by Maisie Mosco
“Ask me what’s right, it’ll take less time to tell you. You don’t miss a thing, do you, Ma?”
“You’d prefer I should?”
Miriam managed to smile, but it was as brief as a firefly flitting across the surface of a stone. She turned away and gripped the gate, her knuckles gleaming white on her work-reddened hands. “I rang up Martin’s billet from the call box in the reception hall.”
“Why?”
“After he phoned to tell us his leave had been cancelled, I had an uneasy feeling and I couldn’t shake it off. A kind of intuition.”
That all mothers have where their children are concerned, Sarah thought. Like a sixth sense God provides you with for the purpose.
“But I shouldn’t have given in to it. I wish I hadn’t rung up,” Miriam went on. “Because he wasn’t there.”
Her expression was now so abject with misery, Sarah feared she had been told Martin had been sent on some terrible danger mission. Only it couldn’t be anything like that, such information was kept secret.
“They told me he’d gone home for the weekend, Ma. So everything he said when he phoned was a lie.”
Sarah’s heart bled for her. What Miriam had learned about her son had nothing to do with danger, but in a different way was just as painful. Each time a mother found out her child had told her a serious falsehood her trust in him died a little. Would she herself ever believe in Nat the way she had before she discovered he had the shiksah girl-friend? It still hurt her to think of how many lies that deceit had entailed.
“The lying is hard enough to take,” Miriam whispered. “But that he preferred to spend his leave somewhere else…”
Sarah sighed. There was that, too. “You’ve told Sammy?”
Miriam shook her head. “Sammy’s had enough hurts in his time, without this.” She leaned against the gate, fiddling with a button on her dress, pensively, as if she were recollecting the injuries life had inflicted on her husband.
Sarah was remembering them, too.
Miriam emerged from her reverie and rubbed her bare arms. “Let’s go inside, Ma, it’s getting chilly. I shan’t tell Martin I found out. But how will I ever forgive him?”
Sarah regarded her with compassion. “To forget about it – maybe not. But to forgive, a mother always finds a way.”
Chapter 10
Marianne lay with her hands folded behind her head, watching the blackout curtains, which they always drew back after lights-out, flapping in the night-breeze. Her bed was beside the window, but even in cold weather the draught was preferable to the liquor fumes her room-mates brought in with them.
Tonight she was grateful for the breeze. The day had been warm and stifling and the tepid shower she’d taken when she got back from Salisbury Plain had not helped her to sleep. It would take more than a shower to cool the fever in her blood and settle the kaleidoscope of thoughts jiggling like varicoloured fragments in her mind.
She could hear Birdie’s porcine snores and see her bony shoulder moving up and down with the rhythm of her breath, in a shaft of moonlight. Joyce was sound asleep, too. How she envied them their casual approach to life; the easy come, easy go attitude that left them unscarred, wnich even in wartime could never be hers.
Joyce’s arm was dangling over the side of her bed, a heavy, silver identity bracelet engraved with her latest GI’s name weighing down her hand. Marianne was the only girl in the unit who didn’t have at least one of these souvenirs d’amour, which some girls displayed like trophies, wearing their whole jangling collection triumphantly together. They stitched US Army emblems to the khaki pullovers they wore over their shirts at dances, too; Birdie’s and Joyce’s by now had so many of these patches sewn on, they looked like collages in which every piece could tell a story.
Marianne had only one emblem, which she kept in her box of treasures. The GI who gave it to her had wanted her to have his identity bracelet, also, but she had refused to accept it. How could she walk around with his name attached to her wrist, as if he owned her? She hadn’t been sure, then, if she loved him. Was she sure now? When he declared his love for her, she had told him it wasn’t possible after such a short acquaintance. Then he had taken her in his arms and kissed her and the fire that had raged in her veins had made her think perhaps it was.
She’d met him the night she went dancing with Birdie and Joyce and there had been no need for them to walk up the hill with her as they’d promised. She had been happy to let Michael drive her to her quarters in his jeep. A nice Jewish boy, she’d thought when he kissed her chastely on the cheek.
His kisses had become less chaste as time went by and they saw each other every night. But she’d wanted them to, she had to admit now, lying in the dark with her face burning with shame. And had not demurred when she felt his hands on her breasts. She allowed the deliriously sweet recollection to swamp her senses, then ruthlessly blotted it out.
She had intended writing to her parents about him, to prepare them for the possibility of their daughter being a GI bride, because he’d asked her to marry him if he survived the war. Not until today, when they were picnicking beside Stonehenge in the sunshine and he’d inquired if she wanted a church wedding, had she discovered that Americans could have surnames like Weiss, but not necessarily be Jewish.
When she told him she was, he’d said his parents wouldn’t mind and had looked offended when she said hers would. Then there’d been an uncomfortable silence and it had struck her that you didn’t have silences like that with someone you knew well.
The moonbeam had moved from Birdie’s shoulder to a picture of Frank Sinatra on the wall and she surveyed the singer’s smiling countenance absently. What had she and Michael talked about during the short time they’d known each other? Books and music. Occasionally about their families, in the superficial way you mentioned your folks to somebody who hadn’t met them. But most of their conversation had centred on the war and everything that went with it. The artificial present they shared, with only brief references to their separate pasts.
She knew Michael was a law student and intended resuming his studies when the war ended. But the student life at Columbia University he’d briefly described was no more real to her than the America she had seen on the cinema screen. Michael himself wasn’t real to her, she’d only seen a single dimension of him. The one clad temporarily in uniform whom she could now see in her imagination.
And it was the same for him, about her. She had tried to explain why she couldn’t marry a Gentile but had failed to make him see that it wasn’t only a matter of adhering to the religious laws. Her reason had begun to question these long ago, but the family aspect continued to hold her fast. And a person from a non-Jewish background couldn’t be expected to understand the powerful force that was inexplicable to Marianne herself.
If she married Michael and went to live in the States, with the Atlantic between herself and the family, would the blood-tie loose its hold on her? she pondered just before she dozed off. Maybe Mam and Dad would forgive her if they didn’t have to actually see her bringing up a family of only half-Jewish children? Then a mental image of her grandmother fingering the little gold brooch she always wore at Shabbos gatherings replaced the one of Michael and her last drowsy thought was that she couldn’t do it.
“When’s the weddin’, cock?” Birdie inquired the next morning whilst they were throwing on their uniforms to get on parade in time for roll call.
“There isn’t going to be one.”
“Well, stone a crow!” Joyce exclaimed, fumbling with her tie. “We fought it was the love match of the century.”
“Turned art ter be ’andin’ yer a snow job, did ’e?” Birdie said, rolling her cigarette from one side of her dry lips to the other. “Them Yanks is very good at shootin’ girls lines abart marryin’ ’em arter the war.”
“Hespecially them whose knickers they can’t get darn any hother way,” Joyce said coarsely.
Marianne blushed to the tip of her fringe. “It
might interest you to know I’ve still got my virginity.”
“Don’t look so miserable abart it, cock,” Birdie grinned. “The war haint over yet. An’ there’s that RAF bloke waitin’ in the wings, haint there?” she added slyly.
“Which RAF bloke?”
“The one what turned up lookin’ fer yer yesterday. What yer’d never said a word ter Joycie’n me abart, yer dark lickle ’orse! Left ’er a note, didn’t ’e, Joycie?”
“We heven ’ad ter supply ’im wiv paper’n an envelope. Where did we put it, Birdie?”
“Hon the chest of drawers, I fink. Hif we ’adn’t been boozed up, we’d’ve remembered ter tell ’er abart it larst night.”
Marianne delved into the clutter on top of the chest and found one of the scented pink envelopes in which Birdie sent weekly tetters to her sailor husband. The handwriting on it was Martin’s, as she had known it would be; he was the only airman she knew. But he’d written her he was going home for Shirley’s wedding, what had he been doing here instead?
She stuffed the envelope into her tunic pocket as the whistle blew to summon them on parade and opened it afterwards, on the way to breakfast.
“What’s up, cock?” Birdie asked when she stopped in her tracks.
“Yer look as if yer’ve bin ’it over the ’ead wiv a mallet,” Joyce declared.
Marianne gave them a dazed glance. “Do I?” she muttered confusedly and went to lean on the cookhouse wall with the sheet of notepaper clutched in her hand.
The message was quite clear, but she could not take it in. Her relationship with Martin had always been solid ground, without the shifting sands she had recently learned could exist between a man and a woman; the mood had sometimes changed – they were temperamental people – but never the essence, the comfortable friendship they had shared all their lives. But now it was over. There could be no going back to it after what Martin had written.
Birdie and Joyce were hovering impatiently beside her, watching the rest of the platoon crowd noisily into the cookhouse.
“Hif we don’t get a move on, there’ll be no bleedin’ bangers left!” Birdie exclaimed, prodding her in the ribs.
Marianne folded the sheet of paper and replaced it in the envelope, but the words inscribed upon it were imprinted on her still stunned mind.
When shall we twain
Join hands again
No more to part?
Thou hast my heart.
Chapter 11
Sarah had observed over the years – and the series of mishaps at Shirley’s wedding confirmed it – that things rarely happened singly. If she broke a cup, more breakages usually followed within a short space of time and it was like that with family matters, too, though sometimes the crop of events was a mixture of bad and good. You would jog along quietly for a while, then suddenly things happened one after the other to jolt you out of your routine.
Saturday 3 June 1944 was that kind of day.
“Answer the phone, Abraham,” she said when it rang whilst she was preparing breakfast.
“Harry’s alive!” she heard Esther’s voice reverberate joyfully over the line before Abraham had time to say “Hello” and Sarah rushed to grab the receiver from his hand.
“Mazeltov!” she said to her daughter as if Harry had just been reborn.
Esther laughed exuberantly, as she had not done for a long time. “We just heard he’s a prisoner in Stalag Eight B, Mother.”
Sarah paled. “It’s in Germany?”
“Don’t worry. We phoned the Red Cross to ask if Jewish servicemen are victimized in German POW camps and they said no. Ben’s already packing a parcel to send to him. And we’re going to shut the shop this afternoon and celebrate with the family, instead of arriving at the tea party late like we usually do.”
Abraham was staring up at the ceiling.
“Cobwebs you won’t see in my house, so don’t tell me you’ve found one,” Sarah said to him after she had rung off.
Abraham smiled and blew his nose emotionally. “It’s times like this that strengthen a person’s faith, Sorrel, when you can feel the Almighty’s presence watching over you and yours. He’s answered the special prayer I made in shul for Harry’s deliverance, so I’ve been telling Him thank you. It’s only polite.”
Sarah kissed his cheek. Nearly forty years he’d been in England, but he had not lost his Hassidic ways. Her husband still talked about God as if He were a flesh and blood person, held conversations with Him even, like their Russian forebears had done. But to Abraham’s anglicized sons and grandsons, respect for the Almighty had nothing personal about it. Perhaps that was why they found the Hebraic laws so easy to break? For Abraham to break them would seem to him like letting down a trusted friend. There was a lot to be said for the old ways.
“Tell God thank you from me also and I hope He’ll carry on the good work with all our boys,” she smiled.
The Shabbos gathering that afternoon was indeed a celebration. Sarah had not seen so many happy faces in her parlour for years. Sammy was going through a bad spell with the arthritic pain in his hip, but Miriam made light of it when she arrived without him and did not allow her private distress about Martin’s deceit, from which she had not yet recovered, to surface and mar the joyous atmosphere.
Sarah was handing round the kuchen, spread thickly with beetroot-and-ginger preserve left over from Passover, when she heard the garden gate clank. “Every day should only be like this one!” she beamed, pointing through the window excitedly.
Her grandson, Arnold, was striding up the garden path in his naval officer’s uniform.
“He’s grown a beard,” Leona giggled.
“Let him grow two, I’d still be happy to see him!” Esther shrieked ecstatically, rushing to the front door to let him in.
“He’s got thin,” Ben said when Esther finally stopped kissing her son and allowed the others to take a look at him.
“I’ve only just stepped into the room and my father’s already criticizing me,” Arnold joked. “Any news about our Harry?” he asked, taking off his cap and smoothing his ginger hair. “Well, that’s one of us safely out of the war,” he said in his down-to-earth manner after they had told him.
“Why didn’t you ring up and tell us you’d got leave? I would’ve bought an extra chicken,” Esther said, regarding him fondly.
Arnold hesitated, then straightened his shoulders and looked her in the eye. “My leave’s nearly over, Mother. I’m due back at my ship tomorrow.”
“What do you mean it’s nearly over?” Ben demanded hotly. “Where did you spend the rest of it?”
Sarah was glad Leona and the twins had gone to play in the back garden. She could feel trouble brewing, the kind that was not for little ears.
“I spent it with my girl,” she heard her grandson say.
“So you’re courting. I’m very pleased,” Esther smiled. “But couldn’t you have brought her home with you?” she added, sounding hurt. “Who is she, by the way? Someone you’ve met in the Services?”
Arnold nodded. “Her name’s Lyn Rogers.”
Ben stroked his chin. “There was a chemist in Leeds called Rogers. He changed it from Roginsky. Maybe she’s related to him, they’re a very nice family.”
“She isn’t Jewish, Dad.”
“What did you say?”
“She’s a Protestant. And I’m going to marry her, but I won’t do it in a church.”
“A favour he’s doing us, Esther!” Ben slumped forward in his chair and put his head in his hands.
Esther was standing behind him and clutched at the chair back for support, as if she feared she might faint.
How lonely they look, Sarah thought in the silence that followed. Their son had made them feel like outcasts; marked them with the brand of the sin he wanted to commit. But the taint would reach out to the rest of the family, as well. Her own descendants would have Gentile blood in their veins and the notion was so terrible she was momentarily unable to speak.
Da
vid had a stony expression on his face, which had been there throughout the discussion. He was thankful that Nathan was out of earshot in Scotland and tried not to look at Rebecca. Must this serpent rear its head in every generation? he thought wearily and was loathing to embroil himself in the pain it caused a second time. But he knew he must. The mantle of patriarchy had fallen upon his shoulders years ago, because his father’s had never been strong enough to support it.
“Let’s go into the dining room,” he said sternly to Arnold.
“What for?”
“It’s time I had a talk with you.”
“You’re wasting your time, Uncle David,” Arnold said when they were alone with the mahogany table stretching like a long barrier between them.
David had stationed himself by the head, near the window, and was aware it was from choice that his nephew had remained at the foot, beside the door. “But you’ll do me the courtesy of listening to what I have to say.”
Arnold smiled. “It won’t be anything I don’t know already. I’ve had a Jewish upbringing, haven’t I?”
“And why are you prepared to turn your back on it? For a girl you’ve only just met?”
“I’ve known Lyn for a couple of years, Uncle. She’s a Wren. I met her when I was stationed at Portsmouth.”
“But you’ve been away at sea most of the time, haven’t you? The time you’ve actually spent together can’t add up to very long.” David took an apple from the bowl of wax fruit on the sideboard and polished it on his sleeve, with a sense of the déjà vu that often assailed him these days. Perhaps because when you were middle-aged there weren’t many things you hadn’t done before. But when had he stood in this room with a wax apple in his hand, delivering a lecture? The time Nat had wanted to study the Classics instead of medicine and he’d had to bring him down to earth.
“You’re not going to tell me the story of Adam and Eve, are you?” Arnold asked wryly, looking at the apple. “Because it isn’t just sex between me and Lyn. She’s a wonderful girl in every possible way. The kind who’d make any chap happy.”