“She must take you as you are,” Kitty had once said over dinner, when he had discussed with her some way in which he was striving to improve himself for Sandra. And indeed she did. It was Norman who was dissatisfied with himself. Sandra had helped him, more than she would ever know, to stand up for his rights, assert himself in situations where previously he would have given way, but she had put no finger on the emptiness of his inner being which even Norman himself could not touch. In his own eyes, although he was already using his return ticket, he was still a small boy at his mother’s skirts, clinging on to them, unable to function on his own. He put on his act, his other self, like a coat of armour as Sandra had instructed him, but felt, at bottom, that Mr Monty at the office was the grown up – for all Norman’s new found assurance – and he the child, and that the world was the arbiter against which Norman was endowed with no real will of his own. He did not hear Sandra ring the bell. She did not ring it. She tapped on the window – Sandra like – and he thought it was the barren tendrils of the wisteria blown by the wind. Then she called, through the letter-box: “Norman!”
She rushed into the narrow hall, into its dark corridor with the oval oak mirror, like a scarlet streak in her wool cape, and into his arms.
Something was wrong. Had gone wrong. Norman lay on his back, with his arms behind his head and Sandra beside him, and stared at the ceiling, with its unsightly mark where he had once waged war against a summer mosquito, and tried to go back over the last two hours in an effort to discover where the chemistry, which had previously precipated such sparklers and rockets, such heights and depths, such mutual pleasure and tender understanding, had failed.
Sandra had refused both his tea and his biscuits so painstakingly set out, and had produced a bottle of champagne which Norman had opened to celebrate their reunion. In her scarlet dress she illuminated the sitting-room. In her glow, the down-at-heel sofa, the dismal paint, the tired curtains, receded.
“I’ve missed you, Norman.” The red of her lips with her intimate knowledge of him echoed exactly the pleats which moved with her body.
“Is this your mother?” Sandra picked up the tortoiseshell frame from the nest of tables, to look at Dolly – protesting at the Brighton sun – against the shingle and the pier in happier days. “Was she ill for a long time?”
She had never been well. Not since his father had died and the chronicle of her manifold complaints had been effaced by her final indisposition. He could see his mother now – in the chair in which Sandra had settled – small, complaining.
“Come upstairs,” Norman held out his hands to Sandra. It had been a long time. In his bedroom where the bed was too small – he had never moved into his mother’s, not liking to – the springs vociferous, they had sought each other out. For Norman the quest had been unavailing.
“Too much champagne,” Sandra said into his shoulder.
But it was not the champagne. It was his mother standing at the wooden bed-end, pulling the faded curtains, opening the door – ‘Time to get up Norman!’ – knocking on the dividing wall.
“It’s this house,” Norman said. He looked at Sandra, like a jewel on his pillow.
“It’s a nice house,” Sandra said.
Driving to the Day Centre, Kitty thought neither about the lunch, baked Klops – anything made with mincemeat always went down well – which she was going to prepare for the old people, nor about the problems of the family, nor of Maurice’s letters, each of which revealed to her a little more of the uncommunicative man, but about Rachel’s wedding, with which, despite herself, she was like Hettie Klopman becoming increasingly preoccupied.
The session with Unterman at Hettie’s had been prolonged. The earnestness of the discussion, the attention to detail, was, Kitty thought, more appropriate to some national spectacle – a coronation or the Lord Mayor’s Show – than to the few hours in the King Solomon Suite where the 400 guests – mainly on the Klopman side – would celebrate the marriage of Rachel to Patrick.
The allocation of the invitations had been made clear from the start. The observation, that this allocation was more or less in line with the financial contribution Kitty insisted upon making, as Sydney had wished, was never actually voiced; Hettie’s opinion concerning the format of invitations it was her privilege, as mother of the bride, to send out, was. Kitty proposed a simple copperplate, identical to Carol’s except that this time, without Sydney, it would be ‘Mrs Kitty Shelton’ who requested the pleasure of ‘your company at the marriage of her daughter to Dr Patrick Klopman…’
By the silence that followed Hettie’s reading of it Kitty knew that there was something wrong. Nothing was right. The black lettering on the plain white card was considered inadequate. A gold card, Hettie thought, with a turquoise satin bow as precursor of the general colour scheme – the theme of the wedding – with raised gilt lettering, and a deckle edge, and a printed, stamped, reply card. Then there was the wording. Many of the Klopman guests, particularly those from abroad, would never have heard of Kitty. Jointly with Kitty, Hettie and Herbert must indubitably request the pleasure… And what about Patrick’s address together with Rachel’s at the foot of the missive? Why should the bridegroom be forgotten? Kitty was non-committal. She would ask… No she would not ask Sydney. She would discuss it with Rachel who although she was the raison d’être of all the controversy would look at her as if she were mad.
She could discuss it with Juda whose discreet invitations for Vanessa’s wedding were already out, but what would be the use? Since it was early days Kitty decided to let the matter rest. Unterman, whose diplomacy was worthy of the United Nations, and who knew on which side his bread was buttered, to whom Hettie had appealed, said either invitation would be acceptable, and after all, what really mattered was the quality of the function itself. Which brought them on to décor which was what this early confrontation was about.
The turquoise and gold colour scheme having been decided upon (by Hettie), the next question was its interpretation. Unterman waxed lyrical and tossed off in turn, for their considerations, a Venetian Palazzo, a Moorish tent, and the Royal Palace of the Queen of Sheba at which point Kitty, who would not have been surprised had he suggested coloured lights and spiral staircases or doves flying out of gilded cages, made a mental resolution to stick to her guns over the invitations lest her family and friends had doubts about her sanity. The turquoise and gold theme was to be homogenous. From the gold ribbons on the bridal car (Herbert’s Rolls with its personalised number plates) in which Rachel would arrive at the synagogue, to the flowers and napery, china and booklets – containing the seven blessings and grace after meals – place cards and book matches, which would be inscribed with Rachel’s and Patrick’s names. The wedding was to be Hettie’s big moment. Her chance to shine.
That much was obvious to Kitty as Hettie came up with ideas – personal, and what she considered unique, touches – which she bounced upon Unterman with an enthusiasm which, as the time dragged on and the caterer started looking discreetly at his watch, did not wane. Hettie was not, Kitty thought, regardless of her bright exterior, a happy woman. Despite her indulgent husband, her worldly wealth, she seemed somehow dissatisfied, and the handicapped son could not have been much help. If her moment of glory was to be Patrick’s wedding, Kitty would not deny it to her. She only sought to temper its excesses and to prevent herself being trampled upon in the stampede for the turquoise and the gold.
The dinner, in this opening encounter with Unterman, a past master of epicurean banquets, had not been discussed. Unterman was bidden only to apply his mind to the question, and to devise for the next meeting an array and variety of dishes which were as delicate in their composition as they were original in concept. There were to be none of his filled pineapple halves or melon boats masted by a cherry and a slice of orange on a stick, Hettie said, followed – because it was summer – by the inevitable strawberries and cream.
Kitty was intrigued to see what Unterman would pull out of
his hat, out of his briefcase which had been filled with glossy photographs of the various interiors he had at one time or another created for the King Solomon Suite, and menus of past triumphs. Stopping at a zebra crossing for a woman with a pushchair, she switched her mind from increasingly persistent thoughts of Rachel and her wedding, and concentrated upon the reality of the Day Centre and the Klops in which images of turquoise and gold seraglios had little place.
The Jewish Day Centre cared on a non-residential basis for the old and the lonely whose plight, in a world which boasted advanced communications and space travel, had paradoxically been accentuated. Sequestered in cars, isolated before television sets, suspended in high-rise flats, the basic need of human beings for contact and companionship had been overlooked. For six hours, twice a week, those lucky enough to have reached the top of the waiting list for a place at the Centre could associate with their peer group, paint, sculpt, exercise, dance, listen to music or to visiting speakers, or simply exchange reminiscences of lives which had once been satisfying, of families to whose periphery they had now been removed.
The old people were cared for by an indispensable and selfless army of volunteers, whose devotion to the Day Centre provided, in many cases, appropriate therapy for their own repressed needs.
Kitty parked her car in the side street behind the minibus which under the aegis of the cheerful driver and one of the volunteers was discharging its load. It was not quick. Arthritis and cataracts and spongy lungs and hardened arteries made merciless inroads which were painfully evident, as the senior citizens with their sticks and their walking frames, took hands and arms and negotiated the steps of the bus and the steps of the building and felt the icy hiatus of the street pierce their clothes and their skin – which was no longer elastic – to seek out their tired, their aching bones. There was not one of them who had not a story to tell of happier days, of partners who had pre-deceased them, of better times. There was a tendency to lump them together – what was it Maurice said about lumping people together? – as some of the younger helpers tended to do, to think of them as ‘old people’, a separate breed, to invalidate them as persons, when they had in their time been husbands and fathers and sons and lovers and professional and businessmen and artists and musicians in which roles they had received, in varying degrees, the respect of their families and of the world. In the lounges of the Day Centre they reassured themselves. With tremorous hands they exhibited cherished photographs, Kodacoloured reminders that life had held pleasures other than the rivers of tea with the home-made cakes dispensed by the ladies, the warbled rendering of ‘Those were the Days’, and a seat in front of the small screen; that it had not always been pinned hips, panaceas and pension books. It is you and I, Kitty thought, and life, which cruelly and very often, had a twist in her tail.
Many of those to whom the Day Centre was a lifeline thrown out twice a week had known other days. You heard them talk. ‘…two rooms like little boxes when I’d been used to space…’ ‘I was always in the garden, now I have to make do with a window-sill…’ ‘…I gave it all to my daughter…what do I want with silver…?’ ‘…my son invited me to live with them but the last thing I wanted was to be a burden…’ If these were burdens, Kitty thought, what of the next generation, the single parents, the feminists with their fight for independence – as if every human being were not by the very nature of his existence dependent – where would they be with their slogans, their battle cries raised in their selfish prime? Where, when their faculties diminished and their bodies failed them, would they turn for solace? Who would there be to comfort them but an impersonal and overtaxed State.
Kitty took off her coat in the Volunteers’ Room, and with it shed thoughts of Hettie Klopman and the wedding, and of Norman and Freda, and even those of Sydney and of Maurice and his letters, and went out into the hall where the old people were arriving and being given assistance with their various outer garments. A hand stopped her on the way to the kitchens.
“I didn’t show you the photograph of my great-grandchildren…”
Kitty had already admired them. Twice, She did not remind Mrs Mendel, who could remember the court in the East End of London, where 89 years ago she had been born, but not the events of yesterday.
“Can you spare me a minute?” Mr Spitzer said. He was originally from Poland and had been coming to the Day Centre for many years and spent most of his time locked in verbal battle with his arch enemy Solly Kischka who had been born in Lithuania. A coronary infarct over Kitty’s barley soup had sent Solly to hospital, since when Mr Spitzer, deprived of his sparring partner, had been like a button off a coat.
“What news of Kischka?”
“He’s making progress,” Kitty said, “I expect he’ll have to take it easy.”
“A Litvak!…” Mr Spitzer – who would miss his companion on the outings to the West End and to Westcliff – said fiercely, “When did he ever do anything else?”
It was one of the hazards of the Day Centre. New friends and proxy families replaced those of a lifetime who had died or were no longer interested. Romance had been known to blossom. The severing of these terminal attachments was hard to bear.
“Why don’t you send him a card?” Kitty suggested. “Ask Mavis.” The mechanics of cards and messages and stamps and post boxes required assistance.
“I only enquired,” Mr Spitzer said.
There were other restraining hands. “How’s Addie?” “Did you see my son on television?” “How’s the wedding?” “I left my stick here, I’ve asked everybody…” “Hello Kitty.” “What’s for lunch?”
In the kitchens the waste-pipe had frozen, Julie Pearl’s daughter had run off with a pop singer and the meat hadn’t arrived for the Klops. At noon the old people would sit down for their dinner, the highlight of their day. The waste-pipe, Julie Pearl’s daughter and the butcher notwithstanding, Kitty thought, come hell or high water, they would not be disappointed.
Eighteen
Dear Kitty,
Your letters are like music – a spiritual food for which there is no substitute and without which life would be a mistake. (Nietzche not MM!) It’s good that your classes have started again. That exaggerator Berlioz (both in his music and his lifestyle), with his incredible ear, and the tight-assed (excuse me) Ravel, were interesting studies, but I’m happy your term begins with Beethoven. The F minor is not my favourite but is both exciting (esp. last movement), and prophetic of the later quartets it took him fourteen years to get around to. I will listen to it and think of my fastidious Kitty on Monday nights in the Performance Studio, where the odours of the previous dance class still linger!
You ask me how it is I am lonely and if I am happy? I have been lonely since Dr Mengele put my mother (she was forty-six years old) and my father in a cattle truck (I thought how nice for them they wouldn’t have to walk!) and took my lame kid brother from the bunk where we slept together (I have a permanent cold shoulder in the spot where he lay) for his experiments in genetics. I am lonely when I see families with brothers and sisters and parents and grandparents (sometimes two sets!), a ring of uncles and aunts and hordes of cousins. I am lonely in that I have no one to love, no one to live for. This is not the same, Kitty, as being alone – I can live with my records and my books, I don’t need people around – which for an artist has two advantages. The first in being with himself; the second is not being with others. As for happiness, human beings do not need to be happy, nor can they be. Like other Jews I have a strong will to live (Got knows where we get it from, can it only be a reaction to persecution?), to paint my pictures (not because I think they are of value, an artist unless he is an imbecile never knows – Virgil on his deathbed wanted the Aeneid buried!), to testify, to bear witness to what is no longer.
Don’t think I mean to change the world. Men do not change nor do they learn anything (read any day’s newspapers) and no one has the right to speak for the dead or make them speak, as every day for some second’s fraction they speak t
o me; a can on the sidewalk brings back discarded canisters of cyclone B, flower beds (the Nazis loved nature and orderliness) and birch trees the entrance to Auschwitz (men and women from every European country passed under that tree). For me ‘Canada’ is not a country but camp-jargon for the barracks, where they stored the loot stolen from our numbers – calculated in men’s suits, children’s shoes, in spectacles and shaving brushes and artificial limbs – and ‘Mexico’ the woman’s section. I have to blink hard to restore the proper meanings to ‘haircut’ and to ‘bath’, and even now look for flotsam – buttons and bits of paper – in the bottom of my soup bowl.
You were right to give way about the invitations if it makes Hettie happy – what difference do a few words make – and to stick to your guns over your dress – never mind the feather she had dyed! So there’ll be two turquoise dresses. Rachel will still get married. Vanessa’s wedding sounds very grand. It’ll be a rehearsal for you.
Glad you’re going to Carol and Alec for Purim. Your grandchildren sound adorable – send me a photo Kitty, and one of yourself. Purim is one of the happiest holidays of the Jewish year. Will you go to synagogue to hear the Megillah? I remember, in Frankfurt, going with my mother and my brother and my three sisters, and stamping our feet and making lots of noise whenever the word Haman was spoken, so that you could not hear his name. The wicked Haman is still remembered. I wonder how long will Hitler be – and Goering and Goebbels and Streicher and Mengele…you see I am obsessed. But seriously, the destruction of the temples (Ninth of Av), the Fast commemorating the breach made by the Romans in the wall of Jerusalem (Fast of Tammuz), Nebuchadnezzar’s siege… Where is the Fast for my Uncle Oskar who was an engineer at the Vienna Technical Institute, for my grandfather who conducted opera in Berlin (Otto Klemperer, your Thomas Beecham, Monet and Rodin were his friends), for my uncle (my mother’s brother) Dr Felix Stein, for my Aunts, Leah and Lottie, for my pious father Dov, for my darling mother (she was beautiful Kitty), for the children on the street of the suburb where we lived… WHERE IS THEIR DAY? Don’t write me any more Kitty. It’s not good for you. I’ll look at your photograph (don’t forget to send it) and remember – Ofira and Masada, happy times. Look after yourself. Maurice
Rose of Jericho Page 16
