Scattered Seed

by Maisie Mosco

  There were no unhappy skeletons in the Benjamin cupboard, he reflected enviously when Lou, whom rheumatic fever as a child had rendered unfit for military service, joined them with his dumpy little wife. The smile on Cora’s plain face radiated an inner glow. It wasn’t just an outward show of domestic felicity when none existed, like Rebecca presented to the world.

  “Mazeltov, Nat,” Paula Frankl, who had been pigeonholed in his mind from childhood as a woman nobody in the family liked, said to him as he and Rebecca mounted the synagogue steps.

  Nathan returned the greeting and surveyed Paula’s condescending expression, which had grown more so with the years. Whether or not you liked a person wasn’t important when it came to a Jewish wedding, he thought dryly. You invited them nevertheless, in case they go around saying your bank balance was such that you’d had to cut down the guest list!

  But he knew this was not the real explanation of the presence of Mrs. Frankl and others of her ilk. Marriages, Bar Mitzvahs too, ranked as milestones in the life of a Jewish family and most were impelled by sentiment or duty to share their joyous occasions with everyone with whom they had travelled the road.

  “If this is David’s idea of a small gathering, he’ll have to hold the reception at Old Trafford if he ever has a big one!” Lou said to him when they took their seats with the bride’s close male relatives and friends near the marriage canopy. “That very fat man’s here, who I see at every Sandberg simchah, but I’ve never been introduced to,” he added with a smile.

  “You know who he is, though.”

  “How could I not? He’s a legend in your family.”

  Nathan glanced along the row of seats to where Chaim Berkowitz’s pot-belly, which seemed larger every time he saw it, protruded massively. It was from the Berkowitzes’ humble home in Strangeways, where they had arrived from Russia penniless, that the Sandbergs had set out on the path to comfortable, English respectability. The couple had moved to Leeds before Nathan was born, but his parents still felt indebted to them.

  On the other side of the synagogue, where the women were seated, Nathan could see Chaim’s wife Malka, rotund as her spouse, a diamond brooch pinned to one of the pastel satin frocks she always had on in his imagination, whenever his mother’s mentioning the Berkowitzes conjured her up. The hat she was wearing sported a sweeping feather that was there when he pictured her, too, and it struck him that he visualized her thus because he had never seen her in everyday garments, only on dressy occasions like today.

  The first time he’d met the couple had been at David’s wedding and he couldn’t recall Malka wearing a diamond brooch at that simchah. But the Berkowitzes’ fortunes had risen since then, like almost everyone else’s here. Shloime and Gittel Lipkin, Moishe’s parents, looked prosperous, too, but Nathan’s father often talked of how he and Shloime had tramped the streets together seeking work when they were newly-arrived immigrants. The Cohens, who had also come over on the herring boat with the Sandbergs, were another example. Yankel Cohen had somehow turned himself into a furrier and had managed to stake his youngest daughter Ruby, with whom Nathan had gone to the Jews’ School, to her own hairdressing salon.

  How had they all done it? Nathan pondered while he waited for David, who had just made a self-conscious exit, to return with Shirley on his arm and Leona trailing behind. The Jewish leap from poverty to affluence seemed an inexplicable phenomenon. He had been left in no doubt by David that the phrase “blood, sweat and tears” summed it up and he had even been brutally subjected by his brother to emotional blackmail on account of this, when he’d wanted to tread his own path instead of the one the family had laid down for him. But that didn’t make the transposition from a crust of black-bread to the world of smoked salmon seem any the less miraculous. Perhaps the centuries of uprooting the Jews had suffered had bred in them a need for material security deeper than that of others? And made them work harder in order to achieve it.

  The organist struck the first notes of the bridal music, cutting into his cogitations, and he rose with the rest of the congregation to receive Shirley and her entourage. Lou’s little girl Lila was a bridesmaid, too, and they shared a glance, and then another across the synagogue with their wives.

  Leona’s all Rebecca and I have left to share, Nathan thought sourly. Then the gall gave way to the sweet taste of the paternal devotion that made his other, unassuaged, hunger bearable, as the child who had held him captive since her infant fingers clasped his thumb on the night she was born, approached carrying his cousin’s bridal train. Her resemblance to Shirley had always been marked, and Nathan noted it now, though his niece’s face was lightly veiled. But Leona had Rebecca’s unusual, tawny eyes.

  She gave him an angelic smile as she rustled past him, resplendent in lilac taffeta. What was it about being a father that melted your heart when your child smiled at you that way?

  Nathan noticed that Sammy and Ben, whose children weren’t here, looked pensive. But they had loving wives with whom to share the wartime emptiness, when the sound of young voices had gone from their homes. Without Leona his own home would be an aching void. Seeing David’s daughter already a bride emphasized this. But he would not let himself think of the day sometime in the future when Leona would marry and leave him alone with Rebecca.

  His mother and father were standing under the flower-bedecked chupah, as grandparents always did, and he saw Abraham take out a handkerchief and dab his eyes when the ceremony began. His mother looked calm, almost detached; but her fingers were at the little Russian brooch pinned to her silver-grey dress, which meant her placid expression belied her feelings. For the elder Sandbergs, today marked a very special milestone. Shirley was the first of their grandchildren to marry.

  Was Sarah remembering the day she had been the girl-bride and Abraham the young bridegroom, under a chupah in Dvinsk? Nathan smiled at the notion. Seeing them now, it was difficult to imagine them that way. Probably, knowing his mother, she was thinking of something quite different, anticipating the great-grandchildren Shirley and Peter would give her. And filled with a sense of personal achievement because none of her English descendants had disgraced the family by marrying “out.”

  The unforgivable sin was not quite as rare as it had been when he contemplated committing it. But the war was to blame for that. Jewish boys and girls were finding themselves in situations into which they wouldn’t have got in peacetime; were mixing with Gentiles they would not ordinarily have met. Yesterday at the Shabbos gathering he’d mentioned a Jewish corporal in his unit who had just married a Christian WAAF and his mother had said confidently that none of her grandchildren who were in the Forces would succumb to that temptation.

  Nathan’s own experience was now distant enough for him to consider it dispassionately. Was his mother’s confident assumption correct? How could it not be when her grandchildren had been conditioned the way he had? It was that conditioning which had finally tipped the balance the family’s way for him. Sometimes he despised himself for his weakness, but would he have been any stronger if he had his time again, without the benefit of hindsight?

  He heard little Henry Moritz shriek from beside Leona, where he and his twin were balancing a small, blue velvet cushion on which Ronald, who was best man, had a minute ago deposited the wedding ring.

  Nathan saw his wife pale and she seemed to be signalling to him with her eyes. What had Leona done? He glanced at the young bridal attendants again. The ring had gone from the cushion! But how could it have done when the twins had not yet borne it to the bridegroom?

  Then Frank raced across the synagogue to Hannah, which seemed to amuse her, and Helga whispered something to him that sent him hastening back to Henry, who was now on his white-satined knees searching the carpet.

  The rabbi waited patiently, as though the antics of little bridesmaids and page boys were nothing new to him. So patiently, that Nathan wondered if on this occasion the reverend gentleman was perhaps unaware of exactly what had happened.

 
; Those under the chupah were all too aware. Shirley had glanced over her shoulder, distracted by Henry’s shriek and Frank’s thudding footsteps and had blanched at the sight of the ringless cushion lying where Henry had deposited it whilst he searched on the floor. David had a thunderous frown on his face and Bessie was choking herself with her pearls, twisting them nervously into a knot.

  Peter was visibly trembling. Nathan could see his tallith flapping. And Sigmund, beside him with Miriam and Sammy, who were deputizing for his parents, looked tempted to hold him up in case he fainted.

  The rabbi glanced at Ronald, who went to consult with the twins.

  “We can’t find it,” Henry announced in his piping voice.

  “It must have rolled somewhere,” Frank added apologetically.

  A moment of silence followed, then Sarah removed her own wedding ring and beckoned to Ronald to come and take it.

  Why hadn’t it occurred to Bessie or Miriam to do that? Nathan thought. Because they were the kind who went to pieces in a crisis. But his mother was not.

  “It’s all your Leona’s fault,” little Lila Benjamin hissed to him indignantly. “She pinched Henry’s bum, I saw her do it.”

  “Tell-tale! You’re supposed to be my friend!” Leona shouted and there was a sharp intake of breath from the entire congregation. “Henry pulled a horrid face at me, or I wouldn’t have done it.” She lifted her long, frilly skirts and ran tempestuously towards the exit, oblivious to the gaping and head-shaking lining the route, her artificial-anemone circlet bobbing up and down on her fiery hair.

  “Place the ring upon the forefinger of the bride’s right hand,” the rabbi said firmly to Peter, whose eyes were glued mesmerically to the doorway in company with everyone else’s.

  Leona was just disappearing through it.

  Nathan and Rebecca emerged from their shock simultaneously and went after her.

  After Shirley and Peter had gone home to change, so they could catch the train to Southport where they were to spend their honeymoon, the evening stretched emptily ahead for the family.

  “That’s the trouble with afternoon receptions,” Bessie said restlessly when the guests had departed and the Sandbergs and Moritzes were left contemplating the remains of the lavish tea littering the tables. “But my husband wouldn’t hear of an evening do. God forbid people should think we’re being his favourite word, in wartime! So they won’t think we’re ostentatious, they’ll think we’re paupers instead.”

  “Nobody could think that with the jewellery you’ve got on,” her mother-in-law told her.

  “All right. So they’ll remember we didn’t spend much on our Ronald’s Bar Mitzvah, either, and say we’re mean,” Bessie retorted. She gave David a resentful look, and a frustrated twitch to the belt of her fifty-guinea, ice-blue gown. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s being all dressed up with nowhere to go.”

  “Me, I’m glad it’s over,” David declared brusquely. His daughter’s eyes had brimmed with tears when she hugged him goodbye and the sight of them had brought home to him that even though she would continue to live under his roof until Peter was a civilian again, her marriage was a parting of the ways.

  Added to this, the wedding in retrospect seemed like a chapter of accidents, a far cry from the perfect day he had wanted her to cherish in her memory. The ring had turned up while they were signing the register, someone had spotted it glistening beside the bimah. But it wasn’t the one over which Peter had made his solemn vows and this Shirley would not forget. None of the women in the family had ever removed their wedding rings; his mother’s finger had been indented with a deep groove when she took hers off and it must have upset her to do so after nearly half a century.

  He shot a resentful glance at Nathan and Rebecca seated stiffly side by side, like strangers on a train. They hadn’t only made a shamble of their marriage, they’d made one of bringing up their child and his own daughter’s wedding ceremony had been marred because of it.

  But Leona, who was presently cuddled on Bridie’s broad lap sucking her thumb like an innocent babe, couldn’t be blamed for the mishaps that had followed. His own foot had stepped on Shirley’s train when he and Bessie led the bridal party across the shul foyer after the service and his clumsiness had wrenched her headdress, to which the train was attached, halfway off her head. It had been dangling over one ear when she stepped outside, where a cluster of wedding-watchers was waiting to gawp at her.

  As if this was not enough, his poor darling daughter had singed the front of her hair on the top-table candles whilst leaning over to shake hands with old Rabbi Lensky, who had been officiating at a funeral and arrived late. Then, to cap everything, the knife had been too blunt to saw through the rock-hard icing on the wedding cake. Peter had eventually managed to stab the point into it, but his attempt to carry this through to a slicing action had sent the whole sugary confection toppling off its base to land in a crumbling, brown and white mess on the floor.

  “What’s up wi’ yer, Mr. Sandberg?” Lizzie inquired.

  David lit a cigarette, conscious of the maid surveying him and of his cheeks having flamed with mortification as he catalogued the day’s disastrous incidents.

  “I expec’ yer in’t dumps, an’ I am mesen,” she declared when he did not reply. “Why don’t we go ’ome? If we ’urry oursen, our Shirley might still be there.”

  He glanced at her bony figure, familiar as a piece of his household furniture, but today incongruously clad in a beaded, purple dress Bessie had loaned her for the occasion. It was miles too wide for her, which an improvised sash could not disguise; and her flat-crowned straw hat, wreathed with cambric pansies, reminded him of the ones horses wore in carnival processions, with its streamers flowing behind and the brim tilted slightly forward above her long face.

  “It’s best not to get home till they’ve gone, that’s why we’re hanging around like this,” he said kindly and saw her features crumple with disappointment. Dear old Lizzie, he thought with a surge of affection for her. But she wasn’t old, she only seemed it. She’d been fifteen, he recollected, when she came to them from the mining village which she now rarely visited. His children had become the centre of her drab existence. She had practically brought them up and they’d probably be the nearest thing to kids of her own she’d ever have. There wasn’t much likelihood of Lizzie marrying.

  Sarah was eyeing the uneaten food, displeased at the waste of her son’s money, and unhappily aware of the gloom around her. A wedding shouldn’t end this way. There should be an air of rejoicing as there’d been when a couple were wed in her Russian girlhood, when the celebrations had lasted for three days and not until the third had elapsed were the bridal pair allowed to desert the guests to consummate their marriage. Joy should not be just for the bride and groom, but for their family who had nurtured and guided them to this pinnacle of their lives, too.

  “Everyone must come back to my house,” she commanded, and the Queen Victoria look in her eyes forbade anyone to refuse.

  She sent the twins scurrying to the kitchen to ask the caterers for a big box, into which she personally packed all the edibles remaining on the tables and told Nathan to put the box in his car. David’s had already been crammed with the remains of the liquor.

  An hour later, she was ensconced in her parlour, smiling with satisfaction. “So,” she declared to the others. “What could be a nicer end to the day than this?”

  Nobody replied, but their tacit assent did not mean they could not think of preferable alternatives, of which Sarah was quite aware. And her own satisfaction was superficial, only a show. In the quiet of her own home, with the twins half-asleep and Leona quiescent for once, she could no longer pretend that the under-current she had sensed before they left the reception was not there.

  Who was it coming from? She tried to decide. It only required one person to be privately eaten up with something for the air in a room to ripple. It invariably did when the family got together, everyone had their pe
rsonal worries and the general anxiety about Harry was ever-present. But what she could feel now was something extra, that hadn’t been there at her tea party yesterday.

  She glanced around surreptitiously. Nat and Rebecca’s lack of accord seemed no worse than usual and David was holding Bessie’s hand, as if he was seeking comfort from her, the way Abraham had from herself on Esther’s wedding night; a daughter’s

  marriage was emotionally more of a wrench to a man than a son’s.

  She watched Ben light a new cigarette from the stub of the one he’d just smoked, but he’d been doing that since the War Office telegram arrived.

  “Mother looks as if she’s ticking us all off on a list!” Sammy joked.

  Sarah avoided his eye, because this was exactly what she had been doing. Once there’d only been Abraham and her young children to concern her, but now keeping track of everyone wasn’t easy, with the size to which her family had grown. Abraham had dozed off, she noted continuing her check. And Sigmund appeared no more morose than he’d been since the war began. Her gaze moved to Miriam, whose beautiful face was drawn into an expression of tight composure. The tension was coming from her; the tortured look in her eyes gave her away.

  “I feel like a breath of air, come and keep me company, Miriam,” she said, taking her hand and leading her out of the room.

  They went to lean over the garden gate in the gathering twilight and neither spoke for a moment or two. Then Miriam gazed up at the overhanging branches of Mrs. Evans’s laburnum, which carpeted Sarah’s concrete path with yellow every spring.

  “How still it is tonight. There’s no breeze to stir the leaves,” she said with a poignant tremor in her voice.

  Sarah scanned her face. “What’s wrong, Miriam?”