The Lemon Tree

by Helen Forrester

  Not daring to part with so much as a garnet from his wife’s jewellery, unless he was starving, Charles Al-Khoury used the remainder of his little store of gold coins to augment his bales of silk with some dress lengths in other good materials. He found a tiny niche of a store on a main street crowded with immigrants. The door was strong and the windows had good wooden shutters. He paid a week’s rent on it to a Greek immigrant, who had been in Chicago rather longer than he had.

  Before opening his precious purchases, he bargained for cleaning help from a young negress who lived nearby.

  Sally earned her living as a daily cleaning lady, and she came for two successive evenings to give the store a thorough scouring. As Helena said to her, ‘You can’t sell material for clothes if it’s got dusty.’

  A quick grin flashed across the black woman’s lined face, as she agreed. On her second evening, she brought a toffee apple with her for Helena, and she watched with pleasure when the grim little face lit up at the sight of the gift.

  Sally enjoyed working for people who treated her politely. She became interested in the fortunes of the tiny store and continued to clean it, though sometimes Charles Al-Khoury had to defer paying her during bad weeks. She would tease him good-naturedly about his broken English, which he took in good part, being anxious to improve it. She drilled Helena in the English names of everything around her, and Helena became devoted to the strong, graceful woman.

  Mr Ghanem, the Lebanese who had kept Charles’s bales of silk for him, was very nearly as poor as Charles himself. He had been in the States for a number of years with his own small business as an importer. He had, however, speculated in land and had gone bankrupt. He now had a small fruit and vegetable shop. Because they had been at school together, he had kept in touch with Charles sporadically over the years, and it was his presence in Chicago that had first given Charles the idea of beginning life again in that city.

  It was Mr Ghanem who had met them at the station and had taken them in a borrowed horse-drawn delivery van to a room he had obtained for them. When Charles’s shop was ready, Mr Ghanem’s half-grown sons helped the new immigrant move the consignment of silk from their family’s basement onto the shelves of the new store. Mrs Ghanem had done her best to comfort poor Leila Al-Khoury, and she gradually emerged from her prostration, white and thin, but in her right mind.

  Much later on, Leila told Helena, ‘I thought I’d go mad. There we were, in this strange country; nobodies, lost in a sea of nobodies. God curse the Druze – and may the Turks burn in hell!’ The words seemed extraordinary, coming from a beautiful seductive woman, once again restored to health; but Helena understood, and thought burning was too good for Turks.

  Leila had continued sadly, ‘Outside that tiny room in which we existed, so few spoke Arabic – and nobody seemed to have heard of French! And the noise of screaming women and howling children in the other rooms seemed unending.’

  Helena nodded agreement. Watching immigrant children struggle for existence had made her feel that the last thing she wanted in life was to be a mother.

  ‘When Mrs Ghanem suggested that I go to work like she did, I was really shocked,’ Leila confided. ‘But we needed ready money so badly that finally I agreed. It distressed your father very much.’ She giggled suddenly, at the memory of her hard-pressed husband’s agitation at the suggestion.

  She giggled again, and then added, ‘I must’ve looked a sight. I wore a second-hand black skirt, a black blouse and second-hand boots. I wore a head veil, like I had done in Beirut, and I felt terrible. It seemed to me that every man I passed stared at me.

  ‘The attic we worked in was so badly lit that I could hardly see how to thread my needles. There, Mrs Ghanem and I sat on a piece of sacking for ten hours a day, stitching on buttons and finishing the buttonholes on men’s suits. I’ve worked harder since then, but never in such confinement; I had to watch that my tears didn’t fall on the fine cloth. What a time!’ She threw up her hands helplessly.

  Helena put her arms round her mother’s neck. ‘Poor Mama,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I lived,’ responded her mother philosophically. ‘But I didn’t want you to be confined like that, so your dear father took you to help him in the store.’

  ‘And he taught me how to run a business,’ Helena had remembered gratefully. ‘How to organize it and be neat and methodical. Buy cheap; sell dear. Have the patience of Job. Have a first-class product for the money. Keep two sets of books – one for the tax collector, and one which tells you what’s really happening. Make friends – which I haven’t done very well. Do favours and collect on them when you need to. Never forget a name – and smile, child, smile.’ He would grin at her from under his black moustache. ‘And don’t trust anybody, unless you have to,’ he would reiterate pithily in Arabic.

  She would laugh back at him. But she learned, and never quite trusted anyone – except Joe Black.

  Afraid to trust a bank, afraid of his wife being attacked in the street if she wore it, Charles hid some of Leila’s jewellery in various spots in his tiny shop, a necklace wrapped in a scrap of black silk under a beam in the ceiling, several rings under a floorboard, a pair of hair ornaments in a box stuck to the underside of his long counter. He instructed Helena that, if he were out, she was never to leave anyone alone in the shop for a single second, including Sally.

  Leila sewed two gold chains into the waistband of her ugly serge skirt, and her best emerald necklace was carried in a linen moneybelt round her husband’s waist. Spread out like this, they agreed, they were less likely to be robbed of all of it; it was capital, partly inherited and partly carefully bought since their marriage; it was not to be used, except in the expansion of the dress material business, if they had some success with it; or, if that failed, to keep them from starvation.

  In the store, Helena was in her element. She watched with care how her father set about establishing his new business, learned how to set up the bookkeeping, how to find suppliers and, most important of all, how to find customers. She would sit unobtrusively in the background while he bargained for bankrupt stock from other businesses or cajoled a lady who wanted the price of a dress length reduced, and when his English failed him, she quietly translated – though her own grasp of the language was not very good. When they had a quiet hour, he would reminisce about the family business in Beirut, and, when he found she was interested, would go into detail about its organization, its employees, and its links with distant countries. He was astonished that she knew and understood much of its detailed running already. She laughed at his astonishment and reminded him how he used to take her down to the warehouses to give her a change. ‘I used to listen to you talking to people – and when I grew bigger, I used to ask Bachiro to show me the papers that seemed to be like oil flowing to facilitate the movement of everything coming in and going out.’

  Her father laughed. ‘You did? You nosy little person!’

  ‘I wasn’t nosy,’ she replied indignantly. ‘I was really interested in what you and Uncle James and Grandpa were doing. I kept thinking that if I had been a boy, you would have begun to keep me by your side and teach me everything.’

  ‘Well, you’re a great help to me now, little flower. I don’t know how I would manage without you.’

  Her big eyes shone at the compliment, and he thought that he should get her married as soon as he could, before the harshness of their life in Chicago toughened her too much. Men liked gentle amenable women; a ruthless trader would not appeal to them.

  But, without realizing that he was doing it, he had already inculcated in her the basic principles of organization, enterprise, forethought and quick decision-making which were to be her strength in times to come.

  Chapter Five

  The two rooms above Charles Al-Khoury’s shop in Chicago were occupied by Polish immigrants. When they moved out, he again bargained with his Greek landlord and succeeded in renting the rooms for little more than he was already paying for the shop. Triumphantly,
he got Sally to clean the rooms and then he installed his wife and daughter in them.

  The tiny store and the flat above it became Helena’s world.

  She carried samples of materials to the houses of well-to-do ladies, when requested; and in the shop she made tea for women who began to discover the fine quality of Charles’s stock. They sat by his counter and talked haughtily to him, under the impression that they were bargaining successfully for a better price than others obtained; dressmakers, who also came, always got materials at a better price, but they always received a lower grade silk. As her father warned her, ‘Dressmakers are always poor; you can’t get more money out of them than they have. Remember that!’

  Helena was allowed to handle swatches from the fat bales on the shelves, and she soon learned what constituted a good dress length. Her English rapidly became better than his, so he encouraged her to write his business letters for him and then to keep the accounts. Though she did not write her father’s letters in Arabic to Uncle James, she sometimes saw them. It was apparent that her father felt that Uncle James was quite mad; he was boiling soap in his landlady’s wash boiler and was selling it door-to-door in Liverpool.

  The bales of material were heavy, and Charles lifted them himself. Helena watched with anxiety the sweat pour down his face, as he moved the cotton-swathed rolls from shelf to counter to show them to customers, and, later, lifted them back onto the shelf.

  One day, when he had gone with swatches of material to see a particularly high-class dressmaker and Helena was watching the shop for him, Sally remarked to her, ‘Your pa’s doing too much.’ She was polishing the old wooden counter to a fine sheen, as she spoke, and did not appear to expect a reply.

  Helena’s heart seemed to miss a beat, as the implied threat of illness sank in. From then on, she insisted that she be allowed to help with the tidying-up of the shop, but she was a skinny youngster without much power in her arms; and he would laugh and take the bundles from her to lay them on the shelves.

  Apart from his stock, American women found the Lebanese shopkeeper charming and they recommended the store to their friends. The tiny business began to prosper. The Al-Khourys hoarded every cent they could.

  At the end of six months, Charles insisted that his wife give up her job with the tailor and stay at home. ‘If we are very, very careful, we can manage,’ he assured her. ‘I don’t like you doing menial work.’

  Helena took her mother for granted; she did not realize that she possessed unusual beauty, and that, as she learned to dress in Western clothes, her father felt jealous when other men looked at her. He wanted her at home, not veiled like a Muslim woman but decently bundled up like a good Maronite.

  Leila Al-Khoury was thankful to be released from the tailor’s stuffy attic, but she refused to wear her native dress or veil her hair. She had fallen in love with hats and bought herself a plain black straw which she trimmed with shreds of silk from her husband’s shop.

  With this imaginative concoction on her head, she pressed herself lovingly against her husband and assured him that he had nothing to worry about. He was partially mollified, though the flowerlike face framed by the hat’s brim was, he felt uneasily, very attractive.

  Helena had not inherited her mother’s beauty. Though she was not ugly, she had her father’s strong nose and wide mouth. She was sallower than Leila and there was no hint of pink in her cheeks; and her long oriental eyes with their secretive, sidelong glances were too foreign for Western taste. The tumbling black mass of her hair was restrained in a bun at the back of her head and gave little hint of its richness. Amid the babble of thousands of immigrants, as a skinny young girl she passed unremarked. Until she met Joe Black.

  Curled up alone in a feather bed in Liverpool, her dream passed from the nightmares of the Lebanon and Chicago, to Joe.

  She smiled in her sleep, as she seemed to hear herself saying to him cryptically, ‘You never gave me toffee apples.’ And his laughing back at her and saying, ‘I never thought of them. Want one?’

  Joe had his own ideas of gifts. In her dream, she saw him lounge into their living-room, the original log cabin in which her stepfather had first lived in Canada. Peeking out of his jacket was a tame grey fox, a birthday gift.

  One Christmas, he had brought her a muff made from a marten fur he had trapped; his mother had cleaned and tanned the skin and he had then given it to another Cree woman who had fashioned it for him. Sometimes, when he had been south to see his grandfather, he brought her a little opium to smoke, bargained from a lonely Russian farmer who had established his own patch of poppies, or, at other times, a small packet of tobacco from Virginia, passed from hand to hand across a continent, in trade.

  The rising sun began to push long fingers between the heavy velvet curtains of her bedroom in Liverpool, and she sleepily stretched out to touch him. But he was six thousand miles away, harvesting a hay crop.

  Chapter Six

  Leila Al-Khoury lamented bitterly that it was Mr and Mrs Ghanem who had brought the typhoid into their Chicago home. The infection had, in fact, sneaked through the tumble-down, crowded neighbourhood like a smouldering fire; but Mr Ghanem was the first person to die from it.

  The local inhabitants were used to illnesses which ran their course, and the patients were nursed at home. Though guesses were made, no name was put to the sickness. Immigrants had little money, so doctors were rarely called.

  Charles Al-Khoury, worked to a shadow of his former self, was in no state to withstand such a virulent infection. The Al-Khourys knew that Mr Ghanem was also ill. His wife told Leila that it was ‘Something he’s eaten.’ It was assumed that in both cases the fever would go away and the diarrhoea would ease, if the patients were kept on a liquid diet. Meanwhile, Helena served in their tiny shop and Leila nursed her husband.

  When Mr Ghanem died, leaving a widow with five sons to feed, Leila realized, in a panic, that this was no ordinary illness. She sent for a doctor, only to be scolded by him in English she barely understood for not calling him earlier. Charles died in her arms.

  Once more, Leila tore her clothes, and the household rang to shrieks of mourning. Both she and a terrified Helena were devastated, as was Mrs Ghanem in her tiny home. Other neighbours, afraid of being infected themselves, left small gifts of food at the shop door, but refused to come in.

  Only Sally walked briskly up the stairs to the Al-Khoury flat, to bring some common sense into their lives. Hiding her own sorrow for a man she secretly adored, she instructed a grief-stricken Helena to get back to the store and mind it. ‘I’ll look after your ma.’

  Helena had obeyed, but she quickly found herself in difficulties. Men delivering cotton and silk her father had ordered through middlemen refused to leave the goods without her father’s signature. ‘You’re too young to sign for it. You can pay cash, if you like,’ she was told.

  ‘Could Mother sign for it?’ she asked, afraid of parting with the small sum in the secret drawer of the old till.

  A man delivering a roll of silk had hesitated at this suggestion, but finally said uneasily that he did not think his company would accept a woman’s signature, and went away with the roll still on his shoulder.

  Beating down her increasing terror, she served customers from the existing stock with her sweetest smile, as she struggled with the heavy rolls. She knew that, unless she could buy replacement materials, the business was doomed.

  Oblivious of the impending end to their sole source of income, Leila sat cross-legged on her bed, allowing Sally and Helena to minister to her. Occasionally, she would fling herself down on the pillows in a fresh burst of weeping.

  Between bouts, Helena asked her urgently, ‘Couldn’t you run the business, Mama? I believe if you took it in hand, the suppliers would accept you – or perhaps we could import some silk direct from China?’ She sighed, and got up to pull back the closed curtains to let in the evening sun.

  Leila put down the coffee her daughter had brought her, turned her blotched face
away from the light, and began to cry again.

  Helena went back to her, to sit beside her and put her arms round her. ‘Mama, dear, listen to me, please. If you can’t help me, we’ll have to close the shop – we don’t make anything like enough to employ a manager, even supposing we could find an honest one.’

  Leila wept on.

  As she patted her mother’s back in an effort to comfort her, Helena said savagely, ‘I know what to do – but nobody will trust me. The salesman from Smithson’s chucked me under the chin this morning, as if I were a baby. He actually said, “Pity you’re not a boy!”’

  ‘Mama, could we sell something to get money, so that I can pay cash for stock?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about business,’ her mother sobbed, and continued to moan into the pillows.

  In despair, Helena held a big sale and then shut the shop. She made just sufficient to pay their debts, except for one.

  ‘Sally, dear. I don’t have any money left to pay you. Instead, I saved these for you.’ She proffered a package containing several pretty ends of rolls that she had been unable to sell.

  Sally bent and hugged her. She sniffed, and then said, ‘You don’t have to worry about me, hon. There was many a time when your pa couldn’t pay me. You and your ma are welcome to anything I can do.’

  Before letting her out of the door, Helena clung to her. ‘Thank you, Sally. Thank you.’

  Left alone, she searched the little shop to retrieve the remaining bits of jewellery hidden there. ‘I’d better take a good look upstairs, as well,’ she thought, as she wrapped the pieces up in a scrap of cotton. ‘If we don’t pay the rent we’ll be thrown out fast.’

  As she tucked the little parcel well down into her skirt pocket, she cried helplessly. She was nearly fourteen years old, tall for her age and very thin, with eyes that were sadly old for one so young and feet that seemed too big for her stature.