She awoke to find herself in bed but she did not know where. She got up hoping to find a bathroom and recalled suddenly where she was. New York. She made for the open door through which she could see the pine-panelled bath. First things first.
Back in her bedroom, her room, she remembered there was only one, she looked at her watch. Two a.m. which was really seven, her normal breakfast time. No wonder she was hungry. She opened the blinds. Outside it was dark, the lights in the tall buildings like so many illuminated postage stamps. Maurice would still be sleeping. In the cupboard at the kitchenette end of the studio she found instant coffee, a packet of Hi-Ho crackers, some Land O Lakes Sweet Cream Lightly Salted Butter and a jar of Smuckers grape preserve. She opened the cooker out of curiosity. The rotisserie and baking tray were wrapped in transparent bubble pack and had never been used.
She was shivering in her nightdress and examined the heater on which she could see no means of adjustment, although Sydney, she was sure, would not have been so foolish and would have known immediately how it worked. She was about to give up when her fingers encountered a panel within which there was a battery of buttons marked “hi”, “lo”, “duct”, “fan”, “vent”, “air”, “warm”, “cold”, “boost”, “on”, “off”, “exhaust”, “comfort range”. She had always seized up in the face of anything mechanical which offered more than two options so she slid the panel shut again and wrapped herself in her dressing gown.
She managed to make some coffee but there was no milk in the fridge. A packet of “non-dairy creamer” contained a white powder which she swirled into her cup. She thought about leaving a note for the milkman and then perhaps not, she couldn’t imagine him climbing fifteen floors and then having to go back for a raspberry yoghurt. She felt strangely detached, alone in her head, and imagined it was the effects of the time change.
She began unenthusiastically to unpack her cases but the clothes seemed to belong to somebody else and were unfamiliar. It was toom to much of an effort. She took the blue imitation leather writing case which her granddaughters, Debbie and Lisa, had given her as a going away present and climbed back into bed.
DEAR RACHEL…
Although she got on well with Josh, who was so like his father, and Carol, in whom she so often saw with uncomfortable clarity herself, it was Rachel, headstrong as she was, with whom she had the most rapport.
I am writing this at seven o’clock our time, although of course here it is only two in the morning. The flight was uneventful, and I was so excited I quite forgot to be afraid. I sat next to a nice young man who was travelling to Poughkeepsie (he collected the plastic cutlery for his camping holidays). He asked me why I was going to New York and it was difficult to know what to tell him. It sounded ridiculous for someone of my age to say I had a boy-friend (gentleman-friend?) so I pretended it was a business trip and he said what business and I muttered something about fashion and started to get myself all tied up.
Why am I here? I ask it now of myself. A bit late perhaps, I hear you say, but I followed my instincts which have always stood me in good stead. You probably won’t understand, I remember thinking my mother immune from the heart-searchings which plague young people, but since your father died I have felt like a lost lamb (sheep!). I know you thought I was all right because I had a cheerful face and managed to carry on doing all the things that I had done when he was alive. The difference was that when we were together the activities had some meaning, but for the last two years I have done everything mechanically, as if I was a robot which had been programmed, and I was afraid to stop being busy because then I might have to face myself and the empty landscape of the future. I had several roles – mother, grandmother, friend, neighbour, committee woman – and I tried to play them, changing one hat quickly for another to avoid the confrontation with what lay underneath the activity. I know that I appeared to be functioning properly but in actual fact I was outside myself, watching myself live.
It’s funny how I can say all this to you on paper and not face to face. In this strange room, in the limbo of the day/ night, I feel that of the three of you I want you, Rachel, to understand. I am not being disloyal to your father. No one can ever take Sydney’s place and you know it. We were childhood sweethearts and grew up together and had a very special relationship. I know that you saw your father as rather stern and authoritarian at times, but believe me, Rachel, he only had your interests at heart and wanted nothing more than for you all to be happy and good and caring human beings. He was uncompromising but he applied the same strict standards to himself that he expected of you so I don’t think you really had anything to complain about. There will never be anyone to take his place. This does not mean that I must live for the rest of the life God grants me by myself. I know I wasn’t alone, with you and Josh and Carol, and Addie, and Beatty and Mirrie and everyone else around but inside I was alone. It wasn’t until I met Maurice in Israel that I felt for the first time that someone was relating to me as me, Kitty Shelton, not wearing any of my hats.
You can’t see why I have to stay for six months? About the babies. Of course I want to look after Debbie and Lisa and Mathew while Carol is in the Clinic. Of course I want to be there when Sarah gives birth to Josh’s first child. Above all I want to be with you, my baby, when you have yours. But if I’d stayed, Rachel, or came back without giving New York and Maurice a chance, I would be sucked in again to my life on the periphery of things, chopped in little pieces, at everyone’s beck and call, to be returned – when you’d all finished with me – to the emptiness of my own flat with only my memories and the television for company. I have to give this a try. Do you think I like it, so far away from you all?
About Maurice, I realise that he seems an old man to you (I’m not so young myself), but there is something between us, both in the flesh and on paper, which we both immediately recognised as important. It’s almost as if I’d known him all my life. If I hadn’t felt that there was something strong here, something compelling, something worth pursuing, would I have come all this way? I’m not crazy. Although just now instead of sitting here in this strange room with none of my familiar things around me and the air-conditioning driving me mad, I long to be back in my own bed, my own room where I put out my hand and know just where everything is. I’m not pretending New York will not be an effort – God knows I’m no Columbus – but what sort of life is it to sit around waiting for the next instalment of ‘Dallas’ or a visit from the grandchildren like the other bridge widows? I am going to live again. Or try. Of course I love you all. I think I love Maurice. Don’t laugh, Rachel, the emotions don’t age…
When Kitty awoke for the second time, although the sun was streaming into the room through the window on to the writing-pad which had fallen to the floor, the room was icy. She looked at her watch, struggling to gather her mental and physical whereabouts. It was morning, New York time, and she had been writing to Rachel, and judging from the number of pages which had spilled out across the floor, at unaccustomed length. She had never been much of a letter writer, communicating regularly only with a distant cousin in Greenock – who was now in an old people’s home – and was surprised at her nocturnal loquacity. It was Sydney who had done most of the writing, when writing there was to do, most of the talking really, while she got on with raising the family and her voluntary work. Collecting up the close-written pages she wondered if Rachel had perhaps been right, that with Sydney to think for her she hadn’t bothered to think – throughout her married life she had scarcely dared an opinion, believing with Sydney in a united front as far as the children were concerned – and that there were unplumbed depths in herself.
All that was past now anyway. Sydney, with his uncompromising views, was gone, and of his children only Carol in Godalming ran her household in accordance with tradition. As far as her own life was concerned Kitty carried on as she had been used to but there had been erosions, which Sydney would not have tolerated, in her performance of the precepts which seemed someho
w to be lacking in significance now that he was no longer around. Maurice of course, although the son of a Frankfurt rabbi who had perished along with every other member of his family as a result of Hitler’s “Final Solution”, was an atheist. This would have bothered Sydney more, she felt, than the fact that she might be in love with him.
The emotions do not age. She had written it in her letter to Rachel, and it was true. When she considered Maurice there was a quickening of the pulse and a sensation of joy indistinguishable from that which she had felt as a young girl for Sydney. There had been no other men. How anachronistic it seemed now when to be on one’s first husband after more than a few years seemed rather quaint and lacking in initiative. She shuddered sometimes when she thought of the offspring of the next generation, a rag-bag of odds and ends with an assortment of parents or petrie dishes from whom they were supposed to derive some vestige of stability. She felt profoundly sorry for all the little AID and IVF mites who would be running around, and although she sympathised with the women unable to have children – she’d had to listen to her sister-in-law Frieda on that subject all her married life – she didn’t hold with tampering with the innermost mysteries of nature even if it were for the benefits of technological progress. What about the violation of children’s rights, orphaning them by using frozen sperm and eggs, deceiving them about their paternity?
In the Jewish scale of values every innocent human life was of infinite worth, one human being was worth no more or less than a million others, and there was no justification for their sacrifice, in vitro or out of it, on the altar of science. She was glad that she’d had her family, her children, before the ingenuity of the scientists had presented so many options. According to Rachel the sum of scientific knowledge was doubled every eight years and man acquired as much new knowledge in this time as he had accumulated over all the millennia of human inquiry and discovery in the past. She’d soon forget all that when she had a child of her own to look after although Rachel was convinced that other than feeding it now and again she would be free to pursue other interests, just as she had always done.
Kitty hadn’t disillusioned her about motherhood; the broken nights – when one must always be listening for the child’s call, the child’s cry – the practical demands (their inescapable dailyness and unavoidableness) and the necessity of meeting them; the sapping of the energies, the whittling away of the resources until one’s entire world became invaded, bounded, by a tiny defenceless, facsimile human bundle. She would have liked to make her youngest daughter a present of more than half a century of experience, to pass on to her the knowledge that having children altered the whole texture of reality, changed the shape of the world, but Rachel had to find out for herself, that much Kitty had learned.
She put the letter on the table to finish later and wondered whether she should put on clothes appropriate to the external heat or the internal chill to face her first New York day. She showered (once she had worked out the complicated vagaries of the unfamiliar plumbing) and dressed, not crediting the sun, in a warm skirt and sweater, and although she should have gone at once to tell Maurice she was awake, unpacked her cases and arranged everything, with the precision she had learned from Sydney, in the walk-in closet which was large enough to accommodate the wardrobe of a film star. She hadn’t brought too much luggage, hedging her bets she supposed, the size of her suitcases demonstrating her doubt about the new life she was contemplating.
She buttoned the blouses and shook the skirts on their hangers to remove the creases, aware that she was procrastinating. It was no longer any good wondering if she should have come, wishing she were in the familiar comfort of her home with Addie Jacobs in the flat across the way. She was here and she was hungry. She picked up her handbag, unlocked the double locks of her front door and crossed the Rubicon of the hall.
The emotions do not age. She might have been a girl at the door of her lover. Her mouth was dry. She read the white slip on the door: “M Morgenthau”, Morning Dew. She adjusted the waistband of her skirt – her body was still swollen after the flight – and pressed the bell. When there was no reply she relaxed her prepared smile. Had Maurice gone out, abandoned her? Was she perhaps still dreaming? She raised a hand to ring again. The door opened.
A cadaverous man wearing a tee-shirt, slacks and a sun visor opened the door.
Kitty stared at him.
“Mo,” he said over his shoulder, “she woke up!”
Five
She didn’t know what she had been expecting, certainly not the three strange pairs of eyes that appraised her from Maurice’s sitting-room. There was the tall thin stranger who had opened the door, stooped and sinewy. What remained of his hair was grey, as was his moustache, and a bald brown dome like the top of an egg showed above the sun visor. A stout man, almost as wide as he was tall, his paunch straining at a yellow shirt and spilling over a pair of violet trousers, sat in an armchair next to Maurice’s easel, clutching a carrier bag. A third visitor, in a red track-suit, dark and unshaven, held a pile of newspapers. They were all staring at her as if she were a thing from another world.
Maurice came from the kitchen holding a coffee pot.
“We play poker Tuesdays and Thursdays,” he said apologetically to Kitty, his glance taking in his three companions. “They couldn’t wait.”
“Six months he’s been talking about you,” the fat one said. “Kitty this, Kitty that. We helped him fix the place up.”
“Herb Bograd, Mort Zuckerman, Ed Benedetti,” Maurice said, starting with the fat man. “Herb had a column in the newspaper Gourmet Cuisine in 15 Minutes.”
“No one cooks any more,” Herb said. “In New York people don’t have time to open a can.”
“You should try his stuffed mussels…” The man in the track-suit began when he was stopped by a look from Maurice who went on with the introductions. “Mort Zuckerman. Neurosurgeon. Retired. We’re all retired. This is Ed Benedetti, one time Professor of Literature…”
“We met,” Ed said.
“…at Yale. Now runs an Adult Education Class at NYU.”
“Hi, Kitty,” they chorused, as if schooled by Maurice.
“Did you sleep?” Maurice said.
“Until two, your time, then I wrote to Rachel.”
“How’s she doing?” Mort said. “Did Patrick get the psychiatric internship?”
Kitty stared at him.
“They know all about you,” Maurice said apologetically.
“He’s been a different man,” Ed said. “You could never get a word out of him.”
“Let it all hang out on that easel,” Mort said.
“‘The dark night of the soul.’” Ed nodded towards the half finished canvas depicting an old people’s transport – the ill, the crippled, the dying – on its way to Theresiendstadt, in mud brown and in grey.
“He never speaks about it,” Mort said.
Kitty looked round the room. “I have many acquaintances but few friends,” Maurice had written in one of his letters. This bizarre poker-game, this ill-matched crew must, she thought, sensing the intimacy which filled the room, furnishing it with camaraderie, have been the few.
“I’m fixing coffee,” Maurice said. “We waited.”
Herb opened his carrier bag. “I bought the croosants, and some back rashers. I thought you might be…”
“She’ll eat eggs,” Mort said pointedly. “Did you bring eggs?”
“Eggs I’ve got,” Maurice said. “How do you like them?”
Kitty realised that it was lunchtime as far as her stomach was concerned, and despite the crackers and the grape jelly of the small hours she was starving. They piled into Maurice’s kitchen where they seated her at the head of the table. Herb got busy with the frying pan at the hob.
“Straight up or over-light?”
Kitty realised that he meant the eggs and wondered what fat he was frying them in. “I’m not fussy.” She decided not to make too many enquiries. Mort poured coffee into her mug.
“I’m a widower,” he said to make her feel at home. He took out a photograph which from the look of it seemed to live in his pocket. A women with bleached hair and blue eyes, with a crack across her cheek from the crumpled paper, smiled at her. “Bright’s disease. Six years ago.”
To Live in Peace Page 4
