In the King's Arms

by Sonia Taitz

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Also by Sonia Taitz

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Reader’s Guide

  An Interview with Sonia Taitz

  Copyright Page

  Praise for Sonia Taitz

  “Sonia Taitz is an incisive, funny writer.”

  —People

  “Wise, witty, and often hilarious.”

  —Publisher’s Weekly

  “Touching, sincere, endearingly besotted.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Praise for In the King’s Arms

  “Sonia Taitz’s witty, sensuous prose enlivens this tale of two cultures converging in Oxford in the 1970s. Lily of the Lower East Side, daughter of Holocaust survivors, falls in love with a son of the English gentry and is drawn into his family drama. Taitz deftly contrasts the lovers’ opposing worlds—and the surprising middle ground where they embrace.”

  —Barbara Klein Moss, author of Little Edens

  “In the King’s Arms is a deeply felt, lyrical novel, at once romantic and mournful, that brings to life the long tentacles of the Holocaust through the generations. In Lily Taub, Sonia Taitz has created an unforgettable, believable and sympathetic character—the young girl in all of us. The author’s finely wrought observations about class structure in England, the vagaries of first love and the overriding possibility of redemption will stay with the reader long after finishing this book. ”

  —Emily Listfield, author of

  Best Intentions and Waiting to Surface

  “Who you are and where you come from are as indelible as the night, or in Lily Taub’s case, the darkest night imaginable. Trying to outrun her world, headstrong Lily escapes to Oxford where she meets the gorgeous and aristocratic Julian Aiken—as English and Christian as she isn’t.

  Always playing in the background of their torrid romance is her parents’ past. Her mother was raised in a concentration camp, and her father spent most of the war hiding beneath a barn in Poland, where overhead the “sweet cows” offered company and precious heat.

  In her gloriously rendered novel, In the King’s Arms, Sonia Taitz writes passionately and wisely about outsiders and what happens when worlds apart slam into each other.”

  —Betsy Carter, author of The Puzzle King

  Also by Sonia Taitz

  NONFICTION

  Mothering Heights

  PLAYS

  Whispered Results

  Couch Tandem

  The Limbo Limbo

  Darkroom

  Domestics (One Act Play)

  Cut Paste Delete Restore

  To Professor John Simopoulos,

  genie of Oxford and fellow traveler

  Love in its essence is spiritual fire.

  EMANUEL SWEDENBORG

  PROLOGUE

  New York: 1975

  THERE WAS A PLACE for everything, and everything was in its place but Lily. She had come to Europe in a great heat, pressing her attentions upon one of its most ancient institutions. To gain access to Oxford she’d had to get “A” after “A” every day of her schoolgirl life, then flag them at the Doorkeepers of Western Civilization. Years of sprawling across the desk with out-flung arm, pleading to be “called on,” annunciated by the teacher. And later, at college, her perfect papers: “well observed,” “sensitive.” Lily entertained the idea that she could amount to something spectacular. The Messiah, who had not yet arrived, could well be a woman, particularly in these times.

  Her poor old father had shelled out the necessary cash; he was so proud of his girl. It was two against one, and the mother had lost. She pushed together a heap of crumbs on the table. “Boy-o-boy, you’ll be some great lady,” said the father, as his wife (Lily’s mother) grumbled. He believed in providence, in “election,” in spirits that are suddenly whisked from corked flasks to do marvelous things. This was because of what had happened to him, how his own life had been saved, thirty years ago, in Europe.

  “Great lady,” her mother finally said aloud, a sullen echo of her father’s blessing. It wasn’t jealousy. It wasn’t that the Nazis had ruined her education. She thought Lily was running away from everything she knew. She thought Lily was running away from her.

  Lily could see her point. They were sitting in their bright kitchen in the Lower East Side of New York City. Linoleum on the floor (a pick-up sticks motif in primary colors), tarnished pots and pans, daisy-patterned oilcloth, bird-drop on the sill. She looked at them and saw two elderly refugees. Modest, simple, straitened. Their shoulders seemed fragile under their clothes. They hadn’t come from Oxford-Europe. They’d come from Eastern Europe. Although they didn’t make the distinction; to them it was one bloody “old world,” medieval checkerboard.

  Her mother was tattooed: blue digits on her arm. Lily used to be ashamed of this, and this disloyalty shamed her too. Even at her Jewish summer camp she’d been sickened by shame, at a place where you’d suppose the other kids had parents like hers. They didn’t: they had managed to find parents who played ball with them, who wore white sneakers and brought them bite-sized Snickers. Lily’s grey-haired (what was left of it) father would grab a snooze on her hospital-cornered cot, the Yiddish newspaper shielding his face from the very brightness of a New World summer. Mother wore ankle socks and sandals; she offered soft, sad bananas, or hard-boiled eggs (wrapped in scrunchy tinfoil). She’d grasp the counselor’s hand (her numbers went flying up and down, a blue whirl), and say “Senk you for vatchink mine Leely!”

  They had raised their girl religiously: twelve solid years of yeshiva, to fortify her resistance to the outside world. Vassar College had been a frightening gamble, but it was in New York and reachable by car service. For years, Lily would not read the Bible in English; it seemed metallic, iced, pinched. Hebrew was dense and dark, like cello sounds, or chocolate. Melismatic melodies played in Lily’s head. They came from the synagogue up the hill; from below the fuzzy beard of the rabbi who first read her Isaiah’s prophecies; from (as a child might say) thousands and thousands of years ago and far away.

  At night she’d encounter anti-Semites in her shadowy bedroom, her parents’ tormentors. She’d reason them away, talmudically deft, stabbing her finger into the air, listening to their responses as she stroked her chin. She managed to dissuade the English from kicking all their Jews out in the 13th century. She sat on the Pope’s knee and tipped his skullcap to one side, so he looked like a merry-making Hassid. She converted the Spanish Inquisitors to
the laws of kashruth: never again would they roast a Jew or eat paella. She made the Nazis cry: gosh, we’re sorry! What in God’s name came over us? The best part was forgiving everybody. “Oh, that’s all right,” she’d say aloud, magnanimously, “Just see that you behave from now on.”

  In a way, at twenty-one, Lily had grown deeply exhausted of the Jewish mania: a world consisting of Jews and non-Jews, the former radically monotheistic, ennobled by fires that cannot consume, messianic. And blessed with smarts. Her father had once said, “the dumbest Jew is smarter than the smartest goy.” Of course, the goyim he couldn’t forget were muzhiks: gap-toothed potato-heads with leering mugs. And her mother had a tendency to rattle off the following catechism: “Einstein Freud Marx Proust Mahler Mendelssohn Chagall and don’t forget Dr. Jonas Salk, without whom they would all be cripples. And still they hate us!”

  But in a way, and quite by nature, Lily was a Jewish maniac herself. The life she was living in America, relentlessly fair-minded, sane, secular, was, for her, mediocre. It offered no existential standoffs, no life-and-death crises. Even her parents seemed to soften and blur under equitable American skies. Lily was prime for zealotry. She had none of their hard-won mildness. She had the memories only, without resolution.

  People often wonder how those who went through what Mr. and Mrs. Taub went through could be so “well-adjusted.” They were. Three decades after liberation, they casually alluded to the nightmare over crullers and coffee. Lily’s mother sported jeweled bracelets on her numbered arm and wafted perfume from shoulders that brutal German men had beaten; she and her husband went out waltzing every Saturday night. It felt strange when Lily looked at her baby pictures, taken by her parents, knowing that their own pictures had been burned, that their parents themselves (her missing grandparents) had burned to anonymous ash and blown away. But they never thought of the pictures that way; they loved the pretty pictures. It was Lily who was blindly chasing ghosts.

  Another thing about Oxford. The obvious: Kultur. God knows, Lily was a snob! She didn’t hold with her father’s smart-Jew-dumb-goy philosophy. Quite the contrary. The Anglo-Christian empire had sunk its stake into her imagination as soon as she read Hamlet (on a typical, schizoid yeshiva day in which she’d had Torah before lunch and Shakespeare directly after). She loved the romance of it; she loved the idea of times out of joint, of deaths avenged and unavenged. She had been conquered, too, by “Art History” with its painted crucifixes, and the image of the mother bereaved. She loved the strength of Renaissance brass, and the moody words “heath” and “moor.” She curled up to regal, passionate Lord Byron. When he spoke of Asia, or George Eliot of Zion, or Blake of Jerusalem, their sudden intimacy made her shiver. Presumption inflamed her.

  She sensed all along that what she wanted, in leaving the familiar, was not just abstract, but impossible. Lily wasn’t going to recreate the fierce “Old World” anywhere. Oxford, in any case, while perhaps medieval, perhaps Victorian, was coolly removed from the passion of blood-hatred. She couldn’t bring her past to it or it to her past. Even the little things she brought over to “brighten up” her room looked flat and small and lonesome there. Somehow the truth kept getting lost in the Atlantic Ocean, traveled either way. Lily might have believed in the impossible, but she couldn’t hold both ends of it at once.

  With one exception.

  1

  Europe, 1976

  WHEN LILY FIRST SAW HER ancient college room, she felt doomed. It smelled of puke and mildew; a chipped sink gurgled dyspeptically in the corner. Her narrow bed was covered in what looked to be tartan burlap (not the generous, lumpy, duvet-smothered, stuffed-pony bed she’d envisioned). She saw a thousand wretched nights ahead, Oliver Twistian nights in which she’d go to sleep squirming and loveless and lost.

  Down the hallway, doors were creaking and slamming. She could hear boisterous voices, English-accented (no: now she was the one with the accent), engaged in territorial frolics:

  “Painsley! You sow! Want some coffee?”

  “I’m ab-so-lyute-ly knackered!”

  “MacAree’s just down the hall.”

  “Where’s the ruddy hammer, Pickles?”

  She locked the door, sat down on her steamer trunk, and bawled. A minute later, her head picked up smartly as a key turned in the door. A sturdy West Indian woman strode in, dragging a vacuum cleaner.

  “HALLO!” she boomed, looking directly into Lily’s face. She wore a wide red headband and a blue housecoat. Her face was badly scarred, burned perhaps.

  Lily wiped tears off her chin.

  “I Hoover your dust balls,” said the woman. “I Mrs. Dancer; yes. I wake up your lazy bones in the morning,” she added, turning on the vacuum with a matter-of fact kick.

  “YES!” she continued, bellowing over the wailing machine, “WHAT A DUST, WHAT A BIG DUST I FIND HERE, OH MY GOD....” She ferociously pursued every inch of the room, and Lily sat, watching her. She envied her busy, purposeful life. She wondered how old Mrs. Dancer could be. Her calves were covered in coarse, pilled stockings, but her hands and feet were delicate and girlish.

  Mrs. Dancer motioned Lily off her trunk, shoved it aside forcefully, and took care of the big dusty rectangle now exposed in the center of the room. “Yes,” she said, kicking the machine off, at last. “Yes,” scratching her nose with a long finger. “I knock up de lazy ones and make de bed tight like a drum.” She noticed that Lily had been crying.

  “I empty your bin.” She swung Lily’s trashcan up to her face, and peered inward. “Nothing in dere. You fill it up presently. You fill it wit your odds and ends, my dear.” She gazed at the girl frankly, questioningly.

  “Yes, I will,” Lily conceded. She found herself having to cry again, at the assumption, hardly far-fetched, that she’d be living in this place for a good long time, and filling her bin up.

  “You come from far away?” Mrs. Dancer stood at the window, leaning on a hip, pensively staring out into the world. From the frantic way she worked, one wouldn’t anticipate the peaceful kindness she radiated at leisure. Lily stood next to her, shoulder to shoulder, looking out through the leaded windowpanes. A great, grey sky, heavy with moisture, dark with the tolling of bells. She pulled the window open and smelled the wet meadow grasses.

  “Yes,” she replied, “From New York City.”

  “You don’t look English.” A trace of approval.

  Lily didn’t know what to say to this. People were always puzzling over her looks. Her hair was light brown. (Some called it “dirty blonde.”) Her eyes were green, like her mother’s, and like her mother’s, her nose was sprinkled with pale freckles.

  “Almost Austrian,” her mother would say (“almost”—Lily thought it sounded a bit like “dirty blonde”); “we could have smuggled you through.” Probably not through England, in any case; Mrs. Dancer’s evaluation was accurate. Lily’s cheekbones were as wide as a Tatar’s, her eyes sliced long, and few Anglo-Saxon women had breasts as round and full. In England, her lush hips seemed somewhat decadent, assailable.

  “Where are you from?” she asked.

  “Jamaica.” She was still looking out the window. “I from Jamaica, Kingstown, you know.” Up close, her eyes glistened, two precious stones in her ruined face. She sighed patiently. “What’s the time, dear?” Lily told her. She turned and left, sliding her heavy vacuum behind her.

  2

  OXFORD CARESSED LILY’S SENSES in a bittersweet way. Church bells tolled from Gothic spires, summoning in her a nostalgia she couldn’t trace. Inside, fair young men sang Evensong, weaving dusk into dusk, spinning her backward into history. Five hundred years ago, they might never have met. She was very near them now and they were very near her. She could hear them, see them fly by on their jingling bicycles, scarves streaming. Her feet matched theirs on the echoing cobblestones. They were gentle and young. A decent folk. Now that she’d traveled across time and the great Atlantic to see them, could they but be kind to her? She was thinking of “kindness,” like an orph
an.

  If you asked Peter Aiken, he’d say that he rescued Lily from the worst possible fate at Oxford: association with the “wrong people.” She was lonely, looking up at the crumbly yellow-brown stones, following the white ribbon trail of swans on the River Isis, shopping for cream-cakes in the covered market, sipping mulberry wine in an ancient tavern. It was all too scenic to enjoy. Peter discovered her in that ancient tavern, quite by accident. He’d taken some girl into the alleyway to kiss, while Lily’d been moodily strolling by, glass in hand, and literally bumped into them. The girl, Flora, she recognized from her college. She was one of those girls with the V-neck sweater and the neat row of pearls. But she didn’t think she’d ever seen Peter before. He had a high forehead, a mixture of nobility and a tendency to baldness. What hair he had was beige as an Afghan hound’s and hung entirely behind his head. He kept his neck and throat bare. An excellent choice: they were pure Modigliani. And he wore yellow kid gloves (“gantlets,” he called them).

  “I’m sorry,” she said, as Peter wiped some wine off Flora’s skirt. “You look familiar,” she added loonishly to the girl. This was no time to strike up a conversation; Peter and Flora still retained a hot and bothered look from their necking; they did not seem in need of chums just then. They stared at Lily. Then Flora said, politely, “Oh, yes! I’m sure I’ve seen you in college.”

  What a kind soul, thought Lily. Then she noticed Peter’s baleful expression.

  “What’s the matter?” she said.

  “What do you mean by that?” he said.

  “The way you’re looking at me.”

  “Are you a student here?”

  “Of course she is, darling,” said Flora, soothingly.