by Maisie Mosco
“Get out and sit in the back with Mother, Miriam,” he said opening the door for her. Having Sarah beside her might help.
Nathan had warned Sarah and Abraham that Miriam was in a state of shock, but they had difficulty in suppressing their own when they saw her appearance.
“No tea party today, Ma,” she said in a brittle voice as they set off. “What will you do with all the cakes?”
Abraham invoked an old Yiddish curse to blight the jam tarts and strudel instead of his grandson. “Let the cakes be a kapora for our Martin.”
Miriam’s lips trembled, but she said nothing.
Sarah took her hand and remained silent, too. Sometimes contact could say more than words. She wanted to tell Miriam not to worry, that her neighbour’s grandchild had recovered from the same illness Martin had. But it wouldn’t be the truth. Little Tommy Evans had been spared the terrible complications. It was no use saying anything, all a person could do was pray.
They passed through the town centre, across Market Street thronged with shoppers laden with parcels. Sarah had never seen it so busy before, but she had never been to town on a Saturday before. Or ridden in a vehicle on Shabbos. She hoped the Almighty would understand why she and Abraham had broken His law. That any Jewish grandparents would have to in such circumstances.
“Martin likes reading the Manchester Guardian,” Miriam said tonelessly as they passed the newspaper’s office on Cross Street.
“He’ll be reading it on Monday,” Abraham assured her. “God won’t let a good boy like him die.”
Miriam remembered her gentle mother whom He had allowed to die after years of suffering, and her sweet-natured brother-in-law Saul Salaman who had met death brutally on a battlefield. I don’t trust God any more, she thought, and it was as if a rock which had always been there to lean upon had been taken away.
When they reached the hospital, Nathan put a firm arm around her while they traversed a long, covered way leading to the wards.
“A big important place like this can’t afford corridors with windows?” Abraham muttered.
“Turn up your coat collar,” Sarah ordered him. A person could catch pneumonia from the icy blasts here instead of getting better! She eyed a couple of hurrying nurses and hoped they were wearing wool vests under their thin uniforms.
They found David, Esther and Ben waiting near the entrance to the surgical unit, with Sammy.
“Rebecca phoned me, and I rang Esther,” David said.
“A nice Shabbos gathering, eh?” Abraham said sounding choked.
Seeing them all there affected Sarah, too. Then Lou came out of the ward and told Nathan to take Miriam and Sammy inside.
Sammy had been alone in the corridor when Lou went to have a word with the house surgeon. “What’re you all doing here?” Lou asked the family.
They looked at him wordlessly.
“All right. You don’t have to tell me, I know,” he said with feeling. “But this isn’t the Jewish hospital where the staff are used to having patients’ relatives cluttering up the place. If Sister Reilly finds you all hanging about here, she won’t like it.”
“Is that so, Dr. Benjamin?” a soft brogue inquired from behind him.
Lou turned and saw the silver-haired angular woman eyeing him. “I was explaining they can’t stay, Sister,” he said respectfully.
“An’ I’ll be after telling them meself, if I see fit, thank you.” She surveyed Sarah thoughtfully. “It’s young Dr. Sandberg’s mother, isn’t it? And the little lad who’s so poorly’ll be your grandson though he doesn’t favour you, nor his mammy and daddy neither.”
“He looks like his other grandma, rest her soul,” Sarah explained.
Sister Reilly’s starched features creased into a smile, which Sarah would not have thought possible.
“Let me think where I can put you, Mrs. Sandberg,” she said as if her survey of Sarah had brought her to a favourable decision. “You can’t be standing here for Lord knows how long, and I can tell just by looking at you wild horses wouldn’t drag you away.”
“Jewish families like to be together when there’s trouble,” Sarah felt constrained to tell her.
“Catholic ones are no different. It puts me in mind of me own family in Tipperary when my mother, God bless her, had her first stroke. But the nuns were awful good and found us a place to be. Even though we weren’t like you, with a doctor in the family.”
Lou was listening with an expression of profound astonishment on his acne-scarred face. “I wouldn’t have believed it,” he exclaimed when the Sister had swept away.
A few minutes later, they were installed in a two-bedded side ward.
“Lucky for you it’s a weekend, when most folk are too busy enjoying themselves to take sick, or it wouldn’t be vacant,” Sister Reilly said when she had ushered them there. She patted Sarah’s shoulder. “I’ll tell Dr. Sandberg where to find you. And don’t you be giving up hope now, my dear. The little lad hasn’t got any worse, even though he hasn’t got any better. Would you like me to light a candle for him when I go off duty?”
Abraham almost swallowed his tonsils at the thought of his grandson’s deliverance being prayed for in a church.
Sarah felt apprehensive about it, but wasn’t there one God for everybody? So, what did it matter if Jesus and the Holy Ghost heard the prayer, too? “I’d be much obliged, Sister,” she said gratefully.
They were sipping strong, hospital tea when Nathan joined them.
“A nice little ward-maid brought it. Her name’s Lucy,” Sarah, who always got on personal terms with everyone, informed him. “Sister told her to look after us.”
Nathan was as surprised as Lou had been. “We used to call Sister Reilly the Dragon when we were students,” he recalled.
“To me she’s an angel,” Sarah declared. “And from her I heard hopeful words about Martin, which I haven’t heard from anyone else. Miriam and Sammy are still sitting with him, Nat?”
Nathan nodded. “But he doesn’t know they’re there. He’s not round from the anaesthetic yet.” He felt stifled in the small room and went to open the window.
“You want your father to get pneumonia?” his mother asked reproachfully.
Nathan exchanged a smile with Lou and closed it again. The older generation of Jewish immigrants were all the same, equating fresh air with disease, and they had brought up their children to have similar ideas. The two young physicians could usually tell whether a house was occupied by Christians or Jews by glancing to see if the windows were open or shut. They had no need to look for the mezuzah on the doorpost of Jewish houses, and it had become a joke between them.
Abraham chose that moment to cough up some phlegm and spit it into his handkerchief. His family were accustomed to him doing this, but Sarah reacted as if the briefly open window had caused it.
“You see?” she exclaimed to Nathan.
Nathan sat down beside his partner on one of the high beds, with his legs dangling over the side. David was seated opposite him, on the other bed. his feet planted firmly on the floor. When I was a kid I thought I’d catch up with him one day, Nathan mused wryly. The difference in their height didn’t matter anymore; David was now thirty-eight and Nathan was twenty-five. They were both men now – not a man and a boy like it had been when Nathan was growing up. But there was no such thing as catching up with David, thought Nathan. David wouldn’t let you, he made you feel small.
His brother’s proximity was setting him on edge and he went to stare restlessly out of the window at the ward opposite. He could see the nurses pushing a surgical trolley in front of the beds. Was one of them Mary? The thought that he might encounter her had caused his throat to constrict when he entered the hospital with Miriam and his parents. What would he have done if they’d come face to face in the corridor? But it hadn’t happened, and he’d been thankful she wasn’t on duty in Martin’s ward, either. He wanted to see her, but there was a part of him that did not. And she certainly wouldn’t want to see
him.
When he turned from the window he saw his mother eyeing him. Why did being here with his family in this small room make him feel trapped? Because he was trapped and always had been. Just being one of them made it so. It was as if the family were a huge web with the parent-spiders in the middle watching to make sure all the little ones stayed caught in it. With the elder-brother spider aiding and abetting them, Nathan thought with an acid glance at David.
“Who’s watching the shop?” he heard Lou ask Ben, and went to sit beside him again, grateful for his friend’s prosaic presence.
“The kids, who else?” Ben replied.
“Harry and Arnold and Marianne are in charge? Well how do you like that!” Sarah said approvingly.
“Our Arnold isn’t too keen,” Ben shrugged, then his saturnine face lit with pride. “But our Harry’s a chip off the old block. This morning a lady came in to buy a pair of twopence-ha’penny socks for her husband and –”
“You sell socks for twopence-ha’penny? How can you make a profit?” Sarah interrupted.
“The profit’s in the turnover, Ma,” Ben explained. “They come from all over Salford for them, like they do for our tenpence-ha’penny Brylcreem that everyone else sells for a shilling. But let me tell you about Harry. He sold the lady a gabardine for herself.”
Only Jews could have a conversation like this sitting in a hospital waiting for one of their own to live or die, Nathan reflected. They did the same at Shivah houses and the mourners they were there to visit sometimes joined in. But it was better than morbid conversation, or no conversation at all. It helped to take people’s minds off what they were there for.
“Tell Harry Mazeltov from me,” Sarah said to Esther and Ben. “For a boy not yet fourteen to have such a business head deserves congratulations. So, you’re selling raincoats also, now, eh? The last I heard you were stocking up with boiler suits and corsets. You did the right thing calling the shop ‘Ben’s Bazaar’!”
“I made him up a cheap range to see how he’d do with them,” David told her.
“And why not? It’s all in the family and business is business.”
Esther got up to stretch her legs and wrapped her rust tweed coat closer around her full figure, then leaned against the wall thinking of Miriam who was unable to have any more children. And now this terrible thing had struck down the only one she had. “Who cares about business at such a time?” she said emotionally. “Saturday’s our busiest day but when David rang up Ben got the car out right away, to come here.”
The brief interlude of normality dissipated into silence.
“Oy,” Abraham sighed fidgeting with his moustache.
“When something like this happens, it gives a person a sense of values,” David mused.
Nathan looked at him coldly. “I’ve always had one.”
Lou dug Nathan in the ribs to prevent him from saying more and changed the subject hastily. “D’you want me to bring Rebecca here, Nat? Though in her condition I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“Rebecca’s at my house,” David said before Nathan had time to reply.
“Thank you for mentioning it,” Nathan said sarcastically.
“I’m sorry, but I forgot. I’ve had other things on my mind. She sounded so upset when she phoned me. I decided to go and fetch her.”
“I wondered why Bessie hadn’t come with you,” Esther said. It wasn’t like his wife to let him out of her sight.
David allowed them to assume this was the reason. But he would not have brought his wife to the hospital anyway. All Miriam needed just now was one of Bessie’s spiteful outbursts. With what they were here for, Miriam must come first.
Lou got off the bed and smoothed down the snowy counterpane lest Sister Reilly’s eagle eye should discover a crease in it. He couldn’t stand the way David was cracking his knuckles, and the looks Nat kept shooting at his brother were enough to make anyone feel jumpy. The atmosphere was rippling with undercurrents
and Lou didn’t want to be there when they erupted. Every Jewish family had a touch of grand opera about it, but his partner’s was worse than most.
“I’ll push off home, Nat,” he said awkwardly. “Cora’ll still be keeping my cholent warm in the oven.”
“She cooks butterbeans for Shabbos?” Sarah asked him conversationally, ignoring the tension around her. “Malka Berkowitz used to give us cholent when we stayed with her and I haven’t tasted it since.”
“Such a memory my wife’s got!” Abraham exclaimed tetchily.
Lou edged his way to the door and tried to catch Nathan’s eye, but he was glaring at his brother again. Was Nat going to take it out of David for ever for stopping him from marrying a shiksah? It was time Nat grew up and accepted that he wouldn’t have been happy in a marriage that had broken his parents’ hearts. “I’ll pop back tonight,” he promised as he made his escape.
“I think we should have Martin moved to a private room. I don’t like him being on a big ward with all those sick men,” David said immediately Lou had gone.
“Are you at it again?” Nathan barked.
“At what, exactly?” David inquired trying to keep his tone even.
“Dictating what should be done! And if I let you, it’ll be a fait accompli in no time. You’ll have it all arranged without even consulting Miriam and Sammy. But this time what you’re interfering in happens to be my province.”
“If I were you, I’d watch what you’re saying, Nat! Doctor or no doctor, you’re getting too big for your boots.”
Sarah quelled them with a glance. “I want you both to watch what you’re saying. Stop it, do you hear me?” Her voice was cool and calm, but her hands were trembling. “Thank goodness your wives aren’t here listening to you shout at each other. Worry we can’t avoid, but rows we can do without.”
Fifteen minutes later, their wives arrived, wrapped in their fur coats.
“How could we sit at home listening to the wireless, when our nephew is so ill?” Bessie demanded. “We wanted to be with the family.”
She means it, Sarah thought with surprise.
“If it was, God forbid, one of my kids, Miriam would be here,” Bessie added feelingly.
David had forgotten his wife’s emotions could occasionally function on that level. “Come and sit down, love,” he said putting his arm around her.
Rebecca did not look at Nathan. “We got a taxi,” was all she said.
“Make your wife comfortable on one of the beds, Nat,” Sarah instructed, noting her pregnant daughter-in-law’s exhausted appearance. “That nice Sister Reilly won’t mind.”
Rebecca sat down on a chair. “I’ll be all right here for the moment, thank you.”
Then Sigmund Moritz entered with Carl and Helga.
“Mrs. Hardcastle had the decency to let Helga know,” Sigmund said, implying that none of the Sandbergs had bothered to do so and stood shaking the raindrops off his Homburg hat in the uncomfortable silence.
Sarah had not noticed that it had begun to rain and now became aware of it lashing against the window. Sigmund was studiously not looking at her and she remembered how he had once let his pride cause a rift between the Moritzes and Sandbergs that had lasted for four years. But the joy of Martin’s birth had brought them together again and destined them to share this anxiety.
“It was wrong of us not to think of telling you, Sigmund,” she made herself say without offering excuses, though doing so was not in her own proud nature.
“I accept your apology,” Sigmund replied graciously, then his expression crumpled. “The Sister wouldn’t let me see Martin.”
Sarah got up from her chair and embraced him. Martin was very precious to her, but he wasn’t her only grandchild. “We haven’t seen him, either,” she said to let Sigmund know there had been no favouritism and patted his shoulder comfortingly while he shed a few tears.
Marianne stood on a stool behind the shop counter looking for the one-and-fourpence-ha’penny pure silk stockings.
“
They’re in a box wi’ Prima Donna on it, luv,” the customer told her. “I know, ’cause I cum in fer a pair every Sat’day.”
“Excuse me a moment, madam,” Harry said to the shawled matron whose vast waist he was measuring in order to sell her a corset. “We’re out of that brand just now,” he smiled to Marianne’s customer. “But we’ve got some others and they must be good; my mother wears them herself.”
He found a shiny purple box and put it on the counter for Marianne. “Put your hand inside the leg,” he instructed her. “To show the lady how the shade’ll look on.”
“Where is yer mam terday, ’Arry?” the customer inquired after she had made her purchase and was waiting for her change. She wet her finger to fix a hennaed kiss-curl more securely to forehead in front of a mirror, then picked up a bottle of “Californian Poppy” scent from the array of cut-price sundries on the counter. “I’d rather ’ave ‘Evenin’ In Paris’ meself,” she said after sniffing it. “Yer dad’s not ’ere, neither, is ’e?”
Harry and Arnold exchanged a glance over their sister’s head which was bent over the cash till.
Harry’s customer looked up from the pink, whaleboned monstrosity she was examining. “Nowt’s wrong, is it? Not a funeral in’t family, I ’ope, or owt like that?”
Harry licked his lips as if they suddenly felt dry. “They just had to go out,” he replied with a forced smile.
“Jews don’t have funerals on Saturdays, or weddings either,” Marianne told the lady, raising her head from the till. “What’s one-and-fourpence-ha’penny from two shillings, Harry?” she asked desperately. Why couldn’t she add up and subtract like her brothers could? The florin the lady had handed her felt hot and sticky from being clutched in her palm while she tried to do the sum. She felt funny inside, too, from what the lady in the shawl had just said.
Harry came to her rescue as he had been doing all afternoon. But not knowing where her parents were continued to make her feel uneasy. She had returned from the library at dinnertime and found them gone. “We’ve got to look after the shop instead of going to Bobbie Sarah’s. Mam and Dad’ve had to go somewhere,” Harry had told her and had said he didn’t know where the somewhere was. But Marianne didn’t believe him.