To begin with she was needed, not only by Maurice, of whose growing attachment to her she had become increasingly aware, but by Herb and Ed and Mort, the “poker-game”, to whom she had become both confidante and friend. In the early days of her visit there had been no cards played but as the weeks progressed Kitty had been aware that on Tuesdays and Thursdays after dinner the door bell would be rung, first by Ed, then by Herb, then by Mort, and the three of them would dispose themselves around the apartment, sitting down and jumping up uneasily as if they were on hot bricks. The conversation – unlike the other occasions when they called, singly or together, when the argument (more often than not over the events in the Middle East) became heated – had been desultory and Kitty had been aware that something was amiss but had not been able to put her finger on it until the evening when Ed, looking out of the window and jingling the loose change in his pocket had said: “Remember that night you declined to see my two pairs when you had threes, Mo? When Herb and me walked away with two hundred dollars?” and the penny had suddenly dropped. Kitty had cleared away the dinner things, taken the cards from the kitchen drawer and laid them unequivocally upon the table where they were devoured with disbelief by four pairs of hungry eyes.
Maurice had been the first to speak. “What’s that for, Kit?”
“Why don’t you have a game of poker?” she said. They advanced on the table as if mesmerised.
“Poker?” Ed said, as if he had no idea what she was talking about.
“A nice game of cards.”
“What about you?” Maurice said.
“What about me?” Kitty arranged the plates in Maurice’s dishwasher which offered a choice of six programmes each with further permutations.
“What will you do?”
“Don’t worry about me,” Kitty said. “I’m going out.”
And she was, for in this fast moving, hard living city where everyone seemed always to be running and, though she spoke the language, she had felt peculiarly alien, she had found a friend. On one of her downtown shopping expeditions she had spent the morning in Bloomingdale’s, taking the elevator to acquaint herself with the floors. In London lifts nobody spoke; a self-conscious silence isolated the retracted bodies as everyone, blankly expressionless, faced the doors. New York elevators were an entertainment in themselves as between the storeys love lives were laid bare (leaving you with a cliffhanger as the passengers disembarked), secrets revealed, friendships renewed, rendezvous made, shopping exhibited, garments tried on, shoes changed, fast food consumed, cosmetics applied and the political situation discussed. Having tired herself out tramping through the various departments (although she had not bought a thing) Kitty took one of these moving microcosms of life to the ground (first, she would have to remember) floor.
A southern belle, in a black bathing suit, yellow sash and high-heeled pumps stepped into the aisle and drenched her in a gratuitous cloud of something that smelled for all the world like over-ripe pineapples, and thrust a leaflet into her hand as she made her way over the black and white floor to the glitz of the Estée Lauder counter to replenish her make-up. A sour matron with a bright blonde perm and iridescent eye-shadow, who came on strong with her sales pitch urging Kitty to further extravagance for her skin’s sake, lost interest immediately when Kitty tried to pay for her purchases with a traveller’s cheque, which her bank had assured her was just like currency, and, removing an imaginary mote from her eye, demanded identification.
Opening her wallet, with its display of English credit cards, Kitty found that nothing would satisfy the gorgon short of her passport. Flustered and embarrassed she was regretting she had embarked upon the whole transaction when the Bloomingdale’s personal shopper (an American institution which saved the pampered customer time and energy, in scouring the departments), a pencil-slim, elegant lady dressed in ice-pink, even to her shoes, had come to her rescue. Assessing the situation she sanctioned the sale with a flick of her pencil and, taking Kitty by the elbow, whisked her up to the coffee shop where over the espressos she revealed herself as one Bette Birnstingl – to Kitty’s amazement a contemporary – grandmother of three.
Over snapshots of their respective families: Kitty’s in Godalming (Debbie and Lisa and Mathew outside Peartree Cottage which had now been sold), and Bette’s in New Jersey and Palm Springs, they found an immediate rapport. Addresses were exchanged across the laminated table top, and from that moment Bette took Kitty under her wing. Like Kitty she was a widow, having buried two husbands. She lived in a duplex high above Manhattan and her talents embraced not only the ability to select suitable outfits for Bloomingdale clients (which occupied her two days a week), but interior decoration. Apart from transforming herself (lifted face, capped teeth, silicone-filled bosom, tucked “tush” and the punishing regime of the Beverley Hills diet) she had converted what was once a few dark rooms connected by a narrow hallway into an area of unlimited space and light and had oriented her living-room, she told Kitty on her first visit, towards the sky.
Kitty followed her new friend round her apartment while she explained enthusiastically how she had opened up the entire first floor, expanding the area both vertically and horizontally, eliminated interior walls (leaving only the kitchen and the powder-room) and raised the ceiling to expose beams and add visual interest. The staircase was “floated” by tearing down the walls surrounding it and the closet underneath was made to “disappear” by covering it with mirrors. A large solarium window, which enclosed the terrace, had not only made the shape of the room more interesting (reclaiming, Bette enthused, valuable living space and light) but was a creative tour de force.
“I wanted to break down barriers to the outside and draw the city’s best aspects into the room,” Bette said. “There’s nothing more exciting than that view!”
The cityscape, dramatic by day and magical by night, grew familiar to Kitty as Bette’s apartment (each area with its own “discrete identity”) became her second home. Sitting on Bette’s peach and green print sofa, or on her bed (walls upholstered with floral fabric – sunshine and flowers – to give a special feeling of warmth and cosiness), Kitty would reminisce about her family in England, sometimes reading aloud their letters, and talk affectionately of Maurice while Bette practised her yoga on the off-white carpet or made up her face (she had almost as many brushes as Maurice) at the lady’s writing desk, positioned strategically to catch the natural light, before the bedroom window.
As far as the city was concerned Kitty could not have had a better guide. While Maurice introduced her to its cultural delights, Bette, who had been born and bred in New York where her father had been in the rag trade, showed her where to bargain hunt in Chinatown and Little Italy, and how to find designer labels (with last year’s skirt length) on the Lower East Side. On Bette’s free days, while Maurice painted, they took the F train to Delancey or the Second Avenue bus downtown, exchanged gossip over midday salads at One/Fifth, or sat on the sidewalk with coffee and cannoli (Kitty) on Bleeker Street. In less adventurous mood they’d lunch at the Russian Tea Room where the Cossack waiter, who had known Bette for years served them Blinchiki, discreetly pointing out the whereabouts, on the red leather chairs among the pink tablecloths, of Garson Kanin with Ruth Gordon, or Peter Shaffer or Lauren Bacall.
Kitty had always enjoyed good health and considered herself no slouch but, trying to keep up with the lithe form of Bette Birnstingl as she tapped swiftly on her impossibly high heels along Fifth or sashayed down the stairs at Bergdorf’s (scorning the elevator), she became uncomfortably aware of her years. According to Bette this was due to her negative childhood encounters with sports (common in women over thirty) and she suggested that Kitty come with her to aerobic dancing – conditioning of the heart muscles without going into oxygen debt. Egged on by Bette, Kitty bought a shimmering leotard like a green second skin (Kitty had opted for black but Bette had said she must think more positive), and now got out of bed twice a week at the crack of dawn to accompany her new
friend to the bare church hall where she kept her special shoes in a plastic carrier amongst the rows of others – “Fast Feet” and “A Bagel Store & More” – on the hooks.
She had at first been apprehensive, it was so long since she had taken any exercise, had thought she was too old. The eager class of leotarded ladies (in all shapes and sizes) dispelled her fears with the warmth of their welcome. In exchange for a dollar she was given her own street door key for security reasons (once class had started the bell could not be heard), and was instructed not to leave any valuables in the dressing-room, to take her furs down to the hall in winter, and to keep her pocket book (handbag) with her at all times.
Doubting she would ever get the hang of the rapid dance routine demonstrated by what looked like a filleted Miss America in time to a hit tape, Kitty, after the initial warm-up, had stepped and stumbled, struggling to keep up. She could scarcely believe (as she had written to Rachel) that now she moved to the music – “Clap, clap! Turn it! Shimmy! Pony-trap! Disco! Do it again! Break! Two! Inside! Outside! Heel-toe! Heel-toe! Snap! Lunge it! Break two! One more!” – counting her carotid pulse at the end of each routine as to the manner born. There was no doubt that she felt better for the classes and as she crowded round the water-cooler at the end of each session, her body damp, her hair plastered to her forehead, she felt a glow of achievement, an aura of well-being, and wished that her children could see her.
Kitty had not introduced Bette to Maurice. Although he said nothing, Kitty sensed that he was jealous of her friend. She knew that he fought shy of strangers, had difficulties trusting people, and thought it politic to keep the two of them apart. Bette, however, who despite her natural gregariousness was lonely (Kitty could detect beneath the frenzied activity the little girl), loved to hear about Maurice and thought it romantic that Kitty had crossed the Atlantic to be by his side. With her customary forthrightness she asked Kitty whether she was going to marry him and was not satisfied with the reply that the subject had not, as yet, been broached.
“You must have thought about it, honey,” Bette said over lunch at the dairy restaurant on the corner of Grand and Ludlow, but the truth was that Kitty had ignored the issue whenever it had insinuated itself into her mind. She was fond of Maurice, she would not otherwise have come to New York, but he was not Sydney with his devotion to his faith for which Maurice seemed not to have the slightest feel. She had tried to keep up her standards, to perpetuate the ritual she had followed for so many years with Sydney. It had not been easy. She had bought a white, easy-care tablecloth in Macy’s, and stainless- steel candlesticks, and set them on Maurice’s kitchen table on Friday nights, inviting Ed and Herb and Mort to inaugurate the Sabbath.
She had blessed the candles (Ed watching with amazement) and pronounced the benediction over the wine (Maurice could not bring himself to, although once he had quoted his beloved Heine: “Komme, Freund, der Braut entgegen, lass uns den Sabbat begrüssen”) from the siddur, the mini-encyclopaedia of Jewish life she had brought with her from England. Over the traditional meal she had cooked she had tried, haltingly (Sydney would have done it so much better), to explain to Ed how the Sabbath with its many laws constituted Judaism’s attempt to create, on one day each week, a taste of the Messianic age, and that one purpose of it was to produce a state of inner peace by relying for twenty-four hours on the resources of mind and body rather than external sources of technology. It was a day for family and friends, of communication between human beings, for returning to oneself.
Ed said it sounded like the super-Sunday Norman Mailer had suggested when he was campaigning for Mayor of New York, minimising traffic in the city and limiting transportation. Kitty said that the Jews had been observing super-Sabbaths for three thousand years and that Mailer’s idea was not so original.
She did her best to reproduce in Manhattan the Friday nights she had known, even to recitation, in its shortened form, of the Grace after Meals (insisting that the men covered their heads) but the spirit of the evening was marred by Herb and Mort who glanced constantly at their watches afraid they would be late for the ball game.
When they’d gone Maurice cleared the dishes and started to fold the tablecloth but she explained that it had to stay in place until the following sunset and Maurice put his arms round her and said: “You’re a good woman, Kit, I’m sorry I can’t go along with all that praying.” And she’d thought that if her youth had been spent in Dachau and Bergen-Belsen instead of north-west London she might have a few questions to ask too. They had spent the evening listening to Bach’s B Minor Mass which Kitty thought went oddly with the Sabbath candles which guttered from the kitchen but she did not say anything and sat companionably close to Maurice in the knowledge that, without Sydney, as far as sanctifying the day of rest was concerned, she had done her best.
For Herb and Ed and Mort her Friday night meals became an institution and she was touched when Ed turned up for one of them with four embroidered velvet skull caps which he distributed proudly to her new family before she blessed the wine.
This evening she had spent with Bette who had entertained her with a blow by blow account of her day bedizening her clients with Calvin Klein and Albert Nipon and Bill Blass, and they had watched “Annie Hall” on video over plates of gravad lax on pumpernickel, leaving her “boys” to their poker game with a plate of butter cake she had made. Now, in the privacy of her studio which with its pots of trailing Alo’ and Dracino Marginata – which later would have star-shaped blossoms – selected by Bette, and her photographs of the family in their frames, already had the comfortable feel of home, she followed her mind across the Atlantic and opened her pad of airmail paper on the unfinished letter, her diary of the New World, and cast her mind back over the past frenetic week.
Last Monday, or was it Tuesday, we saw ‘Ghosts’ at the Brooks Atkinson with Liv Ullman (she’s lovely) as Mrs Alving. She has a real tomboy laugh. I thought it extraordinary and could see it again, especially after Ed explained about how Ibsen was able to find the universal in the commonplace and that Ibsen’s characters were later stolen and used by Bernard Shaw. Did you know that Engstrad was the inspiration for Alfred Doolittle in ‘Pygmalion’ (remember when we all went to ‘My Fair Lady’ on poor Daddy’s birthday?), and Oswald is the model for Dubedat in ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma’? According to Ed, Ibsen saw plainly that the past is a beast in chains, and that out of the unchaining of the beast comes art. We live willingly among ghosts (don’t we all?) and draw nourishment from them as well as pain. The first production of the play in English was given here in New York in 1894 and it wasn’t shown in London until 1914.
Ed is a mine of information. I told him about your writing Carol and he said why don’t you send him one or two of your poems? Why don’t you? He wants me to go along to his literature class. He’s given me the most fascinating book to read, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, a story which is set in Georgia between the wars, written in the form of an ignorant girl’s letters (of hope and hopelessness) to God, and is about incest and brutality and the will to survive. Celie’s letters are full of misery – ‘I’m poor, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook’ – but they burst with a terrible poetry which despite everything is sometimes very funny as well as sad and moving.
What other news? Israel is getting a bad press here. I suppose it’s the same in England. Herb says the Jews are divided from the Israelis. The Jews want to live in accordance with the Bible but the Israelis only pay lip service to it (the ‘land of Israel’ is only a biographical accident) and want to be a completely new people, a satellite of western culture. If they were offered better jobs elsewhere, they’d pack up and run. Eretz Yisrael means nothing to them!
What do you mean Rachel refuses to go to Sarah’s for Rosh Hashanah? Surely she can be adult enough to have a difference of opinion with Josh without going to those lengths (we have long arguments here round the kitchen table and still talk to each other)? In any case I don’t think it is very nice when Sara
h is taking so much trouble to entertain the family. I’ve given her my honey cake recipe but forgot about the tsimmes with dumpling which Grandma always used to make for a sweet New Year. She used prunes or dried pears but I prefer the carrots cooked with sugar or golden syrup. I am making it for Maurice and the “boys” (they’re looking forward to it). I’m inviting Bette, she’s really lonely poor soul (she doesn’t get on too well with her children), not that she keeps any of the holy days but she wants to see Maurice’s paintings (she has an entire wall of Kandinsky prints and wants to talk to Maurice about his Russian years) and the apartment. I’m not too sure how everyone will take to her (she’s a bit brash) but it will be nice to have another woman at the table.
I shall be going to the Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on Lexington, where I have been for the last few Saturdays, but I shan’t know a soul. They have a very touching notice outside – commemorating the number of Sabbaths the Soviet ‘refusenik’ Anatole Scharansky has spent in prison and how many more he must spend there before his sentence is complete – and a guard on duty. Inside, the red velvet benches in the gallery are not divided into seats like at home, the ladies wear little lace mats instead of hats on their heads according to the colours of their dresses – the tunes are all unfamiliar, the rabbi drags out the service and the heat is like a Turkish bath. I shall be thinking of you girls at home and probably shed a little tear.
To Live in Peace Page 9
