by Maisie Mosco
Lately, he had found himself comparing the lifestyle he had now with the nothing he’d had then. But when you’d come up in the world, how could you take things for granted? It was probably only those who’d always had them who did.
“Me, I’m glad to see the back of those two,” Bessie said, glancing at Sammy’s letter. “Miriam always was a troublemaker,” she added, avoiding David’s eye.
And her old enemy was now safely out of the way, David thought. That was why she had not harped about Miriam’s ingratitude, he realized with a flash of insight. She had not wanted to keep reminding him about her. Oh, the craftiness of women!
The last time Bessie had revealed her fear that he would one day desert her for his still-beautiful first love was when one of Lou Benjamin’s brothers left his wife and children, to run away with a widow, during the war. For weeks afterwards, Bessie had watched David like a hawk whenever they were in Miriam’s company. As if Mottie Benjamin’s infidelity had made her realize that even among Jews such things could happen.
What a fool you are, Bessie, David wanted to tell her. But he knew from experience it was wiser to hold his tongue. Only once had she ever expressed her insecurity in words. It had been while she was pregnant with their first child and he had promised her then that he would never leave her. Their baby boy was born dead and David’s home life had been hell for months. His mother had eventually set things right. Somehow, she’d lifted Bessie out of the trauma into which she had sunk and ejected the bossy aunt whose presence in his household had had the opposite effect. This had been the unhappiest period of David’s marriage. And he’d known plenty of them! But it had never once occurred to him to walk out on Bessie. You got married for better or worse; and now, he had his children and grandchild to comfort him.
“Put the damn letter away!” Bessie exclaimed. “I can’t bear the sight of it.”
David smiled at the smear of marmalade on her chin. Why did he always care for her most when she seemed ridiculous and vulnerable? And how many times had he asked himself that question over the years?
“Be careful, you’ll make me spill the tea,” she said characteristically when he got up and went to kiss her.
Even the mishaps which had not yet occurred were his fault, not hers! “You’re a real case, aren’t you, love?” he laughed.
“Who wouldn’t be? Married to you?” Bessie watched him return to his chair. “So what did the letter say?”
He’d wondered when curiosity would get the better of her. “Not what you imagined. Sammy’s got a job.”
“He won’t have when they find out what he’s like.”
“Doing what he’s always wanted to, he says,” David conveyed, letting her cutting comment pass and trying to pretend to himself that his brother’s revelation was not hurtful. He had always thought Sammy would be lost without him. “Harold Bronley’s taken him on at his furniture factory. In the antique-reproduction department where they do hand-carving.”
“Who’s Harold Bronley?”
“Ivor Bronley’s brother.”
“I’m no wiser now,” Bessie said impatiently.
David poured himself some more tea and carried it to the window seat. “They were Hymie and Isaiah Bronsky when I knew them,” he said, surveying the shrubbery separating his side-garden from the one next door. “But that was a long time ago, when we were all kids. They were staying at the Berkowitzes’ with their parents when we arrived from Russia. Chavah, who I rang up, is their mother.” David smiled reminiscently. “They left for New York the next day and all I can remember about them is their clothes were even shabbier than mine. But it seems they’ve done very well for themselves.”
“You haven’t?”
“Sure. But I’m not in their league yet and I shouldn’t think I ever will be. Sammy says Harold employs three hundred workers in his factory. And Ivor – you won’t believe this – is a Hollywood film producer, no less! That scruffy little kid who sat on his mother’s lap at the table that night, dipping his fingers in her soup.”
“America’s the place to get on,” Bessie declared.
“A person can do all right here, too.”
“If they’ve got what it takes. So don’t expect your brother to ever be more than a worker.”
“All our Sammy ever wanted was to be happy,” David answered. “But I don’t think he’s even been that,” he added pensively. ’I hope to God he will be from now on.”
“It’s up to him, isn’t it?”
No, David thought with a poignant smile. Happiness was a fragile, fleeting thing, whisked away and destroyed by other people. “What would you like to do this morning, love?” he asked, collecting himself.
“You can come and help me choose a new hat to wear for our grandson’s Brith.”
Shirley’s second child was due shortly and Bessie was certain, from her daughter’s shape, that she was carrying a boy.
“You women and your old wives’ tales,” David teased her. But his mother and sister had made the same prediction and he hoped they were right.
“I think Harry’s wife’ll have a lad, as well,” Bessie said. “Last week at the tea party, I noticed she was carrying all at the front, too.”
David laughed. “In that case we might bump into Dr. Smolensky buying Naomi a hat for their grandson’s Brith.”
Kendal Milne’s was crowded with Saturday morning shoppers, many of whom were Jewish.
“Once, we’d all have been in shul,” David reflected to Bessie whilst she tried on a pair of lilac kid gloves to match her purchase from the model millinery department.
“So nobody’s frightened of God punishing them anymore,” Bessie shrugged.
David felt a pang of conscience. “Most people are too busy to even think of Him.”
Bessie handed the gloves to the trim saleswoman. “I’ll take these, thank you.”
“Yes, modom.”
“And you should talk!” she rebuked David when the girl went away to wrap the gloves. “This is the first Saturday I’ve ever known you have off work, except when one of the family’s been called up for a mitzvah in shul. Tell me who’s busier than you are?”
David had sent Moishe Lipkin to the continent to try to interest buyers in the new Sanderstyle range, or he would have been in his office this morning for their usual weekly sales conference. Despite her pregnancy, Shirley had insisted on designing a selection of garments she hoped would initiate export trade and had personally supervised the making of the samples.
“Your daughter isn’t too pleased about Peter doing Moishe’s English travelling while he’s abroad,” Bessie said, when they were walking along Deansgate, laden with parcels. She had been unable to resist buying two romper suits for the possible grandson and some dresses for little Laura.
David had bought his mother a cardigan and his father a tie. He rarely went shopping in town and his parents never did. “Shirley isn’t alone in the house at night,” he replied, juggling Bessie’s hatbox from one hand to the other.
“I wouldn’t call having Lizzie sleeping there the same as her husband’s company,” Bessie retorted.
“We have to do what’s best for the business. And that includes Shirley and Peter, as they’re part of it.”
“Shirley cares about the business as much as you do, David.”
“That, you don’t have to tell me. But she must be prepared to make some personal sacrifices if necessary, too. If I hadn’t been prepared to, there’d have been no Sanderstyle.” David caught a glimpse of his reflection in a shop window and vowed not to eat any knedlach at dinner today. Where had his waistline gone to? “If things click abroad we’ll take someone on to handle the foreign trade,” he promised Bessie. “Then Peter won’t need travel any more. Moishe’ll be back in his old job.”
“But the while, you’re not being fair to your pregnant daughter.”
David controlled his irritation. He’d move heaven and earth for Shirley! But when it came to business, he had to be firm. Sanderstyle’
s progress was for her benefit as well as his. One day, she and Peter would own it.
He had to be firm with himself occasionally, too. When the sun was shining, and he felt like being out in the fresh air, instead of cooped up in the factory. There were times when he felt that if he didn’t get a break from work, he’d crack up, and on one occasion he had made up his mind to leave his office and play a round of golf. But his accountant had rung up, whilst he was putting on his coat, to remind him the audit was due. Golf in the middle of the afternoon, with all he had on his mind? he had thought. And that had been that.
But it was the same for every businessman, he reflected. And there were plenty who didn’t survive the strain; lately his contemporaries seemed to have been going down like ninepins. Was it catching sight of his portly figure that had set his mind on this track? Only last week he had attended the funeral of a man his age, who’d dropped dead in his warehouse. Hugo Frankl had been at the graveside, too. “A lot of good his bank balance’ll do him now,” Hugo had sighed when they were getting into their cars to rush back to their businesses.
This was not the first such reminder David had had that he was a candidate for an early burial. Each time he was brought up short, he resolved to take things easier, but putting the resolve into practice was not in his nature. The dynamo inside him, which his father said had always been there, would not let him slacken his pace on the treadmill he had created for himself.
In a way, he was a prisoner of his boyhood dreams, too. When weariness overtook him, he would hear an inner voice telling him he had come too far to stop now. How could he stop when he was well on the road to making his dreams into a reality?
“You’re very quiet all of a sudden,” Bessie remarked while they were picking their way through the vehicles in the car park.
“I was thinking about what it will be like when we move to Cheshire and live in a mansion.”
“You’re crackers, wanting to live there!” Bessie, who did not want to, exclaimed. “They don’t even let Jews join the golf clubs.”
“So let them not,” David retorted, though the bar was hurtful and not peculiar to Cheshire. Barring Jews from golf clubs was the last bastion of anti-Semitism in England and he’d heard it was the same in the States. But it had not prevented him from playing golf or limited him to the public course at Heaton Park, where he had learned to play. The Jews had their own club, in Whitefield. Like those in London and the rest of the provinces, it had a thriving membership and David had joined last year.
Sometimes he saw Gentiles playing there, invited by Jewish friends, and membership was open to them if they cared to apply for it. It was not the club’s policy to practise against others the humiliation inflicted upon Jews.
A few of David’s acquaintances had already migrated to Cheshire. Leo and Otto Rosenthal, with whom he had attended the Jews’ School, were among them. Their wives had not wanted to move away from their own community, but the Rosenthal brothers had built up one of the biggest textile houses in the north and intended to live accordingly.
Me, too, when the time comes, David thought, speeding homeward along Bury Old Road, past those of his brethren still sufficiently devout to be walking home from shul. What was the use of success if you didn’t show people you had achieved it? That you’d done so in spite of the hurdles that life had set you. And when he had his Cheshire mansion, he would drive to Whitefield for his Sunday morning golf, like the Rosenthals did. And thumb his nose – mentally – at the goyim, no wealthier than himself, who wouldn’t let him join their club.
“Pass the chopped liver to Daddy, Leona,” Rebecca said whilst removing her napkin from its silver ring.
Leona picked up the heavy crystal dish and placed it within her father’s reach. He was seated with his back to the window, at the head of the refectory table. Her mother sat at the foot and in a minute Leona would have to repeat the passing process in the opposite direction, after which Mummy would return the dish to her. Their food was always served in that order. Her father first, to show respect for him. Then her mother and last, herself. It had been that way ever since she was old enough to join her parents in the dining room, so why did it suddenly seem ridiculous? Because her mother had no respect for her father.
The realization had dawned on Leona gradually, as a lot of other things about her parents had. When had she began noticing they never seemed comfortable together, like married people usually did? Instead, there was always something she couldn’t define crackling in the air between them. And since Daddy’s return from the army it had got worse; they now no longer shared the same bedroom.
Mummy had said this was because she didn’t want to be disturbed by the phone when Daddy was called out to patients during the night, which had seemed sensible to Leona at time. But that was before she had begun having her periods and her father had a private chat with her.
He hadn’t said what her mother had: that it was a pity she had to start being a woman when she was only eleven. Instead, he’d told her exactly what the changes in her body meant. And how babies were made, which had been a shock. You couldn’t imagine your parents doing something so disgusting and yourself being born because of it. But her father had said that when she got married she wouldn’t think it disgusting. That it was Nature’s way of letting a man and a woman express their love for each other and children were the natural consequence of it.
The night Daddy told her, she’d lain awake turning over in her mind everything he had said. Thinking how lucky she was to be a doctor’s daughter and have the mysterious Facts of Life explained to her. It wasn’t until later that she stopped relating the information to herself and connected it with her parents not sharing a bedroom.
“Stop daydreaming and get on with your meal,” her mother said to her.
Leona ate a little of her chopped liver, though she was not hungry, and slid the dish to her father, who usually had a second helping. Why had they bought such a long table when they got married if they were only going to have one child? Because they hadn’t known then that they were going to fall out of love and stop doing what you had to do to make babies. How frightening it was to know you couldn’t be certain that loving someone would last.
There was a Christian girl at school whose parents were divorced, but Leona had never met any Jewish children to whom this had happened. Was it going to happen to her? Lucy Jameson lived with her mother and only saw her father on a Sunday.
She looked at her own father. His hair was streaked with silver at the temple, though he wasn’t yet forty. How handsome he was and how dear to her. Her mother was, too. Lila Benjamin envied her her good-looking parents, but she didn’t have to live with them. With no brothers or sisters to share the ordeal. Be their pig-in-the-middle, the one who passed them things at mealtimes and was the subject of their conversation at all times.
This was how Leona felt when the three of them were together. When had she last heard them say a word to each other that wasn’t concerning herself? It was as if they’d run out of other things to talk about. And all too often their discussions ended in a blazing row.
Bridie brought in the soup, her bustling entrance cutting into Leona’s thoughts.
“There’s kreplach t’day, peteen, as well as lokshen,” she said, giving Leona the special smile she always had for her. “Oi’m a dab-hand at ’em if Oi sez so meself.”
Nathan laughed. “I’m thinking of entering you for a Jewish cookery competition, Bridie!”
“Compliments from himself Oi’m gettin’.”
“You deserve them,” Rebecca declared.
Bridie straightened her cap and beamed. “Whin it comes t’me kreplach, Oi do indeed, Mrs. Sandberg. Bobbie Sarah, whin she came fer dinner, did whisper in me ear moine’re noicer than Lizzie Wilson’s. But Oi’ve got t’admit Lizzie’s comes a close second,” she added, departing to her kitchen with a rustle of her starched apron.
A faint odour of carbolic soap, which Leona always associated with her, lingered in
the room. Dear, lovely Bridie. She was as familiar as the silver tureen from which Mummy was ladling the chicken soup. And the mellow, oak-panelled walls that matched the furniture and gave the dining room an air of cosiness, despite its largeness. Like everything in the house, Bridie had always been there. So had the special little touches Leona’s mother gave to their home. Leona could not recall a single meal when there hadn’t been some kind of table decoration. In spring and summer, the centrepiece was flowers from the garden – sometimes just a single rose, or a fat rhododendron spilling its leaves over the edge of the vase. When the garden was empty of flowers and blossom, her mother would arrange some laurel in a crystal witch-bowl that caught the light from the chandelier and sparkled in a host of iridescent colours.
But it was only the room that was cosy, not the people in it. None of Leona’s aunts took the trouble to do everything beautifully, even when it wasn’t Yom Tov or Shabbos, like Mummy did. Nor did her grandmother. But mealtimes in their houses were much more enjoyable than they were here.
“You’re very quiet today, Leona,” her father remarked.
“It’s because she finished all her homework last night, so she’s got the weekend free, isn’t it, darling?” her mother smiled to her.
Her father was smiling at her, too. Why couldn’t they smile at each other? If Bridie and herself didn’t live here, they’d forget how to. Damn them!
“Stop frowning, love,” her mother said.
But Leona could not. It was terrible to think like this about your parents, but how could she help it? Separately, she adored them. Together, they sometimes made her feel she was about to explode.
“Don’t tell Bobbie and Zaidie I let you do homework after the Shabbos candles were lit,” her mother advised. “Or there’ll be hell to pay.”
“She had my permission, too,” her father said.
Even when referring to things they had done jointly, they rarely used the word “we”, Leona thought resentfully.
“And I don’t agree that she shouldn’t tell my mother and father, Rebecca,” he added curtly.