette she knew and, watching her flash her capped teeth at Ed or flutter the synthetic eyelashes, with their overkill of mascara, at Mort, Kitty’s heart went out to her. Maurice did not address her directly and as he pointed out to Kitty that Bette’s plate was empty, or enquired of her, “Does Bette want some more wine?” Kitty realised that he was as ill at ease as her friend.

  The conversation was lively. Sharpened by the sauce of Bette’s presence, Ed and Mort vied with each other in a mordant display of wit. Flattered by the dinner companions either side of her Bette did not forget Herb and leaned across the table, with a plentiful display of cleavage, to draw him into the conversation although he was impervious to her charms. Bette was one of those people who said everything, verbalised it, as soon as it came into her head. There was no clutch – as Sydney used to say – between her brain and her mouth, no secrets. Between the tsimmes and the honey cake with its spiking of slivered almonds, Bette had treated the table, as she had Kitty when first they met, to a resumé of her life. Despite the sophistication of her dress and the artifice of the face she had applied, there was, Kitty thought, a refreshing innocence to Bette. Ed and Mort were captivated. She fluttered between them like an attentive moth, making Kitty feel quite superfluous.

  Bette’s conversation, her monologue really, which erupted from her painted mouth like a silver stream, was animated, but it was when the time came for the prayers, for thanking God for the New Year meal and enabling his people to reach that particular season, that she surprised them all. She not only joined in with Kitty’s recital of the Grace but she sang the hundred and twenty-fourth psalm which preceded it with a voice so pure and a Hebrew so fluent that the kitchen was filled with melody and the company reduced to silence. Afterwards Bette told them that not only had she studied Hebrew into her late teens but had sung in the temple choir, and, although she no longer practised them, had not forgotten her accomplishments. With her virtuoso performance Bette seemed to relax. Kitty would not – pace the silver lamé – let her help with the dishes, and while she loaded the dishwasher with Maurice, Bette sat quietly on the sofa between Ed and Mort, and showed them pictures of her grandchildren. When Maurice came in with the coffee, a ritual in which he took pride and with which he would never allow Kitty to interfere, Bette asked if she could see his paintings, and reluctantly – he did not much care for the public baring of his soul – with a glance for help from Kitty, he agreed.

  Bette didn’t say they were “darling”. She didn’t speak. As he turned over his catalogue of wretchedness, his sombre chronicle of his people’s descent into the inferno, so that the skull-like heads, the bodies in their tattered rags, were caught for a moment in the lamplight, Bette watched in silence and could not have uttered if she had wanted to because in the face of such human degradation, there were not, even for her, any words.

  Afterwards, she did not ask Maurice about Kandinsky, it would have been like talking of birdsong to a man who had dwelled in hell. She sat on a chair by the window and told him about her former husbands and the illnesses from which each had died. It was after midnight when the telephone rang and Kitty rushed to take it.

  “Rachel,” she said excitedly into the receiver, and to the assembled company: “It’s Rachel! And a Happy New Year to you. Where are you?” She put a hand over the mouthpiece: “She’s in bed.”

  “They’re five hours ahead,” Bette said.

  “How was Sarah’s dinner?” Kitty said. “What do you mean you walked out?… Who brought the subject up?… Trust Beatty! He didn’t mean it, Rachel. Maybe Josh did say it but he didn’t mean it… Yes, we’ve had a lovely evening… Herb and Ed and Mort and my friend Bette. Bette used to sing in the temple choir. She’s got a wonderful voice. How are the children? Give my love to Patrick, and Carol and Alec, and Sarah. And Rachel…give your brother a ring in the morning and apologise, it’s not fair to Sarah in her condition… I know you’re in the same condition. I think of nothing else but the three of you… Don’t say you’ve no intention. Sleep on it… All right… And a happy New Year to everyone. Thank you for phoning, darling. God bless.”

  “She wishes you a happy New Year,” she said to Maurice.

  “Wonderful children,” Bette said.

  “Josh said Begin was behaving like a Nazi and Rachel walked out.”

  “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Maurice said.

  “I feel sorry for Sarah,” Kitty said. “After she’d gone to all that trouble.”

  “Sweet of her to call,” Bette said, trying to pour oil upon the troubled waters. “My kids don’t even know it’s New Year.”

  “5743,” Maurice said. “To find the Jewish year quickly you subtract 239 from the last three figures of the Gregorian year and add 5000: (1)982-239=743 + 5000 = 5743.”

  “The world is more than 6,000 years old,” Ed said.

  “Sure. The date is poetic really.”

  “She’s always been like that,” Kitty said.

  “Who?” Bette said.

  “Rachel. Takes after her father.”

  “She’ll get over it. Stop thinking about it.”

  “How can I stop thinking about it. If I wasn’t so far away…”

  “I’d better go,” Bette said, seeing that Kitty was upset and that it was best to leave her on her own.

  Ed and Mort sprang up like jack-in-the-boxes.

  “I’ll come down with you,” Ed offered.

  “It’s time I was off,” Mort said.

  Kitty found Bette’s gloves.

  “It�
�s been a divine evening,” Bette kissed Kitty. “Real homey.”

  “I’m glad you came.”

  “I’ll see you at class. My car will be in the shop for service.” She usually gave Kitty a lift to aerobics.

  “She’ll take a cab,” Maurice said.

  “May you have a real sweet year.” Bette embraced Maurice and winked at Kitty over his shoulder. “Take away 239 and add 5000. You learn something new every day.”

  Against a chorus of “Happy New Years”, flanked by Ed and Mort and with Herb bringing up the rear, she hobbled in her tight skirt across the hallway.

  “See you Tuesday, honey.” She put two scarlet tipped fingers to her lips and blew a kiss to Kitty. “Don’t be late.”

  She exited into the elevator.

  It had been her evening.

  Fourteen

  The day began much as any other. Maurice was already at his easel, putting the finishing touches of lamp black to the painting he called appositely “Agony” when Kitty had crept out of the apartment and taken the elevator downstairs to ask Joe to get her a cab.

  She was nervous now about cabs. Once she had flagged down a yellow car in the street, thinking it was a taxi, and a disreputable looking driver with glazed eyes had appraised her insolently before asking if she wanted a ride. She had given him the address of Bette’s building, not five blocks away, and had barely sat down on the naked springs when she began to have her doubts. Outside Bette’s the man had held out a lazy hand.

  “Ten dollars.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kitty said. She had done the journey many times and had never paid more than two. “Where’s the meter?”

  His lip curled. “In the trunk, lady!”

  Suddenly realising her mistake, and that it was not a regular taxi, she had handed over the money and made her escape, putting the price of it down to experience.

  “Morning, Mrs Shelton,” Joe said, coming from behind his desk where he was sorting mail. “Not very nice out there today. Look like it gonna’ rain.”

  Kitty waited beneath the canopy while Joe, with his magic fingers, went to whistle up a cab. Unusually, it took him almost fifteen minutes. Apologising for the delay, and blaming it on the lowering skies, he opened the door for her. “Take care!”

  Kitty gave the address of the church hall where she was to meet Bette and, engrossed in the shocking revelations from the Middle East which she had seen on breakfast TV in her studio, had paid off the cab before she realised, looking in her handbag where she usually kept it, that she had forgotten her key to the hall.

  As she leaned on the bell, realising that it was unlikely anyone would hear against the music – the class must already have started – the first drops of rain began to fall. The passing pedestrians produced umbrellas as if from nowhere, not slowing their pace as they put them up. Kitty had not brought hers. She tried knocking. A passer-by glanced at her curiously as she hammered at the door. She was getting wet. It would be quicker, she decided, to take a cab back and pick up her key which she remembered had got left behind when she changed her handbag.

  She stood on the corner, her hand raised. A cab stopped but a man in front of her, whom she hadn’t noticed, jumped in. The traffic, swishing by, made her dizzy as she watched it. Her light dress was getting soaked. To find an empty taxi in New York, as in any other city, when it was raining was like prospecting for gold. With the sound of Maurice’s voice in her ears cautioning her, she decided to walk. As she negotiated the avenues, stepping delicately to avoid the puddles, “walking” and “not walking” in accordance with the signals, her mind wandered from the forgotten key to the universal vilification of her people by the world press as they rushed to condemn Israel for a massacre they had no part in, while those who had perpetrated the crimes in the camps of Sabra and Chatila seemed to have been forgotten in an outburst of anti-Jewish hysteria.

  While Kitty knew the allegations and exaggerations not to be true, she found herself half believing the barrage of criticism and although the sins were the sins of others she was unable to stop herself feeling guilty. There was no doubt that the invasion of the Lebanon had brought death and destruction, and that it was a cruel business in need of a lot of justifying. Any Jew knew in his heart, however, that Israel would not kill for the sake of killing. Foreign analysts did not share the same sentiments. They blew up the horrors (accepting stories of Israel’s ferocity at face value without checking the sources) and did not even consider what western countries had done in similar circumstances without a quarter of the brouhaha.

  Take the last war alone. If Adolf Hitler had taken shelter in some apartment building alongside innocent victims, would anybody have had any compunction about shelling the apartment? There had been no reporters describing the victims, cross-examining the maimed or recording on television the sobs of surviving relatives when the British and Americans – without military necessity – had destroyed the city of Dresden on carnival night, killing more than one quarter of a million people including children still in their fancy dress, or when the Allies had sent five hundred planes to bomb an open city – houses, schools, hospitals, shops, the lot – to save the lives of its own soldiers. At the time it had seemed normal. True it had been a war and in times of peace values altered, but what was going on in Lebanon was also a war despite the fact that the media persisted in treating it as an outburst of gang violence. Its partiality was following ancient and well trodden paths in using Israel’s errors and shortcomings as a stick to beat her with. The Jews of Europe had been familiar with such policies and little, it seemed, had changed.

  Ruminating on such thoughts, Kitty, her head down, keeping close to the buildings to avoid the worst of the downpour, decided to take a chance and a short cut down a street which she knew was not particularly salubrious. After two months New York no longer seemed frightening and she forgot for long moments at a time the gentler world of London built to a more human scale. If it had not been for her loneliness she might almost have begun to love the city where Maurice felt so much at home. As it was, not an hour went by – no matter how involved she might be in a morning’s shopping with Bette or an afternoon’s exploration of its cultural delights with Maurice – that she did not think of her family. She was concentrating on Rachel, trying to picture her in her advanced pregnancy, she had always been so skinny, and thinking how the recent news was sure to set her wayward daughter even further apart from Josh, when having turned into the cross street she stopped – attracted by the photograph of a young girl who might have been Rachel – to read a flyer on a lamp post and realised that there was no chance she was going to make even the tail end of her class if she didn’t hurry, and that Bette would be wondering what had happened to her.

  Reading the message: “Missing. Joanna Katz-Rosenbaum… graduate student at Long Island University…last seen in the vicinity of the Metropolitan Museum in Central Park…” Kitty became aware not through observation, she was too engrossed in her thoughts, but by a kind of tingling at the back of her neck that she had left the bustle of the avenues and the shop windows with their early winter displays behind her, and had entered a kind of no-man’s land of the underbellies of buildings and bursting garbage cans. She couldn’t understand where everyone had suddenly disappeared to. It seemed she was almost alone among the dank shabby brownstones and conscious suddenly of feeling, apart from very wet, very isolated, very small. The street was not long and at the far end she could see the criss-crossing movement of the traffic. She tucked her handbag into the bend of her elbow and hurried on.

  She wasn’t sure when she first saw them. At one moment there seemed to be no one about and the next she was advancing towards a corrugated, graffiti-covered hoarding, against which lolled three youths, one in a white suit with matching cap and two in sweatshirts, who were watching her approach. In a moment of déjà vu she knew exactly what was going to happen, although she told herself that it was not. She had faced the situation before in her nightmares, waking co
ld with terror to find that there had been no nocturnal prowler, no loaded gun pointed in her direction, and that she was safe. She tried to concentrate upon her thoughts of Rachel and the new grandchildren she was expecting – the three new grandchildren – but they would not come in any recognisable pattern and she took a step, Rachel, a step, Carol, a step, Sarah. She wished Josh were here, or Bette, or Maurice whom she had promised that she would always take a cab. Perhaps one would come along – a car, anything, even a person, an everyday pedestrian, a human being going about his business.

  The youths, heads protected from the rain by baseball caps, were about twenty yards away and although they watched her timorous progress towards them, only their mouths moved, rotating rhythmically. She told herself that she was being foolish, but her imagination had never been fertile and she knew what she knew. She glanced to one side. In England there were always welcoming houses with their garden paths, small shops run by friendly Asians. The backs of the moist buildings stared blankly. Her legs moved, one after the other, but she did not move them. She was aware of the proximity of the young men but kept her gaze on the decreasing distance to the end of the street and did not look at them. She remembered, as a child, closing her eyes and thinking herself invisible because she had them shut! Perhaps they couldn’t see her. Perhaps she was too small. Against the towering buildings, between their peeling pillars, she felt like Alice in Wonderland when she’d drunk the potion, minute.