Scattered Seed

by Maisie Mosco

  “You can’t count anymore?” she demanded. It was wrong to keep pushing away the thought of Arnold’s Matthew. “Three we’ve got. You know it and God knows it. And you and Esther make me sick!”

  “Is that so?” Abraham said stiffly.

  “Ben would welcome Arnold back with open arms if he wasn’t scared of what Esther would say. And so would I. I have to tell you the truth. What is the use of this game of Let’s Pretend you and your daughter are playing?”

  Abraham did not reply.

  “Arnold hasn’t been wiped off the face of the earth,” Sarah informed him caustically. “He’s living in Didsbury with his wife and child. And cutting him off doesn’t stop him from still being ours. Marianne went to see her nephew when she was home for Pesach and took Arnold a pot of my homemade ginger jam to put on his matzo.”

  “Are you telling me he still keeps the Passover, even though he’s married-out?”

  “He keeps everything. Marianne said one of his wife’s Jewish friends explained kosher-housekeeping to her.”

  Abraham sat down. “They’ve got Jewish friends?” he muttered doubtfully.

  “Why not? It’s only Arnold’s family who have ostracized him.”

  “I don’t know what that word means. I don’t read books like you do.”

  “It means what we’ve done to our grandson,” Sarah said scathingly. “As if he’s not fit for us any more, just because he’s made a mistake. Well, me, I don’t believe in that attitude. If you love someone, you love them whatever they do. And I’m not going to kid myself I’ve only got two great-grandsons when I’ve got three,” she added with a smile. “Even though it hurts that one of them isn’t Jewish. I want my family to get bigger, not smaller.”

  Marianne went home for the double Brith and found herself envying the two young mothers their uncomplicated lives, which contrasted so sharply with her own. How lovely it must be to have your husband at your side, your union blessed by the family. Instead of having to pretend there was no man in your life.

  The babies were circumcised in Sarah’s dining room. Howard first, because he was the elder, and then Mark, attired in the family gown and hat that had just been worn by his second-cousin.

  “A very special bond this pair will have,” the mohel said to Shirley and Ann when he congratulated them at the celebration in the parlour, afterwards.

  As if the kids in this clan don’t have enough bonds to contend with, Marianne thought. Her cousin and sister-in-law were seated side by side with their babies in their arms. On the new beige leather sofa Uncle David had bought for Bobbie after Mark was born. Did he think the old, figured-velvet one wasn’t good enough for people to sit on at his grandson’s Brith?

  The velvet sofa had been there since Marianne’s childhood, its multi-coloured pile that had reminded her of a cascade of jewels when she was little, faded and threadbare in recent years. She missed its cosy presence and her grandmother had confided that she did, too, but had not wanted to deprive Uncle David of the joy of giving on such an important occasion in his life.

  His wife and daughter were wearing the presents he had given to them. Shirley’s was the string of cultured pearls gleaming against her blue silk dress. Competing with the heavy gold necklet around Auntie Bessie’s fat neck. What a cat I am! Marianne chastised herself. But it wasn’t really cattiness. Just the way things struck her and set up questions in her mind. Why, for instance, did Uncle David always try to please or comfort people with material things? She recalled the many occasions when she was a child and had looked miserable, or he’d thought she did, when he’d handed her a sixpence instead of inquiring what was wrong. As though, it seemed to her now, he thought money was the cure for all ills. And the things it could buy status symbols, she reflected, glancing through the window to where his Jaguar was parked.

  But Uncle David wasn’t the only one with that attitude. Marianne’s gaze fanned around the room, with the cool, observing eye she’d recently become aware she possessed, and which Ralph said was the eye of a writer.

  Paula Frankl’s fur coat was a status symbol; Auntie Rebecca’s double mink tie, too, or they wouldn’t be wearing them indoors, on a summer day. The diamond rings most of the women had on were winking in the sunlight and Marianne’s mother was wearing two. Even her brother Harry was parading the evidence of affluence, sporting a ruby tie-pin. What were they all trying to prove? And why didn’t Christians need to prove it?

  A Christian walking into this room would have every right to think that Jews were ostentatious! Marianne thought with chagrin, allowing her eye to lose its mere observer’s viewpoint. Then it fell on her grandmother, and on Hannah and Helga. Three less showy ladies it would be difficult to find. All Jews were not alike, it was only Christians who thought so. They thought so because the gaily-hued birds in an aviary stood out more than the others. It was those with the bright plumage people remembered.

  “So when is your granddaughter Marianne going to give you some nachas, Mrs. Sandberg?” Paula Frankl said to Sarah as if Marianne were not there. “It’s time you had some pleasure from her also.”

  Marianne managed not to glare at her. Mrs. Frankl and Bobbie aren’t even on first-name terms, though they’ve known each other all those years, she reflected, and wondered, as she had many times, why this hard, unpleasant woman, the whole clan’s bête noir, had to be present on all their joyous and sorrowful occasions.

  “A girl can give pleasure to her family in other ways, as well as by getting married and having babies, Mrs. Frankl,” Sarah declared.

  Marianne gave her a grateful glance, which she appeared not to see. Perhaps she was too busy avoiding her daughter’s rebuking one?

  “What, for instance?” Esther snapped. “If our Marianne writes a book, will I be able to cuddle it in my arms?” She snatched baby Howard from Ann and kissed his fuzz of red hair, to emphasize her point.

  “When our Marianne’s book is on the shelf at Central Library, nobody will be prouder than me,” Sarah answered.

  “What I’m hoping for at the moment is to have a play I’m writing on at a theatre,” Marianne put in. “But my mother would rather I had something in a cradle,” she could not stop herself from adding acidly.

  “You could have both,” Shirley said to her. “A husband and children, and a career. Like Hannah and me.”

  “For you it’s different,” Paula Frankl declaimed. “You’re helping your daddy in his business. Otherwise you’d be at home instead of leaving little Laura, the poor child, all day with your mamma’s maid. Like now you’ll be doing unfortunately with your baby boy, too.” She cast her cold blue eyes upon Hannah. “As for someone letting her sister-in-law bring up her children, taking advantage of her good nature – well, say no more.”

  “You’ve said too much already,” Hannah retorted.

  “Everyone should be taken advantage of in such a way,” Helga smiled. “I enjoy it, Mrs. Frankl.”

  “But your poor mamma, whose dear friend I was from girlhood, would turn in her grave to know how you’ve sacrificed your life.”

  Marianne saw Sarah exchange a glance with Sigmund. With dear friends like Paula, who needed enemies? it said. But her dead husband had been a real friend. A kind and gentle man with whom Sigmund had grown up in Vienna. Perhaps it was respect for Ludwig Frankl’s memory that allowed the family to tolerate his widow?

  Moishe Lipkin was beside Helga, as he always was when invited to gatherings of the clan. Still her faithful suitor, though he and everyone else knew he would never be more.

  “Poor Moishe, also,” Paula commiserated with him tactlessly.

  His sallow complexion tinged with red as he tried to hide his embarrassment.

  Paula’s son Hugo was with her and hastily changed the subject. “Why not visit our Eva while you’re in Manchester?” he said to Marianne. “What with her little boy and another baby on the way, she doesn’t get out much. She’d be glad to see you, you used to be so thick with each other.”

  The
last time Marianne had met Eva, she had wondered what they’d ever had in common. Marriage had made Eva into a different person; obsessed by recipes and nappy-rash and how nightly massage with olive oil prevented you from getting pregnancy stretch-marks on your stomach. “I’m going back to London tonight,” she told Hugo.

  “A pity. Her husband’s still got a few single friends. If you were staying on for a few days, she could have invited them round to meet you.”

  Marianne blushed and had to bite her lip to stop herself from delivering a sarcastic retort. I’m only twenty-two! she wanted to say caustically. And being a wife and mother isn’t the be-all and end-all. It would be useless to say this to people who thought it was. To whom you were on the shelf if you hadn’t got an engagement ring on your finger by the time you were her age. Ralph’s being a Christian was the only thing stopping her from getting married, but she could not tell them that, either. Or that with him she would have the kind of marriage Hannah had, in which the wife’s personality wasn’t subjugated to her marital state.

  “You knew Hildegard’d gone to Palestine?” Hugo said to her.

  “England, where she came to as a refugee, wasn’t good enough for her,” his mother sniffed.

  Marianne ignored the unkind interruption. “No, I didn’t know.”

  Hugo sighed. “We tried to talk her out of it. But there was no chance once she went to the David Eder farm.”

  “What’s that?” Marianne asked.

  “How could anyone be so ignorant?” Shirley exclaimed.

  “Not everyone is as well informed about such matters as you are, dear,” Peter said to her. “You’ve been steeped in Zionism all your life. Marianne hasn’t. The farm is where the Habonim Youth Movement trains people to be chalutzim, to work on a kibbutz,” he enlightened Marianne. “It’s in Kent,” he added, and a distant expression entered his smoky-grey eyes. “I once thought I might go there myself. But things didn’t work out that way.”

  “Are you sorry?” Shirley challenged him.

  He turned to look at her and at their baby son. “How could I be?” he smiled.

  But Marianne had detected a note of regret in his voice when he spoke of what might have been. Possibly it had been unconscious, but it had made her recall the boy he had been when he arrived in England. Before he became part of Uncle David’s family. Got soaked up by it was more accurate, she thought, surveying him. The sharp edge of individuality she remembered was no longer there. It had already been blunted by the time he married Shirley, but there was now no trace of it at all; he was just a mild-mannered young man, enhanced by his continental charm. Perhaps it wasn’t just wives whom marriage metamorphosed into a role of domestic conformity?

  Her thoughts turned to Hildegard, the frail young girl who’d escaped from Vienna with Peter and been given a home by her relatives the Frankls. But she hadn’t fallen into the conventional trap Peter had. She had gone her own way. And to do so demanded strength, especially to go the way Hildegard had. It was difficult to imagine her behind a plough or tilling the fields. In a land torn by conflict, which required more than physical strength. You needed guts to make up your mind to go there.

  “A place for nice Yiddisher girls right now Palestine isn’t,” Hugo sighed.

  “So let’s hope it’ll be safe one day,” Bessie said. “My husband’s certainly written enough cheques for it.”

  Marianne excused herself and left the room. Money again! But without the cash raised for the Jewish National Fund by Jews in the Diaspora, Palestine would be in dire straits, she reflected, passing the blue-and-white collecting box which had lived on her grandparents’ hall table as long as she could remember.

  There was one in her parents’ house and in every Jewish home she had ever entered, even of those who were not active Zionists. A constant reminder of the hoped-for homeland and the necessity to help support the cause. Many, like her Uncle David, sent large sums every year. But the way her aunt had mentioned this in the same breath as a reference to the present strife, in which freedom fighters were paying with their lives, had seemed to Marianne immensely distasteful. Like Joe Klein, she could not condone the violence they were perpetrating, but what Joe had said about them preferring to die rather than lose their vision had affected her deeply.

  She went into the dining room, wanting to be alone with her thoughts, but found her Uncle Nat there with his partner, discussing someone’s spleen. “Don’t doctors ever talk about anything but their work?” she smiled.

  “What do writers talk about?” Nathan countered.

  “She’ll tell us when she is one,” Lou grinned. “So far as I know, she’s only dreaming up adverts, so far.”

  Marianne bristled. “You mean so far that’s all I’m getting paid for.”

  Nathan slipped his arm around her, affectionately. “Lou’s teasing you, love.”

  “No, he isn’t. He’s like everyone else around here. He thinks nothing’s important unless it spells money.”

  Lou remained unperturbed by the accusation, but Nathan’s expression clouded.

  “So that’s how you see us, is it?”

  “With one or two exceptions.”

  Nathan smiled wryly. “I gather I’m not one of them.”

  Marianne avoided his eye. Did she see him that way? She wasn’t sure. On the surface, he was. With his big car and a wife like an expensive fashion plate. He wasn’t just a GP any more but was also specializing in psycho-analysis. Her parents had told her he’d taken a course on it and in addition to his work as a physician was treating patients with psychological problems privately. Many people had begun having nervous trouble during the war and, it seemed, Uncle Nat was cashing in on it. The outward signs of a materialistic attitude were all there. But he hadn’t always been like that, Marianne recalled.

  Lou did, too, and smiled reminiscently. “This reminds me of a conversation we once had when we were students, Nat. And you were talking just like Marianne is. I used to have to keep your uncle’s feet on the ground in those days, love,” he chuckled to her. “But people change, Marianne.”

  “I know,” she replied, studying Nathan’s face. He was still a handsome man, the best-looking one in the family. But there were lines of discontent around his sensitive lips and a film of disillusion dulling his eyes. “One day, I might write a book about why people change,” she said thoughtfully.

  “You’ll have to do a lot more living before that day comes,” her uncle answered with a wan smile. “To equip you to write it.”

  Marianne left the room and went to soothe her troubled thoughts in the cosy comfort of the kitchen. Lizzie and Bridie were not money-mad, nor would they be discussing spleens! She found them seated on the sofa, waiting, as always on such occasions, to help with the clearing-up after non-family guests had left. Her grandmother had so far successfully fought off suggestions that it was time she employed someone to help her in the house.

  “Got fed up wi’ t’cumpny, Marianne?” Lizzie asked.

  ’What do you think?” Marianne sighed. “It was bad enough having all my grandparents’ old neighbours from Strangeways looking at Shirley and Ann’s babies and saying, ‘Please God by you, Marianne,’ before they went home! But Mrs. Frankl’s still here.”

  “If our Shirley can put up wi’ ’er, you can,” Lizzie declaimed. “None of us likes ’er, we only grin an’ bear it fer ol’ times’ sake. But Marianne never was one ter put up wi’ nowt,” she informed Bridie, asserting her longer length of service with the family.

  “I’ve known Marianne since her tenth birthday. ’Twas on me way from Liverpool in himself’s car we did meet. After Doctor had fetched me from t’boat,” Bridie recalled.

  Marianne could remember her Uncle Nat coming to visit her father, who had tonsillitis. He’d left Bridie in his car, away from possible infection, and Marianne had gone to sit with her. Life was like a book of memories, but this was the first time she had turned back to that page. Perhaps you only did so with events that were important to yo
u. As Bridie’s arrival among strangers had been to her.

  The matronly Irishwoman bulging out of her drab grey dress had been a comely girl then. Lizzie had not put on weight with the years, but her freckled forehead was corrugated as a wash-board; probably all her employers’ worries had been hers, too.

  Marianne surveyed them fondly. If they left us, there’d be a great big hole in our lives, she thought. But they never would. The family was their raison d’être.

  Bridie was knitting a cardigan for Abraham. “Yer Bobbie’s a wonderful wuman, Marianne, bless her darlin’ heart. But she never knits.”

  “When’d she ’ave time, wi’ all t’troubles o’ t’clan on ’er ’ead?” Lizzie demanded loyally.

  “Is it accusin’ me o’ runnin’ herself down, ye are now, Lizzie Wilson?” Bridie flashed. “An’ who but ye were it said t’me Bobbie Sarah’s gittin’ past caterin’ fer so many visitors? She’ll be doin’ what’s t’be done till her dyin’ day, I answered yes!”

  “Stop it, you two,” Marianne laughed. “We all know you both love my grandmother.”

  Lizzie gave her attention to the rabbit-wool hat she was crocheting for Shirley’s little girl, who was snoozing on her lap. “Remember t’pretty frocks I used ter crochet fer you an’ our Shirley, Marianne?” she smiled. “Yer were both t’same age as Laura is now, when I came ter work fer yer uncle an’ auntie. An’ I was a lass.”

  “Have you ever regretted coming, Lizzie?”

  “Where’d I’ve ended up if I ’adn’t? Four o’ mi sisters ’as been widdered by pit accidents. Now, their sons is down t’pit. Wed ter t’lasses they went ter school wi’, who’ll be thankful if they’re not left wi’ ’ouseful o’ bairns ter fetch up by thirsen.” A faraway look had entered Lizzie’s faded blue eyes. “Best t’lasses round there can ’ope fer is ter share their old age wi’ an’ ’usband coughin’ up blood from t’chest disease miners ends up wi’ if they live long enough.” She retied the bow of yellow ribbon in Laura’s hair and planted a loving kiss on the child’s plump cheek. “I’ve not gone short o’ kids ter warm mi ’eart, ’ave I, Marianne? An’ I’ve got a gud ’ome. I reckon I’m one o’ t’lucky ’uns.”