by Maisie Mosco
“Weak with not walking,” Sarah added.
But Bessie was not listening to them. She turned to Sarah anxiously. “I’m six months younger than Miriam, Ma.”
“And if you put on one of your smart frocks, which she can’t afford, and comb your hair the way you used to you’d maybe look it.”
Bessie sat down on the bed, but she did not get back into it. Sarah had stirred her fighting blood as she had cunningly intended.
“Does Miriam ever take Sammy’s dinner to the factory, Ma? Like I sometimes took David’s?”
“How do I know?” Sarah shrugged stirring it more. But she did not want to pursue this tactic until she had softened it with the next one. She took a package from her shopping bag. “Here, Bessie. Something to nosh.”
Bessie opened it eagerly, sweetmeats were still her only comfort.
“Your sister-in-law sent it.”
She eyed the Sachertorte as if it might be laced with poison.
Miriam had brought the cake to the Sandbergs’ when she and Sammy visited them the previous Saturday and Sarah had asked if she minded a slice being given to Bessie to cheer her up. Saying Miriam had sent it wasn’t really a lie, she told herself.
“Tell her thank you,” Bessie said biting into it. Her sweet tooth had won.
“You’ll tell her yourself next time you see her. They come to me every Shabbos for tea. And this week David’ll come because it’s my birthday.”
Bessie stopped eating and stiffened.
“If you feel well enough he’ll bring you with him.”
“They’ll carry her back on a stretcher if she walks from Cheetham Hill to Strangeways,” Auntie Rivka moaned.
“So I’ll go by tram, God will forgive me for riding on Shabbos after all I’ve been through,” Bessie said. Only over her dead body would David be in Miriam’s presence without her! And her aunt was getting on her nerves. “Why don’t you go downstairs and peel the potatoes for supper, Auntie? I’ll set the table myself.”
“She orders me about like a servant!”
Sarah maintained a diplomatic silence, she knew when to hold her tongue.
“After all I’ve done for her!”
“I’m very grateful, Auntie, but I didn’t ask you to do it,” Bessie reminded her, getting her best dress out of the wardrobe.
The misguided woman’s expression crumpled into distress. Why did her good deeds always reap this kind of reward? But her pride had been hurt as well as her feelings and she regarded her niece coldly. “You’re better enough to go downstairs and set the table, you can peel the potatoes also, I’ve got a house of my own to look after. Your uncle will come for my things.”
She left the room without glancing at Sarah and a few minutes later they heard her slam the front door.
Bessie stood in her nightdress looking suddenly lost. Auntie Rivka was the rock she had leaned upon for months. “Stay for supper, Ma,” she pleaded, afraid she would be unable to cope alone after doing nothing for so long.
Sarah felt sorry for her, but staying would not be in accordance with what she had come here to do. “You can give David a boiled egg to eat tonight,” she said kindly. “It’ll be better than a banquet to him, believe me, as long as you’re there at the table with him, well again.”
Before leaving, she went into the kitchen with Bessie and pointed to the blankets on the sofa. “Those you can put away in the cupboard now. And take my advice, let them stay there.” She kissed her daughter-in-law’s cheek. “While a man sleeps in his wife’s bed every night nothing can go wrong.”
The next day, David took his sandwiches to eat at his mother’s house in the dinner break.
Sarah gave him a bowl of soup to go with them. “So how come you’ve left the factory to look after itself?”
“I wanted to see you on your own.”
“Yes?”
“Yes! What did you say to Bessie?”
“Who me?”
David laughed. “I got a feinkochen for supper last night, but who cares!”
“She took the trouble to beat up the egg and fry it in butter is a good sign. To boil is easier.”
David put down his soup spoon and studied her placid face. “How did you get her to dress and go downstairs? And don’t pretend it wasn’t your doing. Auntie Rivka gave up.”
“Auntie Rivka!” Sarah exclaimed dismissively.
“And how did you get rid of her?”
“He wants to know all his mother’s secrets,” she smiled.
“Bessie said you didn’t tell her to go, she went because she wanted to.”
“It’s true.”
That was all Sarah told him and he never found out exactly what had transpired that afternoon, or that she had plotted it carefully in advance, move by move. But David was too overjoyed that his life was back on an even keel to care how it had happened. Living with Bessie was still not happiness, but not having to live in isolation anymore made him thankful for what he had.
Part Three
Consequences
Chapter 1
Sarah’s formidable reputation was enhanced by the ejection of Auntie Rivka from David’s life. When the family teased her about it she would laugh with them, but her private thoughts she kept to herself. Being a mother didn’t get easier when your children left the nest, the way you’d imagined it would when they were still young. You no longer had to cook and clean for them, but their problems were still yours.
Sometimes she thought about this at her Shabbos tea parties, when she looked at Esther with two small boys tugging at her skirts and a baby girl on her lap. Miriam and Bessie were mothers now, too, and Sarah would listen to the three of them discussing their infants’ teething troubles as if this was the biggest worry in the world and smile to herself because their real worries hadn’t begun yet.
But if being a mother was sometimes painful, to be a grandma was ecstasy. “So!” she said with satisfaction from behind her teapot one Shabbos afternoon. “Just look at those beautiful babies!”
“The year 1924 was a very good year for our family,” David laughed.
Sigmund’s eyes twinkled behind his pince-nez. “In more ways than one!” He eyed his chubby grandson whom Miriam was cuddling on her lap. “Without our Martin would we all be here like this together again?”
“You had to come to your senses sometime.” Sarah could never resist telling him so.
“I never lost them!” he retorted as he always did. “I only made it up with you for Martin’s sake, so he wouldn’t be saddled with grandparents not speaking to each other, like I told Abie when I spoke to him at the Brith.”
“Sure you did,” Abraham said comfortably, exchanging a smile with Sarah and Rachel. They knew Martin’s birth last September had been a welcome excuse for Sigmund to end the rift without losing face, but nobody expected him to admit it.
Sarah sipped her tea contentedly and watched Bessie lift the edge of little Shirley’s diaper to show Miriam a patch of rash on the child’s bottom. Children drew people closer as nothing else could and her daughters-in-law were now able to be in each other’s company without strain, each fitting into her own place in the family.
“Who’s a little angel?” Bessie cooed planting a kiss on Shirley’s ginger head, happier than she had ever been in her life. Being the mother of David’s child made her marriage feel secure and she exchanged a parental glance with him as the object of their mutual adoration threw her teething ring on the floor.
David hastened to retrieve it and give it back to her, shaking the silver bell attached to it to amuse her. She dropped it and gurgled when he bent down and picked it up again, not yet six months old but already aware her father was her willing slave.
Esther’s baby was lying on the rug playing with her fingers, a grave expression on her tiny face. She did not smile much and her dark eyes always looked thoughtful. Marianne had come into the world with the umbilical cord twisted around her neck and according to medical opinion ought not to have been alive. At fir
st she was considered delicate, no amount of feeding succeeded in transforming her into a chubby child; then it had occurred to Esther that her daughter was a minute replica of Sarah, whose birdlike proportions had always belied her strength. The resemblance became more marked as time went by and now everyone noticed it.
Sammy sat gazing affectionately at his wife and son, but Miriam seemed unaware of it. Her baby was the centre of her world and nothing else mattered. The inner glow, missing for so long, had returned to illuminate her lovely face and blazed like a lantern whenever she looked at Martin. She stroked the soft brown fuzz on his head, exulting that she now had someone she loved whom nobody could take away from her.
“Let Shirley and Martin lie on the rug with Marianne and kick their legs, it’s good for them,” Esther instructed her sisters-in-law to whom she was the voice of experience.
The two babies set up a howl immediately and Marianne joined in.
“Such fancy names these little ones have got, I can’t get used to it,” Sarah told Rachel above the din. The children had Jewish names also, to be used on religious occasions, but were called by the English ones on their birth certificates. “Their parents think they’ll grow up to be film stars!”
“A Charlie Chaplin in the family’d suit Dad fine,” Ben laughed.
“So I like the pictures,” Abraham defended himself. “Everyone needs to relax.”
“Such a relaxation I can do without!” Sarah snorted. She had been to the cinema once and pronounced it a waste of time. “Who needs to pay money to be made to laugh and cry and get nervous palpitations from seeing nice young girls tied to railway tracks?” She watched Bessie and Miriam lift their babies from the rug and was not surprised when Marianne was left to continue howling. Esther was a strict mother.
“How can you let her?” David reproached his sister.
“When she finds out it gets her nowhere she won’t do it. Why d’you think my Harry and Arnold’re so well behaved?” She glanced approvingly at her two little sons. Three-year-old Harry was shaking a cocoa tin full of dried peas to amuse Arnold. The Kleins had no money to spare for toys, but Ben, who had not had any when he was a child, made sure they were not short of improvised ones. “There! What did I tell you?” Esther added triumphantly to David when Marianne’s screams petered out.
“I thought she’d never stop!” Nathan exclaimed. Being uncle to five was something to boast about at school, but at home on Saturdays he would gladly have disowned them. He was sitting by the window reading The Iliad. Carl sat beside him and was also reading. They occupied the same spot every Saturday and it had become known in the family as “bookworm’s corner.”
Sigmund never read when Martin was there, but sat feasting his eyes on him.
Sarah got up to offer a dish of strudel and paused for a moment surveying the human web which the years had woven around her. How clever Nature was, the way she arranged things; a headful of red hair here, a short nose there and a long one somewhere else, mixing and blending this way and that, making each new person in some way or other the continuance of their line. And how could it happen that her grandson Martin had Rachel’s face? That David’s Shirley looked nothing like him or Bessie, but resembled Esther? Who had decreed that Marianne would be the image of herself? The wonder and mystery of it overwhelmed her.
“What’s the matter, Mother?” David asked when he saw the expression on her face.
“I was just having a little think.”
“Hm,” he said ominously and everyone laughed. Sarah’s “little thinks” could have shattering consequences.
“So, Rachel,” she said to her friend hiding the sorrow which welled up when she looked at her. She began refilling the many teacups. “We’ve got a nice big family now, eh?”
Rachel smiled contentedly. Her own family had only been extended by the addition of a son-in-law and one baby boy, but she thought of the Moritzes and Sandbergs as a single clan, as they all did. She was now unable to walk and had to be wheeled to the Saturday gatherings in her bath chair, but her spirit still burned bright. “The Almighty is good, Sarah,” she declared. He had given her a grandchild who’d brought them all together again.
“Sure He is, Rachel. And you’ll soon be better, out of that chair and dancing again,” Sigmund told her.
“Since when did I dance?”
“So you won’t dance, you’ll make the Sachertorte. Helga’s isn’t as good as yours.”
Helga smiled stiffly as she always did when her father spoke to her mother this way, and continued playing with Esther’s boys. She loved children, but life had dictated she wouldn’t have any of her own and sometimes she thought of the marriage offers she’d had during her years of widowhood. One had been from Moishe Lipkin, whom she liked, but she knew she could never leave her mother. The chances had come and gone, but while she was needed she had no regrets. She saw Miriam glance at her and knew it was because their father was still going on with his ridiculous talk.
“Remember how you used to walk faster than me, Rachel?” Sigmund was saying. “You’ll do so again, my dear.”
Why doesn’t he stop it? Miriam thought desperately. Mother knows she’ll never walk again, she’s accepted it. Why can’t he? How did Helga bear it? Seeing Mother slipping away and Father pretending she wasn’t really ill, never being able to forget it for a minute because she lived with them.
It was not just in his wife’s presence that Sigmund maintained the pretence. From the beginning he had refused to admit she was seriously ill, joking and laughing as he had when Rachel first showed Sarah her trembling hands.
He had not changed his habits, or paid her more attention, but still sat immersed in his books while she lay on her sofa, as if she was only inert because she felt tired and would soon get up to pour him a cup of coffee. It was as though believing it would make it real, that denying it meant it was not the case. How he had explained to himself his wife’s absence from their marital bed nobody knew. Helga heard him walking the floor every night, but passed no comment.
The family found his behaviour unnerving and his daughters suffered because of it. Only Rachel understood. The one concession he had made was to move house, so she could see more of her grandchild, but Miriam suspected he had agreed because it was what he wanted himself.
They now lived opposite her and she took Martin to visit them every day. But sometimes Sigmund would take him out in the pram whilst she did her housework and Helga would have to go looking for him if a customer arrived for a fitting.
David had moved his parents from Strangeways shortly after his daughter’s birth. It was inconceivable to him not to have them nearby. He had found them a spacious home on Heywood Street, which stretched between two points on Cheetham Hill Road, and Sarah was momentarily speechless when she saw the three-storey house with a much larger front garden than David’s. It had one at the back, too.
“All this for your father and Nat and me? You could fit six families into it,” she had exaggerated.
“What about Esther and Ben and their kids?” David had taken it for granted that his sister would continue living with them.
“They want a place of their own and why not?”
“So your grandchildren’ll come to stay the night and fill the rooms. And I’ll pay the rent.”
“You think your father would allow you to?”
“It’s you who gives the man his money when he calls. Father doesn’t have to know.”
The new house had a large dining room and David had bought an enormous table to be used when all the family came together for the Passover Seder and other Festivals. His mother had told him to return it to the shop, she did not own a cloth big enough for it. He bought her an enormous tablecloth instead; he was not going up in the world without taking his family with him, though the climb was not proving easy.
Sarah’s Sabbath tea parties were held in the front parlour and Salaman’s sofa was much sat upon these days.
“So how’s business, David?” Ben
asked when the women had gone to the kitchen to wash the dishes.
“How can it be?” David replied cryptically.
“People have to replace their crockery when they break it, but even for me it could be better,” Ben complained. “The folk who come to Flat Iron Market these days only come to look, they don’t have a penny to spare in their pockets.”
“A lot that Ramsay Mac did to make things better!” Abraham snorted.
Sigmund smiled. “You expected him to, Abie?”
The Labour Government had been and gone, Mr. Baldwin was currently beset by troubles with the miners and the economic climate abysmal. David had never been more glad the factory was not a union shop. His employees were on short time, but the personal bond between him and them had helped soften the blow. Nobody had called him a bloated plutocrat whose greed had brought about their plight, as was happening in other factories. They knew that when times were good again for him, they would also be good for them.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” Carl said lifting his head from the Manchester Guardian which he had been perusing. Abraham’s remark and his father’s reply had just filtered through to him. Politics interested him, but he viewed them dispassionately as he did life and seemed to have no desire for active participation in either. “It’ll take years for real Socialism to come to this country.”
David, who did not want it to, cut the discussion short by turning his attention to Nathan. “How’s school going, Nat?”
Nathan looked hesitant.
“Not getting bad marks are you?”
“Could we go into the dining room, David? I have to talk to you.”
Nathan could not recall when he had first known for certain he didn’t want to be a doctor. The sight of blood, or being with someone who was ill, always distressed him. He couldn’t look at Rachel without feeling guilty because he was healthy and she was going to die. And the thought of cutting up a human body in order to learn how it functioned sickened him.
This was how the deepening conviction that medicine was not for him had begun, but lately something positive had been added to it. Latin and Greek were his best subjects and the head of the school classics department had spoken of entering him for an Oxford Scholarship. Manchester Grammar sent boys to Oxford and Cambridge every year, but it had not occurred to Nathan that this was within his reach.