I suggested to Emily that Mona and Oscar might like to have some coffee.
Mona hunted in one of their bags and came out with a jar of instant coffee and gave it to Emily.
“We drink a lot of coffee, and I heard you can’t get good coffee over here.”
“We’ve got instant coffee,” Emily said.
“Oh, you have,” Mona said, puzzled. “Well, we like it strong.”
As soon as Emily was out of the room, my sister said:
“I thought you said she was half Jewish.”
“I said that long ago, because of Maw. She asked me where did I get married? Who was the rabbi? Now she knows. I know she knows. She said if this happened in her time the family would be sitting shiva.”
“I always say, the way you live your life, that’s your business,” Mona said.
Emily came back with the coffee, and she also had some hamburgers in buns that she made earlier and heated up.
“Gee, these taste good,” Oscar said.
“They’re like we make them,” Mona said, somewhat surprised.
I was surprised how she had aged. I knew she was two years younger. But she looked in her forties. Except for her body, which was very slim. She sat hunched, her back curved, jaw thrust forward, smoking one cigarette after another.
I heard a car go up. We live on the side of a hill. Mona stopped eating.
“What was that?”
I told her.
She heard a rail outside the house rattle. People hold onto it for support as they walk up the hill. But it was loose.
“And what was that?”
We were all quiet.
“I heard something—it’s upstairs,” she said.
I went upstairs.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“I’ve got to do this every night,” Oscar said. “You should see the locks on our doors. And the bolts. And the chains. When I go away after breakfast she locks the double doors with double locks—they’re special locks. Then the chains. And then the bolts. She even has a gun and a dog.”
“But what for?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Mona said quietly.
“You weren’t like that,” I said.
“Let me tell you,” Oscar said, with a sleepy grin. “You’ve got some sister.”
Just before nine the farmer and his wife came. And it became a small party. They drank several gins too quickly. They gave us a chicken and pressed tongue. I gave them the bottle of sherry. They left presents for the kids under the tree. They thought it was marvellous to come and find people who had only twenty hours before been in Canada. The farmer’s wife—bright faced, plump—and Mona found something to talk about.
“—I also had my gallstones out.”
“Mine burst,” Mona said, “as the surgeon was putting it on the tray.”
But they couldn’t stay, as they had to get back to the farm.
Though the room had become much warmer, Oscar had not taken his hat off all evening. He had removed his suit-jacket, sweater and tie. With his hat on his head he went to sleep in the chair by the fireplace.
As soon as Mona saw that Oscar was asleep she said:
“What do you do about teaching the children religion?”
“We don’t,” I said.
“Our kids celebrate Chanukah. They all wear Mogen Davids around their necks—This is the Star of David, Emily,” Mona said, showing her the thin gold chain around her neck. “In my home I have two sets of dishes. I light the candles on Shabbos. We eat bacon—but outside, in someone else’s house. You might think that was hypocritical. Do you light the candles on Friday night?”
“If I did that, Mona, I’d feel hypocritical.”
“Who did you name Rebecca after?” Mona quickly changed the subject.
“After Aunt Rocheh,” I said. “You may not remember her. She’s the one that never married. I think she died when we were kids. How did you get Francine?”
“After Fruma—Oscar’s grandmother.”
“Fruma is Frieda or Fanny,” I said.
“No,” she said. “You can take anything from the Fs . . .”
“But why just the Fs . . . ?” I said.
“Well, it’s got to be like Fruma—you can have Faith, Felicity, Fawn.”
“They don’t sound like Fruma to me.”
“They don’t have to sound, long as the first letter’s the same. For instance, your Rebecca is after Auntie Rocheh. Then you could have had Roxana, Roxy . . .”
“That’s the name of a cinema,” I said. “Who’s Lance after?”
“He is after Oscar’s grandfather Laybel—he could have been Lawrence, Lorne . . .”
“What about Lou or Lionel?”
“They’re old-fashioned.”
Mona stubbed out her cigarette and immediately lit up another. I had noticed earlier the area of nicotine on her finger, but it was while I gave her a light that I noticed her hand was shaking.
“We don’t let Francine go out with any English boys in Meridian. We send her away to Montreal during the holidays. She also learns Hebrew.”
“Girls in Canada,” I said, “learn Hebrew?”
“Why not?” Mona said aggressively. “I believe in God. Don’t you?”
“No.”
“Don’t say that,” Mona said. “You must never say that.”
“Don’t believe him,” Emily said, trying to calm her down.
“I believe in fate,” Mona said, “that between Rosh Hoshannah and Yom Kippur your fate for the year is decided.”
“I don’t go along with that,” I said.
No one spoke.
Then Mona chuckled. “It’s a good thing Oscar’s asleep, otherwise he’d never forgive me for talking like this.”
We gave them our bedroom. We slept on a mattress in my office with coats over us. This arrangement was all right for tonight. But tomorrow we’d have to try and get some sheets and blankets from the woman next door.
Emily and I were trying to get to sleep. Our eyes seemed level with the gap at the bottom of the door that showed the light from the hall.
“She must have been saving that up for a long time,” Emily said. “I wanted to like her.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ve never felt terribly close to my sister.”
Fifteen years ago, in Montreal, I was asked to leave the middle of an English 10 class.
“Someone to see you,” the Dean’s secretary said.
And there in the dark cool hall, under the arts building clock, was my mother. A bit frightened but dressed nicely in a small blue hat, a new black coat, and dark gloves. She had come up, on her own, from Ottawa to try and make me change my mind about coming to Mona’s wedding. I don’t know what excuses I gave for not going. And I don’t know why I chose my sister’s wedding to make a stand.
My mother took me out for a meal, in a small restaurant on St. Lawrence Main, which I enjoyed. It wasn’t as good as her cooking, but it seemed ages since I had Jewish food. And the signed photographs on the wall of Max Baer, Al Jolson—her, all dressed up, across the table—the food—brought back my childhood on Murray Street; the stillness of the house on the Sabbath, with my mother, a handsome woman, sitting out the afternoons by the window. She wept—she may even have given me a few dollars—and I said I would come.
At the wedding I remember my father coming down the aisle with Mona. He was about the same size as Mona, but looked smaller, in a double-breasted blue serge suit which was cut down to fit him from one of my uncle’s discarded suits. His lips pressed tight, near to tears, a little frightened. Away from the house he always looked lost.
Then the reception downstairs in the vestry rooms. There was something like three hundred guests. Most of them I didn’t know. Perhaps I had, even then,
gone further away from home than I thought. (The way the waiters were openly helping themselves to the booze—the way the people were stuffing themselves.) It seemed to me—at university because of the Veteran’s Act, sixty dollars a month, which meant eating peanuts in the last week—that my mother, who had cleaned out her bank account for this wedding, was feeding a lot of strangers.
I remember the young rabbi sitting in front of me, eyes moving continuously. He was new, “from outta town.” And ate very quickly. Then he got up to make his speech. He talked of Mona, whom he had never seen before.
“Mona, today you are a princess. Oscar, you are a prince.”
Earlier that week Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh had got married.
Then he sat down, mumbled quickly and indistinctly his after-eating prayers, gave a few little shakes of his body, and vanished.
Next morning Emily and I and the kids were up early. The kids were very excited. Oscar and Mona came down after ten. Said they slept well. Didn’t eat very much but drank endless cups of coffee that Emily kept making, and smoked cigarettes.
It was the coldest winter England had for over a century. And though there have been Christmases in this resort where I have been able to walk about without a coat, this time we had fires going in every room. Fortunately our lavatories didn’t freeze, though the neighbours’ did.
Oscar became a great favourite with the kids. He had a way with children. He sat two of them on one of his knees. He told them stories about Canada and their summer cottage by a lake.
“. . . We’ve also got a speedboat and we go through the lakes. You could come up and stay at the cottage with us and have some of Mona’s blueberry pie and see the animals. You’ve never seen a skunk. They come right up to the cottage . . .”
He spoke in a sleepy, genial way. The kids loved him.
“Why don’t you go back?” he said.
“We’ll see—maybe next year.”
“You owe it to the kids,” he said.
Mona began to speak in Yiddish. “Was it a question of money?” Emily and the kids just looked on, puzzled.
“It’s a bit more complicated,” I said in English.
“How about if we take the kids back with us?” Oscar said. “We’ll take Martha and Ella. We’ll look after them and they can go and stay with us in the summer at the cottage.”
Martha and Ella were hugging Oscar.
I didn’t think for a minute he was serious.
“Look,” Oscar said. “We can take them back for nothing on our tickets. We’ll feed them, look after them. It’s not a question of adopting them. They’re yours.”
“We’ll see,” I said to the two excited kids. It hurt, the way they were so willing to go away from us.
Whenever Mona didn’t want the kids to understand something she began to talk in Yiddish. Until I finally decided to send the kids into the other room. Only to have Rebecca come back upset.
“They’re whispering,” she said. “They’ve got secrets.”
It was nearly noon and we hadn’t left the kitchen table. I suggested I might take them out, show them the place, and get some fresh air, so as to give Emily a chance to clear up and do some shopping.
It was freezing outside. There was no one out. The puddles in the narrow streets were frozen. The long fine sand beaches were empty. The water in the bay was grey. No boats in the harbour, only a few gulls were huddled together at the harbour’s entrance, facing the wind.
“You should see it in the summer,” I said.
“I can imagine,” Mona said, huddled up in her Persian lamb coat. “It sure is a nice-looking place.”
Oscar took coloured moving pictures of Mona and myself and the kids. And of the empty streets, the empty restaurants, the empty beaches, and boarded-up shops. Then we came back with rosy cheeks and sat around the fire in the dining room.
“It’s healthy, the fire here,” Mona said, lighting up a cigarette. “Not like our place—so stuffy.”
I went outside in the courtyard with the coal-bucket and came back with it full to the top.
“You know what you remind me,” Mona said, “you coming in like that—with the pail of coal?”
“I know,” I said. “Paw.”
There were times when I went out to get the coal from the shed in the courtyard that I remembered my father coming up from the cellar in the house on Murray Street, with a bucketful of coal for the Quebec stove in the hall. Just as there were times, upstairs in my room, when I was making out a list of payments to come and remembered him and his black book with his list of people owing him money.
“Do you remember you telling me: don’t let boys touch you between here,” she drew a line across her neck, “and there.” Another line at the knees. “And you remember when you were at university and I saw you in Montreal. You had written that song. When you met me you gave me twenty dollars. I said no. What, you said, it’s not enough. And gave me another twenty.”
I didn’t remember either of these.
Instead, I remembered when she was about eight or nine. When she was hit with a stone from a slingshot. It cut her head. They had to shave her head. And she wore a beret. She wore it in school. And the kids made fun of her.
“And you remember my wedding?” Mona said. “You remember Betty’s fiancé, Sam? He was supposed to take a movie of the reception. But all he took was pictures of Betty . . .”
I didn’t remember that either. I remembered Mona being sick. The doctor came to examine her. He gave her a large bar of chocolate for being a good girl. She gave me some. And we went upstairs and ate it in her room. Later, I watched the long, thin, white-yellow worms come out of her mouth and lie slowly twisting on the floor.
Mona and Oscar had never seen Christmas before, except in the movies. So I briefed them.
“This is the way it’s going to be tomorrow. We wake up in the morning. We say happy Christmas to each other. Then the kids come down. We have breakfast. Then go into the front room. And I read out the names and give out the presents.”
When they heard this they went out and came back loaded with presents that they wrapped up in their room and put under the tree.
“I arranged for a taxi to come on Boxing Day,” I said. “We’ll drive around and see some of the country around here.”
“I thought you told Maw you had a jalopy.”
“I might have said that,” I said, “for Maw’s sake.”
In the evening we sat around and watched television.
“They’ve got the same programs here,” Mona said, “as we’ve got in Meridian.”
“They’re American shows,” I said.
We watched a quiz show for children. “Your TV is so much better than ours,” Mona said. “It’s so educational.”
But they were mainly interested in the commercials.
After the news I switched off and we sat around the fire, drank coffee, and smoked cigarettes.
“Why don’t you go back to Canada?” Oscar said.
“It takes money to get out of here,” I said. “And maybe, now, I’ve lived too long away.”
“With your education you could have been a doctor,” Mona said. “It’s true,” she said to Emily.
“But I’m a writer,” I said. “How many doctors has Canada got—thousands. How many writers? A handful. It’s easier to be a doctor than a writer.”
“Yeh, I know,” Mona said sadly. “But it’s hard.”
I went and got some whisky—no one joined me.
“In a year’s time I figure I’ll make enough money to retire,” Oscar said.
“Talk, talk,” Mona said. “That’s easy.”
“You’ll see if I don’t,” Oscar said. “I’d be halfway there if it wasn’t for her operations. You know, she’s had half a dozen already.”
“It’s true,” Mona said.
Oscar, I knew, was in the scrap-metal business. But he bought anything that he could sell at a profit. He would fill up his warehouse and then load up a truck and drive the stuff to Montreal or Toronto and sell it.
“I’ve got to ring her up every night,” Oscar said, “when I’m away from Meridian.”
“We’ve got a system where we don’t have to pay,” Mona said. “If we don’t want to talk but just let the other one know that he arrived in Montreal or Toronto—Oscar asks person-to-person and makes up some name like Johnson. ‘“May I speak to Mr. Johnson,’“ he says. And I say, ‘“I’m sorry Mr. Johnson is not in.’” And I know he got there all right.”
“You think that’s something,” Oscar said. “We know a woman who rings up Montreal long distance to get her kosher meat. She’d call up the butcher and say, ‘“Is Chuck in?’“ And of course the man would say that Chuck wasn’t in. But he knew that meant she wanted chuck that week.”
“We’ve got three properties in Meridian,” Mona said. “So you could come and stay there. I know it’s a small out-of-the-way place. But until you find your feet.”
“Thanks,” I said.
But I didn’t see much point in exchanging one small town for another. I desperately wanted to get out of this seaside town and live in London again. It’s a cosmopolitan city that I miss. I try to go to London as often as I can, but it’s expensive. Even so, a few days in London and I come back as if I had a shot in the arm. I feel sharper in London. I go through the streets and feel like singing. I do sing. I go to bed in London feeling slim and not the way I feel here, as if I’m carrying a large body with lots of weight and deadness.
“I’ve got to get us out,” I told them. “There are times I’ve just got to take myself away from here. So I take a train to Plymouth. And just to walk down straight streets again. Until about noon it’s fine. After that, I know I’ve got to come back to this place.”
“Do you miss London, Emily?” Mona said.
“It’s my home town. There are days here when I feel life is going by—day after day the same—and you’re waiting for something to happen.”
I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well, and Other Stories Page 18