Scattered Seed

by Maisie Mosco

  “Is that so, Nat?”

  Other people’s parents called each other “dear”, or “love”, or “darling”. Hers could barely manage to be civil to each other. No, it was worse than that. They were staring venomously along the length of the table. If looks could kill, they’d both be dead.

  “I won’t have my daughter brought up to tell lies,” she heard her father say, but did not remove her gaze from the cruet set, which was where it had settled. “Or even to hide the truth,” he added.

  Her mother laughed, but it was not a pleasant sound. “What people don’t know can’t hurt them.”

  Something in her mother’s voice compelled Leona to raise her head. She saw her father avert his eyes and crumble a bit of bread on his side-plate. Had he done something terrible that her mother had found out about? He must have done, or why couldn’t he look Mummy in the eye?

  “Nor do I want Leona to be a hypocrite,” he said after a silence. “Pretending to accept one set of standards and living by another, whether it concerns religion or anything else. She’s old enough to begin making choices and once she’s made them she must have the courage of her convictions.”

  Leona saw her mother’s shoulders quiver.

  “If you’d had the courage of yours, Nat, there wouldn’t have been a Leona,” she said. “Now let’s finish our soup, shall we?”

  Finish our soup? Leona thought, gazing down at the little meat-filled oblongs of dough floating amid the lokshen in the golden liquid. Sit here munching kreplach as if what she’d just heard had not been said? “What did you mean by that, Mummy?”

  “Nothing. Forget I said it.”

  “But you did, didn’t you?”

  “When you’re old enough to understand, maybe I’ll tell you,” her father said quietly and received a contemptuous glance from her mother.

  Leona noted his tight-lipped expression. When he’d had the private chat with her, he’d said that although babies were the natural result of love-making, there was something called birth control that prevented them from being conceived. “Children can sometimes be born by accident, can’t they?” she challenged him. Her voice grew tremulous. “Did Mummy mean you didn’t want me?”

  He sprang up from his chair and came to kiss her, but she pushed him away.

  “Did she, Daddy?”

  “That’s the most ridiculous question I ever heard,” he said, sitting down again. “How could you think such a thing when you know I adore you? It’s because I do that I don’t want you to fall into the traps I did. And the most dangerous is bending your life to please other people. Once you fail into that trap, you’re there for ever. Take it from me.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Daddy.”

  “But one day you will,” he told her with a twisted smile. “And even if you end up happily toeing the line, I want you to be the kind of person who isn’t intolerant of those who don’t.”

  “She’s my daughter, too,” her mother said sharply. “And I don’t happen to agree with the selfish philosophy you’re preaching.”

  “Think what we’d both have been saved if I’d practised it myself!”

  They were glaring malevolently at each other again. Leona dropped her spoon into her soup with an angry plop.

  “Why don’t you stop doing this to me?”

  “What are we doing to you, love?” her mother asked, putting on her maternal smile.

  Her father’s face was now wearing his paternal one.

  “Making me wish I was anyone’s daughter but yours!” Leona exploded.

  They both looked so surprised she had to laugh, because it seemed absurd that they should be. Then her laughter became tears and she fled to the kitchen and Bridie’s comforting arms.

  David and Bessie were the first to arrive at the Shabbos gathering. They found Sarah’s neighbour laying a fire in the parlour.

  Sarah was hovering apologetically beside her. “It was so warm and sunny this morning, I didn’t think we’d need one, Mrs. Evans. I’m sorry to make you dirty your hands when you’ve got on your nice afternoon frock.”

  “You know I don’t mind obliging you, Mrs. Sandberg.”

  “It’s very good of you.”

  Mrs. Evans was trying to coax the flames to stay alight when Nathan and Rebecca arrived.

  “Leona’s got a bit of a cold,” Rebecca said, explaining their daughter’s absence.

  “No, she hasn’t, she just didn’t feel like coming,” Nathan declared.

  “What!” Sarah exclaimed.

  “A person doesn’t have to be ill to miss one of your tea parties, Mother.”

  “They don’t?” Abraham said uncertainly.

  “No, Father.”

  David eyed Nathan sharply. “You’re in a funny mood today, aren’t you?”

  “Just an honest one.” Nathan watched Mrs. Evans trying to draw the reluctant flames with a newspaper, wondering what he was doing here himself if what he had just asserted was so. There were plenty of things he’d rather be doing. And reading, for which he never had time, was one of them. Yet he turned up at his mother’s, Saturday after Saturday, as if drawn here by a magnet. “Let me hold the paper in front of the grate,” he said to Mrs. Evans. “Why should you have to do it?”

  Mrs. Evans’s expression had tightened when he spoke bluntly to his parents and now did so again. “Because this is your mother’s house, Nat. And she’s like me, she doesn’t want any sins committed in it.”

  She eyed Nathan through her owlish spectacles and he noticed that her shoulders were snowed with dandruff as they had always been, though there was never any sign of it on her stringy, grey hair.

  “Indeed to goodness, I don’t know what my children do in their own homes. They could be knocking back the beer, God-fearing though I brought them up to be. But in my home, bach, they wouldn’t dare,” she told him.

  Nathan blushed. Mrs. Evans was still capable of making him feel like a criminal, the way she had when he and Lou had sometimes sent a ball soaring over her back-garden fence, in their youth.

  “You tell him!” Sarah applauded. But what good will it do? she asked herself, glancing through the window to where her two Shabbos-breaking sons had parked their cars.

  When they’d first begun riding to her tea parties instead of walking, they had shown respect for her, if not for God. Made sure their vehicles were not outside her door. Now, they didn’t even do that. They were becoming less Jewish all the time and the sins they committed were like second nature to them. Perhaps it was because the family was becoming more and more English. And the two different influences pointed in opposite ways.

  Sarah had begun realizing this a long time ago and accepted that it had to be. Well, about some things, anyway. Once, all God’s laws had been on one level to her, none more important than another. And this still applied to the way she lived her own life. But for her children and grandchildren she now had a set of priorities. Some sins she was prepared to turn a blind eye to, thankful that, apart from Arnold, her brood were not committing the ones at the top of her list.

  “You’re the only woman I know, Ma, who still has a Shabbos goy to see to the fire,” Rebecca remarked after Mrs. Evans had gone.

  “I could tell you the names of plenty who still do,” Sarah retorted.

  Rebecca smiled. “And I bet they’re all great-grandmothers.”

  Among Sarah’s acquaintances this was largely so, and she did not try to deny it. Nor could she hide her contempt as her gaze took in her sons and their wives. Accepting the fact that they ignored many of God’s laws did not mean she must pretend that she liked it. “So when my generation is all dead and gone, you and your children can forget there ever was such a thing as Shabbos-goys to help Jews respect the Almighty,” she flashed. “And your children’s children won’t have to forget what they’ve never known.”

  “Calm down, Mother,” Nathan said, placatingly.

  Sarah tried to do so, aware that her outburst was contrary to her turning-a-blin
d-eye policy. But sometimes the things you’d decided in your mind could not quell what you felt in your heart.

  “You can’t expect people living in the twentieth century to obey rules laid down for wanderers in the Wilderness,” Nathan told her. “The way you do, Mother,” he added.

  “Oy,” Abraham sighed. “Today, they call them displaced persons, but it’s just a different name. Wanderers in the wilderness is what some of our people still are.”

  David sat cracking his knuckles, longing for a cigarette, but he still would not dare to smoke here on Shabbos. “Father’s got a point.”

  “But it doesn’t relate to the one I was making,” Nathan replied. “And I intend to join the Reform Shul because of it.”

  “What?” his parents and brother shouted in unison. Then they eyed his wife questioningly.

  “Who am I to argue with him?” she shrugged.

  “Trust Rebecca to make sure it’s on my head, not hers,” Nathan said cynically. “Even though the Reform way fits in with her lifestyle.”

  “Why not change your name to an English one, while you’re at it, Nat?” David said coldly. “I’m thinking of doing so myself,” he announced. “But not for religious reasons,” he added scathingly.

  His final sentence was drowned out by a three-cornered outcry.

  “On Shabbos my sons come here and drop bombshells!” Abraham yelled and was overtaken by a fit of coughing.

  “In our old age they want to give us heart attacks!” Sarah joined in. She picked up the Kendal Milne bags David had handed her when he arrived and flung them at him. “Take back the cardigan and the tie! Who wants them?”

  “It’s absolutely disgusting to even think of changing your name, David!” Nathan declared witheringly.

  “Why?” David asked coolly. “The Sandbergs have been in England since the beginning of the century and we’re here to stay. So why go on being lumbered with a foreign name, which hasn’t exactly been an advantage? English people are suspicious of foreigners.”

  “It’s even more disgusting coming from someone who sees himself as the head of the Sandberg family,” Nathan said as if his brother’s reasons were of no account.

  Sarah saw her husband blanch. Her daughters-in-law were trying not to look at him and her sons busy glowering at each other. David was the head of the family and Nat knew it. But she hadn’t known Nat had resented it. He of all people, who wouldn’t be Dr. Sandberg if it weren’t for David. Her husband had not known it and was sitting with a stricken look in his eyes.

  “Apologize to your father and your brother,” she ordered Nathan.

  “To my father there’s no need, I said David sees himself that way, not that I think he is.”

  Who wouldn’t when it’s thrust upon them? And they can’t remember the time when they weren’t burdened with it? David thought. His brother was riveting him with a frigid stare.

  “The head of a family’s someone to look up to, David. And lashing out money right, left and centre can’t buy that.”

  “Thank you for telling me, Nat.”

  “I should’ve had the guts to tell you years ago.”

  Their old enmity was out in the open again, stalking the room like a living thing. Brothers shouldn’t be this way with each other, Sarah wanted to tell them. But they were, and there was nothing she could do about it. She tried to speak, but her tongue seemed momentarily paralysed.

  “I never tried to buy respect in my life,” David said tersely.

  “And in my case you haven’t got it,” Nathan replied. “You had once. Until it hit me that what you were after was power. What Miriam said to you before they left was true. You take hold of people’s lives and mould them to your own design. With me, you used blackmail to get away with it. With Sammy, you didn’t have to, he was yours for the asking.”

  Sarah stepped forward and slapped Nathan’s face, then was consumed by horror at what she had done. Even when he was a child she hadn’t raised a finger to him. Not to any of her children and nor had Abraham. It hadn’t been necessary. She fingered her brooch agitatedly. “If you don’t say you’re sorry to David, I’ll never forgive you, Nat.” How could a mother have any peace of mind with this terrible feeling between two of her sons?

  Nathan was stroking his stinging cheek. “There’s plenty I’ll never forgive, either, Mother.”

  “Listen, who doesn’t feel like that in a family sometimes?” Abraham interceded. He was panting after his coughing spell, his face crumpled with distress. He tried to smile. “But we get over it.”

  “Do we, Father? Or do we just pretend to? Because of the cords that bind us?” Nathan sat down by the hearth and watched the flames roaring up the chimney, the way he had liked to do when he was a small child and the Sandbergs gathered around the fire in Moreton Street, on winter evenings. How secure he’d felt then; as if nothing outside could harm him. But when he thought back, all the hurts he had suffered had been inflicted from within that cosy circle. “There comes a time when the cords begin to get a bit frayed,” he declared.

  “And what causes them to?” David flashed. “Straining against them, that’s what. The way you’ve been doing since you were a lad. Thinking you’re entitled to go your own way and to hell with the rest of us!”

  “But you didn’t let me, did you, David? Which is what I’ve been talking about. This to-hell-with-the-rest-of-us stuff you just spouted was what I meant when I said you’d used blackmail.” Nathan glanced at Rebecca, to whom his brother and mother had conspired to chain him. “It’s too late for some things,” he said flatly. “But not for others.” He was done with being a Jew who lived by double standards. “From now on, I’ll please myself what I do. And that includes joining the Reform Shul.”

  “Oy,” Abraham groaned.

  “You’ll just have to resign yourself to it, Father.”

  “And to me being called Sanderton instead of Sandberg,” David said.

  Abraham shared a sorrowful glance with Sarah. “What the years only do to a family.”

  “Especially a Jewish one,” she answered.

  “Christians don’t need to adapt their religion,” Nathan said.

  “Or change their name so it won’t sound foreign,” Bessie put in on David’s behalf.

  “Plenty of Jews have anglicized their names and it hasn’t made them any less Jewish,” David declared. “But what Nat’s going to do is something else. Me, I’d rather ask God to forgive me for breaking His laws than kid myself I’m not sinning by observing an adapted-for-convenience version of them.”

  “But you break them for convenience, don’t you?” Nathan countered acidly.

  Abraham treated them both to a withering glance. “So I’ll have one son, a Mr. Sanderton, praying to the Almighty in an orthodox shul. And another, who is still called Sandberg, reading in English to whoever it is they pray to at that Reform place! Which of you is disgracing me most, I can’t make up my mind.”

  “What can you do?” Sarah sighed. The answer, as always, was nothing. Two new bones of contention had been flung into the family arena that afternoon. How many more would land there in the name of changing times, before she had lived out her allotted span?

  “In Russia this couldn’t have happened,” she heard her husband declaim.

  But worse things could and did, she thought, as she always did when it was necessary to bend with the wind of change. What else but remembrance of past oppression could help her come to terms with the price of freedom? Which was how she had come to think of such painful aspects of the present.

  Chapter 3

  Marianne sat hunched over her typewriter, awaiting the mental spark that would set her work alight. It had been kindling in her mind when she awoke that morning but hearing from home had extinguished it. If only Mam’s letter hadn’t arrived on Saturday, when she had two free days to work on her play. On the other five, she had to earn her bread by writing advertising-copy and switching over to her stage characters in the evenings wasn’t easy.


  She cast a resentful glance at the blue envelope lying on her desk beside the synopsis she had written for Act Two. Her mother’s epistles evoked the same guilt as the ones she’d sent when Marianne was in the ATS always had. Only the content was different. Come home, Marianne, we need you. All your old friends are engaged or married with kids already. Giving their parents nachas and how must it look to everyone that you’re not?

  The Yiddish word, for which there was no English equivalent, embraced the special brand of pride and pleasure combined that Jewish parents hoped to reap from their children and increased Marianne’s feeling that she was letting hers down. The “everyone” to whom her mother referred was the closed-in community from which she had fled to London, a month after her release from the Services. She had no regrets about having done so. Only a troubled conscience.

  “How’s it going?” the man in her life inquired from the scuffed leatherette armchair by the hearth.

  And not just about that! Marianne tore the sheet of paper from the typewriter and tossed it into the waste basket. “It isn’t.”

  “You shouldn’t have opened that letter until Monday.”

  “But I did, didn’t I, Ralph?”

  He got up and came to stand beside her. “In some ways you’re like a puppet on a string,” he said, stroking her hair absently.

  Marianne jerked away from him. “If I was, I wouldn’t be here!”

  “But they’re still able to make you jump and flounder. From all those miles away.”

  “Who’s floundering?” she retorted. “I’m my own boss.”

  “Then why won’t you marry me?”

  She watched him return to the chair and fold himself into it. “There’s a hole in your pullover sleeve, remind me to cobble it up for you. And you know perfectly well why.”

  Ralph sucked his empty briar pipe for a moment. “But I’ll never accept it.”

  “Why did I have to run into you again?” Marianne exclaimed venting her feelings on him. “If Uncle Joe hadn’t been abroad on an assignment when I went to see if he could get me a job on his paper, it wouldn’t have happened. And out of all the firms that employment bureau could have sent me to, it had to be the one you work for!”