Out of the Ashes

by Maisie Mosco

“She’s welcome to change places with me,” Ann snapped, “but heaven help your dad if she hooks him and it looks as if she’s going to. Bridie will walk out the minute Sybil walks in.”

  Ann rested against the sink and said after a pause, “This takes me back to Sigmund Moritz’s big mistake.”

  Leona recalled the ageing baby-doll face of the woman Sigmund had married. There was too another parallel. Like Sigmund, Nathan was a clever man – and Sybil as unintelligent as Sigmund’s lady-love.

  When boredom set in, and it had not taken long, he had bade her farewell and put her from his life and his mind. The large sum of money that came to him when she died intestate was a shock, and he had not spent a penny of it on himself. He had, however, willed it to Frank, in the certain knowledge that money slipped through Henry’s fingers and Frank would not see his twin go short.

  While they set the dinner plates on the counter, to serve the main course, Ann too was deep in thought. How different this Seder night was from those of times past. Gone was the bustle of activity in the kitchen, the laughter too, all the females in the family getting in each other’s way, sharing in the preparations and then in the dishing up of food from huge pots and pans. The pan in which Sarah Sandberg had made soup for Seder nights had resembled a cauldron! Ann recalled with a smile.

  But those days were gone, along with what the sociologists called the “extended family” – which seemed to Ann a clinical term for the caring and sharing she remembered. Future generations would not experience the simple pleasures that Ann and her children had. Instead – well, even marriage itself was now regarded by some as a dying institution.

  “I miss Marianne,” she said to Leona.

  “Don’t you miss Kate?”

  “My daughter has lived in Israel for so long, I’m not accustomed to having her with me on Seder nights.”

  “But I’m accustomed to having mine with me. When Carla phoned to tell me that Kate had invited her and Alan to spend the Passover with her, I had to stop myself from saying, ‘Please don’t go.’”

  “And time was,” said Ann, “when all of us not being together for a festival would’ve been unthinkable. I’ve just been asking myself what’s happened to Jewish family life –”

  “The same as has happened to gentile family life, Ann. It’s moved with the century and no longer has time to be what it once was. Which isn’t to say that our family doesn’t still stick together in a crisis –”

  “Since my life is now one big crisis,” said Ann, “I appreciate how often you and Frank drop in.”

  Ann was slicing pickled cucumber when Harry called stridently, “Are we getting a second course? If not, my nursemaid can put me to bed and Grace can be said without me. I’m not giving thanks to God for a lousy meal I didn’t get!”

  “Your nursemaid is going on strike!” Ann heard herself retort.

  “About time, too,” Leona told her. “You look dead beat and who could be surprised.”

  “Would you mind serving up the dinner, Leona. My legs seem to have turned to jelly.”

  “Probably from the shock of what you just said to Harry.”

  “I didn’t mean to –”

  “But Harry hasn’t slumped to the carpet, has he? He’s still sitting in his wheelchair – and enjoying the sympathetic glances that woman is giving him!” Leona observed through the hatch. “You should put your foot down with him more often, Ann, and if he has another stroke it’ll be his fault, not yours.”

  “Could you be that callous with Frank?”

  “I would surely have hastened his end long before now! Go back to the table, Ann, and send Frank to help me.”

  Frank’s first words when he entered the kitchen were, “Why did you have to embarrass poor Sybil the way you did?”

  “You’re as gullible as my dad, Frank. And if I don’t prise Sybil out of his life, it will be poor Nathan.”

  “You’re behaving like a jealous daughter, Leona. I wouldn’t have expected it of you.”

  “If that’s how you interpret my concern for my father, then you’ve lived with me for more years than I care to count without really knowing me,” she replied.

  “More years than you care to count, eh?”

  “Hand me the oven cloth, will you? And if you’re going to look for double entendre in everything I say, an experienced lawyer like you won’t find it difficult to twist my words.”

  Frank watched Leona take one of Ann’s aprons from a hook and put it on, lest she splash gravy on her dress. A good housekeeper she wasn’t, but like all Sarah Sandberg’s granddaughters and great-granddaughters, she never dished up food minus an apron. It was a family joke among the men, but incapable now of causing Frank to smile.

  “Would you mind telling me what’s been going on in here?” he asked while she hastily tied the apron strings in a bow. “What did you say to Ann to make her suddenly turn on Harry?”

  “What did I say to her? A better question, Frank, would be why hasn’t she blown her top a lot sooner?”

  “And the answer is that she loves him. If I may draw a logical conclusion from that, you wouldn’t stand for such behaviour from me, no matter how ill I was.”

  Had he heard Leona’s words to Ann on the subject? No, he couldn’t have, with the chit-chat going on around him in the dining-room.

  “If that’s your oblique way of saying you think I no longer love you, Frank –”

  “I’ve never doubted that you love me,” he cut in. “But there’s more than one kind of love.”

  Leona blotted out a mental picture of his twin, wondering why her cheeks were not burning with shame. “Drain the vegetables, will you, Frank? Or we shall never get this meal on the table.”

  He might just as well have said: There’s affection and there’s passion, and all the difference in the world between the two. But the occasions when their equable relationship was suddenly jarred by Frank were rare. And characterized by the things left unsaid.

  One word too many from either of us, Leona thought now, and the life we’ve built together could collapse like a house of cards, though it was a good deal more solid than that. Since childhood, Frank was to Leona her best friend and that hadn’t changed.

  She was taking the casseroled chicken from the oven, assailed by déjà vu. How many years had slipped by since she and Frank stood gazing down at the kitchen floor awash with gravy, and swimming in it amid chunks of broken pyrex, the special dinner Leona had cooked because Henry was coming?

  Disappointment laced with shame, when Henry called to say he wasn’t coming, was responsible for Leona’s forgetting to use the oven cloth and dropping the hot dish from her burned fingers. And while the mess was being cleared up, the fraught conversation had somehow led to Frank’s saying what he had tonight.

  When everyone at the Seder table finally had their meal before them, Ann delivered her second shock of the evening.

  “I’ve made up my mind to put Harry in a nursing home. I’ve had enough.”

  “That’s what I am to her,” Harry told Sybil. “A burden that has to be put somewhere.”

  Sybil eyed Ann reproachfully. “How can you do that to your husband?”

  “Your two dropped dead, I believe. If you’d had my experience you’d have done what I’m going to without thinking twice.”

  Again Sybil appealed to Nathan. “That’s no way for her to speak to the lady who could be her future aunt.”

  “Ann is overwrought, my dear,” he replied, patting her hand.

  And adding nothing to contradict her estimation of her own status, Leona noted.

  “However, I think Ann’s intention is a good idea,” Nathan declared.

  Harry’s response was, “Living – if you can call my existence that – where I’d get the nursing without the pity would suit me fine!”

  Howard, unduly silent throughout the evening, let fly at his father. “Mum is the one who should be pitied, but I wouldn’t expect the man you’ve become to see it that way!”

 
He calmed down and smiled at Sybil. “Please excuse what this Seder night has turned into –”

  “If she’s hoping to marry into the family, she’ll get used to hearing shouting matches,” said Ann.

  “What’s the betting,” said Leona, “that there’s one going on right now in London?”

  “If they’re trying to put me off, they won’t succeed, Nat,” purred Sybil, “and I don’t think I’ve mentioned to you that I’ve always fancied living in Bournemouth.”

  Leona envisaged her father sitting on a bench on Bournemouth’s East Cliff, whiling away the time with other senior citizens. To what else but that was this crafty creature leading him by the nose? The going to seed that Ronald had feared would surely ensue.

  “From what I’ve seen here tonight, you’ll be well out of it, Nat,” Sybil went on.

  A remark that brought Nathan up short and caused him to remove his hand from hers. “I happen to be the only surviving elder of my family, Sybil, and I take that responsibility very seriously.”

  “I’m a family person myself,” she mewed.

  Nathan surveyed her in silence, his thoughtful expression indicating that he was suddenly seeing her differently.

  “You must forgive me for wasting so many months of your time,” he told her courteously.

  A show of claws followed. “Like hell I will!”

  If Dad had already given her what she’s been after – an engagement ring – a breach of promise courtroom scandal might now be his lot, thought Leona, watching Sybil try to make a dignified exit.

  It was Howard who saw her out. When he returned, he said, “Why did you suddenly break it off with her, Uncle Nat?”

  “My son just took the words from my mouth,” said Harry.

  “And I have to say that I’m still recovering from the surprise,” said Frank.

  Nathan gave them a smile and said brusquely, “I’m going to leave you to figure it out for yourselves.”

  “I already have,” said Leona, “and I’m proud of you, Dad.”

  Once again, Family was responsible for changing the course of her father’s life. But this time he had not required coercing, and the outcome was the opposite of the disasters to which family loyalty had led him in the past.

  Chapter 3

  The following day was one of surprises for Marianne, some better described as shocks.

  Ann washing her hands of Harry? And Harry agreeable to entering a nursing home? Uncle Nat suddenly ending his romance seemed but an item of gossip beside those two astonishing developments.

  “Your mother doesn’t mean it and your father is just playing her along,” Marianne had said when Howard called to tell her.

  “Believe it or not, Marianne, Mum is like a new woman since she made the decision. And Dad is now saying he’d have made it himself, but he didn’t want to upset her.”

  “A likely tale!” said Marianne.

  “I agree. But all that matters is it’s best for both of them and it’s going to happen. It will also ease things for me. I shall be able to go to Germany more often and stay longer. There’s something I’ve been keeping to myself –”

  When Marianne rang off her mind was awhirl. Howard’s reply to her asking why he was keeping his girlfriend a secret did not bode well: “There are complications I don’t even want to think about.” But sooner or later he would have to, and Marianne hoped that he would not by then be inextricably involved in yet another insoluble situation.

  An unpleasant surprise was a visit from Shirley, during the afternoon. When the doorbell rang, Marianne thought it might be Jake arriving earlier than he had promised.

  “I know you weren’t expecting me,” said her cousin, “but there’s no need to grimace! And you still look the mess you always did when there was no special reason for you to look nice,” she added, eyeing Marianne’s crumpled jeans and baggy shirt.

  “You, on the other hand, look even more sour than usual,” Marianne countered.

  “Well, I’ve never had your capacity for laughing off the rotten tricks life’s played on me.”

  “Hiding my feelings with a smile, you mean.”

  “But you’ve never spared mine, have you? And why are you keeping me standing in the hall?”

  While Shirley followed her into the living-room, Marianne crossed her fingers lest Jake arrive before she left.

  Jake had found it impossible to be on easy terms with Shirley – which qualifies him for membership of a big club, thought Marianne. All he needed, Marianne too, was for Shirley to catch him dropping in here!

  Shirley glanced around the room disapprovingly, before removing some magazines from the armchair they were occupying and sitting down. “Nobody would think you were your mother’s daughter, Marianne.”

  “The same could be said of Laura.”

  “Is that some kind of insult?”

  “It’s just a statement of fact. Unlike you, Shirley, I’ve never thought that children are obliged to be replicas of their parents. Nor that parents are entitled to harbour expectations. Those who do have themselves to thank if they end up bitterly disappointed.”

  “You think you know it all, don’t you?”

  “On the contrary, Shirley, my philosophy is you’re never too old to learn. And I’m still learning.”

  “I didn’t come here for a lecture, Marianne. Or to be put down!”

  “Why did you come? We’ve known each other too long for you to beat about the bush with me.”

  “And only once did I fool myself that we were friends as well as cousins.”

  Remembrance of herself and Shirley when they were wartime evacuees returned to Marianne. A couple of miserable kids marooned together in the care of a dour Welshwoman.

  “You were always better at doing sums than me – how old were we when we shared that grim experience?” she asked Shirley wryly.

  “Thirteen, I think. And grim it certainly was! Whenever I smell carbolic soap, I remember the old dragon washing our hair under that cold water pump in the yard.”

  “My most vivid recollection,” said Marianne, “is of the hours we spent on that little pebbled beach.”

  “You scribbling stories and me sketching fashion designs.”

  “That was when I decided what I was going to be.”

  “Me, too. And we both achieved it, didn’t we?” Shirley flicked a speck of fluff from the sleeve of her black suit, crossed her shapely legs and hardened her tone. “But back to the present –”

  Back to us being two women who dislike each other and don’t try too hard to hide it, thought Marianne.

  “There’s something I need you to do for me,” said Shirley.

  One of us is nevertheless capable of asking the other for a favour. “And what might that be?”

  Shirley then launched into a tale of how she had overheard Laura and Jake arguing that morning. “Their bedroom door was closed, and I heard them when I passed by on my way downstairs. I had no idea what it was about, but Laura didn’t speak to Jake during breakfast and he was skulking behind the Financial Times.”

  “Come on, Shirley! Jake is hardly the skulking type.”

  “You haven’t heard the rest of it. When Jake had left for the office, I asked Laura what was wrong, and she told me to mind my own business –”

  “Good for her,” Marianne cut in, “and if what you want from me is to find out for you, forget it, Shirley.”

  “I haven’t finished the story yet. And perhaps you won’t think it a coincidence, which I don’t, that Laura then went into the living-room, where the au pair was doing the dusting, and fired her.”

  “Trust you to put two and two together and make five!” Marianne exclaimed. “If you can’t see that Jake has eyes for nobody but Laura, it’s time you got yourself some glasses, Shirley. I’d also suggest that you have your brains tested. Another useful piece of advice, is a woman who messed up her own married life should stay the hell out of her daughter’s.”

  “What a cruel bitch you are, Marianne! An
d don’t give me that crap about having to be cruel to be kind. You’ve never shown me a scrap of kindness, so why would I expect you to now?”

  Shirley rose from the chair and made the angry exit Marianne had seen her, over the years, make time and again after a confrontation with this relative or that – and most frequently with the man now her ex-husband.

  When Marianne first met Peter Kohn he was a bewildered young lad, torn from his family by circumstances neither he, nor his parents, could have envisaged. If they had, they would surely have run for their lives as their more prudent brethren had, long before Hitler marched into Austria.

  Marianne had not forgotten Sigmund Moritz’s anxiety about his relatives in Vienna. Then an evening came when he received a message from them, and Marianne’s father and her Uncle David had taken turns at the wheel to drive him immediately to Dover, to meet a Channel steamer.

  Marianne and Ronald, who had persuaded their elders to let them go along for the ride, were fast asleep when they arrived. There were no motorways then, she reflected. Dad and Uncle David must have driven hell-for-leather to get there in time. And seeing the refugees leaving the ship – the expressions on their faces, and the weeping when those meeting them embraced them – was something that would remain with Marianne for the rest of her life.

  Also Sigmund Moritz’s joy when he espied his great-nephew, Peter, whom he recognized from a photograph though they had not met. And then Sigmund’s sorrow when Peter told them that the rest of the family had been taken by the Nazis.

  With Peter was a forlorn young girl with whom he had somehow escaped the fate of their two families. Nearly five decades had since passed, but Marianne could still not contemplate that fate without a shudder. It had not taken that long for the evil she had naïvely thought stamped out to prove otherwise.

  Catching a glimpse of her workaday appearance in the hall mirror was sufficient to hasten Marianne to freshen up before Jake arrived. Not on your life, though, would she have bothered to brush her hair and put on lipstick had she known Shirley was coming!

  While doing so her mind returned to Shirley’s ex-husband.

  David had taken Peter into his family and had considered him a second son, later welcoming him as a son-in-law. Was it perhaps gratitude for all he had received from his foster-parents, including love, that had kept Peter tied for so long to their daughter?