The Sugar Men

by Ray Kingfisher

  ‘Just think,’ Susannah said. ‘I’ll see your father again.’ She pointed a crooked finger at David’s business suit. ‘You know I used to joke to him about your dress sense. I always told him he should be worried because you were too neat and smart to be a son of his.’ She paused as David spluttered a laugh, then continued, ‘I’ll bet he’s as scruffy as a hobo without me to look after him. I expect his shoelaces are undone and his tie’s all crooked, and he needs me and misses me every bit as much as I do him.’

  She paused again while David gulped and Judy sniffed.

  ‘And don’t worry, I’ll pass on your regards to him,’ Susannah said, which made her children smile. Then her face lit up ever so slightly, looking tighter and younger than it had any right to. ‘You know, I’m not scared,’ she said softly. ‘Not at all. Everything passes in time, and I’m no different. I’ve seen plenty of countries, married a wonderful man, given birth to two of the best children in the world. And that’s not bad for a little Jewish girl from Berlin.’

  David looked at her and blinked away a few tears.

  ‘I’m happy,’ Susannah added. ‘I lived to see my eightieth birthday.’

  David and Judy passed each other a glance. Judy nearly said, Even if it wasn’t actually your birthday, but it wasn’t the moment, and hearing those words would have upset her if not her mother.

  But Susannah had that magical motherly understanding, almost hearing her say it anyway. ‘I’m sorry about the birthday thing,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter anymore but I guess I made too big a deal of it at the time.’

  ‘Mother,’ Judy said, speaking slowly and tentatively. ‘About your birthday. Did you find out about it?’

  Both David and Judy looked to her expectantly for a few seconds.

  Eventually Susannah nodded slowly. ‘I guess I learned a thing or ten.’

  ‘So . . . what happened when you were in Europe?’ David said after a few moments’ silence.

  ‘There was a war, my darling, a mighty big one. Millions of people died, and the Germans . . .’ She stopped on seeing the reprimanding looks of her children.

  David’s face cracked a smile. ‘Jesus, Mom. You did a lot in your life but why weren’t you ever on the stage?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Susannah said. ‘You always were on the receiving end, weren’t you?’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ David said. ‘I don’t mind at all.’

  Judy knew not to push it, and reckoned David did too. Their mother knew damn well they both wanted to know, and if making a joke of it was her way of saying she didn’t want to talk about it, then that was fine by them.

  But then Susannah’s face took on a more serious expression, almost studious. ‘I was going to tell you,’ she said. ‘But not immediately. I was waiting for the right moment.’

  ‘Well . . . now’s a moment,’ Judy said.

  Susannah opened her mouth and gave a little shrug of the shoulders before she started speaking. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And, after all, I guess the two of you, just like me, deserve to know the truth – everything.’

  ‘So?’ David said.

  She turned to him. ‘How long do you have?’

  David gazed at her for a second, then reached into his pocket, pulled his phone out, and switched it off. ‘I have all the time in the world for you, Mom.’

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you fix us some milk and cookies and then we’ll talk?’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Judy said, standing up.

  ‘It’s okay,’ David said. ‘I can—’

  ‘No,’ Judy answered, stepping between him and the door. ‘You stay right where you are. And don’t you dare start without me.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The truth was that Judy needed a break. Something about the events of the previous few months told her she needed a few minutes alone to prepare herself mentally for her mother’s travelogue.

  Milk and cookies had been a common childhood treat for her and David, a balm for all worries great or small. And as she crept downstairs into the kitchen – where she’d learned to eat almost fifty years before – the memories of those years started hurling themselves back at her.

  Of course, she’d regularly returned home to see her parents for thirty years – and her mother alone for the last three. It had always held a special place in her heart the way any childhood home should – the long narrow kitchen with its ridged-oak set of table and chairs her father had made before she was even born, the living room with the large window overlooking the back yard (and with the crack in the ceiling that drew the eye to the scene outside), the hallway with cheap pictures of everyday birds that had somehow stood the test of time and changing fashions. All of these and everything else about the place had now taken on a tinge of sadness for Judy. Sometime soon strangers would buy this house and change all of these things, the things her mother had kept just as they were in order to complement her memories.

  But what of Judy’s own memories? Now she was comfortably settled into middle age all misdemeanours that might have been were long forgiven and forgotten. But being in that very state of middle age – and bringing up her own children – had also made her reappraise her own childhood with unbridled honesty. And it hadn’t quite been the idyllic time everyone tried to pretend. Sure, she felt secure and loved; she’d grown up to be happily married with two awkwardly normal children, but there had always been something about her mother that seemed different from other mothers. There seemed something of an emotional gap between them too, and there had been plenty of odd behaviour of one sort or another on her mother’s part that hinted at deep-rooted problems. There was the occasion Shirley Carlton from across the road told Judy she’d heard her parents whisper that Judy’s mother used to be an alcoholic, which was something Judy knew to be untrue (so much so it didn’t upset her in the slightest at the time). However, it seemed to pulse away in her mind like unpalatable thoughts often do when you aren’t quite 100 per cent sure and that tiny percentage threatens to spread like a virus.

  There were the medical prescriptions that her mother kept locked away in a cupboard – even when Judy was in her twenties. There were those very vague memories – so faint Judy could never be sure of their veracity and had never told anyone about them, not even her husband. Memories of her father telling her to stay away from the bathroom for an hour or more because her mother was in there, and she wasn’t to tell anyone about it or ask what her mother was actually doing in there. Only once did Judy disobey those orders, and ended up having a very short conversation through the locked door with a woman who didn’t seem to be her mother at all. And she remembered how surprised she’d been, when she first started visiting school friends’ houses, at how little food they had in – fridges merely three-quarters full, some cupboards with space left over; no tins, bottles or jars stacked up in the corners of garages.

  There were also the distant family members – aunts and uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles, cousins and second cousins – that everyone but the Morgans seemed to have. All the Morgans had were Paul, Helena and Reuben in North Carolina, and a few Scottish relatives of Father whose names they never remembered because they hardly ever met.

  Then there were the occasional looks of stark terror on Mother’s face when there was a knock at the door – even in the middle of a bright afternoon – when Judy knew not to ask questions or do anything that might upset her. That fear of asking – never a fear of Mother herself – meant that even when Judy reached that inquisitive age she automatically filtered out questions on certain subject areas.

  But the childhood memories that simply wouldn’t loosen their grip on her mind were those of the arguments between her mother and father that she was sure had happened when she’d been around four or five years old, ones she’d asked David about once when she visited him at college. He just closed his eyes, shook his head, and told her very firmly and very finally to read up on her history, which she didn’t understand at the time.

  When she fi
nally did ‘check her history’, what she found merely confirmed that this was something best left alone to wither away. On the few occasions that the family heard or watched news stories about the aftermath of the war – for instance, the trials of the Nazis – all mouths stayed shut and waited for the issue to pass. Once, when David was in his early teens, he asked his mother what she thought about the penalties handed down to the SS officers. She replied that sometimes it wasn’t a good idea to think so much, that he should get on with his life and study and work hard, and leave the past in the past. But he persevered and asked what she thought of how the German authorities had behaved over the issue, while in the background Judy stilled her breath all the better to hear what Mother’s reaction would be. But Mother simply replied that there was good and bad in every group of people and he should stop getting all obsessed with it. However, it was clear from her short breaths and the tremble in her voice that it was a case of ‘do as I say and not as I do’ – or even just ‘shut up’. And, as far as Judy could recollect, neither of them ever raised the subject with their mother again.

  It was only later on, when Judy was at college herself, that she started to understand what David was trying to get at – at least she guessed so, for they never discussed it. Their mother had always been unable to talk about any aspect of her own childhood, except to say that she’d been born in Germany as Susannah Zuckerman. Beyond that the only glimpse of their mother’s ancestry had been when David and Judy had come home from school and – for some long-forgotten reason – Judy had asked her whether they were Jewish. Her mother gathered both of them in close the way only a mother can and told them with a calmness she seemed to struggle with that they should be proud of the half of them that was Jewish, the half that was Scottish, and the fact that they were also as American as anyone else in the country. It was something never mentioned again, and when Judy later studied the history of the Second World War it was something she pushed away to a dark, cold corner of her mind. She simply couldn’t connect her own mother with what had happened there – or didn’t want to – and couldn’t even phrase the question in her head that she’d always pondered on but never obsessed about: why she and David hadn’t been brought up as Jews.

  Once, while her mother was sleeping, she checked her arms for tattoos. There were none, which only made her more curious about her mother’s background. But still, she knew not to ask outright about her experiences in Germany – or wherever – during the war, and resigned herself to never knowing the truth.

  When the man who was later to become Judy’s husband casually asked about her mother’s background, she told him it was something they simply didn’t talk about because Mother found it too upsetting, which effectively ended that conversation for good.

  It was only in middle age, with the rage and passion of youth extinguished but still giving off wisps of smoke, that David and Judy learned just something of what had happened to their mother. It had leaked out when Father became ill, when he knew he didn’t have long to live and, it seemed, wanted his children to know at least a little about their mother’s history. And there lay the contrast between them. Father had spent the first twenty-four years of his life living in the same house in Glasgow, and if anyone wanted to know about his years working in the Govan shipyards they only needed to ask – then pretty soon they’d be wishing they hadn’t. On the other hand, Mother had always hinted at having such a varied and interesting life but clammed up whenever she was asked to talk about it.

  Which was where Father helped. In his final days he told David and Judy that their mother had been brought up in Berlin, but had moved around Europe in her teens – so much so that she couldn’t quite remember the place names – and had ended up in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She’d been nicknamed ‘The Lucky One’, partly for escaping death when so many others hadn’t, but mostly because the camp had been liberated on her birthday. Soon after recovering she’d come over to America with Paul, Helena and Reuben – also all from Berlin – and settled in Wilmington. And after that they never wished to live anywhere else.

  Three years after Father’s death, that was still the sum total of Judy’s knowledge of her mother’s childhood. There had been the occasional moment in those three years when Judy had relived a few of those faint memories from her own childhood, and found that they were starting – but only starting – to make some kind of sense. The ups and downs of her own life, however – and a fear of upsetting the family equilibrium – always managed to get in the way.

  Judy poured out three glasses of milk, emptied some ginger and orange cookies onto a plate, and put the lot on a tray. She went to pick the tray up but paused as she glanced out through the back window, her eyes settling on the banner stretched across the lawn celebrating Mother’s ‘Big Eightieth’ birthday.

  The banner had been there for three months now. It was tired and sagging in the middle but still hanging on, and the sight of it immediately threw Judy’s mind back to earlier that year, when the whole thing had started.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Susannah’s ‘Big Eightieth’ birthday party had taken place on 15 April 2009.

  God had granted the town of Wilmington, North Carolina, a day that was cloudy but easily warm enough to spend most of the day outside. The fragrances of freshly cut cedarwood and roasting hot dogs mingled to produce an effective deterrent to whatever early-bird insects were around at that time of year and might have wanted a piece of the action.

  On one side of the back lawn was the most complex and ornate bird-feeding station in the county by all accounts; a solid square trunk was concreted into the ground, and struts and beams of various ages and types of wood were bolted on at a range of heights. And, in turn, what looked like hundreds of smaller rods – the ‘twigs’ – were connected to those. Hooks and snags and the odd flat surface abounded to hold whatever titbits people managed to get up there. The story of how it came to be had been told to friends and neighbours so many times it was etched in Judy’s mind. Her father had made the contraption two years after he and her mother were married – about the time she’d suddenly got interested in attracting birds into the garden. Much later on, when, as an adult, Judy had got to know some of the family friends who still referred to it as Archie’s Knot-Tree, she heard talk that it had been more of an obsession than an interest, and once overheard a whispered aside that Archie didn’t have any choice in the matter because any new obsession of Susannah’s couldn’t possibly be worse than the old one. Whatever that meant, it was obvious to Judy that her father had been intent on building those sparrows, wagtails, bluebirds and meadowlarks the biggest and best feeding station possible. He once told Judy that while he was building it he kept moaning that he didn’t understand what was wrong with a goddam tree. When Judy asked the very same question he told her that a large tree cost a whole lot more than the waste offcuts from the boatyard he worked at, and Judy’s mother simply wouldn’t wait for a small one to grow. Judy knew the two sides to the story didn’t quite match up, but didn’t think anything of it.

  On the other side of the lawn was a large shed, the shed Father had used as a wood-turning workshop right up until a few weeks before he died.

  And early on the morning of their mother’s eightieth birthday Judy and David had snuck out and strung a huge banner up high between the shed and the bird-feeding station, a banner with the appropriate number of years daubed in words Mother said were so large they were ‘loud enough to wake up Roosevelt’.

  Susannah said that using Archie’s shed was a fitting use for the old goat’s hideaway because he wouldn’t have wanted to completely miss out on her – or indeed any – party.

  Throughout late morning and early afternoon the back lawn was lively with neighbours, relatives and friends old and new. David and Judy and their families stayed all day, with a steady mix of people dropping by throughout.

  Those who didn’t yet know about Susannah’s recent diagnosis were put right in no uncertain terms by David
and Judy, with strict instructions on how to behave in front of her. They were not to cry or frown or pity or say, ‘Physicians? What do they know?’ or advise, ‘My Uncle Jerry was told he had cancer three years ago and the old dog’s still alive today.’

  It was left for David and Judy to bear those particular bombardments of ‘poor Susannah’ sympathy.

  It happened at about five o’clock in the afternoon.

  Judy noticed her mother starting to wilt outside – perhaps overwhelmed by the occasion or attention she wasn’t used to – and also it had become just a little chilly, so she insisted on taking her indoors for a rest. She settled her down in an armchair facing the back yard, so she could still see the banner and the guests gathered on the lawn in her honour, then fetched her a drink of warm lemonade and asked her if anything was wrong and whether she was enjoying her birthday.

  It was then that her mother said it.

  Only four words came from between her thin, cracked lips, but Judy couldn’t have known the significance of those words at the time, and what an effect they were to have on her mother’s life and on Judy’s understanding of her own.

  Although Judy heard it clearly, she asked her to repeat it because she didn’t quite believe it. Her mother did, and Judy told her not to be so silly. It was then that Judy saw a look in her mother’s eyes she’d never seen in all her years; those dark-brown saucers seemed so full of secrets they were about to overflow, and Judy felt fear crawling up her spine.

  Judy told her to stay where she was – hardly a rational statement given her mother’s physical condition but a reflection of her state of mind at the time – and hurried outside and down to the end of the lawn to where David was.

  ‘There’s something wrong with Mom,’ Judy said after she’d pulled him aside from the guests.