by Maisie Mosco
“I’m not lazy now. I baked a cake this morning.”
“So why won’t you do anything for the baby?”
Rebecca stared up at the ceiling impassively as she had done throughout the exchange. “I don’t want to.”
It was then that Nathan accepted what Lou had been saying to him for days. His wife was suffering from post-natal depression. They had similar cases among their patients. Women sometimes neglected their homes after childbirth, or their appearance. Some turned against their husbands, but it was rare for a woman to reject her child.
That evening, he called to see his parents on his way home from the surgery, letting himself in with the latch-key his mother had insisted he keep when he married.
Sarah and Abraham were sitting by the kitchen fire, the singing kettle on the hob lending an air of peace to the homely room.
Nathan shut the door and leaned against it. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he told them.
“First you’ll sit down,” Abraham said rising from the rocking chair.
Nathan lowered himself wearily into it and warmed his cold hands in front of the flames.
“And now you’ll talk to us about it,” Sarah said to him quietly. “What are parents for?”
Nathan could feel their love reaching out to him and regarded them gratefully. But there was nothing they could do to help him. “There’s nothing to talk about. You know the position,” he said.
Sarah smiled. “Positions of one kind and another there always are in a family, Nat. So, everyone puts their heads together to see what can be done. And once or twice I’ve taken matters into my own hands.”
“That, there’s no need to tell us,” Abraham put in. “We know you already. Remember when she got rid of Bessie’s Auntie Rivka who was ruling the roost in David’s house?” he reminded Nathan.
“For months Bessie lay in her bed after that stillborn child,” Sarah reminisced. “With no reason to get up while that woman was there waiting on her hand and foot, encouraging her not to get better. So now Bessie’s doing likewise to Rebecca and no good can come of it.”
“Rebecca wants her there,” Nathan replied. “I’ve never liked Bessie, but I have to admit she’s being a brick.”
“That doesn’t mean what she’s doing is right for your wife,” Sarah insisted. “Ask her not to come any more and send Bridie home to Ireland for a holiday. Then Rebecca will look after the baby, you’ll see.”
“No, she won’t, Mother.”
“Twenty pounds I’d bet you if I had it.”
“You’d lose the bet. Because Rebecca doesn’t love the baby.”
Sarah and Abraham exchanged a shocked glance. How could a mother not love her own child?
Nathan got up to take an apple from the bowl of fruit on the dresser and bit into it. “My wife is mentally ill,” he said flatly.
Sarah poked the fire and hid her alarm. “How did she get that way?”
“Childbirth brought it on. It sometimes does.”
“Brought it on? Or brought it out?”
“What’s the difference?” Nathan said impatiently.
“To bring something out it would first have to be there.”
Nathan chewed the apple slowly and thought about it.
“You’d like my opinion?” his mother inquired. “I’ll give it to you anyway. Rebecca stopped being herself before Leona was born. Anyone could see it. And if you ask me, she’s bottling something up inside her which needs to be got rid of. Like a boil gets better after the pus is drawn from it.”
Could his mother be right? Nathan pondered as he drove home. What she had said about Rebecca not being herself before the baby’s birth was true. Was his treatment of her responsible for this trauma?
He brooded about it while he ate his lonely, evening meal. Rebecca had retired early, as she now did every night. She had not resumed her activities with the Refugee Committee, nor had she been to the Shabbos tea parties and it struck him for the first time that his wife was escaping from something; that her rejection of Leona was not the only symptom of her condition. And why was it Bessie she wanted with her? Even her own mother’s offer to stay for a while had been refused.
Why had he not attached any significance to all this before now? He’d allowed his personal involvement to blur his professional eye. Which proved it made sense that doctors shouldn’t treat their own wives. When he went upstairs, Rebecca was buffing her nails at the dressing-table. And humming, as she nearly always was these days. Was that another symptom? He tried to recognize the tune, but it was just an unmusical buzz, flat and toneless.
How beautiful she is, he thought with a pang. Her hair, released from its daytime chignon, lay sleekly upon her shoulders and he could see the satiny gleam of her flesh through the coffee-lace negligée she had slipped on. It was the one she had worn on their wedding night, when her body had still been a mystery to him.
“It’s been a long time since we made love,” he said thickly. But she went on polishing her nails and continued humming, as though she had not heard him, her expression telling him nothing. What was she thinking? The intimacies he had shared with her did not enable him to read her mind.
Nathan got his pyjamas from under the pillow and began to undress. “Remember how we used to go to bed on Sunday afternoons?” he said to Rebecca, but again she did not reply, and he had to restrain himself from grabbing her beautiful shoulders and shaking her out of her apathy. There was no physical reason not to resume their sexual relationship, she had had the baby in February and it was now May. But her indifference to their child had dulled Nathan’s libido. He had not felt the urge to make love to Rebecca until tonight. If he tried to, would he be rejected, too?
“Cora came round with Philip this afternoon,” Rebecca said conversationally. “I never saw such an ugly baby.”
But his mother adores him, so what does it matter? Nathan wanted to reply. His desire had fizzled out like a snuffed candle; but memories of the bodily pleasures he had known with Rebecca were all about him in the room, as the pungent aftermath of the candle would be. He brushed them aside and put on his dressing gown. Leona was in her cradle in the kitchen and he must bring her upstairs, so Bridie could go to bed.
“There was never such a pretty child as ours,” he declared.
Rebecca’s humming grew louder, and he knew she was trying to shut out what she did not want to hear.
“You’d know if you bothered to look at her,” he went on.
Rebecca got into bed and pulled the covers over her head.
The next morning, whilst they were eating breakfast, David rang up to tell them Bessie had a head-cold and would not be coming.
“Bridie can see to the child,” Rebecca said.
Her impersonal reference to their daughter chilled Nathan to the marrow. But the day-to-day problems of raising Leona were uppermost in his mind. Bessie couldn’t be expected to do what she’d been doing indefinitely.
Rebecca was eating a boiled egg and had the Daily Express propped up against the teapot in front of her. “Mussolini’s conquered Abyssinia,” she said.
Nathan had not even glanced at his Manchester Guardian and at that moment could not have cared less about what was going on in the world. “We’ll get a nurse to live in, then we won’t have to trouble anyone,” he said wearily.
Rebecca raised her eyes from the newspaper. “Any particular nurse?”
How long had she known about Mary? Nathan’s throat constricted, and his heart began to pound, so great was his shock in discovering that she did know. Then his mind detached itself from his emotions. Draw the pus from the boil, his mother had said and perhaps the truth was the best poultice. “So, I was in love with a nurse once,” he made himself say casually.
“You still are.”
Rebecca’s face was expressionless, but Nathan could feel her anger pulsating beneath the surface. “I was when I married you,” he admitted unreservedly and paused to consider his next words. “I don’t think I a
m anymore.”
Rebecca poured herself a cup of tea and stirred it carefully.
“David’s marriage wasn’t a love affair, either,” he added. “But Bessie’s happy with him.”
“Is she? I know all about it, Nat. He was still in love with Miriam when he married her, wasn’t he? And he married her for money, like you did with me. She told me everything that day we went to the hospital together, she was upset because they’d had a row.”
“Did she tell you about Mary?”
“No. I told her. It was written on your face that night. Bessie and I are in the same boat. She hates Miriam and I hate that Sister.”
The reason for his wife’s sudden affinity with Bessie was now clear to Nathan. But it was only a side effect of what ailed her. “Leona’s the one you seem to hate,” he said bitterly. “What’s she done to deserve it?”
“It’s what she represents,” Rebecca replied staring at her egg. Then she stabbed the spoon through it, violently, as though whatever she was containing within herself had broken free and caused her to do it. “The things I let you do to me in the name of love,” she said quiveringly. “But it wasn’t love. You were using me.”
Nathan got up and went to stare out of the window at the heavy blossom on the flowering cherry tree but feasting his eyes on it did nothing for the hunger in his heart. He could hear Rebecca weeping, but did not go to comfort her. She wouldn’t want him to. What was it he was hungering for? He tried to analyse it but could not attach the feeling to anything specific. It was just a general emptiness that had suddenly overwhelmed him.
He turned from the window and saw his wife rocking back and forth in her chair, her arms wrapped tightly about herself, tears gushing down her face and splashing unheeded on to her housecoat.
“I’d better go, I’ll be late for surgery,” he said heavily.
Then a shriek from Bridie sent them both fleeing to the kitchen.
“’Twasn’t my fault,” the maid greeted them. She was standing by the hearth with her cap on askew, trying to soothe Leona who was crying piteously. “Bridie wouldn’t let no harm cum t’her own wee darlin’. ’Twas a wicked bit o’ coal spittin’ out o’ t’foire on her precious leg. There, me little sweet –” she began to croon, but stopped in mid-sentence.
Rebecca had snatched Leona from her.
“Will ye look at herself now!” Bridie beamed recovering from her surprise.
Nathan required a moment to recover, too. His wife was cradling the baby against her breast, kissing the small red weal on the child’s plump thigh.
“I hope you’ve got something good for burns, Nat,” she said. “We don’t want her to grow up with a scar.”
After he had attended to his daughter’s leg, Nathan went to tell his mother what had happened. His patients could wait!
Sarah smiled sagely. “Cats have been known to devour their own kittens, but they’d scratch to death anyone else who tried to harm them.”
“And nobody can say you’re not an authority on cats,” Nathan teased her.
“By now, I know a thing or two about people, as well. So, everything is all right, thank God. And also, I hope you’ve learned something, Nat.”
“I have.”
Sarah resumed polishing her brass, which his arrival had interrupted. “Including that when a marriage is arranged and not a love match the wife needs a bit of extra attention to make her forget it? In my day she didn’t. But from what I’ve seen with two of my daughters-in-law, these days they do.”
Nathan had learned a good deal more than that and began applying his new insight to his work, probing his patients with questions when they unloaded their personal problems in his surgery, instead of just listening with half an ear. He established that Mrs. Kaplan’s wheeze only occurred when her sons lost money at the dog races; that the medicine he prescribed had no effect, but a win for her boys cleared her chest immediately. He had not yet fathomed why little Sidney Jacobs stuttered when his father brought him to the surgery in search of a cure but chattered away impediment-free when he came with his mother. Or why so many married women complained of headaches from which they had not suffered when they were single. Now, these and similar mysteries began to obsess his thoughts.
“You’re a doctor, not a detective,” Lou said when they discussed it.
“All diagnosis is detection and patients have minds as well as bodies. One can play havoc with the other.”
“Me, I’ve got enough to do seeing with my eyes and listening with my stethoscope!” Lou exclaimed impatiently. “But trust you to get involved with intangibles.”
“How can one treat the whole person, otherwise?” Nathan replied, but it fell on deaf ears.
Despite his partner’s scepticism, the interrelation of psyche and soma continued to intrigue and absorb him as medicine in the accepted sense had never done, providing an incentive his working life had hitherto lacked. Persistent symptoms for which there was no physical cause were no longer a nuisance, but a challenge to him, and even Lou was impressed when young Sidney Jacobs’s stutter was traced to his father once having threatened to cut off his tongue because he talked too much. Nathan was now required to convince the boy that his father had not meant it, but this too was a challenge and he relished the therapy as much as he had the delving.
Mother’d say there’s never an ill wind, he thought after relaying his findings to Lou. The traumatic aftermath of Leona’s birth had put him through hell, but it had led him to an exciting new aspect of medicine.
Chapter 10
After Rebecca’s crisis was over Bessie could not adjust to her normal routine. “I don’t know what I used to do with myself all day,” she told David one morning while he dressed for work.
Nor do I, David thought. The household had functioned as usual during his wife’s absence. With a maid like Lizzie Wilson, who could produce traditional Jewish dishes in addition to coping with all the other household tasks, the mistress was dispensable.
“You used to see your friends in the afternoons, didn’t you?” he reminded his wife. “Why not ask someone round?”
“Maybe I will,” Bessie said. But the prospect appeared to offer her no comfort.
“Or go and have tea in town.”
“I can’t do that every day. It’s a waste of time,” Bessie declared.
David eyed her with surprise. Had she suddenly realized what an empty life she’d lived? He had always been aware of it but would not have dared voice his opinion. He watched her get out of bed and put on her dressing gown. “You’ve lost weight, love,” he remarked.
“When I was looking after Leona I didn’t sit eating toffees.” Bessie sat down at the dressing-table to brush her hair, which had re-grown in curling, silver tendrils, though it had been straight and mousey-brown before the disastrous perm. “Fancy going grey at my age,” she said as she did every morning. “I look more like fifty than thirty-six.”
David made his regular reply. “It looks nice. On you it isn’t ageing.”
Bessie surveyed her appearance, which was softer and more natural than the self she remembered. She put down her brush and shrugged. “I don’t care if it looks nice or not.”
David stopped knotting his tie. This was not the Bessie he remembered, either.
“I’m fed up with myself,” she added disconsolately. “Nobody needs me.”
“The kids and I need you. What’re you talking about?”
“But they’re at school and you’re at work.”
“You didn’t do much for them before they were school age,” David said. “Lizzie looked after them, didn’t she?”
The defensive outburst he expected did not come.
“I wish I had, but it’s too late now, isn’t it?” Bessie answered quietly.
David could not believe his ears. “By the way, I’m definitely changing the firm’s name,” he said to distract her. She had protested angrily when he told her he was considering doing so, but again the reaction he anticipated did not materi
alize. “The Sanderstyle labels are already printed, but I’ll need your signature to register the company,” he added.
“Naturally you will,” she replied disinterestedly. “As Dad left his half of the business to me, I’m your partner, aren’t I?”
David was dumbfounded. What had happened to the petulant, difficult woman he’d married? The conversation had delayed him and when he arrived at the factory, Eli, the cutter, was pacing the workroom waiting to consult him about the design detail for a special order.
“Let me take off my coat before you start on me!” David expostulated.
Eli took his watch from his pocket and glanced at it censoriously. “Ten minutes late he is, and he wants I should wait.”
“You tell him, Eli,” Abraham, who had entered with David, said with equal disapproval. “He kept me standing in the porch, wondering where he was. Maybe I’ll come to work on the tram in future.”
“Who would let us in if Eli didn’t have a key to the place and you were late like this?” Issie, the senior machiner, rebuked David above the rumble of the sewing machines.
“That’s why he has one. In case I am,” David retorted and went into his office with Eli dogging his footsteps.
“What’s with double flaps on the pockets all of a sudden?” Eli demanded, brandishing the sketch David had left for him. He slapped it down on the desk and took out a handkerchief to blow his bulbous, red nose.
“The customer wants it.”
“We’re selling to lunatics these days?”
David curbed his impatience. “You thought I was one, didn’t you, Eli? The day you and Issie made our first fashion sample.”
“So, I was wrong about you. I apologize for thinking it.”
“If you and Issie’d had your way, raincoats would still be shapeless slip-ons! But I don’t want your apologies, what I want is your co-operation.”
Eli tucked his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat and stared down at the permanent stains on the shiny serge, ruminatively. “So, you’ll get it, don’t you always? Only thank God there won’t be the name Salaman on the labels of those double-pocket-flap coats!”