Scattered Seed

by Maisie Mosco

  David did not know whether to cry with his daughter or laugh with his son. His wife looked pathetically funny and was gazing at him with a hunted expression in her curranty eyes, rooted to the spot by the humiliation of being seen like this by her husband and children, the fingers of one hand twitching against the other in a nervous spasm, as if she were caught in a trap.

  Pity tightened his throat as his brain sought the right words to comfort her. The anger she had aroused in him had fled away, as it always did when she suddenly seemed ridiculous and vulnerable. But there were no right words. His sympathy would be misunderstood and rejected; she had turned a deaf ear to it all week and he had finally lost patience with her.

  “Put your scarf on again, Mam,” Ronald spluttered. “Before you catch cold.”

  Bessie emerged from her trauma and covered her head. “Now you know I wasn’t exaggerating, David,” she said dispiritedly. ’I bet you thought I was making a fuss about nothing, that it was just a little bald patch.”

  “Hurray! Mam’s just spoken to Dad!” Ronald yelled.

  “And tomorrow we’ll get her a wig to wear till her hair grows again,” David smiled.

  Bessie was tucking in the ends of her scarf in front of the mantelpiece mirror. “I wouldn’t be seen dead in one!” She turned around to glare at David, then shrieked with horror. Her elbow had caught her best crystal vase, sending it to shatter in the hearth.

  David knew what her next words would be before she uttered them.

  “Now look what you’ve made me do, David!”

  “You always say that to Dad if he’s there when you break something,” Ronald accused her. “Doesn’t she, Shirley?”

  Shirley nodded reluctantly.

  They know her as well as I do, David thought and wondered if they had noticed his own quirks and failings, too.

  “You’re always getting at Dad when it isn’t his fault, Mam,” Ronald said moving close to David.

  “Shut up, Ronald! Leave Mam alone!” Shirley flashed and went to link her arm through Bessie’s.

  So, Ronald’s on my side and Shirley’s on Bessie’s, David saw with a sense of shock. It was probably normal for them to identify with the parent of their own sex, but even so – What’re we doing to these kids? he asked himself remorsefully. A lovely childhood they’d have to look back on! What could be worse than a divided family? And how easy it would be to foster partisan feelings, he thought as Ronald’s warm little hand crept into his.

  “Go and kiss your mam and apologize for what you said,” he instructed Ronald, though every word the boy had spoken in his defence had been correct. “And you come and give me a hug, Shirley. You can give your brother one, too. He’s just as sorry for Mam as you are.”

  Plenty of time for things to divide them when they grow up, he reflected, watching the children shake hands solemnly. But God forbid it should be the kind of thing that had come between himself and his brother Nat.

  Bessie was staring mournfully at the splinters of expensive glass in the hearth, which had momentarily taken precedence over the loss of her hair. “That vase cost my poor dad a fortune, David.”

  “Anything that can be replaced by forking out cash isn’t worth getting upset about,” David replied.

  “Why not, Daddy?” Shirley asked him.

  He sat down in his wing chair and cradled her on his lap, then settled Ronald on the chair arm, thankful for the comfort of these two youngsters who loved and trusted him. “Because the things that can’t be bought are the ones that really matter.”

  That night Bessie let him make love to her and afterwards he stroked her scarfed head which she had doubly protected by the addition of a bonnet-style hairnet, grateful that she had not rebuffed him, pondering on the way her stupidity aroused tenderness in him, though her barbed tongue, which sprang from it, caused him so much pain.

  It’s you I care about, Bessie, not what you look like, he wanted to tell her, but he knew she would not believe him; her conception of married love has not matured with their years together, as his has. He had never loved her in the romantic sense, but marriage had taught him that love is many-sided and multi-dimensional, that children and troubles shared add depth to a shallow beginning.

  His wife had fallen asleep and was snoring loudly, though she complained that his snores kept her awake. Marriage! he thought and smiled in the darkness as Bessie wriggled her icy feet between his. As if a bald head could stop him caring about her after twelve years! Or was it thirteen? He was beginning to lose count. But to Bessie, his feeling for her was still only skin deep.

  The next morning, he rang up Ruby Cohen from the factory to ask her advice about a wig.

  “Maybe you should get a blonde one?” Ruby suggested.

  “No,” David said hastily. If he went home with a blonde wig, his wife would put her own brand of interpretation on it and think he didn’t love her because she was a brunette. “I want one exactly like Bessie’s hair, Ruby.”

  “So, I’ll go to town myself and get it for you. I’ll even stand the cost, seeing you’re not going to sue me. You’re not, are you?”

  “Just get me the wig, Ruby! I’ll pick it up from your place on my way home for dinner.”

  Moishe Lipkin, David’s travelling salesman, was in the office when he made the call.

  “Why didn’t you think of getting Bessie the wig right away? You’d have saved yourself a week of tsorus,” he smiled.

  Moishe was not just an employee, but au old and trusted friend in whom David often confided.

  “I could also cause myself trouble by taking one home, so keep your fingers crossed till she’s agreed to wear it,” David replied.

  “When I look at you married men, I’m happy to be miserable on my own!” Moishe joked, eyeing David’s weary expression. Then his own grew wistful. “I proposed to Helga a couple of times, you know.”

  David looked surprised. Most things reached his ears over the family grapevine, but Helga had always kept personal matters to herself. “I’ve often wondered why you’ve stayed single, Moishe.”

  Moishe shrugged philosophically. “I meet plenty of nice girls on my travels. There’s one in Cardiff who’s been trying to catch me for years. But what can you do? Helga’s the only one I’ve ever wanted. The first time I asked her, she wouldn’t leave her sick mother, and after Mrs. Moritz died she said her father needed her.”

  He got up and paced about, opening a drawer in the file cabinet and shutting it again, picking up a bottle of ink from David’s littered desk and moving it to a different position absently, a wiry little man immaculately groomed in a well-tailored dark suit. With the same monkey-face and restlessness he had had as a small child, David recalled, watching him.

  “Remember how you nearly fell overboard when we came to England, Moishe?” David smiled.

  “My mam’s never let me forget it!” Moishe paused to stare through the window at the slate-roofed factories across the street. “I also remember your dad and mine tramping round Strangeways together when we first got here, looking for work And how we all used to grumble about the rain. But it’s rain that’s given us our livelihood, isn’t it?”

  “It was far from a livelihood in those days. When I look back on them, it seems miraculous that we survived.”

  Moishe sighed. “Doesn’t it always, one way and another? But Jews as a race are great survivors.”

  “Let’s hope it stays that way,” David said, thinking of the tales he had heard recently of jackbooted bullies hammering on doors in the middle of the night, in Hitler’s Germany. Which gave him a troubling sense of “There but for the grace of God go I.” He pushed the distant spectre away. What good did it do to dwell on it?

  “So, tell me how you did with the new range last week,” he said to Moishe shifting his thoughts to business. Saturday mornings were the only time he saw his salesman.

  “I’ll go through the order sheets with you afterwards, David. Right now, I want to talk to you about designing a label. One that
people will connect with our coats the minute they see it. At the moment, all we put on is the cleaning instructions. The customer doesn’t know who makes our garments.”

  “What does that matter, so long as she likes what she sees and buys it?”

  Moishe smiled shrewdly. “You’d be surprised what a name can do. When a firm’s got a smart reputation, the customer’s as good as bought one of their coats before she sets eyes on it. How are we going to get a reputation like that if we’ve got no label?”

  “Hm,” was David’s thoughtful reaction.

  Moishe pressed home his point. “We’re making beautiful garments, but without a name they’ll never be in that class.”

  David sat doodling on his blotting pad. “Let me think about it, Moishe.”

  “What’s to think about? I spend my life in those smart shops watching women choose, while I’m hanging around waiting to see buyers. I know what I’m talking about, David.”

  “You’re the only person I know who’s more go-ahead than me, Moishe,” David smiled. “Remember how I took you aside at our Sammy’s wedding, when the business was still on the floor, and offered you a job? I knew then I was doing the right thing. All right, we’ll have some labels made with Salaman printed on them.”

  “No,” Moishe replied adamantly. “I think the firm needs a new name, too.”

  David stopped doodling. “What’re you talking about?”

  “Salaman smacks of a little Jewish factory.”

  “You’re getting anti-Semitic all of a sudden?”

  “What I’m getting is clever. We’re not making coats for Jewish housewives to wear when they’re shopping for fish. Most of our business is done with goyim, as I don’t have to tell you.”

  “Bessie’d kill me if I used a label that hadn’t got her father’s name on it,” David said. “You know how close she was to that old miser.”

  “He wasn’t miserly with her,” Moishe recollected. “She was the only kid in Strangeways who had two Shabbos coats and money to buy toffees.”

  And it didn’t end there, David thought. His first car had been bought by the father-in-law he’d despised, so Bessie could be driven around in one. Everything she’d wanted that David couldn’t afford to give her she had asked for and got from her father. “No, he wasn’t,” he said brusquely to Moishe retasting the bitterness of past humiliations. “And if I change the firm’s name, too, she’ll double-kill me.”

  “She won’t if your bank balance goes up because of it,” Moishe answered astutely. “And believe me, it will. So, will my commission, I’m not being entirely unselfish,” he grinned. “So, let’s start thinking of a new name.”

  “If I brought part of my own into it, it might help Bessie not to mind,” David said thoughtfully. “Especially as our Ronald’ll be coming into the business one day. How does Sandberry strike you?”

  “Too like Burberry.”

  “Sandgarments, then?”

  “Coats for the deckchair assistants at Blackpool he thinks he’s promoting!”

  “We could combine my two kids’ first names. Shirlron doesn’t sound bad.”

  “For one of those fancy houses where the people aren’t satisfied with just a door-number.”

  David threw down his pen. “You’ll have to leave it to me, Moishe. Let’s deal with your orders now, then you can go home, and I can get down to doing the books.”

  “It’s a pity Sammy can’t take that job off your hands.”

  “Sammy knows nothing about book-keeping,” David bristled.

  He still can’t bear the slightest criticism of his brother, Moishe thought with a silent sigh. When was David going to come to his senses and stop carrying Sammy? “He could go to night school and learn, couldn’t he?” was all he dared say. “I’m going to his house tonight. Why don’t I suggest it?” he added carefully.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” David said curtly. He lit a cigarette and puffed it edgily. Why did nobody but himself make allowances for Sammy? Moishe was Sammy’s best friend, but even he considered him a shirker. And Bessie had wanted David to fire him for years. “Sammy’s got to see a specialist about his leg,” he said as though his brother’s disability mitigated his deficiencies.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Moishe replied, only too aware that in David’s eyes it did.

  “Sooner or later I’ll employ a book-keeper,” David said stiffly.

  Moishe smiled to ease the strained atmosphere. “The new label will help you to afford one.” That the business was run on shoestring was no secret to him. His interest in it was as personal as if he were a director, which he hoped to be one day. Meanwhile, he was content to work hard to bring that day nearer. “Sanderstyle would be a good name for the firm,” he said with flash of inspiration. “And it’s got the first half of Sandberg in it,” he pointed out to add weight to the suggestion.

  David looked up from the order sheets Moishe had just handed to him. “I like it,” he said after a moment. “It’s got class.”

  “So, you’ll buy me a bottle of schnapps for thinking of it for you,” Moishe grinned.

  David arrived home for lunch with Bessie’s wig, and the name Sanderstyle buzzing like a friendly bee in his mind. But the wig had to come first. He would tell her about the name later.

  “I’m not even going to open the box,” she said.

  Shirley opened it for her. “It looks just like your own hair, Mam. Be a sport and try it on.” She took it out of the box and held it up for Bessie to see. “Look, it’s even got marcel waves.”

  David stood by the window, carefully saying nothing. Fortunately, Ronald was not yet back from shul to put in a wrong word at the right moment!

  “If it suits yer, Mrs. Sandberg, yer can wear it’n go to t’tea party at Bobbie Sarah’s,” Lizzie said. “Then yer’ll see what Zaidie Sigmund’s sweet’eart’s like, along o’ t’rest o’ t’family.”

  Bessie hesitated, then went upstairs to put on the wig. When she returned, Shirley told her how lovely she looked.

  “I’ve never looked lovely in my life,” she said with desperate honesty. “How do you think I look in it, David?”

  “Like Bessie Sandberg again,” he smiled, relieved that she did.

  “You wouldn’t lie to me? Let me make a fool of myself?”

  “Yer know as I wouldn’t,” Lizzie declared before David had time to reply. “Yer look a treat, luv. Yon’s a much nicer sheitel than ’er next door wears an’ yer’ll not ’ave ter wear it all that long. It’s not as if yer’ll ’ave it on yer ’ead forever, like she will, ’er being very frum.”

  “Your Yiddish gets better and better, Lizzie,” David grinned.

  “If I don’t know by now as a sheitel’s a wig religious Jewesses wears after they’ve wed, an’ frum means religious, Jesus ’elp me, Mr. Sandberg! An’ who were it lit t’ Shabbos candles when t’missis were ill in bed?”

  “You, Lizzie love,” Shirley said kissing the maid’s freckled cheek.

  “Aye. Even though it were on a Good Friday.”

  Bessie kept on the wig while they ate their meal and Ronald came home and was halfway through his before he noticed, which convinced her that her appearance was passable.

  David heaved a grateful sigh and allowed himself to toy in his mind with a design for a Sanderstyle label, while spooning his lokshen soup. He was still preoccupied when they walked the short distance to his mother’s house, that afternoon.

  “Oh God, it’s blowing off!” Bessie shrieked as a gust of wind greeted them at Sarah’s garden gate.

  Shirley and Ronald had the presence of mind to each clamp a hand on the top of her head to hold the alien hair in place, whilst David propelled her to the porch and Lizzie pressed the doorbell.

  Sarah, who had witnessed the incident through the parlour window, was the essence of tact. “What a lovely coat you’ve got on, Bessie,” she said when she opened the door and did not raise her eyes above the level of its silver-fox collar.

  Sarah’s Sabbath te
a party was a tradition begun in 1905 when she invited Sigmund and Rachel Moritz and their children to share a simple repast in her home in Strangeways.

  The Sandberg-Moritz clan nowadays could not have fitted into that tiny house, nor would the refreshments she served then have satisfied the newest generation’s anglicized appetites. Egg and cress and tomato sandwiches, jam tarts and buttered scones were served along with the plain sponge-cake and strudel. And even the elders took their tea with milk instead of lemon, though Sarah and Abraham still slipped a cube of sugar into their mouths, Russian-style, rather than stir a spoonful into their cups.

  In earlier years, the gathering had begun at three o’clock, but the family now arrived at four-thirty and stayed until eight, so that Esther and Ben Klein could join them for a couple of hours after closing their shop.

  Saturday afternoon was the happiest time of Sarah’s week and reminded her of her childhood in Dvinsk, when all her relatives had gathered for Shabbos tea in her grandmother’s house. She would sit behind the two enormous willow-patterned teapots her son-in-law Ben had given her when his living came from a pot-and-pan stall on Flat Iron Market, surveying her brood with satisfaction.

  This particular Saturday, she was unable to relax. Several of her grandchildren, who had heard their Auntie Bessie had lost her hair, were staring at the wig. Why hadn’t David told her his wife would be wearing one, then she could have warned the children not to pass any remarks about it? It wouldn’t take much to cause Bessie’s tense expression to erupt into something worse.

  And Nat was eyeing David so coldly Sarah could not pretend she was imagining it. She glanced at Rebecca, who was unusually subdued, and at Miriam and Helga, seated tight-lipped side by side on the sofa, awaiting the arrival of their father and prospective stepmother. So quiet it was in the room, so different from the usual noisy chatter; enough to make even Sarah feel nervous!

  “So,” she smiled issuing her habitual opening gambit. “And what has everyone been doing this week?”

  Marianne was seated cross-legged on the rug, fiddling moodily with the garters that held up her white Shabbos socks. “You know what I’ve been doing, Bobbie,” she declared passionately. “Crying my eyes out, that’s what.”