by Maisie Mosco
There was no sign of the postman when she peeped through the living-room window and she went to the kitchen to get herself some bread and jam.
Why was I born with a sweet tooth? But Janis was, too, and she’s slim. Not tubby like me! And why do Jeremy and A.P. have to tease me about it? It isn’t fair!
These were the thoughts of the none too happy child Bessie had become, though her mother was blissfully unaware of it. Having supplied her child with a father, and the added bonus of a sister and a brother, it had not occurred to Laura that all might not be well.
The little girl, however, had, after her initial euphoria, found the change wrought in her life not in every way to her liking.
Once the centre of her mother’s world, she was now but one of the family. Though not exactly jealous of Janis, who was never less than kind to her, it was not easy for Bessie to come to terms with Laura’s closeness to Janis.
A more temperamental child would have communicated that all was not well by giving vent as Ben so graphically had to Howard. Bessie, though, communicated her private feelings only to her diary, which she kept hidden as little girls are wont to do.
Though she called it her diary, it was an exercise book and on the cover she had printed in red crayon: “My Secrets”.
She would never break her promise to her mummy to keep certain things just to themselves, she thought when reading and rereading her account of “the lovely time when it was just Mummy and me.”
Except for Mummy’s boyfriends, but they had come and gone, like the housekeepers had, she remembered while eating her bread and jam. Nothing was like it is now.
The thud of the mail landing in the hall sent her rushing to fetch it.
“Look, Mummy! Grandpa and Hildegard have sent me a great big card from Israel,” she said brandishing the envelope as Laura came downstairs and gave her a hug.
“Happy birthday, my darling. And I think I espy an even bigger card! That one will be from Grandma Shirley,” Laura added dryly.
“It is.”
Laura watched Bessie open the pile of envelopes, recalling how in her childhood and youth the family had never failed to remember her birthday. There were some who still did.
It was on my thirtieth that I stopped short and took stock of my life. Never a dull moment, my career looking promising, but something lacking. And to whom but Marianne would I have gone for comfort?
Laura would not forget spending that day mooning at Marianne’s flat. How Marianne had eventually pronounced that the lack she felt was stability, which required a permanent relationship.
My reply was along the lines of, “No fear! I’m not bending my life to include a husband, like you have. But that needn’t mean I can’t be a mother.”
It was then that Laura had made the decision that culminated in Bessie’s birth. And the look Marianne gave me when she walked me to my car was as if she thought she was seeing me off to get myself pregnant immediately! My reputation was that things are no sooner said than done and hang the consequences.
“What are you smiling about, Mummy?” the consequence of that decision inquired.
“It’s my daughter’s birthday and I love her very much.”
“Even though I’m not pretty?”
“You will be when you lose your puppy fat.”
“When will that be?”
“I didn’t lose mine till I was sixteen.”
“Six more years of Jeremy calling me ‘Pudge’!”
They had taken the cards to the kitchen and Jeremy entered as if on cue.
“Happy birthday, Pudge!”
“See what I mean, Mummy?”
“It’s just his fond nickname for you,” said Laura.
Bessie’s face lit with hope. “Does that mean he loves me?”
“Yuk!” said Jeremy. “And yuk to my other sister behaving as if Kurt is Romeo and she’s Juliet.”
“This house doesn’t have a balcony,” Laura said with a laugh.
“The balcony is all that’s missing!” Jeremy opined. “Would you like me to cook you a special birthday breakfast, Pudge?”
“That’s very nice of you, Jeremy, but I’m dieting.”
“Since when?”
“Since I found out that if I don’t, my puppy fat could stay on me till I’m sixteen. And when you make the sandwiches for my party, Mummy, please put some of the fillings on crackers, for me. I’ve made up my mind.”
Laura managed not to smile. One look at the desserts and gone would be Bessie’s resolve. “You can do that yourself, darling. With twenty little girls coming to tea, the whole family is going to be busy. You can start blowing up the balloons after breakfast, Jeremy. Kurt will help you when he gets here.”
“That’ll be a change from him sitting looking in Janis’s eyes,” said Jeremy with the disgust of a lad whom Cupid’s arrow had yet to pierce.
Janis then entered wearing the dreamy expression to which the family had become accustomed, poured herself some orange juice and went to gaze through the window.
Laura’s humorous thought on the day Janis and Kurt met had proved to be good judgement. After lunching with the girl he had mentioned, he had returned with flowers for Janis and the two had gone for a walk on the Heath. Laura could not have foreseen then what she now thought more than possible. That her young Viennese cousin might one day also be her son-in-law.
Their youthful affair – if such it could be called – had about it an aura at odds with the earthiness that characterized most such relationships nowadays. Why else had Jeremy – not known for his lyrical imagination – equated them with Romeo and Juliet? Perhaps because there was no other way to describe them.
The balcony isn’t the only thing that’s missing, Laura thought. Unlike the Montagues and the Capulets, there’s no family enmity to stand in their way. Laura and Jake had met Kurt’s parents when they had visited their son in London and had found them charming.
Jake joined his family singing, “Happy birthday, dear Bessie,” and lifted the little girl high in the air, to whirl her around rumbustiously.
“Careful, Dad, you’ll break your arms,” said Jeremy.
“But next year I’ll be a feather-weight, Daddy,” Bessie said when he put her down. “There won’t be so much of me to love.”
“Yuk, yuk, yuk!”
“Just you wait and see. And my big sister hasn’t remembered it’s my birthday –”
Janis emerged from her daydream and came to set that right.
“Falling in love makes people forgetful, doesn’t it, Mummy?”
“And if Jeremy says ‘yuk’ again I shall bop him on the head. Let’s get on with our breakfast.”
Jeremy dished up the eggs he was scrambling while Laura replenished the toaster and Janis fetched the marmalade to the table.
Laura wished she had her camera handy to snap Bessie’s comical expression as she watched everyone else tuck in and restricted herself to an apple. But the time would come when she would remember her daughter’s tenth birthday as when the nightmare began.
Chapter 11
The overt anti-Semitism in Austria, revealed to the world during the run-up to that country’s Presidential election, was made the more personal for the clan by Kurt’s presence among them.
By then he had met not just the Londoners but the Mancunians too. His being Sigmund Moritz’s relative was sufficient to ensure him a welcome from those to whom Sigmund was a pillar of their own past.
“I can’t believe the Austrian people will choose a man with Waldheim’s background to be their President,” Jake said to Kurt one evening after the family had watched the Nine O’clock News.
“Have a banana, Bessie,” said Laura.
“No, thanks.”
“A plum then –”
“Will you stop it, Laura!” Jake exclaimed. “If she wants to diet, let her.” He turned to Kurt. “What those people we just saw interviewed in the street said – well, didn’t it come as a shock to you?”
“Not exact
ly. But then, I live in Austria. You do not. Did your father not tell you,” he asked Laura, “how when Hitler marched into Vienna he received a rapturous reception?”
Laura shook her head. “But I always had the feeling that there was a good deal my dad had blotted out. It couldn’t have been a pleasant memory for him, could it? That the people he had grown up among – he’d have been about fifteen at the time – cheered their heads off at what for him and his family was like the knell of doom.”
Laura paused pensively. “He never told me, either, about the night his parents were taken by the Nazis – which was probably the equivalent of Germany’s Kristallnacht, when the sound of breaking glass while all the Jews were rounded up was part of the horrific scenario,” she said with a shudder.
“From such details my parents also have spared me,” said Kurt, “but each time there was an anti-Semitic incident in Vienna – and I find it significant that there are many more now that Waldheim is standing to be our President – my father would recall the Anschluss, how he watched from a window of his family’s apartment the rejoicing that greeted Hitler’s arrival.”
“Isn’t it possible,” said Laura, “that the people thought if they behaved otherwise they might go the way of Jewish citizens?”
A sardonic smile curled Kurt’s lips. “That has always been the excuse and it has suited Jews who returned there, my parents included, to accept it. But I ask you now did the French toss flowers at those who occupied France, as the tanks rumbled by on the Champs-Elysées’”
“France is but one example. And those who did would have been labelled collaborators and made to pay for it after the war. Austria, on the other hand, was by some means recorded as a victim despite the joyful acquiescence we are discussing. And for the people now to say they will not have Waldheim besmirched –”
“They’re not all taking that attitude,” Janis corrected Kurt.
“But should they elect him President, it would be for me an admission of their own guilt as a nation.”
“That was quite an impassioned speech, Kurt,” said Jake.
“Perhaps because it is a matter about which I, other young Austrians also and not all of them Jewish, am greatly concerned.”
“Can you spare some of Kurt’s passion, Janis?” Jeremy said with a grin.
She hurled a cushion at him. “It will be heaven help the girl you fall in love with!”
“Janis and I,” said Kurt, “shall warn her not to fall in love with you.”
They were seated contentedly hand in hand on the sofa and exchanged a radiant glance.
But when, thought Laura, would romance not be enough for them and sex become an urgency? Jake would not countenance Janis’s marrying while still a student, fond though he had grown of Kurt. If and when they decided to live together – well, Jake’s reaction to that was something Laura preferred not to contemplate.
There was too the uneasy prospect of Janis’s living in Vienna if she married Kurt. Among people like those who had told the TV interviewer that they supported Waldheim.
Laura would not let herself envisage there ever again being a Hitlerite manifestation of anti-Semitism. But if I were Austrian, I might now think it wise to up and run. If for no other reason than I wouldn’t want to live my life uncertain if my next-door-neighbours were privately Jew-haters.
Laura was then forcibly reminded of what was manifesting itself in her own country.
“Kurt and I haven’t told you yet,” said Janis, “about something utterly disgusting we learned at the meeting we were at last night. A boy at one of the northern polytechnics had dog dirt put through his letter-box – as if the swastika painted on his flat door wasn’t enough!”
“I’m glad you didn’t tell us while we were eating dinner,” said Jeremy.
Then the telephone shrilled in the hall and he went to answer it.
“If it’s for me, I’m not in,” Jake called to him.
“Engaged in one of your tactical deals, are you?” Laura said with a smile.
“No, I’d just like an uninterrupted evening at home.”
It was not to be.
“It’s Marianne, for you Laura,” Jeremy said when he returned, “and she didn’t chat to me like she usually does. She said there’s been a death in the family.”
Chapter 12
Once again the clan gathered for a funeral in Manchester. Since Judaic law decrees burial of the dead without delay, not all of Harry Klein’s relatives were able to be present.
His daughter, Kate, had by chance been visiting her parents when Harry suffered his second and fatal seizure and it was she who supported her mother at the graveside.
Howard, beside the rabbi, had in his eyes an expression that caused Marianne to wonder if he was tracing his father’s end backward to the night he and she returned from Germany without Ben.
What, though, had the time between then and his drawing his last breath been for Harry but a living death? There are those able to come to terms with severe disablement, but Marianne’s brother had not been one of them. Instead he had tortured himself and those who loved him.
But what a good man the real Harry was. He did not deserve to be going to his grave without having seen his only grandson again, Marianne reflected with sorrow as the simple coffin customary in her religion was lowered to its resting place.
Her Uncle Nat’s face looked paper white. But this was the cemetery in which all the elders of the family were buried, where he too would one day lie. She had not seen him for some time and was affected by his increased frailty.
The woman who had briefly revitalized him had not been replaced by another, and he had since achieved the English Literature degree to which he had aspired. What did he do with his time now? Alone in that echoing house with Bridie, who would surely have retired to her native Ireland were it not for her loyalty to him.
My grandmother, thought Marianne, would have suggested to Leona that she take her father to live with her and Frank. Sarah wouldn’t have paused to consider if that arrangement would work and would doubtless have succeeded in contriving it.
While Howard recited the solemn Kaddish prayer for his father, it struck Marianne that since Sarah’s death she had come to truly know her. How often have I asked myself what my grandmother would have done and been led to examine the consequences of some of her manipulating?
Who but she had influenced David and Nathan, each in their turn, to put practical matters before love in their choice of a wife? That David and Miriam had not married was in its way tragic. And Nathan’s life with Rebecca equally so.
Am I being disloyal to my revered grandmother’s memory? No. There’ll never be another like her. The fabled matriarch had not ruled her family with the proverbial rod of iron, but with an influence capable of moulding lives. She had always left the final decision to you. And all her intentions were unarguably good. Not all of her remembered wisdoms, though, had in the long run proved wise.
Marianne eyed Sarah’s nearby tombstone and silently told her, You weren’t quite so perfect as I thought, and it makes you easier to live up to.
After the funeral, while the next of kin were partaking of the ritual mourners’ meal in Ann’s living-room, Kate stopped trying to swallow down hard-boiled egg and salt herring and turned to her brother.
“I’ve asked Mum to come and live with me in Israel, Howard, and I hope you won’t mind.”
“Have you discussed it with your husband?”
“Aryeh told Mum on the phone that he hoped she would now come and get some pleasure from her granddaughters.”
Howard put down the bagel he was trying to eat and managed to smile at his mother. “I agree with Aryeh that it’s time you had some pleasure, and if that’s what you want to do, go ahead.”
“Thank God,” said Ann, “that I’m blessed with wonderful children and the same kind of son-in-law.”
“You still think I’m wonderful, after what I did to you?” Howard said wryly. “And by the way, Karin sent
you her love when I called her.”
“When you brought her to meet us,” said Ann, “your dad said, ‘That’s the right girl for our son.’”
“For once I’m in complete agreement with him.”
Arnold then astonished them all by bursting into tears.
“Today, I don’t feel in the least like Sir Arnold Klein,” he said to their further amazement. “I’m just a man who’s lost his brother.” He glanced at a photograph of Harry that stood on the china cabinet. “Nobody could have had a better one,” he told Howard. “I wish I’d had the chance to say that to your dad.”
He dried his eyes and added gruffly, “If you’d like me to, I’ll stand in for him when you get married.”
“I’ll hold you to that, Uncle.” Howard turned to Ann. “Have you given Kate your answer, Mum?”
“Not until I’d made sure you wouldn’t mind. But how better could I spend the years I have left?”
A sentimental interlude followed while Ann and Kate hugged each other, and more tears were shed.
Howard too had done his share of weeping today. Only Marianne had remained dry-eyed. The brother she knew had died a long time ago.
Lyn entered with a coffee-pot, Laura and Shirley behind her carrying cups and saucers, sugar bowl and milk jug.
“Couldn’t you find a tray?” Ann said to them.
“What does it matter?” said Shirley.
It doesn’t, thought Marianne, but it illustrates that with some folk the niceties prevail whatever the circumstances. Grief or no grief. When she arrived here this morning she had found Ann dusting the furniture, making sure her home was spick and span in readiness for the housewifely eyes of the women who would sit with her in the living-room prior to the departure of the cortège.
My mum made me clean the bathroom before my dad’s funeral, Marianne recalled, in case anyone went in there to use the loo – not that it had required cleaning, any more than Ann’s house is ever other than immaculate. I remember thinking, How can my mother spare a thought for that, when she’s just lost her husband? I felt like ticking her off.