Scattered Seed

by Maisie Mosco

  He returned to his bench to prepare the pattern for the garments he did not want to make, indignation in his every move, David noted, watching him through the glass partition. Eli didn’t approve of the firm’s name being changed, either. Nor did Issie. But David had not expected them to. Even though his father-in-law was dead and had taken no active part in the business since the war, employees like Eli and Issie, who had spent all their working lives at Salaman’s, retained their respect for him though his treatment of them had merited anything but.

  But there was no question of the workers’ loyalty to himself, either, David mused while he opened the mail. The way Eli and Issie had ticked him off wouldn’t have been countenanced by many employers, but it was their personal interest in the business that made them feel entitled to speak their minds and he would not have had it otherwise.

  During the mid-morning break, he took his tea and bagel into the workroom, as he often did, ever cognizant of having once been a worker himself and that his staff were human beings, who appreciated a friendly word from their boss.

  “How’re the children, David?” Millie Greenbaum, another long-time employee, greeted him from behind her machine.

  “I’ve brought some new snaps to show you,” David smiled, taking them from his pocket and passing them around.

  “Let me see already!” Millie said, impatiently snatching them from Eli. “Shirley’s getting to look like your sister Esther, David,” she pronounced.

  “And Ronald’s the image of your Nat,” Eli declared. “He should only have his brains, also.”

  David smiled stiffly. Once he’d been pleased his son resembled his handsome young brother, but not anymore! “Did I tell you our Shirley’s passed the scholarship for Central High School?” he said proudly.

  “Half-a-dozen times,” Issie chuckled through a mouthful of black bread-and-butter.

  “My lad’s passed ter go there, an’ all,” a quiet, Gentile woman who had joined the staff a fortnight ago said from the second row of machines.

  “That’s marvellous, Emily,” David congratulated her warmly. Thank goodness education wasn’t only available to kids whose parents could afford to pay for it, he thought. If it were, he wouldn’t have gone, however briefly, to that school himself.

  “That’s why I’ve gone back ter work,” Emily added sipping her tea. “Ter mek up fer what our John won’t earn till later on. ’E’s got ’is eye on’t university!” she laughed.

  “Good luck to him,” David applauded. In the Sandberg family, only Nat had been that lucky and everyone else, himself included, had slaved to bring it about. “I’ve got something else to show you,” he smiled collecting himself and handing a piece of paper to Eli. “Remember how our Shirley used to draw pictures on your bench with chalk, when she was a tiny tot? She’s still at it, but she uses a pencil these days.”

  Eli studied Shirley’s sketch of Lizzie Wilson. “She’s a better artist than you, David.”

  “Who wouldn’t be?” David grinned. But he was proud of his daughter’s talent. The drawing he had shown to Eli had a three-dimensional quality which even after years of sketching designs he could not achieve.

  Millie and Issie had a look at it, too.

  “Perhaps she’ll take over the designing here when she grows up,” Millie said.

  “That somebody should, I’m looking forward to,” Eli added snidely.

  “And then you’ll maybe be better tempered,” Issie said to him. “After all these years of trying to make head or tail of David’s designs.”

  David took the bantering and the laughter at his expense in good part. “Who knows?” he shrugged. But the possibility excited him. What could be better than having both his children in the business, helping him reach the heights he intended to attain? Ronald he was sure of. His son’s future was here waiting. Shirley could turn out to be an unexpected bonus.

  It had occurred to him whilst driving to the factory that Bessie could learn to type and keep the books, now she had lost taste for frittering away her time. But her presence at the factory was not a pleasant prospect. The workers who remembered her as Isaac Salaman’s spoiled daughter wouldn’t be comfortable with her around and nor would Sammy for whom she had only contempt.

  Sammy was not at work today. The specialist Nathan had sent him to see had not advocated surgery but was seeing him regularly and had just ordered a week of bed rest. David made a note on his desk pad to remind him to deliver Sammy’s wage-packet on Friday. As if I need reminding, he thought. The secret guilt he carried for his brother’s plight would haunt him till the end of his days.

  Hugo Frankl, who owned a store in Oldham, arrived to see the new range and David brushed his family problems aside and escorted him to the room where samples were hung on rails.

  “How’s your father?” he inquired.

  Hugo sighed. “A business man he’ll never be, but I let him think he is. What can you do?”

  “And your mother?”

  “The same as always,” Hugo replied cryptically.

  David gave him a sympathetic smile. The brittle, nagging Paula Frankl he’d known since his childhood would never change.

  “Not that Father wants to be a businessman,” Hugo shrugged. “He’d still be working for that glazier in Red Bank, who he got a job with when we first came to England, if it weren’t for me.”

  And he’d probably be a damn sight happier, David thought. All Ludwig Frankl had ever wanted was to earn his bread as simply as possible and, like his friend Sigmund Moritz, be left alone with his books and music.

  Hugo was examining the samples. “My cousin with three shops in London tells me some of his manufacturers have got showrooms now,” he imparted.

  “Does it make the garments any better?” David smiled.

  Hugo licked his lips, a habit David remembered from their schooldays. “Any garment is improved with a good figure inside it,” he winked. “They use girls instead of coat hangers.”

  There’s a lot I don’t know about selling, David mused after Hugo had given him an order and gone. Sending Moishe out to see buyers in other towns was only part of it. He thought of asking one of his machinists to try on the coats next time a customer called, but it would mean letting a machine stand idle for however long it took. And none of his females employees had a really good shape. For fifteen bob a week he could take on a young girl to help in the office and make sure he chose one who had.

  As always, when he made a snap decision he implemented it immediately and went out to arrange a suitable advertisement in the Manchester Evening News. Afterwards, instead of returning to the factory to eat his lunch, he drove home to see Bessie whose depressed countenance kept floating to the forefront of his mind.

  “T’missis ’as gone out wi’ ’er nex’ door,” Lizzie told him. “An’ yer could o’ knocked me down wi’ a feather when she said as she were goin’ ter.”

  David was amazed, too. Bessie had never liked their next-door-neighbour.

  “Terday were t’first time they’d spoke since Mrs. Levy ticked t’missis off fer only wearin’ a sheitel ’cause she lost ’er ’air an’ not fer religion’s sake,” Lizzie added.

  David could think of nothing his wife and Mrs. Levy had in common now that Bessie no longer wore a wig.

  “She’s a marvellous person,” Bessie said when he expressed his opinion that night. “I went with her to help at the Soup Kitchen today.”

  He was putting a cigarette in his mouth and paused with it in mid-air. Their neighbour’s devotion to charitable work was well known, but Bessie had never shown the slightest inclination to participate in it. He lit the cigarette and gave her a perplexed glance.

  “I’m going to help there again, I enjoyed it,” she declared. “And I’m joining the other committees she belongs to. There’s a lot of good work to be done in this town.”

  It won’t last, David thought. She’ll soon be gallivanting around town with her friends again, like she used to do. No woman could change to thi
s extent permanently.

  Time proved David wrong. Bessie’s appetite for doing good seemed insatiable.

  “I’m pleased she spends her time helping people, but I still don’t understand it,” David told his mother when he called to collect some jumble she was giving for a sale which one of Bessie’s committees was organizing.

  “What’s to understand?” Sarah answered. “Helping others is a pleasure, once you find it out.”

  David picked up an old saucepan Sarah had not yet put into the carton and fingered the lid absently. “But it isn’t like Bessie to be so selfless.”

  Sarah smiled. “That, she isn’t entirely being.”

  “You mean she gets personal satisfaction from it?”

  Sarah took the pan from him and polished the pitted aluminium with a cloth; whoever bought one of her discarded utensils, even if they only paid threepence for it, would find it in shining condition. “Which do-gooder could deny that and be honest? But also, they relieve a lot of misery, and they’re entitled to their satisfaction.”

  A few days later, Bessie rang up David at the factory. “You won’t believe who was queueing for soup today,” she said grimly.

  “I’ll be doing it myself if you keep interrupting me when I’m trying to earn a living!” he answered impatiently.

  “Who else should I interrupt and ask to deliver things sometimes to poor people? All my friends’ husbands do it.”

  “I know. They’ve told me.” Bessie’s friends these days were not the shallow women with whom she had mixed prior to her transformation and he preferred their husbands to the last lot.

  “It was Sigmund Moritz, David.”

  “What?”

  “Queueing for soup.”

  For a moment David could not take it in.

  “But he didn’t have any,” Bessie said, while he was recovering from his confusion. “He ran a mile when he saw me.”

  After Bessie had rung off, David tapped on the glass partition and beckoned his brother into the office.

  “My father-in-law’d have to be starving before he’d queue for free food,” Sammy declared when David had told him.

  “Exactly.” David looked thoughtful. “But since he married Gertie Fish, his income’s come from her business, hasn’t it?”

  “I think she just gives him spending money.”

  “What a lovely situation for a man to be in! He’d never have given up tailoring if she hadn’t insisted on it.”

  Sammy’s face was puckered with distress. “When he moved out, Helga wanted to clear his workshop to use it as a parlour, but he wouldn’t let her. He goes to sit there by himself sometimes, when he visits them. Do you think he’s left Gertie?”

  “Why else would he be wandering about hungry and penniless? He told Mother his marriage wasn’t paradise, but his pride would never let him tell any of us a thing like this. We must try to find him, Sammy.”

  They went first to Gertie’s shop to inquire if she knew where Sigmund was staying and found her behind the counter in a muddle of the haberdashery from which she made her lucrative living.

  “You’ve come for his things, I suppose,” she rasped the moment she saw them. “So, take them and good riddance!” She flung aside a dusty, red velvet curtain, her pouter-pigeon chest heaving, and shouted up a flight of narrow stairs. “Mona!”

  A pair of stick-like legs, clad in wrinkled black hose and with two odd shoes on the feet, appeared on the landing.

  “Throw down the suitcase with that dogsbody’s belongings in it,” Gertie instructed vindictively. “Me, I wouldn’t soil my hands packing it. It’s enough my poor charlady had to,” she told the cluster of customers.

  Sammy had turned crimson and David had to fight the urge to throttle her. They exchanged an embarrassed glance. Had the woman no sense of propriety?

  Gertie resumed measuring some blue-sequin trimming. “I don’t blame them looking ashamed, related to such a ganef,” she told the fat lady she was serving.

  “It’s terrible,” the lady agreed.

  “I beg your pardon?” David interceded.

  The customer looked nervous, but Gertie’s eyes merely grew stonier.

  “It’s no secret round here what a life I’ve had with him,” she informed the brothers.

  “You called him a thief,” David said icily.

  “What else would you call someone you catch with their hand in the till?” Gertie spat as Sigmund’s suitcase thumped down the stairs.

  David strode to get it, sending a boxful of tiny, silver bugle-beads scattering on to the floor in his haste to escape from her venom. He could hear his shoes crunching on them as he made his exit.

  Sammy was already outside. “It’ll take her hours to pick ’em all up,” he said with satisfaction watching Gertie scrabbling on her hands and knees.

  Then the fat lady slammed the door on them.

  David put down the suitcase and tried to pull himself together. “I don’t know how I stopped myself from hitting the lying bitch!”

  Sammy was looking at the battered old valise. “He brought that with him from Vienna.”

  “I know,” David said heavily. There was something pathetically lonely about it, dumped on the pavement in the July sunshine, with its owner heaven-knew-where. “Carl told me it was so full of books his father couldn’t walk more than a few steps without putting it down.” How had a man of Sigmund’s intellectual stature come to this? The same way Ludwig Frankl had let himself in for the life he had with Paula. Intellect didn’t always go hand in hand with good sense.

  “I’m devoted to Sigmund, but there’re times when I could give him a good shaking, and this is one of them!” he fumed as they got into the car. “Why should I have to leave my business to look after itself and go looking for him? If he had any sense he’d be with the family now, instead of causing us all this trouble.”

  He lit a cigarette and sat tapping his fingers on the steering wheel when a bread van, making a delivery on a side street he was using as a short cut to Cheetham Hill, held them up.

  Sammy sat rubbing his leg, which always seemed to ache more than usual when he was under stress. “You don’t think he’ll do anything daft, do you, David?”

  David did not reply but prickled with alarm. The old fool was capable of throwing himself under a tram, rather than face the family after he’d been seen queueing for soup. “It’s no use trying to keep it from Miriam and Helga. We’d better go and tell them,” he said brusquely.

  The sisters were sitting together in Miriam’s kitchen, winding some knitting wool for a shawl Helga was making for the baby Hannah expected in December.

  Miriam let the white skein on her wrists fall to the floor when David and Sammy entered. “What’re you doing here at this time? What’s the matter?”

  After they had been told, she leapt to her feet and paced the rug like an angry tigress. “I feel like killing that woman!”

  “Make David and me a cup of tea instead, love,” Sammy said gently.

  Miriam stood with her fists clenched for a moment, looking into her husband’s eyes, then her body relaxed, and she lifted the kettle from the hob on to the low fire that had to be kept burning even in summertime to heat the hot-water cistern.

  David marvelled, as he often did, at his brother’s soothing influence upon Miriam. But he had always known Sammy was the right man for her. His own love for her, now just a distant remembrance, had had the opposite effect, fuelling the flames of her tempestuous nature and causing more pain than pleasure for both of them.

  He watched her brew the tea in a brown earthenware pot, the kind Bessie called “working-class,” and get out some thicks willow-pattern cups and saucers which his wife would also consider beneath her. Only the best was still Bessie’s maxim; her new interest in good works had not removed her personal pretensions to grandeur.

  But he had similar ideas himself. The difference between him and Bessie was that he didn’t look down on those who hadn’t. And he never would. Not even when he
moved to Cheshire and had a home like the one his Christian schoolfriend Jim Forrest lived in. He’d only been inside it once, but the experience had given him something to aim for. That Miriam had derided and which she had said was beyond his reach, he recalled, as she handed him his tea.

  None of them had spoken whilst the tea was being prepared and the thoughtful silence remained whilst they drank it.

  “What’re we going to do about Father?” Helga said, when David pushed his cup and saucer aside and got up to stand with his back to the fire.

  “Why are you asking David?” Miriam said to her. “It’s Sammy who’s Father’s son-in-law.”

  “We’ll have to ask the police to look for him, and it doesn’t matter which of us makes the phone call,” David put in tactfully. Was Miriam trying to take him down, or build her husband up? What did it matter? “I see Sammy’s made you a new fruit bowl, Miriam,” he said, to ease the awkward moment.

  Sammy eyed the leaf-shaped receptacle on the dresser disparagingly. His beautiful wood-carvings were all over his home and had places of honour in those of the rest of the family, too, but he was always dismissive about them. “I have to do something in my spare time,” he shrugged.

  “Who’s interested in fruit bowls with Father missing?” Miriam flashed. “You’d better go to the phone box and report it, Sammy.”

  “There’s no need,” David said. “I’m going back to the factory to lock up for the night. I’ll make the call the minute I get there.”

  Helga followed him out. “You may as well drop Father’s case, on your way.”

  David got the valise from the car and carried it across the street to the Moritzes’ house. “I don’t believe it!” he exclaimed stopping short on the pavement and pointing to the front room window.

  Sigmund was in his workshop, bending over the cutting bench.

  Helga smiled. “I do! We’d better not pass any remarks, or ask him any questions, David.”

  “I wouldn’t dare,” David laughed. He felt like jumping for joy but managed to contain himself. “Who’s he making a garment for, Helga? He hasn’t got any customers.”