by Maisie Mosco
“So now I’ll tell you why,” Abraham smiled. “When I was out of work, every day he gave a hot drink to me and Shloime Lipkin and Yankel Cohen. And to plenty of others.”
“That’s what you’ve kept a secret from me all these years?” Sarah asked looking perplexed.
Abraham shrugged, but said no more. How could he explain the feeling that had existed between the unemployed immigrants who had gathered by the fire in a back room at the shul? The shame they had shared because they couldn’t support their families. A shame that was so demeaning, they had not wanted their wives to know of the brief respite they allowed themselves from the day-long, fruitless search.
It was now nine o’clock and the night-time hush that had descended upon the hospital had permeated the room. Every shuffle of a foot. Abraham’s sporadic coughs, the replacing of a cup in a saucer and the sound of the tea being thirstily gulped down lent emphasis to the stillness.
“Sitting here makes a person feel cut off from everything,” Ben said brushing some crumbs off his trousers.
“But no man is an island,” Nathan quoted.
“What d’you mean?” his prosaic brother-in-law inquired.
“There’s nothing that happens in one part of the world that doesn’t affect the rest,” Sigmund supplied.
“I’d say the interpretation was open to debate, Father,” Carl said. “Ben was thinking about it on a personal level.”
“Who, me? I wasn’t thinking about islands at all.”
“He’s got better things to think about,” Esther declared.
Bessie felt her wig to make sure she still had it on straight. “Some people’ve got worse.”
Sigmund ignored the interpolations as he often did in order to pursue his own point. “While we’re sitting here with our load of tsorus, our brethren are being persecuted in Germany.”
“Oy,” Abraham sighed.
“Listen, a person’s own sorrow has to come first,” Sarah told Sigmund.
“Am I arguing about it?” he retorted. “That’s the trouble with this world. Everyone’s got their own packet. They don’t have time to think about other people’s.”
David stopped eating his sandwich. “Unless it arrives on their own doorstep.”
“A clever boy you always were, David,” Sigmund applauded. “And Nat also, but he’s suddenly gone shtum.”
“I wish I’d kept quiet in the first place. You daren’t open your mouth in this family in case it builds up into something you never intended,” Nathan said irritably. “This isn’t the time or place to be worrying about what’s going on in Germany –”
“Didn’t I just say that’s the trouble?” Sigmund interrupted. “There’s never a right time or place until it happens to you, like David said.”
“The English aren’t like the Germans,” Esther chimed in.
“What about that Mr. Mosley?” Sarah demanded hotly.
Rebecca had a remote expression on her face, as if she had dissociated herself from the heated discussion taking place around her. There were times when Nathan agreed with her opinion of his family and this was one of them, though he would never admit it.
“I don’t think Mrs. Evans and Mrs. Watson could be like the Germans,” Sarah declared.
“The fact that it couldn’t happen here is no reason to turn our backs on those it is happening to,” David asserted.
“Who is turning their back?” Sarah said sharply. “But it can’t be in the front of our minds all the time. We can only help those who manage to escape and in between we’ve got our own lives to live.”
“That’s not the right attitude, Mother,” David persisted.
“You’d like me to get on a boat and go to Germany to fight with Hitler?”
“That’s what it’ll come to in the end,” Sigmund declaimed. “Another war.”
“You always were a warmonger!” Sarah accused him.
“It’s true, Father,” Helga endorsed.
“You’d prefer I should say what I don’t think, just to please you?” Sigmund shouted.
“I’d prefer you shouldn’t say anything!” Sarah retorted. “I’m upset enough already…” Her voice petered out when the door opened. Then her fingers tightened on her brooch. The girl in the snapshot she had found in Nathan’s pocket was standing in the doorway.
Oh God, Nathan and David thought simultaneously.
“What on earth’s going on in here?” Mary inquired, surveying the littered room which momentarily distracted her attention from its occupants.
The pages of Carl’s newspaper had found their way on to the floor, a pile of coats lay haphazardly on a bed, some discarded bits of sandwich were scattered on a table and there were cups and saucers everywhere.
“This is a hospital, not a station buffet,” Mary said entering to gather up the disordered Manchester Guardian, “I could hear you shouting outside in the corridor. I’d be obliged if you’d remember there are patients here, trying to sleep.”
Nathan had not known she was now a Sister. The dark uniform suits her, he thought. Then she turned and saw him, and the colour drained from her face.
“Hallo, Mary,” he made himself say. Only David knew who she was, and the others wouldn’t think it strange for him to be acquainted with others on the staff as well as Sister Reilly.
“Good evening,” Mary said stiffly, aware of her heart fluttering wildly in her breast.
“I’m sorry about the mess,” Nathan apologized. “We’ll clear it up before we go.”
“Sister Reilly left a message that she’d given permission for a patient’s relatives to wait in here. But I’ve been doing my rounds, I haven’t been on the ward yet. I’d no idea it was someone of yours.”
“They don’t have a Sister on every ward at night, it isn’t necessary,” Nathan explained to the others. “It’s my brother’ lad,” he told Mary.
Mary’s gaze moved to David and flickered with hostility. She had only seen him once before but would remember the occasion always. He had found Nathan with her in the park one day and had treated her as if she didn’t exist. He appeared not to recognize her, but she knew he had.
“My other brother,” Nathan supplied.
Mary removed her gaze from the man she had come to think of as the representative of the enemy, who were all now collected in this room regarding her impassively, like a solid bloc united against an outsider. “I’m sorry your nephew is so ill,” she said to Nathan.
Rebecca became aware of something in the atmosphere that had not been present a few minutes ago, and of her mother-in-law and David glancing at her uneasily. She looked up at Nathan and saw that his eyes were riveted to the Sister’s. What she could feel was coming from the two of them! A wave of shock stirred the child in her womb. This young Gentile woman with the English-rose face was part of her husband’s past and he was still in love with her. It was her shadow that hovered over their marriage.
Sarah saw the brief, unguarded glance of shared pain and longing, too, but hid her alarm. Everything is bershert, she told herself philosophically. She had always believed that Fate took a hand in people’s lives. Her children scoffed at the notion, but it was Yiddish folklore that everything was fated, and over and over again she had found it to be true. It was fated for Martin to be a patient in this hospital, so Nathan would re-encounter his shiksah sweetheart and his mother would have the opportunity to put paid to it once and for all. The knowledge that Mary ought not to have been on duty that night would have lent confirmation, but Sarah needed none.
“It’s nice to meet people my son used to know,” she said putting Mary firmly into the past tense. “Did you hear he’d got married, Sister?”
Mary’s expression revealed she had not known, as Sarah had suspected.
“His wife Rebecca is resting on the bed,” she added with a smile. “Her baby’s due soon, we have to look after her.”
Mary managed to return the smile. “Congratulations,” she said to Nathan.
“Jewish people s
ay Mazeltov,” Sarah told her emphasizing the difference between Mary and the family.
“I know,” Mary replied. You’d be surprised at the things I learned about Jews in the years I went out with your son, she thought bitterly. And the main one was the power of the blood-tie. She surveyed the silver-haired lady who had taken charge of the conversation; her birdlike proportions did not detract from her matriarchal bearing and behind her equable exterior was a hint of something that told you she would protect her family against whatever might threaten it.
“I must get on with my rounds,” Mary said wanting to escape though she was no longer a threat.
Nathan took a step towards her and she saw David glance at him warningly.
“Shall I come to the ward with you, Mary?”
Mary let her eye rest briefly on the beautiful young Jewess with the Old Testament name who was Nathan’s wife and would soon bear his child, and accepted, as she had not really done until now, that a chapter of her life was irrevocably over. “It isn’t necessary, thank you.”
“A nice girl,” Sigmund pronounced when the door had closed behind her.
And a sensible one, thank God, Sarah said to herself with relief.
Nathan went to stare out of the window, so nobody would see his face. He would have been surprised to know that David wanted to comfort him and that his mother was similarly affected.
Later, Lou returned with a pile of smoked-salmon sandwich wrapped in greaseproof paper.
“He thinks it’s a wedding!” Esther snorted.
“Food is Jewish comfort,” Sarah declared.
But nobody could bring themselves to eat.
“Let’s have a peep at Martin, Nat,” Lou said.
“Mary Dennis is on duty tonight. She’d rather we didn’t.”
“Is that so?” Lou replied putting two and two together and making five. “Well she isn’t going to frighten me off!”
It was Lou who went back and forth between Martin’s bedside and the family, as the uneaten sandwiches dried up and the long night dragged on. At four in the morning, the boy’s condition raged to a crisis and Lou brought Miriam and Sammy to the side-ward at Mary’s request.
Another hour passed by and nobody spoke a word. But Sarah prayed silently and knew that Abraham and Sigmund were doing the same. Daylight was filtering into the room when a young doctor entered rubbing the morning stubble on his chin.
“The lad’s going to be all right,” he smiled and went to pat Miriam’s shoulder when her pent-up emotion was released in a flood of tears.
There’s never an ill wind, Sarah mused, travelling home in David’s Morris Cowley saloon through the wet, deserted streets.
“That Sister who ticked us off didn’t seem to like Nat, did she?” Bessie remarked cutting into her thoughts.
David supposed it might have appeared that way to someone who didn’t know what he did. “I wasn’t in the mood to notice,” he lied.
“When I see how those nurses boss doctors about, I’m glad I’m only a presser,” Abraham declared.
Sarah said nothing. But she was thinking that the ill wind had done a power of good. Any ideas the shiksah might have had about Nat still being interested in her had been hit on the head now she knew he was married. She hadn’t even let him go to the ward with her, which was as good as telling him his place was with his wife. Sarah couldn’t help feeling sorry for her and hoped she would find a nice husband from among her own people.
A milk float was clanking its way to the local dairy as David stopped the car outside his parents’ home. Tibby was asleep in the porch and Sarah carried her damp, furry pet into the kitchen, full of contrition that it had had to spend the night outside.
Abraham went immediately to the kitchen dresser to get his prayer shawl and the phylacteries he must put on to say the morning prayer. “This is the first time I’ve laid on my tefillin before going to bed!” he yawned putting on the tallith and rolling up his sleeve to strap one of the small leather-boxed, holy texts to his arm.
Sarah had just poured some milk for the cat and was eyeing the array of cakes on the table. She’d been putting them on to dishes for the tea party when Nathan came to fetch her. She watched her husband strap the second phylactery to his forehead before beginning the prayer.
“Today we’ve got plenty to thank God for,” she smiled. Martin would get well. And Nathan would settle down now and be a happily married man.
She would have been less sanguine about the latter had she known how the night’s events had affected his wife.
Chapter 9
Though Martin remained in hospital recuperating for several weeks, the family did not encounter Mary again. They took turns to sit with him during visiting hours, and at Chanukah, Sister Reilly allowed Miriam and Sammy to bring a menorah and light the little coloured candles in it, so he would not be deprived of his Festival celebration.
“I got a letter from Bobbie Sarah telling me to ignore Christmas,” he told Marianne when she visited him on Christmas Day.
“She’d be here telling you in person, if she hadn’t got flu. So, would your mam and dad.” Half the family had gone down with influenza and the other half were looking after them, or Marianne would not have been Martin’s sole visitor.
“I’m rather enjoying Christmas, actually,” he said glancing around the gaily decorated ward.
Marianne looked at the tree, resplendent with tinsel and coloured glass baubles that tinkled in the draught each time the ward door opened. “I wish Jews were allowed to have holly and mistletoe and Christmas trees. My mam and dad won’t even let us hang up our stockings,” she added with a sigh.
“I hung mine up once, a long time ago,” Martin said. “But it was empty the next morning.”
“I suppose we can’t expect Santa Claus to visit Jewish children.”
Martin laughed and clutched his operation wound, which was still feeling sore. “There’s no such person, you daftie! It’s the parents who fill the kids’ stockings.”
Marianne eyed him accusingly. “You’re always saying things like that to upset me! Remember how you told me there’s no such place as Heaven? I kept thinking of it when everyone thought you might die, and it made me feel terrible.”
“Did they really think I was going to die?”
She nodded gravely.
“I wrote a poem about death, before I got ill,” he said pensively.
Marianne studied his face which had lost its little-boy chubbiness and noticed he had been biting his fingernails again, a habit he had conquered a couple of years ago. “You used to write happy poems, Martin,” she said in a troubled voice. “But the last few you’ve shown me haven’t been.”
“I wouldn’t say your stories were, either,” he countered. “When we were little, before you started writing them down, you used to scare me and all the other kids at school, telling them to us.”
Marianne took off her red beret and flicked her fringe away from her eyes. “But my stories couldn’t really happen, could they? I mean they wouldn’t be likely to,” she added confusedly, unable to explain more concisely that Martin’s poetry related to real life, but her stories didn’t and somehow that made the horrors she inflicted on her characters all right.
“You mean there aren’t any tins of treacle big enough for people to sink into like they would into a swamp,” Martin grinned, citing one of her tales to show he understood.
They were distracted by the arrival on the ward of a group of carol singers.
“D’you think we should put our fingers in our ears?” Marianne asked Martin anxiously. At school when carols were sung, the Jewish children were not expected to remain and left the room. Then the choir sang the first melodious notes of “Silent Night” and she forgot her misgivings and listened, spellbound.
“A person can enjoy something without believing in it,” Martin said when the carol was over.
“But Bobbie Sarah’d say we shouldn’t be enjoying you-know-who’s birthday party,” Marianne whisper
ed, as the haunting refrain of “Away In A Manger” filled the ward.
“Sometimes being Jewish is very difficult,” she said after the carol singers had gone.
The ward-maids were bringing round festive refreshments and Martin eyed the dainty sausage rolls and miniature meat pies on the trolleys. “Too true,” he replied regretfully as a tray minus those non-kosher treats was brought to him.
“I wasn’t thinking of food,” Marianne told him, fishing a jam-jar of custard and peaches out of a carrier-bag. “Mam sent you this. I nearly forgot to give it to you.” She unscrewed the lid and passed him the spoon her mother had also sent in case there wasn’t one handy. “I was thinking of all the other things Jews aren’t supposed to do and how guilty it makes you feel when you do some of them.”
Their Uncle Nat appeared at the foot of the bed in time to hear this. “The best thing is not to,” he advised. Because you can’t get away with it, he wanted to add.
Marianne turned around to face him. “I didn’t know you were standing behind me.”
Nathan smiled wryly. “There’s always someone standing behind you when you’re Jewish, love. Even if it’s only in your mind.”
“Do you mean God?” she asked thoughtfully.
“God’s supposed to be watching and listening to everyone, whatever their religion,” Martin informed her. “Isn’t that so, Uncle Nat?”
“I’m not here for a theological discussion!” Nathan said. Every word led to a deeper one with these two kids. He deposited a pile of books on the bed. “I came to bring you these, Martin. And a piece of news. You like Miss Ritman, don’t you?”
Martin nodded enthusiastically. “She’s visited me six times. And she lets me call her Hannah.”
“You’d better call her Auntie Hannah in future.”
“Why?”
“If you’d seen her and Uncle Carl holding hands at the tea party last Shabbos you wouldn’t need to ask,” Marianne giggled. “Maybe they’ll let me be their bridesmaid,” she added hopefully.