The Gallery of Vanished Husbands

by Natasha Solomons

  ‘Mrs Montague.’

  Juliet stalked across the lino and along the corridor, smelling of antiseptic and bleach and head-lice shampoo where she’d been countless times with both children for fevers and sprains and jabs and a confetti of childhood rashes. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been for herself. She stood outside Dr Ruben’s office, poised to knock, more anxious than she liked to admit.

  As she opened the door Dr Ruben smiled, his face glowing with genuine pleasure at seeing her.

  ‘Hello, hello, my dear. It’s been too long. Though, of course, we never wish to see patients. I missed you at our Hanukkah party. And you missed quite a piece of brisket.’

  Dr Ruben had been the family physician since before the days of the NHS, the Greene family migrating with him from private practice to the new health service. Now, faced with his benevolent smile and those familiar half-moon spectacles, Juliet was aware that her palms were beginning to sweat. She wished that she’d made the appointment with some stranger at the practice but it was too late now. She’d taken the morning off work and Juliet Montague was no coward.

  ‘I’d like to go on the pill.’

  Dr Ruben’s face lit up like a menorah.

  ‘Mr Montague is back! Mazel tov! I had not heard. Mrs Ruben tells me nothing or perhaps she is sworn to secrecy and I’m doing her great disservice.’

  Juliet said nothing for a minute, bewildered that this good doctor, this kind man, could be so delighted at a profligate husband’s return. This was the same Dr Ruben who’d coaxed Juliet to rest and ignore the silly whispers and sly smiles and who’d called by on his way home every night for a week when Leonard developed a fear of going to sleep because of nasty dreams. ‘No prescription needed but a bedtime story. Just needs to hear a man’s voice.’ Juliet saw that his fingers itched to pick up the telephone and call his wife and talk over the splendid news.

  ‘My husband has not returned.’

  Dr Ruben frowned and pushed his spectacles further up his nose. The joy ebbed away from his face.

  ‘But you wish to go on the new pill?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But it is for married women only.’

  ‘I am married.’

  ‘But your husband has not returned.’

  ‘No.’

  Juliet sighed, sensing that this conversation could continue in circles for some time to come.

  ‘Dr Ruben, I wish to take the pill. I am a married woman so I understand that you can prescribe it for me.’

  ‘Well, yes, but . . .’

  ‘The man I am sleeping with is not my husband. I’ve waited eight years. I think that’s quite long enough. But I would very much like not to get pregnant.’

  Dr Ruben stared at her, his happiness quite extinguished. Juliet remained silent. She would not beg and she worried that if she said very much more, he might refuse. Defeated, he reached for a pen.

  She hesitated, hand poised on the door handle. ‘Dr Ruben?’

  He looked up, alarmed at the prospect of further unsavoury revelations.

  ‘You won’t mention my coming here to anyone – not to Mrs Ruben, not to my mother?’

  He bristled. ‘I took an oath.’

  Juliet nodded, relieved just the same that she’d asked.

  • • •

  Juliet and Mr Greene washed up together after dinner. It was hot in the small kitchen, the windows fogged with condensation. As Juliet plunged a grease-slicked pan into scalding water, Mr Greene cleared his throat.

  ‘Mrs Levi made some rather unnecessary remarks to your mother while she was queuing for chicken livers.’ He wiped steam from his lenses. ‘And she wasn’t asked to bake her famous cinnamon rugelach for kiddish at Rosh Hashanah this year. She was very upset.’

  Juliet said nothing and scrubbed the pan a little harder.

  ‘She brought them anyway, mind, but I couldn’t help noticing that in the end most of them were left, though last year Mr and Mrs Nature were forced to split the last one.’

  Juliet sighed and reached for the pile of plates. She knew her parents’ telephone didn’t ring quite as often, and somehow her mother’s friends found they were often busy when Mrs Greene suggested they bring their grandchildren round to play with Frieda and Leonard. Mr Greene rhythmically stacked the clean dishes. He did not utter an accusation but they both knew without it being said that Juliet’s behaviour was responsible for the slow withdrawing of the neighbours. When George vanished, the good people of Mulberry Avenue had wondered how much of it had been Juliet’s fault but they were not without sympathy. For years they had noted how she’d put a brave face on things and as they nibbled on latkes and salt-beef sandwiches, they had told one another it was marvellous how she struggled on. Now something had changed. Mrs Harris and her friends had noticed Juliet wasn’t getting along quietly any more. There were rumours that she’d taken a boyfriend (‘At her age, quite ridiculous!’) and that the children went with her on her sordid liaisons in Dorset (‘Who knew the West Country was such a bed of licentiousness and vice?’). It was common knowledge that she cavorted with artists up in town and she never went to shul any more, even on high holy days.

  Juliet glanced at her father. He hadn’t shaved with his customary precision and his heavy-rimmed spectacles couldn’t hide the purple shadows beneath his eyes. He looked old. The guilt wriggled inside her.

  ‘Dad, would it be better for you and Mum if the children and I moved away?’

  Mr Greene lowered his tea towel in horror, his face pale. ‘Don’t take my grandchildren. We can manage a few queer looks but we can’t manage without the three of you. I shouldn’t have said anything.’

  Juliet let the guilt lodge inside, stick in her chest. She thought that was the end of the conversation but when they came through to the lounge Mrs Greene sent the children upstairs to play, though she was usually very particular about them all sitting together in the living room making polite conversation. When Mr Greene poured Juliet a sherry, she knew it was very bad. Her first thought was that Dr Ruben had broken his promise, and her second was that her parents were going to try to persuade her to give up the gallery.

  ‘Tell her, Davey, she’s gone quite white,’ said Mrs Greene.

  Mr Greene cleared his throat. ‘It’s about George. Your husband George,’ he added, as though Juliet might think he was discussing some other George.

  Juliet felt dizzy. It was very hot in the front room. Mrs Greene liked to turn up the gas heater to a rage and the smell and heat made Juliet feel a little sick.

  ‘Can I open a window?’ she asked, getting to her feet.

  ‘You’ll let out all that nice, expensive heat,’ objected Mrs Greene.

  Juliet wanted to say that that was the general idea, but weakening she sat back down. She licked her dry lips.

  ‘So, George?’ she asked as casually as she could.

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Greene cleared his throat and glanced at his wife, reaching for her plump, floral-patterned knee. ‘The thing is, we’ve found him.’

  CATALOGUE ITEM 9

  Sun-seeker on Venice Beach,

  Tibor Jankay, Oil on Canvas, 30 x 45in, 1961

  ‘TRAVEL TO AMERICA with a man, not your husband?’ whispered Mrs Greene, as though alarmed she might be overheard even in the privacy of her own front room.

  ‘Well, travelling to America with my husband would be tricky,’ said Juliet, frustration making her irritable.

  ‘What will people say?’ asked Mrs Greene, dabbing her eyes.

  ‘Nothing, if you don’t tell them.’

  Mr Greene cleared his throat and held up his hand for peace. ‘I thought we could send a letter. You shouldn’t go yourself and your mother’s right, it’s not—’ he cleared his throat, hunting for the right word, ‘it’s not decent to go with your man-friend. We can send one of your uncles. Ed’s always wanted to visit America. I’ll pay for his ticket.’

  Juliet shook her head. ‘No, Dad. I have to go. George would never answer any letter.
And if he is there, it has to be me who finds him.’

  Mrs Greene clucked in indignation, not ready to concede defeat so easily.

  ‘But what about the children? You can’t have them with you, living in sin on board a boat like that.’

  Juliet bit her lip, unsure if her mother was more indignant about the sin part or the fact it was on a boat. Before Juliet’s wedding, Mrs Greene had given her a cryptic warning about the dangers of married love in unusual places. Juliet supposed the warning held for unmarried love too.

  ‘We’ll all have different cabins. The children like Max. It’ll be an adventure.’

  She did not confide to her mother that they stayed with Max when they visited him, allowing Mrs Greene to assume that they borrowed a cottage as they had on their first trip. Mr Greene frowned and removed his spectacles to clean them on his trousers with exactly the same gesture as Leonard. He didn’t look angry, only sad, and this disturbed Juliet more than her mother’s pink-ruffled fury. She picked at a mark on her skirt. There was no other choice. The morning after she found out about George, she’d taken a train to Dorset and arrived on Max’s doorstep with two British Rail sandwiches and a flask of coffee and informed him that he must take the Cunard Lines job. She marched him to the village and waited inside the booth while he made the telephone call to accept the position and request that the pair of first-class tickets to New York be exchanged for four berths in tourist class. To her surprise and relief, Max had not objected. As soon as she had explained about George, he’d only nodded once and said, ‘Of course you must go to America.’

  The journey was arranged for the summer holidays. Juliet would close the gallery for August and reopen in September. Juliet, Max and the children would spend a whole month in America. But Mr and Mrs Greene had remained so appalled that they refused to come to Southampton to wave them off. Juliet suspected that her mother was afraid of coming face to face with Max. Knowing her daughter had a goyishe lover was one thing, meeting him quite another.

  • • •

  Nonetheless, when the day of their departure arrived, Juliet stood on the deck of the ship with Leonard and Frieda, all three studying the shore just in case Grandma and Grandpa appeared at the last minute. When they didn’t, Juliet was forced to shrug and say lightly, ‘It’s a long way for them to come. They’ll miss you all the same.’

  Three days later they were already more than halfway to New York. Juliet, alone on the upper deck of tourist class, watched the sea green and grey under the clouds, the sun sneaking up from behind the curve of the earth. At this hour only the crew were up. Above, on the first-class deck, waiters in white scuttled to and fro, shaking out parasols and placing cushions on deckchairs – she shivered at the thought, it was much too cold for sunbathing. It was nearly six, or was it only five? The clocks altered every day and she was already starting to lose track of time. She drew her cardigan around her shoulders and leaned out over the rail.

  Reaching into her skirt pocket, she retrieved the scrap of newspaper. The flimsy paper stock was starting to disintegrate along the creases where she had folded and re-folded it. It was written entirely in Yiddish save for the words THE JEWISH DAILY FORWARD printed in fat capital letters at the top of the page. Mr Greene had translated the relevant parts into English, inscribing them in neat pencil between the lines of newsprint. On the facing page there was a rogue’s line-up containing grainy photographs of twenty men. Several had splendid moustaches caterpillaring across their top lips and there were one or two bushy orthodox beards. Some of the men smiled at the camera, others frowned, but none looked guilty or sheepish – these were all photographs taken before the crime. Above the faces Mr Greene had translated the headline: ‘A Gallery of Vanished Husbands’.

  The picture of George Montague was halfway down the page. He beamed out at Juliet, as though delighted to have his picture in the paper. She couldn’t remember when it had been taken or what had provoked that smile. It was odd to think of all the small things that she must have forgotten. A missing husband was a lot like a dead one, but without the guilt when one started to forget him. Beneath the picture of George was a puzzle of Yiddish, but Mr Greene had provided an English translation.

  On 8 April 1952 George Montague deserted his wife and their two infant children, Leonard and Frieda. His wife has not heard from him since. Mr Montague is believed to have come to America. He was thirty-one years old when he vanished. His wife asks that either he come home or issue a divorce through the nearest rabbi for the sake of his fatherless children. Anyone who knows of Mr Montague’s address should contact Mr G. Jones via box no. 8674 Brooklyn, NY.

  • • •

  Juliet always felt peculiar reading this. Her family had been reduced to its merest facts like an over-boiled stock, and her own voice replaced with the words of the mysterious Mr G. Jones (private detective). She had no name, only ‘his wife’, and she asked questions in print that she had never asked in life. She supposed that Leonard and Frieda were ‘fatherless children’ but somehow that made her think of orphans out of Dickens and it didn’t seem to have much to do with the scowling Frieda cooped up in her bedroom with the record player filched from the front room or Leonard dropping Meccano around the house. They certainly weren’t infants. But when pressed, her father explained that it was a description aimed at stirring the heart, since there was always a hope George himself might read the advertisement. And when it came to cultivating guilt, Juliet had to concede that her parents were maestros.

  It was odd to see George surrounded by so many strangers, but by now he was a stranger too. She hadn’t looked at a picture of him for years. Soon after he’d gone she’d scissored him out of all of their photographs, unable to bear him smiling at her as though nothing had happened. She knew that Leonard had hunted through her closet and trinket boxes searching for him. Perhaps Frieda had too, but was better at tidying up properly afterwards.

  Juliet glanced down at the newspaper. Beside the photograph of George someone – not her father – had written in fat red felt pen: George Molnár. Gorgeous George’s Glasses, Culver City, CA. There was nothing else. No clue as to the identity of the writer. All Mr Greene could tell Juliet was that an envelope had arrived at Gerald Jones’s Brooklyn mailbox with the torn-out page inside, this new information scribbled across it. There was no accompanying note, no request for a cash reward or offer of further details.

  She slid the torn page back into her skirt pocket. It was time to find him. She wondered what it would be like to finally be free. No longer an aguna but a divorcée. It sounded glamorous – the word was swaddled in fur coats and diamonds. Juliet smiled. There mightn’t be any diamonds for her but there might be her portrait, although she expected that George had sold it years ago. She felt a pang of anger and sadness – she longed to recover that piece of herself.

  Sometimes at night lying in the dark beside Max she could feel the tug of the invisible chain tying her to George. He made her not quite respectable. While Juliet no longer had any interest in respectability, she wanted to select the method of her own notoriety. She knew that once she was divorced, every Friday night she would have to put up with her mother inviting round a sausage string of possible suitors – all equally nice and equally dull. Mrs Greene wouldn’t relax until she was safely married again. Juliet smiled to herself, wondering if it had ever crossed Mrs Greene’s mind that once she was divorced she might marry Max. Not that she was planning on marrying anyone; not even him. She was tired of being someone’s wife. The ship slapped against the tide, the water cracking along the hull. Light brushed the horizon, the ocean rushing endlessly past on every side.

  ‘George Montague, I’m coming to find you,’ she called out into the dawn. From the bow of the ship a tern slipped into the air, skimming above the surface of the waves for a moment before soaring into the morning air on vast white wings.

  • • •

  That afternoon the sea turned rough, white-topped waves rushing the side of the ship which t
ipped to and fro like a gin-addled grandmother in her rocking chair. The queasiness grew in Juliet’s stomach and finding Max stretched out in their cabin and the small room reeking of cheap whisky, she sought refuge on one of the children’s bunks. It was quiet in their tiny cabin – Leonard and Frieda, blissfully untroubled by seasickness, had ventured out to search for entertainment in the tourist-class lounge. Lying on Leonard’s bunk, Juliet drew the curtain across the porthole, blocking out the tossing horizon. She fell asleep for several hours and when she finally woke it was dark and the sea was calm.

  ‘We tried not to wake you up,’ said Leonard.

  ‘And you’ve been asleep for ages,’ said Frieda.

  ‘I won a dollar at bingo. Look,’ said Leonard, holding up a green note. ‘I’m going to spend it all on a hamburger dinner.’

  ‘Still think you cheated.’

  ‘Did not.’

  Juliet sat up, forgetting she was lying on the lower bunk bed, and cracked her head. As she rubbed a burgeoning lump on her forehead, she saw that both children were sitting cross-legged on the tiny patch of floor beside the sink. She looked at their faces pale in the gloom, pupils fat with watching. Mr and Mrs Greene had been adamant that the reason for the trip be kept hidden. Whatever you do, you mustn’t tell the children why it is you are really going, Juliet. Tell them anything you please. That it’s the holiday of a lifetime. But they don’t need to know anything more about the whole nasty business. They’ve forgotten him and they don’t need it all stirred about again.

  Her head throbbed.

  ‘Pass me a glass of water, love,’ she said to Frieda.

  Frieda emptied out a tooth mug and carried it to Juliet who sipped the cool water with relief. It tasted faintly of peppermint. She sighed. She was so tired of keeping secrets. Reaching into her pocket, she felt the familiar rustle of the newspaper.