by Maisie Mosco
“There has to be a reason?” Sigmund said unbuttoning his coat and avoiding her eye.
“With you, yes,” Sarah replied bluntly. “In all the years we’ve known each other, whenever you’ve paid me a morning visit it’s been for something.” She had a good idea what the something might be, and Sigmund’s demeanour was confirming it. “Remember when we lived in Strangeways and our children were young, how you used to walk in through the back door when I wasn’t expecting you? In those days you were like a mouthpiece for David, always encouraging his impossible ideas,” Sarah smiled though she had not smiled at the time.
“So here I ring the front doorbell, coming the back way is a longer walk. And David doesn’t need me to speak for him anymore,” Sigmund said brusquely, swallowing his regret that his mentorship of the young David Sandberg had led to nothing.
Sarah put on her overall again – with Sigmund Moritz she did not stand on ceremony – and began the delicate process of pulling her pastry to make it paper-thin.
“When Helga does that it always breaks,” Sigmund remarked.
“It has to have just the right amount of oil in it.” Sarah stretched the dough carefully with her small, strong fingers. “So?” she said questioningly. “To watch me make strudel for the Shabbos tea party you haven’t come.”
Sigmund’s gaze roved casually to the brass candlesticks on the mantelpiece and the gleaming mortar and pestle that matched them, but Sarah could feel a sudden tension emanating from him, as if he were steeling himself.
“Maybe I came to ask you to make an extra piece,” he said quietly.
He’s going to ask if he can bring his lady-friend, Sarah thought. And he hadn’t yet mentioned her to his own children, though Helga and Carl live in the same house with him. Tell me about her already, she wanted to urge him. Get it off your chest and you’ll feel better. Did he really believe that none of the family knew about the woman? But he had always been a man who contained his deepest feelings, hiding himself behind a book, losing himself in music. When she and Abraham had first met him, they’d thought him eccentric and rude. Time had proved them right about his eccentricity, but they’d learned long ago that the rudeness was part ego and part absent-mindedness, never personal.
“There’s someone I’d like you to meet and Shabbos afternoon, when everyone comes here, would be a good time,” he said.
Beating about the bush was not Sarah’s way. Until he himself broached the subject, she would not have dreamt of doing so; he was entitled to his privacy. But now that he had, she spoke her mind. “Someone you’d like to marry, maybe?”
Sigmund looked startled and then guilty, fidgeting with his watch chain, his pinkish complexion reddening, as if he were a small boy caught with his hand in the biscuit tin.
“It isn’t a crime,” Sarah said gently. “But why did you wait so long to tell us?”
“My son and daughters know, too?” he said resignedly.
Sarah nodded. He had been seen in Mandley Park with the woman, during the summer. It was not a park the Sandbergs and Moritzes frequented, but one of the small, grassy retreats in Salford, which was probably why Sigmund had selected it as a meeting place, the family had surmised. David and Bessie’s maid used it as a short cut to Higher Broughton when she went there to visit a friend and had loyally reported her observations, which had included that she had not liked the look of the lady.
“Listen, who can keep a secret round here?” Sarah jested swallowing her misgivings. “But why did it have to be a secret?”
Sigmund took off his pince-nez and studied them. “Nobody minds?”
“All they mind is the way you’ve kept it to yourself,” Sarah lied. But sometimes a person had to lie because the truth would cause trouble. Helga who hadn’t shed a tear in public when her soldier husband, Saul Salaman, was killed in the Great War, had wept on Sarah’s shoulder at the prospect of some unknown woman taking over the household she had run from the time her mother’s illness began. Miriam was concerned for her elder sister, but more so for her father when she heard Lizzie’s description of his lady-friend.
“Her name is Gertie Fish and she lives in Salford,” Sigmund supplied. “I met her when I was looking for fancy buttons for Paula Frankl’s spring coat and I couldn’t get them at my usual place.”
So, Paula Frankl’s to blame! Sarah thought irrationally. Rachel Moritz had not liked her.
“Gertie’s got a trimmings shop,” Sigmund went on. “Before her husband died, they had one in Sheffield.”
“How come she moved to Salford?” Sarah inquired.
“To be near her family. Mrs. Radinsky is her twin sister.”
Sarah could not conceal her consternation. Mr. Radinsky was a lovely man. She and Rachel had bought their fruit and vegetables from him when they lived in Strangeways. But his wife!
“I know what you’re thinking,” Sigmund said defensively. “But identical twins they’re not.”
“I didn’t say a word.”
“Your face was enough.”
Sarah began filling the pastry with apple and raisins, trying to check her flustered feelings. “Perhaps you should mention her to your children before Saturday?”
Sigmund replaced his pince-nez on his nose and mopped his brow, which was noticeably perspiring. “And go through with them what I’ve just been through with you?” He sprang up and laced his stubby fingers behind his back. “Once is enough!” he snorted irascibly. “I’m my own boss, I can please myself what I do! My children are adults, who I marry won’t affect them.”
“Miriam, maybe not, she doesn’t live with you. But Helga and Carl –”
“A lot of companionship I’ve had from those two since Rachel went,” Sigmund cut in with a bitter smile. “Helga’s across the street at Miriam’s every evening. And Carl – well you know what he’s like. I might as well be in an empty house as living with him.” He stood staring into space morosely.
“You should have told them how you feel,” Sarah said softly, distressed by the sadness in his eyes.
“Should my own flesh and blood need telling?”
“You can’t blame them, Sigmund. All their lives you’ve let them think books and music were all you needed.”
“Maybe I thought that myself,” he admitted grudgingly. “When Rachel was alive.”
A man needs a woman’s presence, Sarah thought. Even one like Sigmund, capable of being so wrapped up in his own interests he’d forget his wife was there. But a deep love had existed between him and Rachel and had made what most women would find intolerable tolerable to her. Would Mrs. Radinsky’s sister be the same?
“So, you’ll bring Gertie to the Shabbos tea party,” she said forcing a smile which belied her misgivings. “And I’ll tell the family she’s coming.”
Sigmund’s expression suffused with relief. “From you it would be better than from me,” he said gratefully. “Then on Shabbos, there’ll be no need for any discussion. Everyone will just wish us Mazeltov and we can arrange the wedding date.”
Sarah saw him to the garden gate and watched him head back towards his house where he had his tailor’s shop, noting the spring in his step. Unloading his burden had done him good. And now it was up to her to pave the way for him with his children. But hadn’t it always been like that with the Sandbergs and Moritzes? Feeling and doing things for each other, their lives woven together by time and events, joys and sorrows shared.
She waved to her neighbour, Mrs. Watson, who was cleaning the upstairs windows. Then as she gathered up some sheets of newspaper that had blown on to the path, she reflected that Mrs. Watson had a lot of relatives, too, but they weren’t always running to her with their problems, like Sarah’s did. Today it was Sigmund. Last night it had been her granddaughter Marianne, then her son-in-law Ben Klein, still not sure it was right to take his children to live near the docks. Who would it be next?
She thought about her son Nathan and the pain he had caused her and smiled down at the cat which had come to rub itse
lf against her lisle-stockinged ankles. “Everything passes, Tibby,” she told it. “The trouble is there’s always something else around the corner to take its place.”
Chapter 5
Mrs. Kaplan shuffled into the surgery and sat down on the edge of a polished oak chair, her manner suggesting she was not sure if she would be staying. “Not a bad place you’ve got here, Nat,” she said grudgingly to the darkly handsome young man seated behind the desk.
Nathan Sandberg glanced around his prison and managed to smile.
The shrivelled-looking little woman fanned her beady gaze along the glossy cream walls, holding it for a moment on the framed certificate as if to satisfy herself that Nathan was qualified to attend her. “I want you should take me for a patient, Nat. A desk with a leather top must have cost something,” she added as though this were a deciding factor in her choice of practitioner.
“And what can I do for you?” Nathan inquired in his bedside voice, which at times sounded to him more like a shop assistant’s.
“Plenty, I hope!”
Nathan controlled the urge to laugh. Wait till he told his partner who the latest addition to their list was. “She’ll expect two bottles of medicine instead of one,” Lou would groan. Mrs. Kaplan had been called the meanest woman in Strangeways when they were boys. She hadn’t been the cleanest either, he recalled, eyeing the stains on her rusty black coat and trying not to wrinkle his nose as a mixed waft of moth balls and body odour drifted from across the desk. Would he ever become oblivious to the unsavoury side of his work? Others said you did, but it hadn’t happened to him yet.
“So, Mrs. Kaplan,” he said, collecting himself. “You’re not feeling too well, eh?”
Mrs. Kaplan inserted a black-rimmed fingernail beneath the roan’s flat cap she habitually wore and scratched her head vigorously. “I’m only middling,” she shrugged, producing a sniff then a cough. “How else can I be with my layabout sons?”
Nathan had not been in practice long, but he had already learned that a GP’s work included listening to his patients’ woes, as well as to their hearts and chests, and that often the therapeutic process of unburdening themselves did more good than pharmaceutical remedies. Mrs. Kaplan was not the first old acquaintance from Nathan and Lou’s Strangeways childhood to defect from another doctor’s care and place herself in theirs, and it sometimes embarrassed Nathan to find himself hearing the family secrets of people for whom he had run errands when he was a youngster.
Who am I to be advising them? he would ask himself. And why should they think I’m the oracle all of a sudden? “It’s because ‘doctor’ is a magic word,” Lou had said when they discussed this. “It puts you in a class apart.” Nathan was aware of this phenomenon, but still found it difficult to associate its manifestations with himself and Lou. Especially when they walked alone Lower Broughton Road to where their cars were parked, and men old enough to be their fathers touched their caps to them.
“Your sons’re giving you aggravation, are they?” he said sympathetically to Mrs. Kaplan who had stopped scratching her head and was coughing again. He picked up his stethoscope. “We’ll just have a listen to your chest, shall we?”
Mrs. Kaplan recoiled against the chairback and crossed her arms over her sagging bosom. “It’s really necessary?”
Nathan was as reluctant to look at it as she was to reveal it, but it had to be done. “I’m afraid so.” He averted his eyes to some papers on the desk whilst she prepared herself for the ordeal and told him about her sons’ gambling debts.
After he had sent her away with soothing words for her aggravation and a bottle of Mist. Expect. Sed. for her cough he pressed a bell to summon the next patient and went to scrub his hands with carbolic soap, marvelling that there was still skin on them, the way they got scrubbed a hundred times a day.
“Sit down, will you?” he said without turning from the washbasin when someone entered. “I shan’t be a tick.”
The tall, pleasant-faced man who had limped into the surgery smiled to himself and did as he was bid, running a hand through his curly red hair which was still damp from standing at a tram stop in the rain.
“Sammy!” Nathan exclaimed warmly when he reached for a towel and saw him. “Don’t tell me you’ve been sitting in the waiting room?”
“Sure, I have, Nat. Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because my family don’t have to.” Nathan perched on the edge of the desk and smiled at him. “You should’ve knocked on the surgery door to let me know you were here.”
“I don’t expect special treatment.”
A surge of affection for his self-effacing brother welled up in Nathan. You wouldn’t catch David waiting with the patients! But they were direct opposites in every way. “What’s the trouble?” he inquired.
“My leg.”
Nathan was momentarily surprised, then wondered why he should be. Perhaps because he was used to Sammy being lame and had never heard him complain about it.
“Also, my hip,” Sammy added. “But don’t say anything to Miriam. I don’t want to worry her.”
“You’d better undress and let me look at it.”
“Anyone’d think you’d never seen it before!” Sammy grinned as he lay down on the couch. “That we didn’t share a bedroom for umpteen years.”
“I wasn’t a doctor then.” Nathan felt the mangled shinbone with gentle fingers.
“That Cossack did a good job when he galloped his horse over it,” Sammy said lightly.
How can he smile about it? Nathan thought. Most people would spit whenever they heard the word “Cossack” if they had had this deliberately done to them by one. But Sammy was too good-natured to bear even a brute like that any malice. “How old were you when it happened, Sam?” he asked.
“It was a few years before we left Russia,” Sammy said thinking back. “I must’ve been about two.”
“Who set your leg, afterwards? Or tried to, I should say, because it looks as if it was done by a carpenter! No wonder there’s arthritis there and this leg’s shorter than your other one.”
“Mother must have taken me to a doctor, but how can I remember?” Sammy studied his brother’s thoughtful face as Nathan continued examining him. Was this calm young doctor in the starched, white shirt and navy pinstripe suit little Nat who used to throw tantrums for no reason? But he’d always been clever, never without a book in his hands. “Miriam thinks our Martin gets his brains from their Carl,” he smiled. “And I let her think it, but in my opinion he takes after you.”
Heaven help him if he ends up like me, Nathan thought cynically.
“But David’s Ronald is the one who looks like you,” Sammy added.
“Yes, he does, doesn’t he?” Nathan agreed with a stiff smile. “Like that snap of me someone took when I’d just started at Manchester Grammar and I was showing off my school uniform.” He went to sit at his desk. “All right, you can get dressed now, Sam. I’ll give you something to help the pain and arrange for you to see an orthopod.”
“What’s that?”
“Medical slang for an orthopaedic specialist.”
“David said I might have to see one, when I told him about my hip before I left the factory.”
“He’s an amateur physician now, is he?” Nathan replied crisply. “As well as everything else he sets himself up to be.”
“Now, now, our Nat,” Sammy said awkwardly.
“You still think he’s Jesus Christ, don’t you?” Nathan answered with a bitterness he could not disguise.
Sammy tried to laugh it off. “A nice thing to say about a Jew from Cheetham Hill!”
“But he can’t put a foot wrong so far as you’re concerned, can he?” Nathan sat twiddling his fountain pen in an uncomfortable silence whilst Sammy finished dressing.
“David’s very good to me,” Sammy said quietly.
“Sure, he is, who could deny it? He’s too good by half! To all the family.”
Sammy fiddled with a button on his raincoat, an unhappy e
xpression in his deep blue eyes.
“That’s why we’re all so indebted to him,” Nathan added flatly as if his sudden burst of emotion had left him drained.
“Whatever David’s faults are, his generosity makes up for them,” Sammy declared sincerely, thinking how strange it was to have to defend someone because they were too kind and remembering a similar conversation he had once had with Miriam about David.
“If you say so,” Nathan replied in the same tone. He was gazing at the photograph of his wife which Lou had deemed was a standard requisite on a doctor’s desk. The first time he had seen it, David had sat quietly smoking while their mother showed it to Nathan, after she had got it from a matchmaker.
“How’s Rebecca?” Sammy asked glancing at it too.
“She’s fine, thanks.”
Sammy winked knowingly. “All things considered.”
“She’s over the morning sickness now.” Nathan turned from the photograph to his brother and assumed his role of physician again. Sammy hadn’t come to the surgery to rake over old coals. “I’ll send you to see Mr. Latimer, Sam. He’s a very clever man.”
“David said if I need to see a specialist I should go privately, and he’ll foot the bill,” Sammy said and saw Nathan’s lips tighten. “Look, you know me, I wouldn’t mind sitting waiting at a hospital,” he added uncomfortably. The coldness between his elder brother and his younger one upset him, and he was beginning to feel like a bone between two dogs, even though one of them was not present.
“Sure, I know you,” Nathan smiled, then the smile disappeared. “And I know David, too. But there’ll be no bill to foot and you won’t have to sit waiting, either. Mr. Latimer’s son Paul was at medical school with me and we’re good friends. Paul was at my wedding.”
“I noticed there were some goyim there,” Sammy recalled.
Nathan laughed abruptly. How typical this was of the Jewish attitude. The Gentile one, too, only the other way round. “Anyhow, Paul’s his father’s house surgeon now,” he said to Sammy. “I’ll get him to fix it up.”
After he had finished the evening surgery, Nathan remained seated at his desk, enjoying the silence and the feeling that the pressure was off him for another day. Perhaps he’d be lucky tonight and not get any calls from patients to disturb his sleep. Oh, sweet oblivion! he thought, then told himself to stop couching his thoughts in the lyrical language he’d indulged in his youth. He was a professional man, engaged in matters of life and death, not the carefree classics scholar he’d wanted to be.