by Maisie Mosco
Marianne forced herself to be patient. “What you’re calling chutzpah, Arnold, was a very understandable request. If you don’t want your son to depart this life believing that how he lived it was more important to you than he himself, you are going to have to show him the understanding he’s yearned for and never received from you.”
Marianne went to the kitchen to make them some tea and returned to find them sobbing in each other’s arms.
Why was it that shared sorrow united the estranged as nothing else could? She put down the tray and made her exit, the happy evening that had preceded this family tragedy far from her mind.
When she emerged from the building Simon Newman’s Honda was still there.
He got out to open the door for her. “I thought I’d hang on, Marianne.”
“That was thoughtful of you, Simon. I’d intended ringing up the hire car firm my brother uses, but the circumstances were such that it went from my head.”
“Just as well I did hang on, then. Or you’d now be trudging to the main road in the dark and I can’t have that!”
A proprietary remark that for Marianne rang a warning bell.
Chapter 4
Matthew’s having Aids was as if a bombshell had hit the family.
“I can’t believe this has happened to us,” Shirley said on the phone to Laura.
“If that’s what you rang up to tell me, Mum, you said it the last time you called me.”
“You’re not going near him, are you?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“If, God forbid, you got it you could pass it on to the children.”
“Mum! You don’t get Aids the way you get measles.”
“Does that mean you are visiting him? And does Pete know yet if he’s got it, too?”
Laura went on mixing the pudding she was making to try to tempt Bessie, the telephone receiver wedged between her ear and her shoulder.
“The reply to your second question, Mum, is Pete’s tests were positive, but the virus hasn’t attacked him and if he’s lucky it won’t. To answer your first query, of course we’re visiting Matthew. It cheers him up to see us. And Jeremy and A.P. often go round there to play him some of their tapes.”
“Jeremy and A.P.? You’re joking, I hope.”
“You hope in vain, Mum.” Laura was enjoying telling her mother what people like her needed to be told. That an Aids victim wasn’t the modern equivalent of a leper. “Janis and Kurt visit Matthew regularly,” she went on, “and Carla and Alan sometimes take little David with them. Matthew says Alan is the sort of rabbi who might have helped him find religion.”
“It’s a pity he didn’t.”
“Well, it might perhaps have helped him now,” Laura replied. “But given the number of gay clergymen there are nowadays, religion wouldn’t have stopped Matthew from being gay and I’m sure that’s what you meant.”
Shirley’s response was, “You don’t take Bessie to that den of iniquity, do you?”
Laura hung up on her.
How did a woman like that produce me! But what have I done to my own daughter?
The family now had two of its members undergoing psychoanalysis – though Moira barely qualified as a member. Bessie’s analyst had made a pronouncement shattering to Laura: Her little girl’s real problem wasn’t a fattie’s desire to be a sylph, but a deep-seated insecurity.
How has my adored child got that way? thought Laura. Did it begin when I was often working away from home? But I’ve made up for that since I married Jake. Is it due to my taking care not to show Bessie the favouritism she doubtless expected? And do Jake and I know any of our children better now than we did before Jeremy let the cat out of the bag?
Laura now watched over Bessie obsessively and such was the tension at home, it was not surprising that Janis and Jeremy spent as little time there as possible. Bessie’s teachers had displayed sympathy and support; seemingly she was not the first anorexia case they had encountered among their pupils though the others were older girls. And their reason for starving themselves less complicated than my daughter’s, Laura thought with distress, given the willowy shapes of the young models in TV commercials, even those advertising chocolate, a succulent bar dominating the ad – and what a conflict that sets up for a girl with a sweet tooth.
What was anorexia but another side effect of the consumer society in which the setting up of role models was part of the hard sell and had a lot to answer for?
Laura, though, now knew she could not blame her child’s condition entirely upon that but was in some way answerable herself. Meanwhile Bessie was on the downhill path and seemed not to care that she now resembled a currant-eyed scarecrow. Indeed, there were times when Laura sensed that she was relishing being the source of anxiety she had become to her parents.
Laura transferred the pudding mixture to a baking tin and found she had not switched on the oven. The hell with it! Bessie wouldn’t eat it and Janis and Jeremy were invited for dinner at Matthew’s tonight. This was the housekeeper’s day off, and Laura felt like a caged lion alone with its frustration and fruitlessly lashing its tail.
A moment later she was dialling a Manchester telephone number.
“Uncle Nat?”
“That’s Laura, isn’t it?”
“None other.”
“I sometimes confuse your voice with Marianne’s.”
“How’re you doing?”
“As well you didn’t ask what am I doing. The answer would be I’ve turned into an idle old man. I used to wish I had time to spare for dipping into my library, but when you have the time –”
“I seem to remember, though,” said Laura, “on one of my visits north finding you doing a bit of gardening.”
“What long memories you and Leona have. That’s the sort of thing my daughter keeps saying to me. A younger person’s way of getting an oldster out of his rocking chair! But I intend getting out of mine for a few days. I’m coming to London to see Matthew.”
“He’ll be thrilled to hear it – the rest of the family here, too, and I in particular am more than pleased.” Laura was unable to maintain her cheerful tone. “Relieved would be a better word, Uncle Nat. I rang up to ask if you’d come and stay with me for a while. The truth is – well, I’m in the heck of a mess and it’s something even Marianne can’t help me sort out. My granddad once told me that you sometimes helped your patients in more ways than the physical.”
“I never denied them a listening ear, if that’s what you mean, but tranquillizers have largely and regrettably taken over from that.”
“Grandpa said you’d got to the bottom of why a little boy was stuttering and after you’d ticked off the parents he soon stopped it.”
Was Laura due for an eventual ticking-off from Uncle Nat? If so, she thought, I no doubt deserve it. She gave him a resumé of the nightmare situation in which she now found herself.
“And you kept that from me?”
“You haven’t been too well, have you?”
“I’m much improved and even if I weren’t, would I let you down?”
Chapter 5
Howard was writing his weekly letter to Matthew, to whom though they were raised in the same town he had not felt close when they were children. Nor did he now, but that made it none the less distressing that his cousin was slowly wasting away, that Matthew might no longer be alive when the hydrangea Howard could see through the window bloomed again.
A picture misted by time rose before him. Sabbath afternoon at his great-grandmother’s house, the highlight of the week for the family. Cakes and sandwiches on the tea-table. The adults all talking at once. His sister and Matthew’s together with their dolls. And Matthew watching Howard and Mark play cards behind the sofa, where Sarah Sandberg for whom the Sabbath was sacrosanct would not cast her eye upon the schoolboy sinners.
Mark and I, the twosome we were, never thought of asking Matthew to join in. Kids didn’t realize that exclusion could hurt, and Matthew wasn’t the assertive sort. He h
ad known too, as the adults did, that Howard and Mark felt more like brothers than second cousins.
Closer than some brothers, Howard thought now, given that my dad and Uncle Arnold had only the blood tie in common. But as if with a single mind, Howard and Mark had volunteered together to lend their strength to Israel’s fight for survival in the ’67 war.
Kate too, and Howard could remember Mark’s granddad aiding and abetting them against their parents’ wishes. David had driven them to London, paid for their tickets, and put them on a plane with other youngsters who had dropped everything to do what they knew had to be done.
Planeloads of kids like us arrived from all over the world, Howard recalled, and our going there to take over essential jobs vacated by those mobilized for active service helped keep the wheels turning.
Only Howard and Kate, though, had come back, and she to tell the family she wanted to make her life in Israel with Aryeh, whom she had met and fallen in love with there.
Howard had not forgotten his parents’ reaction to their seventeen-year-old daughter’s decisiveness. Nor Sarah Sandberg’s saying it was God’s will that a new branch of the family take root in hallowed land. Well, words to that effect. When gripped by emotion Sarah had tended to wax lyrical. Like her legendary almonds and raisins, which Howard had thought amusing until he found himself tasting them.
What would Mark have said about my living in Germany? Would he too have been censorious? The lad I remember would not. But who could know, had Mark lived, that events wouldn’t have changed him as they had others in the family? You started out with only your genes dictating your personality, but life could turn you into someone you yourself barely recognized.
There was no guarantee that Howard and Mark, born on the same day, would still be thinking alike at the age of forty – a landmark Howard had passed last week, and as always on his birthday he had thought of Mark.
Did Kate ever think of Margaret, once her closest friend? Or had she firmly put from her mind the cousin whose adult path was so different from her own? The path perhaps, but in effect not the destination, Howard reflected – Margaret in a closed-order nunnery, and Kate living in one of Israel’s ultra-orthodox enclaves.
What Matthew and I now have in common is, for each of us it’s as if we no longer have a sister. Do my letters cheer him up? Or serve to remind him of how, when we were all kids, Mark and I had no time for him? But that didn’t stop him from writing to me when Mark died. By then, Matthew was a drama student in London.
Karin popped her head around the study door. “Supper will soon be ready, Howard. And we have an unexpected visitor.”
“Be with you in a minute, darling –”
“The visitor is Ben.”
Howard put down his pen and rose. “What is he doing here on a weekday? Is something wrong?”
“From his expression I would say so. But he did not, and I would advise you not to question him.”
There remained, and perhaps always would, no-go areas in Howard’s relationship with his son. But the same went for Karin and her kids. When Magda and Rudy returned from spending time in Berlin with their father and one or the other seemed tetchy, or subdued, she held her tongue.
Howard sometimes marvelled at her being the down-to-earth person she was; that despite her background her priorities were the same as his; that she didn’t want servants to wait on her, or a chauffeur to drive her around, but was content with the life they now shared.
He followed her into the live-in kitchen that epitomized their lifestyle. Though this house was a wedding gift from her parents, its atmosphere was of the real world, poles apart from the home in which she had grown up.
Somehow Karin managed to cope with the twin demands of domesticity and her career. She had not wanted resident help and like Laura employed a daily housekeeper. But she was now carrying Howard’s child. This evening her ankles looked puffy. And he had not yet voiced his anxiety about the frequent commuting between here and Berlin that their living in Munich necessitated. Though she had cut down on her business trips elsewhere, delegating some of them to her personal assistant, there were still times when she flew to wherever at a minute’s notice.
Howard, on the other hand, was anchored to a desk in Munich and marvelled too at how easily he had adapted to dealing with the paperwork for transactions involving goods he never saw.
“Where there’s a will there’s a way,” had proved true for Howard in all respects. He had got himself back into his son’s life and Ben was here on a weekday, to prove it, an event that despite the lad’s troubled demeanour could not but gladden Howard’s heart. I’m no longer just the father who brings him here on a Sunday morning and takes him home in the evening. He’s come to me.
“Something smells good!” he said to Karin with a surge of exuberance. “What’s Rudy missing by eating at his friend’s house tonight?”
She was adding salt to a pan of soup, and Magda laying cutlery on the red and white checked tablecloth that lent colour to the dining alcove – one of Karin’s homely touches that Howard still found surprising.
“If I tell to you what is for supper it will not then be a surprise,” Karin said with a smile, “and it is I who have cooked it, since I arrived home early. What Frau Schwartz has made for us I have put into the deep freeze.”
Karin paused to taste the soup. “Ben, he has had his supper, but I am hoping he will join us for dessert.”
“If we’re having ice-cream, I’m sure he will,” said Howard.
“How did you guess?” said Karin.
And how inane this conversation is, thought Howard. But she’s helping me deal with whatever’s troubling Ben and I couldn’t have a better wife. Howard had never known his son so silent.
“There is also some of Frau Schwartz’s Apfelkuchen in the refrigerator,” Karin went on with the charade. “On Sunday, Ben, he asked for a second helping.”
“If he does not want it, I would like to have it with my ice-cream,” said Magda.
Howard thought it time to prod his lad into saying something. “Why don’t you and Magda share the Apfelkuchen, Ben?”
“I don’t feel like eating dessert this evening and when I told my mother she made a fuss and asked if I was feeling ill.”
“I would worry that Magda and Rudy were ill if they had said they did not want dessert,” said Karin. “That is how we mothers are.”
“But I’m not ill!” Ben replied with feeling. “And my mother said I was making it up, when I told her what has upset me.”
He was standing beside the window, his expression now mutinous.
“How about telling your dad what’s upset you?” said Howard.
“While he is doing so,” said Karin, “Magda and I shall go upstairs to her room and decide what she shall wear for her friend’s birthday party.”
“We have already decided I shall wear my new skirt and blouse –”
Karin took her by the hand. “Come along, Magda.”
Ben waited for the door to close behind them before saying perceptively, “Karin knows that this evening it’s only you I’ve come to see, Daddy –”
“And I’m always here for you. I want you to know that. Let me add, though, that angry as you seem to be with your mother she loves you as much as I do and –”
“But I wasn’t making up what I told her!” Ben interrupted. “And she didn’t give me time to tell her everything!”
Howard put a hand on his shoulder. “Calm down, lad. Let’s make ourselves comfortable, shall we?”
They sat down on the padded window-seat, Ben’s favourite place to curl up with a book when he came on Sundays and the family stayed at home.
Did he feel part of this family? Howard hoped so. “Come on, then. Out with it, I’m listening.”
“There are things I don’t understand, Daddy, and they stop me from being happy.”
“Would you like to tell me what sort of things?”
“Once, at Uncle Ernst’s house, he said to me that
the Jews are lying. That there wasn’t a Holocaust. I didn’t know what that word meant and when I asked him, he said it wasn’t necessary for me to know. Only to believe him, like all the children in his family do.”
Good old Uncle Ernst! The one-time SS officer. “Was your mother there when he said that to you?”
Ben shook his head. “If she had been, I’m sure she would have told him what I did. That you’re a Jew and you don’t tell lies.”
Would Christina have risked a confrontation with her family’s venerable elder?
“When I told her, she said I must excuse Uncle Ernst because he’s very old.”
But still spouting the poison of his younger years and getting away with it, thought Howard.
“It isn’t just Uncle Ernst,” Ben went on. “There’s a new boy at my school who’s moved to Munich from Dusseldorf. Today he said to me and some other boys the same as Uncle Ernst said to me. About the Jews lying.”
“Did you give him the same answer you gave the old man?”
Ben nodded. “And afterwards all the boys, not just him, made jokes about my nose!”
“Is that what your mother accused you of making up?”
“Not exactly. But she didn’t believe me when I told her the boy from Dusseldorf made himself a moustache with a pencil, raised his hand and said, ‘Heil Hitler! Juden araus!’”
How many budding neo-Nazis were there in West Germany’s schools? The incident Ben had described wasn’t something Christina would easily bring herself to believe possible in the eighties.
Nor did Howard want to believe it, but his son hadn’t dreamed it up and a chill had settled in the pit of his stomach. There was little doubt that Ben was suffering the effects of the computer games Howard had heard about. Lodged by their programmers in easily accessible “mail boxes” which kids who had home computers could call up.
How more insidious could the implanting be? And where it would do the most damage. What were the children but the nation’s future?