by Maisie Mosco
“Good, I’ll have some for breakfast tomorrow, on the matzos he and I bought in Golders Green. If Mum tries to stop me from having a Passover breakfast, there’ll just have to be another row.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” said Marianne.
“But she isn’t going to like it,” A.P. went on. “Believe it or not, I overheard Mum accusing Dad of trying to convert me to his religion. She didn’t want me to come here tonight.”
Marianne did believe it. Martin’s relationship with his wife was becoming increasingly acrimonious.
“She said he was doing it insidiously,” A.P. relayed, “and I wasn’t sure what she meant.”
“There is such a thing as a dictionary,” Marianne replied lightly. Not for anything would she be the one to tell him what his mother was implying.
Why couldn’t Martin’s marrying-out have proceeded as smoothly as had his partner’s? But Andy and Rhoda had no children. And such was Rhoda’s devotion to her husband, if he had wished it she would doubtless have espoused Judaism. A less painful decision for a Protestant perhaps than for a Catholic, since Catholicism, like Judaism, was a way of life.
“In my opinion, Gran, my mum is turning into a religious maniac,” A.P. interjected into Marianne’s ruminating.
Marianne’s opinion, too. She nevertheless eyed her grandson sternly. “Now you listen to me, A.P. You are never to speak that way of your mother again.”
“That won’t stop me from thinking it.”
“But some thoughts are better kept to ourselves, A.P. That way they don’t hurt people we love.”
Marianne could have added that this was a lesson she herself had had to learn. As a teenager she had been too outspoken for her own good.
“How can my telling you what I think hurt my mum?” A.P. countered. “You’re not a blab-mouth.”
“But you want me to take sides with you against your mother,” Marianne answered, “and that is painful for me.”
“Does that mean you’d rather I didn’t tell you my troubles?”
Marianne masked her distress with a smile. He was too young to be beset by troubles. But my refusing to listen won’t cause them to go away. Instead he would bottle them up.
“When you have things to get off your chest, by all means come to me,” she said kindly. “But should they concern your parents you must expect me to remain neutral.”
“I’m pig-in-the-middle, though, aren’t I?”
Marianne remained in the alcove that had allowed them to talk privately, watching A.P. join the youngsters by the hearth.
Shirley and Laura were gone from the room, doubtless to the kitchen, and Martin and Jake checking the table, making sure there was a Haggadah beside each place, a nostalgic reminder for Marianne of every Seder she had attended.
The atmosphere too was the same, born of long tradition, the air redolent of cinnamon and apple pounded with walnuts to a paste, to symbolize the mortar spread by the Children of Israel in their years of enslavement. Marianne could remember a Seder night of her youth when something had gone wrong with her grandmother’s matzo balls and jokes were made about Sarah providing not just the mortar, but the bricks.
What right had Moira to deprive A.P. of the warming memories that would accompany his contemporaries in the family through their lives? Stop it! Marianne ordered herself. She could not, however, forget her impression of Moira’s family. The stiff-upper-lip Lord Kyverdale, and her ladyship carefully forgetting that she was once a chorus girl.
As if by tacit consent, they did not visit Marianne nor she them. What have we in common other than a grandson? An only grandchild for each. Marianne’s recollection of Martin’s wedding reception was of a champagne-sipping crowd in one of England’s stately homes. Denuded of people it would echo with silence. So formal were the Kyverdales, whenever Marianne envisaged them they were seated at either end of the vast table at which she had only once dined, both resplendent in evening dress.
The memories A.P. would accumulate from his mother’s family would be the opposite of warming, Marianne thought, listening to an exchange now taking place between him and Bessie. A.P. plainly wasn’t enjoying it but would look back on it with humour when he grew up.
“If you’ll sit beside me at the table, you can share this lovely big Haggadah my daddy has bought for me,” Bessie was pleading.
“No, thanks,” said A.P.
“You don’t like me, do you?”
“But I have to put up with you because you’re my cousin,” he replied with schoolboy callousness.
“What do I have to do to make you like me, A.P.?”
Marianne was then diverted by Jake’s coming to chat with her.
“How’s the writer of the family?”
“She’s enjoying the hospitality of our entrepreneur,” Marianne answered in kind.
“I’m stuck with that nomenclature, aren’t I?” he said with a laugh.
“You must blame your wife for that. It was the reply she gave her mother when Shirley asked what you do. If I hadn’t already met you, I’d have expected you to be a portly gent with a big cigar!”
“Hardly Laura’s style.”
But nor are you, Marianne silently replied. Laura’s taste in men had in the past ranged from the arty to the sophisticated. In her youth, though, she had hung around with pop musicians, including a guitarist who wore pink velvet suits. It had taken Sarah Sandberg a long time to recover from the shock of meeting him.
But unlike the rest of the family elders, Sarah had never given up hope of Laura’s eventually settling down with what she had termed “a nice Jewish husband.” She would surely have approved of Jake Bornstein.
“To tell you the truth, Marianne,” he said, “I don’t know what a gorgeous creature like Laura is doing married to me.”
“Then allow me to tell you,” said Marianne, while surveying his greying, dark hair, and the blue eyes that were probably capable of seeming steely when he did a business deal, “that Laura considers herself fortunate to be your wife. And I have to add that she has never before seemed to me so content.”
They glanced to where Laura and Shirley were now talking together, the daughter a younger version of the mother. But there, thought Marianne, the resemblance ends.
The peevishness of disappointment was written in the downward cast of Shirley’s lips, undisguisable as the lines not quite camouflaged by heavy make-up. Nor could her ageing posture be disguised by the draped silk dress she had on.
As usual, Shirley was wearing black which she seemed to have decided was right for her while still in her twenties. As if, Marianne reflected, she had made up her mind then about the picture she wanted to present throughout her life. But what a pathetically brittle picture it now was.
Laura, though, cared no more now for how the world saw her than she had as a girl. Her concerns had never been those of her mum. Tonight she had donned a green brocade sari that Jake had bought for her on a business trip to India – which some would consider unsuitable for a family Seder – and with that coppery hair, how breath-taking she looked.
Jake cut into Marianne’s musing. “How’s the new book going?”
“The one still in my typewriter, or the one in the shops?” she said with a smile. Why was Jake eyeing her tentatively?
“I was wondering if you could spare me a little time, Marianne. There’s something I need to discuss with you.”
Need?
“How would it be if I dropped in on you late tomorrow afternoon?”
“Fine. I’ll stop work when you arrive.”
Implicit in Jake’s request was that Laura was not to know. And such was his tone, Marianne had almost added that she would have the kettle on.
So bleak was Jake’s expression, Marianne forced herself to lightly change the subject. “If the latecomers don’t get here soon, we shall find ourselves having a midnight Seder!”
It was a relief in one way, if a prospective ordeal in another, when the four to whom she was referrin
g then arrived and Jake left her side to greet them.
Bessie rapped a spoon on the table and declaimed, “Pray silence for Sir Arnold and Lady Klein!”
Though Lyn looked as if she would have liked to disappear through the floor, Arnold accepted it as his due and kissed Bessie’s plump cheek.
As no doubt he kisses the kids he encounters while electioneering, thought Marianne with distaste. What a smarmy individual her brother had become.
Matthew had entered with Pete, behind his parents, his curled lips reflecting Marianne’s feelings, and she saw him glance pityingly at his mother.
If avoiding Arnold was Matthew’s policy, Pete’s was quite the opposite. Pete has certainly made an effort with his appearance this evening, Marianne noted. The well-pressed suit he had on was a far cry from the baggy trousers and skimpy pullovers that accentuated his girth and were his habitual garb.
“There wasn’t time when we met on the doorstep to congratulate you on your knighthood, Sir Arnold,” he said in his booming voice while pumping Arnold’s hand.
“Yes, well – that’s very good of you,” Arnold mouthed. “And now if you will excuse me, I haven’t yet had a word with our hostess.”
Arnold pointedly detached himself from Pete and Marianne could have hit him! She put a smile on her face and went to lend moral support to Lyn, remarking when Matthew and Pete came to chat to them, “You two haven’t dropped in to see me for ages. What have I done to deserve it?”
“Martin told us you’re into a heavy work stint,” said Matthew, “but when weren’t you?” he added with a grin.
Marianne noted the sartorial elegance to which he had bowed as he grew older, his appearance now the public’s expectation of well-known actors, the bow tie he was wearing a perfect match with the silk handkerchief in the breast pocket of the maroon velvet jacket skimming his trim waistline.
Pete on the other hand – well, Marianne had marvelled from the first at the alliance between them. Matthew so sensitive and Pete an extrovert whose talent had set him among the outstanding directors of his day, the attention to detail in his work the opposite of the untidiness with which Matthew had to live.
They had met in the sixties, when experimental theatre began revitalizing the British scene, as its off-Broadway counterpart had in the States. Marianne had written a play for their company to perform and recalled with a smile the panning she and they had received from the critics.
Those days, though, were long gone for all three. Marianne had then been already well on her way, able to take the risk she had and survive the damage. For Matthew and Pete the struggle had been long.
Remarkably, she thought, they were still side by side in every respect, Matthew towering over Pete’s avuncular figure, their comfortable rapport no less now than it had always been.
“You must come and eat with us one evening, Marianne,” said Pete. “We’re in town rehearsing our next production. Remember when we had time to drop in on Marianne, Matt?” he added reminiscently. “And she’d sometimes say she wouldn’t be a minute, then disappear to her study and forget we were there?”
“If that’s a retrospective rebuke I probably deserve it,” said Marianne.
“It isn’t,” said Matthew, “and if it wouldn’t embarrass you for me to say it – I shall anyway – Pete and I haven’t forgotten the friend you were to us then.”
“I’d like to think I am still.”
“That goes without saying,” said Pete, “but the time we’re talking about was when gays were ostracized.”
Matthew glanced at his father. “By some we still are. The last time I had a conversation with my dad – and I can’t remember when that was – he said he couldn’t believe there was such a thing as a Jewish homosexual. And why did the exception to the rule have to be his son.”
Matthew allowed himself a wry smile. “Oh well! If he has to suffer me, I also have to suffer him is how I’ve come to look at it. Cheer up, Mum,” he said to Lyn. “You and I still have each other and I’m grateful for that.”
“Can I please have your autographs on my new Haggadah, to prove to my friends that you really were at our Seder?” Bessie called to Matthew and Pete.
They laughed and went to join her.
“What Matthew just said – it’s how I feel, too,” Lyn told Marianne. “With my husband living in cloud-cuckoo-land and my daughter shut away in a nunnery, it’s as if I have only Matthew left. If anything had come of Margaret’s friendship with that young surgeon, instead of her doing what she finally did I might now be a grandmother. And he was a lovely man.”
“But could you imagine Arnold with a Pakistani son-in-law?”
“That could be why Margaret didn’t give him one. Not for Arnold’s sake, for Ravi’s. Arnold had avoided meeting him, when they came to England together for some medical conference. An on-going situation like that, and it would have been, wouldn’t be pleasant for Ravi if he and Margaret had married.”
Lyn’s face crumpled with distress. “When I met him, Marianne well, the way he looked at Margaret, and she at him – isn’t it terrible that because of Arnold, their love for each other has gone to waste? And I sometimes think that how Margaret has ended up is her way of paying her father back for being the man he is and its effect upon her and her brother.”
“It would be best,” Marianne replied, “for you to interpret Margaret’s joining the Holy Order she has as her finding comfort in her Faith. How else are you to reconcile yourself to it? And we must hope it is the truth.”
“I shall never reconcile myself to it. If only –”
Marianne cut Lyn short with a remembered saying. “If only we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.”
“But not at my Seder!” Jake quipped, coming in on the end of their conversation as everyone flocked to the table and the ancient Jewish ritual finally began.
“This is the first time I’ve sat at a Seder table without my sister,” Harry Klein was declaring in Manchester, “and how it feels to me is as if our family is cracking up!”
A tear then rolled down his cheek and plopped into his chicken soup. “The Londoners will, of course, have started their Seder late, without me to organize them. But I bet they’ll get a better meal than we’re having.”
“How could you say such a thing, when Mum’s been slaving over the cooker all day!” Howard exclaimed.
“If insulting me makes him feel better, he is welcome to upset me,” said Ann.
“Nothing makes me feel better!” Harry retorted. “And the truth is I can’t wait for God to end it for me.”
“What are we to do with him, Uncle?” Howard said bleakly to Nathan.
“You,” Harry accused him, “have already done enough! Who was it who brought on my stroke?”
The small gathering fell briefly silent and Leona, seated beside Howard, put a comforting hand on his.
“The only one who could help your father is unfortunately unwilling to do so,” Nathan told Howard. “Himself.”
Nathan’s friend Sybil then intervened. “Isn’t that the case with most people, Nat?”
She received from Harry the first smile seen on his face since he was taken ill.
“At last, someone who understands!” he said. “All I get from my family is the pity I could do without. If Sybil’s going to be my new aunt, Uncle Nat, that’s fine with me.”
“But I am in no hurry to acquire a stepmother,” said Leona.
Sybil said sweetly, “That, you’ve made more than plain, dear. Unlike my children, who only want their mother to be happy.”
“It isn’t their mother I’m concerned about. It’s my father,” Leona countered smartly.
Sybil fingered one of her gold earrings and appealed to Nathan. “Say something, Nat, or I’ll ring up for a cab and leave.”
“All I’m going to say to my daughter is she’s left it somewhat late to show concern for my happiness. And if anyone leaves, it ought not to be the lady who befriended me when I needed
someone.”
“Now we know where we stand, I’ll stay,” said Sybil.
“But I,” said Leona, “don’t intend to be driven from a family Seder by a stranger. If everyone has finished their soup, I’ll help Ann clear away the plates.”
Sybil, she had noted, seemed to take it for granted that others would wait upon her – and had probably been adored by the two husbands she had outlived.
In many respects she reminded Leona of some of the elderly widows she had met in Florida. Though, she lacked their genuine warmth and had not resorted to cosmetic surgery, her preoccupation was to captivate a man.
But how did a woman like her manage to captivate a man like my dad? thought Leona with distaste. There was something kittenish about her, including her small round face, and the hazel-green eyes made feline with the aid of carefully applied eye-liner. Not to mention her cuddly shape, accentuated by an angora dress of a hue that made her look like a ginger kitten.
Tonight she had shown her claws. But only Leona and Ann had noticed them. Sybil’s effect upon men of all ages was plain. They wanted to protect her. The few occasions on which Leona and her husband had been in Sybil’s company were enough to display that even sensible Frank had fallen under her spell.
As for my father – there was little doubt that the tiny woman he had met at a Bar Mitzvah made him feel the macho man he most certainly wasn’t and that had to be the answer, Leona decided while helping Ann stack the soup plates in the dishwasher.
“What’s all that clattering going on in the kitchen?” Harry shouted through the serving hatch.
Only Leona venting her feelings, thought Ann, hoping that it wouldn’t result in her Passover china being chipped.
“All we need now is that woman in the family!” she exclaimed to Leona. “Take a peep through the hatch –”
“If you don’t mind, I’d rather not.”
“Sybil is mopping soup off Harry’s chin and he’s actually letting her! He is able to do it for himself, but he never does.”
“Since he’s male, I’m not surprised he’s joined her list of conquests.”