A Time to Love

by Beryl Kingston

  He blinked his eyes open and took the towel as though she had offered it. ‘It’s all right, Ellen,’ he said, ‘It’s over in a minute. He’ll hardly feel a thing. An’ anyway you don’t have to be there. It’s only the men and the mohel. The mother waits in another room with all the other women. Dumpling’ll look after you.’ His face was dry now. He hung the towel over the rail and smiled at her. ‘It’s a good job done,’ he said, trying to encourage her because she was looking at him so strangely.

  She folded her hands protectively over her belly and prepared to give battle. ‘If you think you’re going ter cut bits off my baby, David Cheifitz,’ she said, ‘you got another think coming.’

  ‘He’s my baby too,’ he said, but mildly because he couldn’t see why there should be any argument.

  ‘You ain’t carried him nine months, nor give birth to ’im neither.’

  ‘Oh come on, Ellen. He’s a Jewish baby. All Jewish babies are circumcized. It’s the custom.’

  She was glaring at him, her blue eyes furious. ‘Not fer my baby, it ain’t. I won’t allow it, an’ that’s flat. An’ if you bring your rotten mogul feller into this house, I’ll cut a lump off him, so help me God.’

  I’ve made an awful mistake, David thought. I should have prepared her for it gradually. She’s not used to the idea, that’s what it is. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we won’t discuss it now, nu? We got plenty a’ time.’

  ‘There’s nothink to discuss,’ she said, and her determination was massive. ‘The answer’s “no”. You can ask from here ter doomsday, it’ll be “no” all the way. My baby ain’t Jewish.’

  And no matter how often he tried to return to the topic, she was adamant. Nobody was going to mutilate her child, and that was the end of it.

  He was more distressed about this than he’d been about any other matter since they married. It had never occurred to him that she might refuse, and now that she had, he couldn’t think of any way to persuade her. But he couldn’t leave his own son outside the Jewish community.

  ‘So what do we do?’ he asked his father as they walked along Fournier Street after synagogue.

  ‘Ve leave it vid the Lord, maybe?’

  But David worried on. It was unthinkable to have an uncircumcized son. ‘There must be something I could say to make her change her mind. If I could only think of it. How can I persuade her, Papa? She refuses no matter what.’ Oy oy! What a situation! It was insoluble.

  In the event, the baby solved the problem for him by being born a girl, a peacemaker from the first day of her life.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Early the next morning after the child was born, Dumpling arrived with a blue paper bag full of groats for Ellen and a set of long petticoats for the baby. ‘I come the minute I see your card, bubeleh,’ she said to David. ‘Oy oy vhat a beauty! Such eyes, I tell you,’ and she quoted from the Talmud, ‘“The birth of a daughter is a blessing from the lord.” So vhat you call her?’

  ‘Grace,’ David told her. ‘Whatcher think?’

  ‘Tuesday’s child,’ Ellen explained, fondling her daughter’s dark head. ‘Tuesday’s child is full a’ grace.’

  ‘Very nice,’ Dumpling approved. To have named her after her grandmother would have been more diplomatic, but it was a pretty name. It suited her.

  ‘I’m off to work then,’ David said, kissing Ellen goodbye, ‘You got everything you need, nu?’

  ‘Me she got,’ Dumpling said happily, escorting him to the door. ‘Vhat more she vant?’

  She was certainly a very good nurse and most attentive. When the midwife came for her morning visit she busied herself in the kitchen, and when the baby woke to be fed she cooked the groats for Ellen, ‘best thing in the vorld for making milk, bubeleh’, and at midday she scrambled eggs, ‘Liddle an’ tasty, ve build up your strength’, and when they’d eaten every mouthful she insisted that they should both take a ‘liddle nap’.

  ‘I shan’t sleep in the middle a’ the day,’ Ellen protested, but she put her head on the pillow just to satisfy Aunty Dumpling, who was nodding and smiling most persuasively. And woke two hours later, to find her sitting on the bed with the baby cradled in her capacious lap, silently crying tears of joy onto the little girl’s dark head.

  ‘Such a beauty, don’t I tell you,’ she said when she saw Ellen was awake. ‘So vhat your moder think of such a beauty? The proudest voman alive I bet, nu?’

  ‘Well …’ Ellen said, musing. Until that moment she’d always been very careful to avoid any mention of her family when she was with Aunty Dumpling. Now she decided to risk it. ‘To tell the truth, she don’t know yet. We’ve sent a card, same time as yours. On’y she’s gone ter live in Liverpool, you see.’

  ‘Oy oy oy!’ Aunty Dumpling said, taking Ellen’s hand at once and giving it a squeeze. ‘Such a sadness! All that vay avay! Never mind, bubeleh, she come down to see the baby, nu?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘She don’t travel good?’

  ‘Ain’t got the money.’

  Dumpling gave the hand another squeeze. ‘Never mind, bubeleh,’ she said, her face puckered with earnestness. ‘Ve make it up to you. You got Davey and me and Davey’s father. Plenty of family now, nu?’

  ‘Not Davey’s mother though,’ Ellen said greatly daring. ‘She don’t think much ‘a me an’ that’s a fact.’

  ‘Give her time, bubeleh,’ Dumpling advised. ‘Vait till she see this liddle precious.’

  But this little precious had had enough of conversation and decided to give tongue for food. And it took a long time to satisfy her because she suddenly seemed to have acquired an appetite. And then her nappie had to be changed, so Dumpling was able to admire her dear little plump legs, and kiss her toes, and stroke her soft skin, before she was wrapped and bundled again.

  ‘The greatest sadness of my life I don’t have children,’ she confided, beaming at her new grandniece.

  ‘You should a’ married again,’ Ellen said, cuddling the baby into her neck.

  ‘Should, vould. It ain’t so easy. Good husband’s a rarity, I tell you. They don’t grow on trees, nu-nu.’

  ‘What about Mr Morrison?’ Ellen asked, surprised at how bold motherhood had made her.

  ‘It don’t enter his head, nebbish.’

  ‘P’rhaps it will,’ Ellen said smiling at her.

  ‘Pigs might fly,’ Dumpling said, but she sounded cheerful. ‘I just rinse this liddle nappie out, nu?’

  That evening while Ellen was recounting all the day’s events and her daring conversation, Emmanuel and Rachel arrived to see their first grandchild. Emmanuel was delighted with her and said she was the prettiest baby he’d ever seen, even prettier than David, and he’d never thought such a thing was possible. But Rachel was quiet and watchful, saying very little and taking everything in, and she brought no welcoming gift, as Ellen was sensitively quick to notice.

  When they’d gone she burst into tears and wept unconsolably for far too long. ‘She hates me,’ she cried. ‘The way she was lookin’ at us! An’ she never said nothink nice about our Gracie, d’yer notice? An’ I seen ’er at all the wrong time too. Stuck ’ere in bed an’ the place all any old how.’

  ‘It wasn’t any old how,’ he tried to comfort. ‘Dumpling had it all lovely.’

  But she was beyond reason. ‘She hates me,’ she sobbed. ‘She’ll always hate me, Davey. She’s made up ’er mind to it, you can see. She was lookin’ me over all the time, lookin’ fer things ter criticize.’

  ‘She ain’t like that, bubeleh,’ he argued. ‘She’s a good woman. She’ll come round in time. You’ll see. She was just being quiet, that’s all. She’s a bit shy.’

  He was wrong. Ellen had assessed her mother-in-law’s state of mind with almost total accuracy.

  ‘A pretty baby,’ Emmanuel tried, as they walked home together in the balmy evening. ‘There is truth in the saying, nu? A man should look on the birth of a daughter as a blessing from the Lord.’ He spoke in Yiddish, because
he had a vague feeling that he would be more persuasive in that language.

  ‘The birth of a Jewish daughter, maybe,’ Rachel said. ‘But this is neither one thing nor the other, poor child. Half and half. An outcast, Emmanuel.’

  ‘Only if we make her an outcast, bubeleh.’

  ‘She is an outcast, Emmanuel. An outcast by birth, neither one thing nor the other.’ Her face was stiff with rejection and obduracy.

  ‘She is our David’s daughter,’ Emmanuel tried.

  ‘She is that woman’s daughter. That woman’s! Ai-yi! What a terrible waste!’

  Fortunately little Grace Cheifitz couldn’t speak English or Yiddish yet, so she didn’t know what a terrible waste she was. She only knew, deep down in the most instinctive part of her nature, that she was a blessing and that she was loved. So she thrived. In six weeks she had lost the first fragility of the newborn and had grown prettily rounded and learned to smile. By six months she was a fine fat baby, with her mother’s dark curly hair and her father’s soft brown eyes, sitting in the high chair her grandfather had made for her, playing with the bricks her grandfather had made for her, and endlessly repeating her own happy songs. And Ellen was making plans for their very first Christmas together.

  ‘It ain’t religious,’ she explained when David scowled his doubt. ‘It’s a celebration, that’s all. A nice meal, chicken an’ things like that, an’ candles, like you ’ave at Shabbas, an’ givin’ presents. We put ’em in a stocking at the foot of the bed an’ say it’s Santa Claus.’ She’d never had a stocking at the foot of the bed in the whole of her supposedly Christian life, so that was all the more reason for her daughter to be given one.

  ‘Well …’ he said. ‘I suppose it’s all right, seein’ it’s for our Gracie.’ There were times when he felt he was slipping inexorably further and further away from the ways of his parents and their relations, and then he was torn, part of him wanting to welcome new ways, part of him clinging with a nostalgic desperation to the old.

  This time he needn’t have worried, for Gracie’s little stocking was an enormous success, with its sugar mouse, and the woollen ball Ellen had made, and the monkey-on-a-stick he’d carved so carefully, and the dolly mixtures wrapped in silver paper, and the orange stuffed so neatly into its toe. They sat, still snuggled into the comfortable warmth of their double bed, and watched while their daughter discovered one present after the other, crowing with pleasure, and then they gave presents to one another and were delighted because they were so similar, a hairbrush for her and a shaving brush for him. And Christmas was everything she had always dreamed it could be. Even if the chicken did take a terribly long time to cook.

  Dumpling was charmed when she heard how happy they’d been, but Rivke and Rachel took it as evidence of the most dangerous backsliding. ‘So vhat I tell you?’ Rivke demanded. ‘Begin vid strange vomen, end vid strange gods.’

  ‘Oy-oy! A present ain’t gods!’ Dumpling said.

  But they only snorted.

  It grieved Emmanuel that his wife was so unbending. As the months passed and Gracie learned to stand and toddle about he grew more and more fond of her, and wished with all his heart that Rachel would love her too. ‘She’s such a good little girl,’ he would urge, ‘and so loving.’ But he was wasting his breath. Her answer was always the same.

  ‘Good she may be, Jewish she ain’t.’

  When June came round again and it was her first birthday he scraped and saved and connived until he had enough money to buy her a doll. Dumpling made it a full set of clothes, all beautifully embroidered, and the two of them delivered it together and were kissed and hugged and thanked until they were all quite breathless.

  ‘I vish my Rachel could’ve seen it,’ he mourned as he and Dumpling travelled home together.

  ‘A hard heart to melt,’ Dumpling agreed. ‘And that dear little soul so pretty and loving. Ai yi!’

  The hard heart still hadn’t melted when the child’s second birthday came round.

  ‘I don’t reckon we’ll ever please your ma,’ Ellen sighed, as she tucked the covers round their sleeping daughter at the end of her special day.

  ‘Never mind,’ David said, putting his arms round her and turning her towards him. ‘You please me. You both please me.’ And his eyes were saying, especially you, and especially now. She was looking quite delectably pretty, with her cheeks so rounded and her eyes shining and that full mouth ever so slightly parted, and love stirring so magically in both of them. ‘Beautiful Ellen.’

  She kissed him lingeringly. Their eyes were so close there was no room for secrets. ‘Guess what,’ she said.

  ‘Urn,’ he said when they’d kissed again. ‘I thought yer might be.’ Her breasts were so full and welcoming.

  ‘December,’ she told him, holding him about the waist and drawing him closer and closer towards her. And then words were superfluous.

  They decided to keep their precious secret for as long as they could. ‘Time enough when I begin ter show,’ Ellen said. And this time they avoided the subject of the brit altogether. Time enough for that when the baby was born. They were far more mature now, David thought, three years married and with a daughter to care for. They’d find an answer. At the right time. He was sure.

  So they went on hugging their secret and enjoying their daughter, living at their own rate in their little kingdom above the goods yard. Now that Gracie was beginning to babble into speech there was so much to say. ‘Choo-choo, Mummy,’ she would call, and the two of them would stand by the window and watch the great engines juddering past. ‘Balk?’ she would ask, looking hopefully at her bonnet hanging on the door, and then they would go out into the sunshine to the sour smell of the breweries and ammoniac horse buses and the oily reek of the new motor cars, and walk down to Spitalfields Market to buy themselves some fruit or, even better take a tram to the Embankment or the fine green parks of the West End. It was a gentle life and a private one and it suited them all so well they almost forgot about friends and relations.

  So it came as quite a surprise when Hymie arrived one evening, blushing with embarrassment, to tell them that he was going to be married and to invite them to the wedding.

  ‘Mazel tov!’ David said, thumping his old friend on the back and dragging him into the kitchen. ‘So what’s she like? Where d’you find her?’

  At that Hymie blushed more furiously. ‘The mothers arranged it,’ he confessed. ‘She ain’t a looker an’ that’s a fact. She’s … well … she’s haimish, ter tell the truth.’

  ‘What’s haimish?’ Ellen laughed.

  ‘Well …’ Hymie hesitated again. ‘Hideous really.’

  ‘Oh she ain’t,’ Ellen teased.

  ‘Haimish is homely, not much ter look at, nice enough,’ David translated.

  And at that she laughed again. ‘How d’yer meet her?’

  ‘I told yer,’ Hymie confessed uncomfortably. ‘It’s arranged. I ain’t met her yet, ter tell the truth. I seen her picture.’

  They were horrified. ‘Oy oy, Hymie!’ David said. ‘You can’t marry a woman you don’t even know. That’s downright primitive.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Hymie said sheepishly. ‘I don’t reckon I’d ever get a wife on me own, not with my looks. We shall do well enough fer each other I daresay. She cooks good, keeps house good, all that sort a’ thing.’

  Ellen looked at him with open-mouthed wonder. But you got to go to bed together, she was thinking. How could you do that with someone you didn’t even know? The idea was obscene.

  ‘Say no,’ David urged. ‘Wait till you find someone to love. It’s much the best way, honest. You might take a lot a’ stick ter start with but it sorts itself out in the end. Ain’t that right, Ellen?’

  It wasn’t quite right but she said yes, for Hymie’s benefit.

  ‘We shall get ter love each other after the weddin’,’ Hymie hoped. ‘Anyway I can’t say no now. It’s all arranged. I’ve brought yer invite. End of October, see.’

  ‘I shall be
a fair ol’ size be then,’ Ellen said, looking at the date. So of course Hymie had to be told their news, and it was his turn to offer congratulations. And be sworn to temporary secrecy.

  ‘You’ll come to me weddin’ though, wontcher?’ he said, and his ugly face was anxious.

  He needs support, David thought. Poor old Hymie. He’s putting on a brave show, but he’s nervous and he’s worried. ‘We’ll be there,’ he promised. And Ellen propped the invitation on the mantelpiece and gave him a kiss. ‘I shall wear me best hat,’ she said, ‘’cos nothink else’ll fit.’

  ‘I’d never a’ thought it of old Hymie,’ David said when his friend had gone striding off to deliver the rest of his invitations. ‘I always thought he’d be modern like me.’

  ‘It gives me the willies,’ Ellen said. ‘Fancy goin’ ter bed with someone you don’t even know. It’s horrible.’

  ‘It’s Jewish.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think much of it.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘Was that what they was goin’ ter do ter you?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘Aintcher glad they never?’

  ‘Don’t ask soppy questions,’ he said joyfully, prepared to answer her with action.

  ‘I never been to a Jewish wedding,’ she said, unbuttoning his shirt. ‘What’s it like?’

  A sudden chill of sadness checked his ardour for a few seconds. Oh, if only she could have been to their own Jewish wedding, accepted from the word go! What a difference that would have made! But then she was cuddling against his chest and his body was aware of her again, and silencing his mind. ‘It’s a weddin’,’ he said. ‘Same as all the others. Why are we still in the kitchen?’

  But it wasn’t a wedding the same as all the others. For Ellen it was a ceremony unlike anything she’d ever seen before.

  For a start she was very put out to discover that she and Gracie were relegated to the balcony with all the other women, and that it was only the men and the bride who were allowed down into the body of the synagogue. ‘I shan’t know nobody up ’ere,’ she whispered furiously, mindful of the sharp ears all around her. ‘I wouldn’t a’ come if I’d known.’