Rose of Jericho

by Rosemary Friedman

  “Sorry about the apple cake…” Kitty said.

  They had squandered little of the night in sleep.

  “I know you like peaches.”

  In the morning Sandra had said: “I must go to Harrods. They have both grown out of their socks.”

  “Norman!” Aunty Kitty was holding out his plate on which there were two yellow domes.

  He had felt resentful. Of Hilton and Milton and their need for socks. Displaced.

  “I’ll make one next week,” Kitty said.

  Norman stared at her.

  “An apple cake. Which night will you come?”

  Sixteen

  Freda watched Harry like a cat a mouse. She was making herself ill. She had lost weight. Harry had sent her to the doctor who had confirmed his suspicions that her bizarre behaviour could be directly ascribed to her ‘time of life’, to the ‘change’. She did not confide in the doctor, who was their friend and who played golf with Harry, did not tell him what was troubling her. He had given her pills which she did not take, advised Harry to keep an eye on her. They were keeping an eye on each other. Into the large house which they had filled with their harmony, their contentment in the simple pleasure of each other’s presence, a chill had crept, a shade, shattering the warmth which had nothing to do with the central heating which emanated from the gas boiler and which was pumped into the house through vents in every room, but with love. Like an extra cardigan Freda wore her suspicion.

  There had been another mauve letter. She kept it in her drawer. Beneath her underwear. ‘Harry Goldstien is my son’s father’. A boy. Harry had always wanted a son. He’d said so in the early days when it had been a subject for discussion. A son to play cricket with in the large garden and later golf, in which Harry would instruct him; a son who would accompany him to synagogue where he would become barmitzvah and who would follow him into the silver business, which had been Harry’s father’s, old man Goldstein’s, a son… With another woman who was scarcely literate and whose notepaper was mauve. Freda watched Harry’s every step. When he went out in the morning the lie of his tie, the crease of his trousers as he set off for the station, the degree of attentiveness with which he kissed her goodbye in the mornings, and with which he greeted her at night. Lately his solicitousness had increased, and it seemed to Freda more to confirm his guilt, his clandestine liaison with the writer of the mauve letters, than to be brought about by the doctor’s injunction for vigilance.

  She wondered why she had been so foolish for so long. How she could have been. Harry often worked late. Clients, he said, wanting to sell silver or to buy. It wasn’t unknown for him to go out at night to their homes, to value their crumb scoops, their Birmingham tea services and their Sheffield cake baskets. Now Freda wanted to know precisely where he had been. He had to describe to her the soup ladles and the caddy spoons, the sugar basins and the sauce boats. He could have been making them up. He could have been making up the two nights a week he spent at the youth club, coaching the youngsters in table tennis, organising debates. Freda went to spy on him, called for him at the synagogue in the car, ostensibly to save him the walk home which he enjoyed. “Harry!” she’d heard someone call, recognising her, “Your wife’s outside.” “Is anything wrong?” Harry had said, worried, as he’d got into the car. Freda shook her head.

  Everything was wrong. She had nightmares at night, and day dreams by day, which displaced the family she had created by the immaculate conception of her imagination. In her kitchen now she saw Harry’s son whose eyes and smile owed nothing to her genes. In bed she turned her back on Harry inhibited by the fact that he had made love to another woman and by the thought of the child he had fathered. Harry accepted her apparent loss of interest in him as confirmation of her menopause as it had been explained to him. The more concern he showed for Freda the more she shrank from him. The more he pleaded that she confide her wretchedness to him, the more she cried inside. Where she had waited eagerly for his nightly key in the lock she now dreaded his treacherous step over the threshold she kept so brightly polished. She searched his briefcase and his pockets for a sign of his perfidy. She followed him to town, to his shop, peering through the window with its salvers and its cream jugs to make sure he was there. On the day he was not – she had stood in the street until her back ached – she had rushed round to Kitty not knowing where else to turn. Had stood on her sister-in-law’s mat with an airmail letter, which Kitty had picked up and put on the hall table beneath a book to go back to the library.

  At Kitty’s kitchen table, over the coffee Kitty had made, and the marble cake which Kitty had put in front of her and which she did not touch, Freda told of Harry’s betrayal, and of the bombshell of the mauve letter, which had arrived to shatter her life together with Kitty’s postcard from Eilat. “Harry?” Kitty said. Harry, who would not say boo to a goose! She could not believe it. Freda could not believe it either. “Why don’t you ask him?” Kitty said. She knew the answer. Freda’s life, bound up in Harry, in whom she had invested her entire stock of dreams, the sum total of her love, might have been disintegrating, but she was neither strong enough, nor willing, to face the final coup de grâce.

  “I’m going mad,” Freda said, lighting a cigarette, and crying on to the marble cake. “I don’t know what to do.”

  Kitty put her arm round her sister-in-law and tried to think what Sydney would have said, what he would have advised. Recalling Sydney and her own widowhood she thought how lucky Freda was to have Harry alive, and by her side, despite the mauve letters, and that a good marriage was worth all the tea in China, and that there were transgressions – although she was not completely sure that Sydney would have agreed – that must sometimes be overlooked.

  “Men are funny sometimes…” Kitty said. She knew that there were men, religious men, in Rabbi Magnus’ congregation who had transgressed – sometimes it was public knowledge – and been accepted by their families again.

  She was saved from further comment by Addie, who had a key, and who came limping – although her plaster cast had been taken off – into the flat. She looked at Freda’s tear-stained face.

  “Not interrupting anything am I?” She didn’t wait for an answer but sat down at the table and eyed the cake. “I wouldn’t mind a piece, Kitty. The plumber’s come – I’d almost given up – and the banging goes right through my head.”

  By the time Addie had gone, having regaled them with the vagaries of her pipes, and the fact that she had had no hot water for three days, Freda had composed herself.

  “You can at least ask Harry where he was this morning,” Kitty said. “Set your mind at rest.”

  “You won’t tell anyone?” Freda said. She was powdering her face, covering the stains of her tears, at the mirror in the hall.

  Kitty looked at the corner of the airmail letter which poked out from beneath the books and which she would read when Freda had gone.

  “Who would I tell?” These days she was the keeper of her own conscience.

  “The family,” Freda said, tying the belt of her fur-lined raincoat, meaning Mirrie and Beatty. She did not want them to know of her humiliation, her disgrace.

  Dear Kitty,

  The bridal gown sounds fine and you were right to give it to your friend. Paris was a great idea but it would have been out of your hands, anyway, who needs it? When your letter came it was like sunshine brightening up my day. My studio is across the hall from my apartment. I came out of it ill-humoured – nothing had gone right – and went down to the mail-box. I rarely bother. No one writes me. When I saw your letter the whole world opened. I didn’t read it immediately, not till I’d washed up, as if you’d come in person to visit me. You say you aren’t much of a letter writer. Fancy sentences don’t make a letter like it’s not the canvas and a few dollars worth of colours that make a picture. I could really see your Sabbath table with the challahs and the silver candlesticks – Sarah sounds a grand girl – and Rachel going with you to the bridal store like a polar bear! It�
��s the same here on the sidewalks, like a parade of trappers, kids dressed up as Eskimos and Afghans, Alaskan squaws and Transylvanian peasants. I guess they’re trying to say something, to protect themselves, with indescribable layers of clothing, from their view of the world. Can you blame them?

  I said I would tell you something about myself. Kitty are you listening? I thought they would listen when we came out of the camps, that the whole world would be waiting, with open arms, into which those of us who made it would run, to annul the injustice, expunge the crimes, to which we would testify. I came to England first and opened my mouth to relate events that would make Dante’s Inferno look like a Broadway comedy. To tell of acts perpetrated upon human beings – whose only crime was that they were Jews or gypsies – so awesome that there were no words that would not diminish them, when I was stopped with a pat on the shoulder – as if my war had been spent in a peaceful town in Silesia – and the news that it had been tough in England too – five inches of water in the bath and dried eggs. America was no different. There are 210,000,000 people living in this country. Who’s interested in the Jews? People get upset about Nigeria or Guatemala. They want to build a new Cuba and get very upset about the blacks or the Puerto Ricans, but the Jews… We love you, they said, but we don’t want to hear. I shut my mouth and have not opened it again.

  I felt ashamed of my experiences, as if it was some kind of disgrace about which I must keep quiet. Others did not. They are much in demand now for whistle-stop tours, to answer the questions of the second generation, the students of history – what do you think about? (expecting the answer ‘immortality’ instead of ‘soup’!); to explain that those responsible for massacring men and women, for tearing little children by their hair from their mothers’ arms, for firing their guns at living targets without hesitation, and without guilt, were not hooligans (a special breed of monster drawn from a gutter society of social misfits) but men who held degrees in medicine and philosophy and the fine arts, who were bank managers, store keepers and real estate brokers, loved music and their children and went home, when they’d perpetrated their day’s evil to their wives.

  If I wanted to keep silent, I hear you ask, why did I not remove the affidavit from my arm as others did? Without it, Kitty, how would I know, that although the nightmare which had robbed me of my past was over, I had not been dreaming? America has been good to me. I came to the United States with three dollars in my pocket. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society gave me ten dollars – I spent it on candy and on cokes which I had never tasted. They gave me clothes and helped me through school, but to lead a well adjusted life you have to have common memories with the people who are your friends. I live among Americans, and the bridge between their backgrounds and mine cannot be crossed, so I stay an outsider and commune with the easel in my studio. Last year I had an exhibition. The critics liked my pictures but no one wanted to hang them on their walls – they found them too uncomfortable. I work all day until the light goes – an unending vomit of experience of which I wonder will I ever be purged. Don’t answer a miserable old man, you don’t have to, but I shall look in the mail-box in the hope that you are still listening to your correspondent, Maurice Morgenthau.

  PS. Glad Addie is out of plaster. Tell her to take care. MM.

  Addie could take care of herself. Kitty did not pass the message on. She did not show Addie the drawing Maurice had enclosed of her own distraught face looking out over the valley through the window of the cable car, nor convey the thoughts his letter had evoked, that her terrors – of which with his sketches he made gentle frun – were as nothing compared with the terrors he had faced, and that when measured against the plight of the Jews in Germany and Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, which Maurice had remarkably survived, even Freda’s problems were negligible.

  “We want it to be the best wedding anyone’s ever been to,” Hettie Klopman said.

  They sat in Hettie’s sitting-room, Kitty and Hettie and Mrs Klopman and Unterman, who wore his cappel in the house, discussing ‘ambiance’.

  Hettie had got over the clash of wills concerning Rachel’s wedding dress, although Kitty had been aware of an undercurrent of vexation – as if she were the fly in the ointment of the ‘Klopman’ wedding – when Hettie had invited her to discuss arrangements with the caterer. When she had arrived, Kitty, by way of a peace offering, had described to Hettie and old Mrs Klopman the dress which Rika Snowman had suggested.

  “Don’t you think lace is a little bit…overdone?” Hettie had said. “You see it in the windows of all the department stores.”

  “There’s lace and lace…” Kitty said.

  “There’ll be a lot of fashion people there,” Hettie said, and by her tone Kitty knew that the subject of the wedding dress would be an irritation which was not going to go away. Because of it she had agreed to compromise – “do whatever you like,” Rachel had finally said – on the question of the bridesmaids. Debbie and Lisa, appropriately dressed, were to walk behind Rachel up the aisle to be followed at a discreet distance in evening, but not bridal wear, by Patrick’s three cousins from Leeds.

  “Evening?” Kitty had said.

  Sydney had not approved of evening weddings.

  “Dinner and Ball,” Hettie had said.

  “There’ll be people coming from Dublin,” Mrs Klopman said.

  “What about Florida? And Israel? Must make it worth their while,” Hettie said. “And what we really wanted,” she addressed Kitty, “before Unterman comes, is to discuss colours, for under the chuppah – we must have a theme – so we don’t all clash. Mine has to be finalised before we go away.”

  “All?” Kitty said. It was the custom of the parents of the bride and the parents of the groom to stand beside them beneath the marriage canopy.

  “I suit lavender,” Mrs Klopman said. “And I’ll have to have a chair.”

  “And my mother’s blonde. So anything blue-ey…”

  “Under the chuppah?” Kitty said weakly.

  She and Sydney had always shuddered at the weddings at which grandparents and other relatives, whose place was not beneath the marriage canopy, threatened to destroy its simple dignity by overcrowding. In place of Sydney, Juda, who would shortly be giving away his own daughter, would give away Rachel. Kitty had already asked him. There were no grandparents – although Kitty thought with regret what nachas her own parents, who had had only known Rachel as a baby, would have derived from the day – on the Shelton side. The chuppah, supported by its four poles which traditionally referred to the chamber reserved for the bride on her wedding day, was going to look decidedly lopsided.

  “I thought a print,” Kitty said. “Something summery.”

  “For the evening,” Hettie had said, as if Kitty had suggested appearing in a bathing suit. “Herbert thought paper taffeta for me, with shoestring straps – I’ll be like a walnut after the cruise – with a little jacket I can take off, for the shul.”

  “I don’t like straps…” Kitty said.

  She saw Hettie’s face darken.

  “For myself, I mean,” she added hastily.

  “I thought of something yellowy, for you,” Hettie said, “then the whole thing will meld.”

  “Meld?” Kitty said.

  “Mine will be turquoise…” Hettie opened her handbag. “I brought a piece to show you. I’ve got an aquamarine the same colour…”

  “I was thinking of turquoise,” Kitty said.

  “Well, we can’t have the same! That would look silly.”

  “I can’t wear yellow,” Kitty said, “not with my skin.”

  “Not yellow,” Hettie said. “More gold-ey…”

  “Not even gold.”

  Kitty saw Hetty exchange glances with Mrs Klopman.

  “My material’s been ordered,” Hettie said firmly. “Herbert’s having it dyed. Turquoise…”

  Kitty said nothing.

  “…I’m wearing an osprey to match!”

  Seventeen

  Norman, like
a caged bear, waited for Sandra whom he needed like the air he breathed. She had been busy; with Hilton and Milton and their new school; arranging teachers and times for their lessons on the cello and the violin. Busy with her sister-in-law, Arnold’s sister, who had brought them over from South Africa and who was staying with Sandra in the new flat. Now that the boys were home Norman could not spend the night there. Sandra would not let him. She thought it wise that Hilton and Milton – not recovered from the trauma of her divorce from Arnold – were spared his presence in their mother’s bed. Having delivered her sister-in-law to the airport, and arranged a sitter for her sons, she was coming straight to Norman. In his mother’s house. He never thought of it as his.

  In anticipation of Sandra’s coming he had cleaned it from top to toe. Hoovered and dusted and shaken rugs, becoming increasingly aware of its shabbiness, seeing it through Sandra’s eyes. He had put the kettle on the New World cooker – three times now – turning it off when it whistled, had taken the gold-rimmed china from the break-front cabinet, arranged biscuits on a doily, as he had seen his mother do.

  It was raining. Each time Norman heard the hiss of a car on the wet road outside, he went to the window hoping to see Sandra’s coupé in the light of the street lamps. When he did not he sat down on the sofa, covering the discolouration on the tobacco brown, uncut moquette – where his mother’s invalid food had slipped from her hand – with a cushion and wishing it were white knobbly wool and that the room was like Sandra’s, light and bright. He was wearing one of his new suits and had wished too late, as he made his bed with the coarse wartime sheets with the utility label, which his mother had bought with her coupons, that he had thought to replace them.