Scattered Seed

by Maisie Mosco

  Nathan held his gaze. “That’s the whole point, David. There are some things that ought not to affect other people.”

  The arrival of Esther and Ben cut short the exchange.

  Nathan wished they had been there when it took place. From that point, he could have gone on to talk about Marianne.

  “Such a day it’s been! We’ve been run off our feet,” Esther said, sinking on to the sofa and easing off her shoes. “Harry sends his love. He got into his car and drove straight to Southport. It’s a pity his wife couldn’t have come to help at the shop, instead of spending this weekend at the Prince of Wales Hotel,” she added, airing her disapproval of her daughter-in-law. “I said so to Harry, but he said he wouldn’t expect it. Neither would I, I thought. Ann Klein she is now, but she’s still one of the stuck-up Smolenskys.”

  “So what can you do?” Sarah shrugged.

  Esther smiled sourly. “Go on working myself into the ground with my husband and son, so she won’t go short of her luxuries!”

  Nathan surveyed the permanently miserable expression on Esther’s ageing countenance. Which her younger son’s defection had put there. Arnold was guilty of treason, in her eyes. Ben’s, too. But, in effect, they had betrayed him. No son or daughter should be cast out by parents who purported to love them. But Esther and Ben had been ruled by religion, not by love and the whole of life had lost its savour for them as a result.

  If they had let themselves come to terms with things, what a different picture they would present from the one they did now. Arnold and his child would be bringing them joy, instead of heartache. And Esther would have a daughter-in-law worthy of respect. She had accepted Harry’s marriage to a girl she did not like. Accepted her because she was kosher. Nobody could fail to like Arnold’s Lyn, who was sincere and unaffected. As Mary Dennis had been as a girl. This was what made the situation not only tragic, but ludicrous.

  “What’re you staring at Ben and me for, Nat?” Esther asked him.

  “I’m thinking what damn fools you are.”

  Esther stopped nibbling a piece of strudel. “I beg your pardon?”

  She was seated on the sofa with Ben beside her. David and Sarah were standing on either side of them. Exactly as Nathan had seen the group in his mind’s eye, when he anticipated this moment, on the train. His father was behind him and this was uncannily right, too. Abraham had not been part of the imaginary scene. Only the strong ones had flanked Esther and Ben. His mother and brother. Who no longer intimidated him.

  “Hasn’t it occurred to you how stupid it is to try to dictate your children’s lives?” he said calmly to his sister and brother-in-law. “You’ll end up with only Harry. Unless you do something to interfere with his happiness, too. In which case you’ll be a lonely old couple, crying into your tea because you’re all on your own.”

  Esther looked at David. “Has our Nat gone mad?”

  “It sounds like it.”

  “As a matter of fact, I’ve never been saner,” Nathan declared. “Something’s happened to make me see straight, which I’d never done before. I hope it will have the same effect on all of you. I have something to tell you. And please don’t say anything until I’ve finished.”

  The request was unnecessary. Learning that Marianne had married a Gentile reduced his listeners to silence.

  “How could Marianne do this to us?” Esther whispered.

  “She wouldn’t have had to if you hadn’t done what you did to her,” Nathan said.

  “What is he talking about?” Ben asked confusedly.

  “That’s the root of the trouble. That you don’t know.”

  Esther began weeping. “What is there to know? Except that we cherished her, and she’s let us down.”

  “It serves you right,” Nathan said ruthlessly. “For putting her – and Arnold – in a position where they had to.” He eyed his mother, who was clutching her brooch as if it were a talisman. And his brother whose expression was thunderous. “Remember when I told you I was joining the Reform Shul and you all set about me? I accused the family of moulding my life, but that doesn’t only apply to me. We’ve all had a taste of it in our time. Haven’t we, David?”

  He saw David flinch, but did not weaken. The things he had decided to say must be said. He made his points swiftly and sharply and watched them hit home, like arrows piercing the target with deadly precision. “If we had a family tomb, a suitable epitaph to be carved on the door would be, ‘Here lie the Sandbergs, who died of obligation –’”

  “Shut your mouth!” David shouted.

  “‘– In their youth,’” Nathan went on. “And thereafter only their ghosts existed. If David prefers not to admit it, that’s his choice. But I’m done with pretending it doesn’t apply to me.”

  Sarah’s complexion had tinged with grey and her eyes were opaque with sorrow. “This is what you think your family’s done to you, Nat?”

  “I don’t think it, I know it. Maybe you’re unaware of your own power, Mother. It’s the most dangerous and subversive kind there is, because it’s fuelled by maternal love which children accept naturally. But not for a moment do I think David is unaware of his.”

  “Oy,” Abraham sighed eloquently.

  Nathan had forgotten he was in the room. But how often had that been the case? If his father had been a strong enough character to make his presence felt, his mother’s materialistic designs for her children might not have been allowed to dominate all their lives.

  Esther dried her eyes. “What do we do now?” she asked David.

  The way she always had, Nathan thought. Though her husband was right beside her, it was David whom she consulted. Ben was regarding David helplessly, too. They never moved a muscle without his advice. He watched his brother take a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and hand it to Esther, whose own was soaked with tears.

  “Get the marriage annulled, of course,” David said tersely.

  As Nathan had anticipated he would. But the trump card was still up Nathan’s sleeve, saved for this moment. “You’ll have a job, with a baby on the way.”

  The silence that followed was terrible. Nathan could find no other way to describe it. As if he had dropped a great stone into a lake without producing a single ripple, or so much as a tiny plop.

  He saw two patches of red appear on his sister’s sallow cheeks. Then his mother lowered herself into a chair.

  For once, Abraham was the first to speak. But it was God whom he addressed. “All my life I’ve been Your obedient servant, and this is the thanks I get for it,” he said, raising his eyes to the ceiling. “Your ways are weird and wonderful, somebody, I can’t remember who, once said to me. Weird, I agree.”

  Nathan put a comforting hand on his shoulder. It was shrugged off abruptly. Nobody had yet mentioned the matter of his own complicity, but that would doubtless come later. He glanced at the clock and saw that Marianne and Ralph were due to arrive shortly. Which he had so far kept to himself. “Something wonderful could come of this,” he said vehemently. “If the people in this room were prepared to let it.”

  Esther sprang to life and glared at him. “Tell us what?”

  “You could give Marianne your blessing and welcome her husband into the family.”

  “Over my dead body,” she answered.

  Sarah rose from her chair. “Which only one of your three children will be there to mourn over, if you don’t. Nat is right about this, Esther.”

  “Have you gone mad as well as him?” Esther demanded. “What you’re saying goes against everything you brought us up to believe, Mother!”

  “And many a time I’ve wanted to say it to you about Arnold, as well.”

  Nathan’s surprise was such that he had to sit down. Was his mother really championing the cause of intermarriage?

  Her next words put an end to any illusion that she was.

  “To do something against what we believe doesn’t mean we’ve stopped believing in it. Me, I’ll never stop. But I have to try to put mysel
f in Marianne’s place. When I was a girl in Russia, who knew from anything outside our own way of life? Judaism was our be-all and end-all; to be Jewish was like living on a desert island and nobody went swimming in the sea of goyim around it.”

  Abraham contributed to the imagery. “They would have been frightened of being gobbled up by sharks.”

  “But here, there’s no need to be frightened,” Sarah said. “And both ways you can’t have it. We’d only been in England a few years when I found that out. My eldest son rode on a train to Alderley Edge, on Shabbos; to visit a Christian school friend.”

  “You can hardly compare that with marrying-out!” David exclaimed.

  Sarah agreed; it was the kind of misdemeanour that these days ranked low on her list of sins. “But it was the beginning,” she declared. The first instalment of the price of freedom, it seemed to her now. “Since then my children and theirs have travelled a long way on the path away from Judaism. And after a while, I stopped protesting. What they can’t do in front of your eyes, they’ll still do behind your back – that I had to accept. Only a fool wouldn’t accept it. And protesting will only drive them away, my common sense told me.” She allowed herself a long sigh. “What is the use of fighting a battle you know you can’t win? Only the quality of Jewish life is still the same, the part that has to do with our hearts. The faith my generation has is less so with my children’s and even less with my grandchildren’s.”

  “Because they’re moving further and further away from religious observance in their daily lives,” Abraham said in a grieved voice. “Do my sons and my son-in-law still lay tefillin and say their prayers in the mornings, I wonder?” He eyed their expressions and knew the answer was no. “And shul, except on Yom Tov, they don’t bother with any more, either.”

  “I do,” Nathan informed him. “I enjoy the service, now. For the first time in my life I understand it.”

  Abraham snorted derisively. “The shul you go to doesn’t count. Every word you said was right,” he told Sarah. “And for what their children do they have only themselves to blame.”

  Nathan was watching the clock. Marianne and Ralph would be here any minute. “Which returns us to the point,” he said brusquely to Esther and Ben. “What about your daughter? And your unborn grandchild?”

  “I’d like to throttle the man who’s got her in the family way!” Ben blazed. It was the first time he had spoken since learning Marianne was pregnant and his words sounded like the sudden eruption of a volcano.

  “He’s now her husband,” Nathan reminded him. “And she wouldn’t have slept with him out of wedlock if you hadn’t made marrying him seem impossible.”

  The red patches appeared on Esther’s cheeks again.

  “Such matters we won’t talk about,” Sarah said delicately.

  A taxi pulled up outside the house, but only Nathan noticed it. “Well?” he demanded.

  Esther and Ben exchanged an agonized glance.

  “Are you going to deal with this like you dealt with Arnold?” Nathan asked them.

  “I won’t let them,” Sarah declared. She rose from her chair, wearing her Queen Victoria expression. “Marianne is my granddaughter and I don’t intend to lose her.” She cast a glance at Abraham. “Like I said to you about Arnold, I want my family to get bigger, not smaller. And I don’t stop loving people because they make mistakes.”

  David hesitated, then spoke decisively. “I agree with Mother. If we go on cutting people off, we could end up with a family half the size.”

  “You always do agree with Mother,” Nathan said. “But in this case I’m delighted.” He waved through the window to Ralph, who was opening the garden gate.

  “Who is it?” Ben asked.

  “Your son-in-law. A big fellow, isn’t he? That’s why you can’t see Marianne standing behind him. I hadn’t yet mentioned they were coming.”

  Marianne ducked under Ralph’s arm and preceded him up the path.

  “Thank God her pregnancy doesn’t show yet, Ben,” Esther said.

  But Ben was no longer at her side. He had rushed to open the door and embrace his daughter.

  Chapter 7

  Marianne’s son was born in the spring of 1948. She named him Martin, which did not surprise the family. But the way the whole clan travelled to London for the baby’s Brith astounded Ralph.

  “The circumcision was over in no time, then they just had some cake and wine and left. I wouldn’t have thought they’d consider it worth coming,” he ruminated to Marianne that evening.

  Marianne smiled. “Because you still don’t know my family. And most Jewish ones are the same. All you’ve learned so far is that everyone’s business is everyone else’s.”

  “You can say that again!” Ralph grinned from the armchair into which he had sunk, exhausted, after his clamorous in-laws’ departure.

  “You’ll find out that goes for joys and sorrows, too,” Marianne informed him.

  She was curled up on the window seat of their new home, watching the rush-hour traffic crawl along Hammersmith Road, with a pot-pourri of the expensive perfumes most of her female relatives wore lingering in the air to remind her of them now that they were gone. And of some of the things they’d said, she thought as a whiff of Shirley’s Chanel Number Five overpowered all the others.

  “I don’t know how anyone can live in a flat,” her exquisitely turned-out cousin had declaimed, standing with her hands on the peplum of her New Look suit.

  Marianne had not known until today that there was a New Look. Or that a few inches of jacket, flaring over the hips from a tight-fitting waistline, was called a peplum. She had put on the navy-blue frock she had bought for her wedding, thankful to have regained her normal shape immediately so she could wear it and look dressed up. But it seemed something had happened to feminine fashion recently. Including a drop in the hemline to only a few inches above the ankles.

  Auntie Bessie had only removed her critical gaze from Marianne’s Old Look in order to survey the living room and pronounce her opinion of it. In one sentence. “There’s no space to swing a cat round.”

  “And no garden where the baby can lie in his pram, in the fresh air,” Ann had said, sounding horrified.

  “I hope my darling grandson won’t feel sick riding up and down in the lift,” Marianne’s mother had moaned.

  But her grandmother had had the last word. “A person has to make the best of what they have. And Marianne takes after me, she’s the kind who’s prepared to.”

  In Manchester, flats were a rarity, but Marianne’s neighbours here had never lived in a house. Houses were more costly. This had not prevented Ben Klein from wanting to buy one for his daughter and son-in-law, but Ralph had refused the offer. Marianne was proud of his independence, which her family seemed unable to understand. Jewish parents, even those who had to scrimp and sacrifice to do so, always helped their newly married daughters set up home. A custom dating back to the days when a perineh for the marital bed was a girl’s basic dowry, she thought wryly. Bobbie Sarah still had hers, stuffed with the original goose feathers. It must have been re-covered umpteen times since it travelled with her from Russia.

  Customs and traditions were the warp and weft of Jewish life. But how far removed she felt from her roots. Seeing the family here today had made her feel more so. Removed, but not exiled. There remained a tenderness for the background from which she had sprung; and a new kind of tolerance for those who didn’t see life as she did, who were content to be part of it.

  Her son was beside her, swaddled in the shawl Helga had knitted for him, as she had for every new baby in the clan. A blue silk coverlet, crocheted by Lizzie Wilson, was thrown lightly over his cradle. The same cradle Marianne’s nephew Howard had slept in last year, as Leona had once upon a time, and which Uncle Nat had stored away for future children. But looking to the future was a Sandberg quality, a Jewish quality; which was strange in a people for whom there had often seemed to be no future.

  Martin was wearing the fami
ly gown, yellowed with age, yet still preserved in lavender and tissue paper, as it had been since Marianne’s great-grandmother sewed it in Russia, for Uncle David. Would a grandson of hers wear it one day? she wondered, stroking the soft, black down on Martin’s tiny head. But this was absurd! What had maternity done to her? Turned her into a Jewish mother thinking about grandchildren when her first child was only eight days old. Like Sarah Sandberg, who went on preserving the gown for the next Brith.

  “What are you smiling about, Mrs. Dean?” Ralph inquired.

  “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”

  He came to sit beside her, and she rested her head on his shoulder. Sometimes she had to pinch herself to make sure this wasn’t a dream. That Ralph was really her husband and they had a son. That everything had turned out as it had.

  They had not yet lit the lamps, but Ralph had built up the fire and the leaping flames were casting an amber glow. On the silver tea service Uncle David had given them for a wedding present. And the twisted brass candlesticks that were her grandparents’ gift. A small bookcase, from the Moritzes, held her most treasured literature and the leather wing chair was from Uncle Nat. The bed she and Ralph slept in had been bought by her parents and her household linens provided by Harry and her cousins. What was she doing? Counting her blessings? Yes, in a way. It was lovely to have all these things, but what they represented, being at peace with the family, was even lovelier.

  When Sarah arrived home from London, she marched to the telephone without pausing to take off her coat and hat.

  Abraham had no need to ask whose number she was dialling. Her expression had told him. “Again you’re phoning Arnold? What makes you think he’ll talk to you? When he’s dropped the receiver in everyone’s ear, including yours, fifty times? He’s told Marianne and Nat he’s finished with the family and you know what a stubborn he is.”

  “Four years the family left him out in the cold to get even more so,” Sarah replied, listening to her grandson’s phone ringing a few miles away in Didsbury. “But a person has to try.”