Out of the Ashes

by Maisie Mosco

  “Go right ahead, I’m sure you don’t need me to organize you,” Marianne replied.

  Nor did he and tears stung her eyelids as she watched him set to work. He would never bring her the traditional joys of a Jewish grandmother. But his displaying so graphically his concern for her was a compensation she could not have envisaged.

  Chapter 4

  While Marianne was trying to decide how best to approach the matter Jake had confided to her he rang up, beside himself with anxiety, to tell her it was now out of their hands.

  Laura had been rushed by ambulance to the Royal Free Hospital. What had at first seemed just a heavy menstrual period had escalated into a frightening haemorrhage, and it was in a gynaecological ward that Marianne next saw her.

  A few days had passed since Jake’s visit and when they spoke on the phone, Marianne had detected a note of rebuke in his voice. As if she ought to have done immediately what he had asked of her. Gone at it like a bull at a gate.

  More proof that he doesn’t know his wife, she thought while threading her way between two patients in wheelchairs in the hospital corridor. Laura’s reaction to learning Jake had consulted Marianne would more likely than not have been to lose her temper with both, then stick her head back in the sand.

  Unlike me, Laura’s never been a realist, Marianne reflected, or she wouldn’t have married a man from whom she thought it necessary to hide the life she lived before she met him.

  Jake was seated beside Laura when Marianne entered the ward, the scent of the flowers he had brought her overpowering the antiseptic permeating the air.

  “I’ve been telling Laura to let this be a lesson to her,” he said.

  “But I am in no mood to be lectured,” said Laura. “What I’d like, Jake, is to talk woman-talk with Marianne.”

  “In that case I’ll let the two of you get on with it and take the opportunity to get myself some coffee.”

  “They make good coffee at that pastry shop on South End Green,” Laura told him. “I used to go there with my friends before I knew you.”

  Jake turned to Marianne. “Believe it or not, I’ve yet to meet any of Laura’s old friends. I suggested we give a party for them. For some reason Laura, who loves parties, hasn’t got around to it.”

  Was that tinged with innuendo? Marianne could not be sure and a moment later Jake was gone.

  “Even a man you love can be tiresome in the circumstances I’m now in!” Laura exclaimed. “Jake’s been going on and on at me because I didn’t take his advice.”

  “About what?” Marianne inquired, po-faced.

  She then heard from Laura what she had already learned from Jake, and said when Laura’s account was over, “The way things turned out, though, Jake was right to be concerned.”

  “That doesn’t mean he had to sit there saying he told me so!” Laura glanced around at the other patients and the nurses flitting hither and thither, and lowered her voice. “I said to Jake that my not conceiving had to be God’s will and I meant it, Marianne.”

  Marianne voiced her thoughts in that respect when Jake had repeated it to her.

  “Yes, it does sound more like Grandma Sarah than me,” Laura responded, “but –”

  “But nothing,” Marianne cut her short. “Why would you suddenly come out with something like that?”

  “Would it help you to understand if I told you I meant that it was retribution? And in our family – well, who but God would any of us think it was from? I’ve learned as I’ve grown older that moulding your life however you please – which I certainly did – doesn’t strip you of your conditioning.”

  Marianne surveyed Laura’s ashen complexion. She had lost a lot of blood and an intravenous drip was attached to her hand. “Did they tell you yet what caused the haemorrhage?”

  Laura nodded. “But I didn’t need telling. And thank heavens Jake hadn’t got here yet, when the doctor spelled it out to me. They’ve advised me to have a hysterectomy. If that isn’t retribution, I don’t know what would be –”

  “Will you stop it with the retribution!” Marianne said firmly. “The whore of Babylon you weren’t.”

  “But there’s something you don’t know, Marianne. When Bessie was two, I had an abortion. You may remember that was the time when my career had just begun to really take off. I was getting a lot of foreign assignments from top magazines and Mum used to come and look after Bessie, so I didn’t have to turn them down. It was before the money started rolling in, so I couldn’t yet afford live-in help.”

  Laura paused to sip some water. “I sometimes let myself forget how Mum stood by me in every possible way. Once she recovered from the shock of me being a single parent, and from choice, she bent her own life so I could get on with mine. I refused to let her stand the cost of a resident nanny – which Mum being Mum she failed to understand. But it didn’t stop her from turning herself into one whenever I needed her.”

  “And when she hears you’re in hospital –” said Marianne.

  “She’ll be zooming down the M1 to be her usual interfering self! – which will of course include trying to have me shifted to a private hospital.”

  They shared a smile. What didn’t cost money was for Shirley never good enough.

  “Jake’s already suggested it,” Laura added.

  But his reason was that nothing, but the best was good enough for his wife.

  “I intend to stay put, though,” said Laura. “I couldn’t get better attention than I’m getting here. Also – well, telling the doctor I’d rather my husband didn’t know the diagnosis wasn’t easy. I have no wish to repeat that request elsewhere.”

  “Shall you have the hysterectomy?”

  “Since it’s necessary, yes.”

  “And you’re hoping to keep that from Jake?”

  “Of course not. Only the bit of the diagnosis which he couldn’t handle if he knew about it. All Jake need know is that I have a nice bunch of fibroids,” Laura said whimsically. “As for the rest – well, the abortion I mentioned was botched. By the guy who made it necessary. He was a medical student. And a real stud.”

  A flash of the old Laura, thought Marianne.

  “I was desperate enough to let him deal with it,” she went on. “Where would I have got the money for a proper job? – except by asking Mum. I’d already put her through enough, hadn’t I?”

  A ward orderly came to take Laura’s flowers to put them in water and said, admiring the profusion of red roses, “Somebody loves you!”

  But Jake Bornstein’s love, warm and kindly though he was, could be likened to a moral strait jacket. And Laura’s situation to that of an idol on a pedestal, albeit in Jake’s eyes slightly chipped, but that he had brought himself to overlook. How long would it be before his idol toppled off?

  “You could have come to me for the money,” Marianne resumed the conversation when the cheerful black woman had departed the bedside.

  “I couldn’t have looked you in the face, Marianne, and told you I wanted an abortion for my own selfish reasons. How else could it have seemed to you? Like why I had Bessie, only this time it suited me to get rid of a baby.”

  Laura fingered the lace trimming on her eau-de-nil satin nightgown, and Marianne reflected that a wealthy woman’s finding herself in a National Health gynaecological ward might serve to bring her down to the basics. All women were equipped with the same plumbing – and the other patients on this ward hadn’t got their nighties from Harrods.

  “That was when I realized what I’d done to Bessie,” Laura revealed. “That because I’d wanted a child, but not a man complicating my life, she would never know her father.”

  Marianne said after a pause, “Is it too late to put that right?”

  “It sure is and on more counts than one. The guy who begat her – and he wasn’t even a good lay – is an Israeli egghead I selected for the purpose when I did the pictures for a magazine article on him.”

  “Did you keep copies of the pictures?”

  “Certa
inly not, since I approached the fathering of my child clinically.”

  “You certainly did!”

  “How I looked at it was that telling the kid who its father was would lead to its eventually wanting to meet him, with resultant effects on my life. Not to mention on his. He flew back to his wife and kids the next day, taking it for granted that the wild oat he’d sowed the night before wouldn’t sprout. How was he to know I’d deliberately taken myself off the pill?”

  Laura added with a rueful smile, “The wild oat, though, doesn’t seem to have inherited his intellect. Bessie, bless her heart, remains firmly fixed at the bottom of the class. So much for my private stipulation that the man who got me pregnant must be brainy as well as Jewish. This is some time for me to be telling you all this – with a hysterectomy looming up. When I’ve reached the end of the road pregnancy-wise. And when I’d have given anything to have a child with the man I love –”

  They saw Jake re-enter the ward, carrying a cake box.

  “Isn’t that typical of him?” said Laura. “Nobody could say Bessie didn’t finally get a wonderful dad.”

  Chapter 5

  On the day Laura underwent a hysterectomy Leona’s daughter, Carla, gave birth to her first child.

  Marianne and Shirley were drinking tea together in Marianne’s kitchen when Leona telephoned her good news.

  “Some more of our grandmother’s almonds and raisins,” Shirley said when the receiver was replaced, “and I felt like saying that to Leona. That she’s got the raisins and I’m sitting here chewing the almonds.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t.”

  “But you wouldn’t put it past me to’ve diluted her joy, would you?”

  Marianne let that pass. “Knowing Leona, I’d say her concern for Laura already has.”

  “Well, we’re that kind of family, aren’t we?” Shirley replied. “When you went through what you did, trying to have another baby, I kept my fingers crossed for you.”

  Marianne was astonished to hear it, and had the good grace to say, “I appreciate that, Shirley. How long are you thinking of staying in London?”

  “A loaded question if ever I heard one. I’d intended staying only a couple of days. As you know, I’m very involved with the Manchester 35 group, and –”

  Marianne interrupted her to say, “I have a lot of admiration for the way you and your friends in that group campaign for Soviet Jewry, year in, year out.”

  Shirley’s altruism in that respect was for Marianne her sole redeeming feature.

  “But you’ve always looked down on me, haven’t you?” Shirley went on. “From your ivory tower.”

  If that’s how Shirley sees me, so be it, Marianne thought with a mental shrug.

  Shirley was thinking, What does Marianne really know about me? While she was off doing her own thing and the heck with her parents, I was helping my dad achieve what he did. And does she think because it’s nearly twenty years since I lost my son I’ve recovered? Forgotten I once had one? All I have now is a daughter who keeps me at arm’s length and money I’d be daft if I didn’t try to enjoy.

  Since people are not privy to each other’s thoughts and we do not see ourselves as others see us, there was no likelihood of Marianne’s and Shirley’s relationship ever being other than it had always been.

  The mutual understanding necessary to friendship had eluded them all their lives and, but for the blood tie, Marianne would not have offered Shirley her company while Laura was in the operating theatre, an impulsive gesture she now regretted.

  Shirley returned to the question Marianne had initially asked. “Leona said on the phone she hoped I’d stay on in London for Carla’s baby’s Brith.”

  The new-born member of the clan was a boy and his ritual circumcision a major event.

  “It would be letting Leona down if I didn’t stay on,” said Shirley.

  Family loyalty again, thought Marianne wryly.

  The event fell on a Sunday, which enabled all the Mancunians but Harry to be present.

  Notably absent were Leona’s mother and Frank’s twin.

  Henry Moritz’s not putting in an appearance did not surprise Leona, though he was currently living no farther away than Rome. As for her mum’s saying on the phone that Mr. Pitkin didn’t feel up to flying the Atlantic – how could a brand new husband come before a great-grandson’s Brith?

  Leona sat holding her daughter’s hand, while the baby was being circumcised in the next room. Waiting for the cry of Mazeltov! from the assembled men to tell them that the deed was done.

  “I can’t bear to think of my baby being hurt,” Carla said.

  “I imagine all mothers feel that way at this moment,” said the attractive girl seated on the other side of her, like Carla the wife of a rabbinical student. “Well, I certainly did, though I knew like you do that the baby is given something soaked in wine, to suck, so he feels nothing –”

  “And I’ve seen some drunken babies in my time!” said Ann, whose newly-relaxed demeanour had amazed those who had not seen her since Harry entered the nursing home.

  The circumcision ceremony was taking place in the bedroom of the small flat Carla and Alan were renting for the duration of his studies.

  “It’s a good thing women are excluded from the actual Brith,” Ann remarked, “or Alan would’ve had to take down the bed to make space for us.”

  “I’d get claustrophobia if I had to live in this place,” said Shirley.

  Marianne could not resist replying, “Where you live doesn’t matter, Shirley, what does is who you live with. If living alone hasn’t taught you that, it has me.”

  “You though,” Shirley retorted, “were lucky enough to have a happy marriage!”

  If Shirley thought luck was responsible for that, small wonder that hers had failed.

  “Doesn’t the spread on the table look lovely?” was Ann’s way of interceding. “But when didn’t it at a Brith in our family?” she added reminiscently.

  Marianne recognized one of Ann’s fruit cakes, and a fancy gateau that had to have been made by Shirley. The Victoria sponge was Lyn’s speciality. And the Viennese Sachertorte Leona’s, from a recipe handed down by Frank’s aunts.

  The dish of chopped herring was Marianne’s contribution – nobody would be surprised to know it wasn’t homemade! Laura, not yet out of hospital, had asked Jake to supply some smoked salmon on her behalf.

  My grandmother used to say that food is Jewish comfort, Marianne recalled with a smile. In times of sadness Sarah Sandberg had put a meal on the table and instructed her family to eat.

  Today’s occasion, though, was joyous, and the baby’s paternal grandparents, Ronald and Diane, had flown from New York to be present, both looking as if the change they had wrought in their lives agreed with them.

  On the table, too, was a platter of the little sesame seed cakes that featured in the Sephardi cuisine to which Diane had introduced her Ashkenazi in-laws in the days when it was an uncommon occurrence among Manchester Jewry for those of the two very different cultures to intermarry.

  Marianne’s mind travelled back to Ronald and Diane’s engagement party, held in the near-mansion her father’s wealth had acquired when the Sandbergs were still struggling their way upward. In the main, Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent had arrived in Britain with money to help them on their way – and those of us, like me, she thought, whose family background included early-immigrant privation, used to look on them as snobs. Their settling on the leafy, south side of the city, and us on the north, had lent credence to that impression, and their calling the place where they met to play bridge and tennis “The Country Club” hadn’t helped! The club was still there.

  How many years did it take for what was once in effect two communities to become one? Marianne was musing when Diane said with a laugh that she had almost left the sesame seed cakes baked in New York on the plane, such was her excitement at the prospect of seeing her baby grandson.

  “It was lovely of you to think
of making them for the Brith,” Carla told her.

  Diane, whose suit looked as if it came from Fifth Avenue, said quietly, “The credit, though it was I who made them, must go to your father-in-law. It was Ronald who reminded me of the family custom, that the women each contribute something to the spread.”

  A moment of silence followed and Carla’s friend, though not a member of the family, could not have sensed something unspoken having evoked it. Diane’s long seclusion, and the reason for it, was such that she might not have made the transition back into the world without Ronald’s help.

  “I’m so sorry Moira wasn’t free to come today,” Carla said to Marianne. “Martin told me she’s just been promoted to editorial director. I’m really pleased for her.”

  And would that Marianne’s daughter-in-law were the friendly, uncomplicated young woman that Carla was, reading no more into Moira’s sending her regrets than the face value.

  “It would have been nice, if things hadn’t gone wrong for Howard, to have had Christina here, too,” Carla added. “I liked her.”

  “Well,” said Ann, “you’ll soon be a rebbetzen, won’t you? – a rabbi’s wife must be charitable to everyone.”

  The cry of Mazeltov then issued through the wall and Carla said tremulously, “Thank God the surgery is over.”

  While they listened to the men praying in unison, Marianne’s thoughts remained with Moira and Christina, to whom the family came to seem a threat: I can see how en masse they would find us overpowering, but we can’t help being how we are, it’s bred in us. For Jews family is as important as our religious rituals. Why else would I stand by Shirley when necessary, and she by me? I seem to remember, the night Ralph died, her appearing as if from nowhere and sitting holding my hand. And me letting her! Nor could Marianne doubt that Shirley’s sympathy was on that occasion genuine. Family loyalty was a deepening enigma to Marianne.

  It was Nathan who returned the infant to Carla and with mixed feelings placed her firstborn in her arms. The irony of his granddaughter and David’s grandson marrying had not escaped him. How ironic too that their love was responsible for another David Sandberg entering the family. The baby had been given David’s name, and would henceforth be a reminder to Nathan that love was more productive than hate.