“I don’t need anything,” Kitty said. She was not extravagant and had a wardrobe full of clothes at home suitable for Florida which she would ask Carol to send her but she allowed Bette to bring her some appropriate outfits from which she would choose one to wear at her wedding. Bette tried to get her into eau de nil or old rose but Kitty, being practical, insisted on something she would get some wear out of afterwards and settled for a classic grey suit, letting Bette have her head over the accessories and her own outfit as Kitty’s attendant.
There was one disappointment. Rachel was not coming. In a graphic letter to Kitty, in which she had explained how she had been packing up her belongings so that Patrick could make the move to Putney, where they had found a flat, while she was in New York, she described that suddenly moving her legs had felt like dragging around two lumps of wood, and that her normally tiny face had become puffy. She had made an appointment at the clinic where it was found that her blood pressure was raised and they had said that she must on no account travel, and that it was unwise to move house and that she must either come into hospital where she could rest or go where she could be looked after. At Patrick’s insistence – and against her will – Rachel had gone to stay with his parents in Winnington Road where his mother could wait on her. She was devastated not to be coming to New York for Kitty’s wedding.
It had cast a blight on Kitty’s happiness.
“What do you think is the matter with her?” she asked Maurice.
“Sounds like toxaemia.”
“Is there a cure?”
“Birth.”
“She’s got another six weeks,” Kitty said.
While Maurice was out picking up the travel documents for the honeymoon trip she had taken his medical encyclopaedia from the shelf and found “toxaemia” in the index. When he returned with the tickets – “The Royal Caribbean Cruise Line welcomes Dr and Mrs Morgenthau to the ‘Song of Norway’ and wishes them Bon Voyage” – Kitty was sitting with the appropriate volume on her lap.
“‘One in ten women suffer from toxaemia in their first pregnancy’,” she quoted, “‘and are considered at risk’.” Maurice took away the book, but Kitty could see from his expression that Rachel’s symptoms must be considered seriously. That she would hate it at the Klopmans’ Kitty had no doubt. While Hettie was kind enough – there was not a selfish bone in her body – her lifestyle was anathema to Rachel who would not take kindly to the enforced proximity with Herbert and his jokes.
So it was that at her wedding Kitty, like Maurice, had had no one of her own. Rachel’s discovery of the complication of her pregnancy had come too late for Josh to cancel his dental patients and Carol was in no condition to travel had she wanted to.
Two days before the wedding Kitty had attended an identification parade at the 19th Precinct. A row of youths with numbered placards round their necks were lined up before a two way mirror and she was asked to point out her assailants. She thought one of them looked vaguely familiar and he was asked to step closer, then she was by no means sure and shook her head. The men were marched away and Kitty was not sorry for she did not want to be responsible for putting any mother’s son in prison, but she was glad that she would have the respite of Florida before she must once more face the New York streets.
The wedding had been dignified and simple: the most moving moment when Maurice unequivocally stepped on the glass. Bette had insisted on providing the wedding breakfast and the little party had gone back to her flat for a sumptuous buffet catered by Fraser-Morris, after which, in an embarrassing shower of confetti, they had left for the airport.
The days following the wedding had not yet resolved themselves in Kitty’s mind which was awhirl still with new and unusual sensations. By the time they had left Palm Beach for Miami and boarded the “Song of Norway”, on which they would spend the next seven days, Kitty’s last doubts about the wisdom of her decision had been resolved, and when she looked at her reflection, if she half closed her eyes she could convince herself that the face which regarded her, alight with happiness, was that of a girl. She did not think about Sydney. He was laid to rest peacefully, for all time, in her past. As the ship, cutting its way through the grey, uncompromising water, steamed in the direction of Cuba, Kitty, her face buffeted by the wind, looked forward with relief and contentment, to her new life.
That it would not be without problems she did not delude herself. They had already run into difficulties. Maurice, an inexperienced cruiser, was not gregarious, and the knowledge that he and Kitty must sit at a table with others in the “King and I” dining-room had filled him with alarm.
The only activity in which he had so far joined (in accordance with International Law which required that all passengers be mustered at their lifeboat stations to be instructed in emergency procedure no more than twenty-four hours after leaving port) had been the boat drill.
Their table companions proved to be pleasant enough. Chuck (“What you all doin’ today?”) and Marlene (whose fourteen stones were not minimised by stretch pants by day and gossamer layers of pastel chiffon by night) from South Carolina, and Wayne and Susan, an ingenuous couple from Milwaukee with anti-seasick patches behind their ears, who had won the trip playing “Guess the Price”. Kitty, all the way from England, with her funny accent and her hesitation the first night over the broiled fillet of Caribbean grouper about whose kashrut she had doubts, was the centre of attention. When the curiosity of their table companions – “Are you retired?” and “What line are you in?” – was directed towards Maurice, it was Kitty who answered. After the dessert he excused himself, telling Kitty to take her time over coffee and that he would see her on deck.
“My husband’s not very sociable,” Kitty said when he’d gone – it was the first time she had used the nomenclature in reference to Maurice. “He likes his own company.”
“My father’s the same,” Marlene said. “They get like that when you’ve been married a long time.”
“We’re on our honeymoon,” Kitty said without thinking, and realised her mistake the moment the words were out. She didn’t tell Maurice of her slip but the next evening, after the Cherries Jubilee, the white jacketed maitre d’ from Manila, flanked by a posse of waiters, entered the dining-room bearing a miniature wedding cake which to Kitty’s mortification he put on the table in front of them, with “the Captain’s compliments.”
The band struck up with a chorus of “Second Time Around” and the entire second-sitting rose to its feet and applauded. Kitty, wishing the decks would open up, consigning her to the deep, looked at Maurice. He took it like a man. Afterwards, in the cabin, she apologised.
“I’ll get over it,” he said, but she could see that it was not easy.
He did not avail himself of the ship’s diversions. While Kitty went to the Welcome Aboard talk (“Turn to the person on your left and say, hi!”), the Grandmothers’ Bragging Session (where she circulated pictures of Debbie and Lisa and Mathew and announced proudly that her quota of grandchildren was shortly to be doubled), and the daily Walk-a-Thon, where she strode round the deck determined to win her yellow ship’s sun visor and tee-shirt, Maurice sat with a book in the lee of the Promenade Deck or in a sheltered niche, protected from the sun by his white hat. She went alone to the South Pacific Lounge where the moustached cruise director (together with his “lovely wife and singing partner, Sheree”), masterminded the Bon Voyage Get Together, to the Friday night service for the Jewish passengers in the Carousel Lounge where they served matzoh ball soup beneath a star of David sculpted in ice, to the Bridge Tournament in the Lounge of the Midnight Sun, and the afternoon screening (curtains closed over the portholes) of Barbara Streisand in “Yentl”.
Maurice’s withdrawal did not perturb her. She appreciated his tolerance of her own foibles and did not expect him to alter the habits of a lifetime. While he was happy for her to enjoy to the full the life on board ship, Kitty was content in the certainty that when she went in search of her new husband she would
know instinctively in which secluded corner of the vessel she would find him.
There was one distraction on offer of which Maurice availed himself. Each evening after dinner would find him at the blackjack tables or watching the roulette wheel in the Casino Royale. Kitty was not a gambler. She stood behind the silent Maurice as he threw his chips on to the baize cloth, and it was only when they had been at sea for three nights that she realised that he always bet on the same numbers. The familiar sequence of them bothered her until with a shock she realised that the 2 and the 9 and 5 and the 3 and 1, monotonously repeated, were the numerals of the concentration camp number she saw nightly engraved on his arm. When she realised what he was doing she no longer cared to watch him play. She’d wait for him on deck and, to the faint sounds of “My Way” or the “Tritch Tratch Polka” coming from the dance floor, they’d stroll arm in arm beneath the stars, and Maurice’s tongue, for Kitty alone, would become unleashed and in the mutual shorthand of small talk and ideas they would pass the time until bed.
Kitty, in her reverie, leaning on the ship’s rail, wondered sometimes if she deserved such happiness, two bites at life’s cherry when there were so many unfortunate people – her sister-in-law Mirrie, for instance – who had not even managed one. She did not hear Maurice come up behind her but was aware that he was there. When he put his arms round her she turned to him and, as the “Song of Norway” scythed rhythmically through the awe-inspiring deeps towards Grand Cayman and Jamaica, laid her head on his accommodating shoulder.
Twenty
While Kitty enjoyed the Caribbean sun, Rachel railed against her enforced inactivity in Patrick’s parents’ house in Winnington Road. She was not used to being idle. She was never ill and had always felt superior to her sister Carol, made of what Rachel considered less stern stuff and prey throughout her life to a succession of minor illnesses either real or imagined. That her own pregnancy, in which Rachel had been revelling in her image of earth mother, might turn out to be complicated had not entered her head. She who had been convinced of her influence on events – from conception to the therapeutic rendering of “Ten Green Bottles” – and that any deviation from the norm, or weakness, was in the mind, had received a blow to her pride. It was mortifying to be reminded that the workings of one’s body were not, as she had previously considered, entirely under one’s own control.
As she lay in bed in Hettie’s guest-room with its William Morris curtains, its matching bedspreads, and its toning carpet which unsubtly picked up the dominant yellow of the print, Rachel had more than enough time to think. She had already entered the lists with her mother-in-law who, now that she had Rachel physically in her clutches, had increased her efforts to influence the life of her first grandchild even before it was born. As she brought up bowls of home-made broth or bunches of grapes (as if she were really ill) for Rachel’s delectation, she would sit on the bed and, her eyes sparkling with enthusiasm, tell her daughter-in-law of the crib bedecked with a million layers of peach tulle – such as had graced the royal nursery – or a streamlined pram (which converted with a “hey-presto” into a carrycot) which she had seen. Rachel, having bought a Moses basket at Camden Lock, and a sling in which she would transport her child for the first four months of its life – after which it would be the folding buggy – was unmoved.
She did not dislike Hettie who, glad to have some purpose to her life, was killing her with daily doses of kindness, but there seemed to be no meeting point between them. She fed her patient tit-bits from the delicatessen when Rachel yearned for her familiar casseroles of mung beans and tofu, and came, seeking to please her, into the bedroom with armfuls of glossy magazines (women as object) and copies of Maisie Mosco.
Their only mutual interest was Kitty, and already, each reading the other her postcards with the news of the wedding and the forthcoming honeymoon in Florida, the subject had been done to death. Despite herself, when Kitty in juxtaposition to Maurice was discussed, Rachel, irrationally, still felt her hackles rise. While her good wishes to her mother on the telephone and by letter had been genuine enough – she dearly wanted her to be happy – something within her still screamed “Judas” and she dreamed many a night of her dead father. No matter how hard she tried to sort the matter out in her head, to make Kitty’s welfare her prime concern, her mother, in committing herself to Maurice Morgenthau, had gone down several notches in Rachel’s estimation. To hear Hettie discuss the romance as if her mother’s elderly suitor was Prince Charming and Kitty herself Cinderella, sickened Rachel and she preferred to direct the conversation to Hettie’s main concern, what she was going to put on her daughter-in-law’s tray, with its drawn-thread traycloth, for her next meal.
Herbert, surprisingly, was more congenial. Rachel had even grown used to the jokes. Delighted to have a captive audience he would come up to her bedroom as soon as he got home at night and sit on her bed, trying to make her laugh: “A Jewish doctor gave a patient six months to live but when the man didn’t pay he gave him another six months!
“How’s your mother enjoying Florida? Mr Cohen comes home one night and starts to pack his bags.
“‘So where are you going?’ asks his wife.
“‘To Tahiti.’
“‘Tahiti. Why Tahiti?’
“‘Simple. Every time you make love there they give you $5.’
“Then Mrs Cohen starts packing her bags.
“‘And where are you going?’ asks Mr Cohen.
“‘I’m also going to Tahiti.’
“‘Why?’
“‘I want to see how you make out on $10 a year!’
“Did you hear the one about a group of Jewish women who wanted to improve their intellectual level? No more talk of maids or children – but only politics and social questions: Poland, El Salvador. Afghanistan, the Bomb. Then one said ‘And what about Red China?’ ‘I love it! I love it!’ says another member of the group. ‘Especially on a white tablecloth!’”
Once she had reconciled herself to her father-in-law’s stories – some of which were not unamusing – his commitment to find the Jew in everything, and his appraisal of people according to the degree of their support for Israel, Rachel found him straightforward, informative and entertaining, and loved to hear stories of the famous old-time Jewish coach “Yussel the muscle”, who had managed Max Schmeling and the boxers, Ted “Kid” Lewis and Jack “Kid” Berg, who had come out of the East End after the First World War.
“Houdini was a Jew,” Herbert said one night as he gave Rachel the evening paper. “His name was Ehrich Weiss and he was born in Budapest. His father was a rabbi. They called him Ehrie for short, which when they went to America became ‘Harry’. He took ‘Houdin’ from Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, ‘The Father of Modern Magic’, and later, as a stage musician, added the ‘i’, Harry Houdini.”
Through Herbert, whose eyes lit up at the mere recitation of their names, Rachel learned to know the Jewish footballers, Abe Rosenthal – his hero – Bela Guttman from Hungary, Miles Spector, the Chelsea left winger, Avi Cohen and Mordecai Spiegler from present day Israel over which country, Rachel discovered, she and her father-in-law were on the same side. Herbert Klopman, of everyone she knew, endorsed her political views.
Sometimes Herbert’s mother, old Mrs Klopman, coming into Rachel’s room without knocking whenever the mood took her, interrupted the discussions, picking up the fag ends of the conversation and adding her own two penn’orth.
“A lot of stuff and nonsense,” she’d say when the subject came round to the military actions of the Palestinian refugees. “My grandmother, God rest her soul, was a refugee, but I ask you, did that make her a terrorist? Sure it did not.”
When her son talked about “the Jews”, she’d say: “For heaven’s sake, Herbert, it’s as bad as talking about ‘the Irish’, you dehumanise people, put them in a lomp, isolate them from the human race.”
Rachel got on well with Patrick’s grandmother. When Herbert was at business and Hettie out shopping, at w
hich she seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time, or at the Children’s Home, she’d have long discussions with old Mrs Klopman whose views on childbirth seemed to have skipped a generation. From the choice of cradle on which she sided with Rachel against Hettie (“Sure, as long as you’ve got a drawer to lay them in”) to the management of the newborn, their views coincided. According to old Mrs Klopman (who didn’t hold with hospital maternity wards where the babe was put behind glass in a cot to cry itself to sleep because nobody came nigh nor by), he should rest in enfolding arms near to his mother’s heart, hearing the sound of her voice, close to the warmth of her breast.
“Carol’s having a nanny,” Rachel said. “She’s decorating the nursery in the new house with yellow ducklings.”
“Yellow ducklings or no, it’ll not be different from the maternity ward,” old Mrs Klopman said. “He’ll be wanting and waiting from one feed to the next. Will I tell you a secret, Rachel? I had Herbert at the breast until he was two years old.”
Carol had been to see her, and Sarah, each commiserating with the unfortunate turn Rachel’s pregnancy had taken. Josh had made enquiries but she refused to allow him to visit.
Carol looked out of the window of the train as it trundled towards Godalming and hugged to herself the surprise that she was going to give Alec. Because of the persistent nausea and discomfort which had prevented her both from choosing her own decorations for the new house (apart from the yellow ducklings) and getting down as often as she would like to Godalming, Morris Goldapple had insisted on another ultrasound scan, although strangely enough in the last few days the malaise which had dogged her for the past nine months had lifted, and despite her bulk she felt an unaccustomed energy, a lightness of mind and body.
To Live in Peace Page 17