Family Chorus

by Claire Rayner

  She looked across the room at her young brothers, Benny and Joe, and then at her stepsister Busha, and thinned her lips a little thoughtfully and poured more tea. There should be time to have a quiet word with Dave about all this before the family started fussing about the wretched baby. In fact, she’d talk to him this very night, wouldn’t even wait till the shivah was over. Getting on with things, that was the key to success; she’d learned that before she was fifteen, had learned the importance of thinking ahead, planning ahead — now she’d prove again just how essential it was.

  She took a plate of biscuits to her stepsister Busha and smiled sweetly at her and asked solicitously after her baby Barbara and the boys Sidney and Melvin and actually seemed to listen to the answers for once, while upstairs in the front bedroom the baby lay in the cot that Fanny had magnanimously loaned, and stared with what seemed to be a fixed glare at the square of greyish pearliness that was the bedroom window, her hands again making those rhythmic opening and closing movements. She was an odd-looking baby, with her spiky dark hair and red face and thin scrawny arms and legs, but she was a very live one for all her puniness. After a while, as the sound of praying voices came up from the room below she opened her mouth and began to bawl.

  ‘So the boys’ll be no trouble to you, Poppa,’ Dave said expansively. ‘You’ll have all the pleasure of them, such fine boys as they are, c’naina horah, and none of the tsurus. Boys can be a lot of trouble, hey? But for me they’ll be no trouble.’ He shot a conspiratorial look at Benny and winked at him. ‘So, as I see it, it’s the best way.’

  ‘I dunno — dunno,’ Shmuel muttered, and he moved in his chair as though he was trying to make himself even smaller than he was, and that was small enough in all conscience; since Milly’s death a week ago he had seemed to shrivel before their eyes, to have lost some part of his physical fabric. ‘What does Fanny say?’ He peered up at his daughter, blinking with little twitches of his papery cheeks. ‘You think it’s all right, Fanny?’

  ‘Dave knows best, Poppa,’ Fanny said and smiled at him. ‘He’s a fine son-in-law, believe me,’ and she patted his shoulder. ‘Good thing he’s here to take care of us all, hey?’ She lifted her chin and stared at Busha, who was sitting on Shmuel’s other side, both her hands holding one of his tightly.

  ‘So what do you want of my life, Fanny?’ Busha said, and there was a wailing note in her voice. ‘I should tell my Nathan he can’t take his opportunities, he should tell his brother in New York, no he don’t want to come? I got my Barbara and Sidney and Melvin to think of, ain’t I? And I’ll be looking after Moishe and Issy —’

  ‘Oh, sure, they need a lot of looking after, such boychiks they are.’ And Fanny smiled even more widely at her stepbrothers, burly and uncomfortable in their suits of heavy serge. ‘Eh, Moishe?’

  Moishe said nothing, just staring back at her, but then Moishe and Issy rarely had anything to say at home. Large and taciturn men, both close to thirty years old, they lived their secret lives in the sweaty greasy gymnasia of the back streets around Whitechapel in the winter, and at the race tracks in the summer, scraping an uneasy living in ways about which the family preferred not to know. Their announcement, a couple of days after Milly’s funeral, that they were going to New York with their sister and brother-in-law had not unduly surprised anyone, though it had made Bessie look miserable and had made Shmuel weep; but then, everything made Shmuel weep now. He seemed to be regarding his Milly much more highly now than he had ever done when she had been alive. But Fanny’s reaction to their decision had been to look pained and to murmur about her poor Poppa, and rejoice silently at how well her plans were being aided by the Good Lord.

  Now she smiled again at Busha, a sweet, forgiving smile that made Busha’s face redden. ‘Listen, dolly, we shouldn’t argue, we ain’t going to see enough of each other in the future that we should argue now. Families is too important they should argue. What’s got to be has got to be! And we got to make the best plans for everyone now we lost our Momma, God rest her sweet soul.’ She wiped away her tears with her lace-edged handkerchief — nothing but the best for Fanny’s nose — and patted her father’s shoulder again. ‘So, Poppa, it’s right the boys should come to us, Dave’ll see to it they get a proper trade and behave themselves. Benny’s all right, o’ course, doin’ well enough at Reuben Lazar’s, but he’ll do better with Dave. And as for Joe —’ She frowned at Joe. ‘A lobbus like that, he needs a firm hand, and you know how he gets away with murder with you —’

  Joe scowled and Shmuel began to weep again, making no attempt to dry his eyes, just sitting slumped in his chair with the tears sliding down his nose, and Busha leaned over him and began to murmur at him, giving Fanny a sharp glare as she did so.

  ‘It’s no good being sentimental, Poppa,’ Fanny said, and jerked her head at Dave. ‘A boy needs a firm hand, he shouldn’t run wild on the streets like some low life,’ and she managed, by not looking at her stepbrothers, to make it exceedingly clear what she had in mind. ‘And Dave, he’ll look after the boys good. Me too. Without Momma to take care, who’s goin’ to deal with their meals and their clothes an’ that? You got to see it makes sense —’

  ‘So who looks after Poppa’s meals and clothes and that?’ Busha said, and once again murmured at Shmuel as his wailing got louder. ‘Eh? It’s all very well you worry about the boys, who takes care of Poppa?’

  ‘So, Bessie, of course!’ said Fanny. ‘Don’t be stupider’n you can help, Busha, already. Bessie. Who else?’

  ‘So why can’t she take care of the boys an’ all?’ Busha sounded triumphant. ‘She looks after Poppa, she can look after the boys. You don’t have to go takin’ them away from Poppa, he needs his boys —’

  ‘And they need a firm hand,’ Fanny said. ‘I told you, you got cloth ears all of a sudden, you don’t hear? We don’t want ’em running wild like — we don’t want ’em around the streets. Momma, rest her soul, sometimes they listened to when she cried to ’em. But will they listen to Bessie? Anyway, she’ll have the baby to look after an’ all. She’ll be busy enough —’

  The room slid into silence and they sat still, and Bessie lifted her chin and looked round at them all, a little dazed, for she had been sitting in a dream of her own as Fanny’s ringing voice had gone on. And on. ‘What did you say?’ she said after a long moment. ‘What did you say, Fanny?’

  ‘Who better, Bessie? Eh? Who better than her own sister? You’ll be just like Momma was, taking care of a baby her own Momma’s died, such a tragedy. Just like Momma, you’ll be.’

  ‘Me look after her? How can I look after her? I got to go to work. Soon’s this week’s over, I got to go back to work.’

  ‘No you don’t, Bessie, doll!’ Dave said expansively. ‘You don’t never need to work again at that lousy place. Five years you been slaving there and what’s it got you? It’s time you got a better life, time it was easier for you. We’ll look after the gelt, see to it you got enough to pay your way. You stay at home, take care of Poppa and the baby, and be a mensch like the other women.’ And he laughed fatly at his joke; to call the women menschen — the conceit pleased him and he nodded at Fanny, highly delighted with himself. And she in her turn smiled brilliantly at Bessie.

  ‘You see, Bessela? We thought — Dave thought of everything. We take the boys, bring ’em into Dave’s business, make a better opportunity for them, you give up the work and stay home with Poppa and the baby like a real little balabuster and we — Dave — we take care of the money. You won’t want for nothing —’

  Bessie felt it rising in her, that hateful cold wash of anger that she knew so well. For as long as she could remember it had been this way; Fanny making plans, Fanny getting the biggest slice of the cake and then giving her the leftovers with a wide generous gesture, Fanny getting everyone’s attention and then, with a sweetness that made onlookers purr admiringly, bringing her misshapen plain sister forward to stand dumbly in her shadow where inevitably she would highlight Fanny’s own su
perior charms. Now she was doing it again, getting all she wanted, a husband, a baby of her own, a home of her own, money to spend — and giving her, Bessie, the leftovers. As loudly as if she had trumpeted it to the whole of the East End, Fanny had said it. Bessie Ascher was no good to anyone. No man would ever come along to invite her to join him under the marriage canopy. No man would ever want her twisted little body, with its spine so crooked after the tuberculosis of her childhood, her mousy head, her plain face with its long thin nose and sloping little eyes set too close together, and its slightly protruding teeth. No man would ever touch her flat little breasts or stroke her scrawny thighs. At the ripe age of twenty-one, there was no hope of Bessie Ascher ever having a real home of her own, so Fanny had given her the leftovers — her widowed father and her motherless sister. A secondhand man to take care of, a secondhand baby.

  The furious words sizzled in her head, burned in her throat, made her tongue tremble behind her teeth, but they stayed there, held behind her closed lips as she sat and stared dumbly at Fanny’s beautiful face, with its big round dark eyes and high colour and even white teeth, and Fanny smiled again, that sweet smile that had always made Bessie want to scream at her, and said, ‘You see, Bessela? Dave thought of everybody. Everybody and specially you. You’ll have the flat and the baby and Poppa, and the boys’ll be out of the way with us — it’ll be lovely, believe me. Not as lovely as if Momma had lived, God rest her soul —’ she added hastily as Shmuel set up his thin weeping sound again. ‘But lovely all the same. So what do you say, doll? Good, eh?’

  Still Bessie said nothing, staring at Fanny with her eyes opaque with her effort to keep any expression out of them, and Fanny stared back, her own eyes beginning to glitter a little with irritation at her slowness, and then, as Fanny opened her mouth to speak, the sound that was becoming familiar began again: the high, bawling fury of the baby crying.

  Bessie sat even more unmoving, if that were possible, still with her fixed stare at Fanny, and after a moment Busha clicked her tongue against her teeth and went to the bedroom and Shmuel sniffed dolorously as she left him and wept again.

  Busha came back, the baby in its scrap of old blanket held against her shoulder, patting the child’s back in a slightly distracted fashion, her face crumpled with distress. ‘She won’t stop,’ Busha said. ‘Mine always stop when I pick ’em up, but this one just goes on and on —’

  ‘Oh, give it to me,’ Fanny snapped, as Bessie made no move. ‘What’s the matter, you’re forgetting already? Melvin’s three and you’re forgetting already how to deal with a baby?’

  She took the child from Busha’s arm and, with an expert twist of her elbow, set her against her own shoulder, crooning a sharp little sound into the tiny ear, and at once the baby began to bawl even more loudly, hiccupping a little with the effort. After a moment Bessie grinned, a feline little grin that showed her teeth.

  ‘Monty’s only two and you’ve forgotten as well, it seems,’ she said. Fanny glared at her and after a moment thrust the bundle into Bessie’s lap, and she, moving a little awkwardly, for she had little experience of handling babies, wrapped the blanket round her more securely and tucked her into the crook of her arm.

  At once the baby stopped crying and looked up into Bessie’s face with a sort of intentness, almos squinting as she blinked and then stared again, and then she hiccupped once more and, with the suddenness of the very young, closed her eyes and slept, leaving Bessie staring down at her with her own face expressionless.

  This time it was Fanny who grinned. ‘You see, Bessie?’ she said, all her good temper returning. ‘You see, dolly? She knows, the poor little baby, she knows who she wants. Believe me, Bessela, you got no choice. She’s chosen you, she wants you to be her Momma. Who better to decide than the baby? So, what you going to call her? You’re going to look after her, you should be the one to choose, eh, Poppa? Bessie can choose her name, hmm? You won’t mind that —’

  She’s doing it again, Bessie thought. She’s got her own way with what she wanted, and now she’s giving me the crumbs. Choose the name — what difference would that make? She sat and looked down at the baby’s face, with its crumpled forehead — for the baby seemed to be frowning all the time — and tried to hate it as much as she hated Fanny.

  But it didn’t happen. The more she stared at the scowling little face with its tightly closed eyes and sparse lashes, the more she wanted to. There was a satisfaction in looking at it, somehow, a sense of comfort. Staring at the small face framed in the old blanket was a pleasant thing to do and she thought, almost lazily, I must get her something better than that. A shawl, maybe, I could knit her a shawl — and then almost physically shook herself. No, I won’t. I’m not going to do it. I’m not looking after her. Fanny can. I’m going back to work —

  Back to work. Still with her eyes on the baby’s face she saw the workshop, saw the banks of rattling sewing machines, the row of goose irons on the great hissing stove, the long scarred wooden bench where she sat with the rest of the felling hands in front of piles of heavy soap-stiffened cloth, and she could almost smell the reek of the steam as the coats were pushed through the big Hoffman pressers, the heaviness of hot machine oil as the treadles roared the day away, the thick ammoniacal stench that came creeping in from the old lavatory in the yard outside, and she felt the ache in her shoulders that filled her when she spent those ten hours every day bent over those interminable hems. Her shoulders didn’t hurt now, not after a week of mourning for Momma here at home. The baby lay lightly in the crook of her elbow, warm against her thin chest, not at all heavy like a thick crombie overcoat of the sort she humped about day after day at the workshop —

  I don’t want to, she shouted inside her head. I don’t want to take care of a baby. I want to live for me, for me, me, me! I want to work and learn and make it happen, the way I always said it would, the way it’s got to. I can’t always have Fanny’s leftovers, can’t stay here doing what she wants just because she wants it — I want to do what I want —

  It’s all nonsense, a small voice whispered deep inside herself, a voice full of cool reason. All nonsense — you, dancing — how can you dance? You with your back like a washboard and legs like sticks, how can you dance? You see them in the penny papers, the way they look, the dancers, the way they smile, the way they preen in their fluffy dresses. That’s dancers, that’s the way they look, not the way you look.

  But here’s this baby, another little voice joined in, here’s this baby and Fanny saying you can stay out of the workshop for always and stay here and look after the baby and Poppa — go to the library, every day. Have time to read books when the baby’s sleeping. Time to think about how you can make it better, make the dancing happen, time to —

  ‘Alexandra,’ she said loudly, so loudly that the baby opened her eyes sharply and her mouth opened too, as though she were about to cry, but then it closed again as she fixed her squinty gaze on Bessie’s face above her. ‘I’ll call her Alexandra. After the new queen. Alexandra’s a pretty name.’

  ‘Bessie, for the love of — listen, Bessela, I said you should choose, but Alexandra? What sort of name is that for a Jewish baby? It’s got to be a name for her mother, of course! Mabel perhaps, or Mary — Momma’s Hebrew name was Miriam, so it’s got to begin the same — you know that! Why not call her Miriam, even? But Alexandra?’

  ‘If I choose, I choose,’ Bessie said, and for the first time since Fanny had thrust the baby into her arms stopped looking at the small frowning face and stared at Fanny. ‘You said I should choose, so I have. It’s Alexandra.’

  ‘Poppa, is that all right with you?’ Fanny flicked her eyes away from Bessie’s direct stare, visibly keeping control on her temper. ‘She’s your daughter — you say what she should be called.’

  Shmuel had dozed off and now opened his eyes wide and looked at Bessie with his face blank. ‘She’s Bessie,’ he said. ‘Bessie —’ He mumbled something under his breath and closed his eyes again, and Fanny looked
at Dave with her brows lifted slightly and he looked back and made a small grimace.

  ‘Fanny, it doesn’t matter,’ he said, and there was a warning note in his voice. ‘Let Bessie call her what she likes, as long as she don’t call her late for her dinner.’ He tried to grin at his own joke, and then, at Fanny’s stony glare, primmed his lips. ‘Let’s call it settled, eh? Bessie takes care of her and your father — and I tell you, it looks like he’s going to need some looking after. He’s taken it bad, poor old Poppa, taken it bad — and I see to it there’s money in her purse every week, and shoin fertig — it’s finished, it’s arranged. The boys come to work for me, and Busha and the rest of them go to New York. Let’s have an end to it already. I got work to do at home, got a business to run. I can’t stand around here all day, much as I respect your Poppa, you understand. So can we go home already? It’s settled, it’s finished —’

  And so it was. By the time her brothers had taken their few possessions to their other sister’s house, and she had rigged up the trappings of baby things, the cot and the little scrubbed pine cupboard for clothes and the nappies and the bottles for feeds and the low chair for her to sit in while she gave her those feeds, Bessie felt as though she had been looking after a baby for ever. She learned to sit with a bottle held just so, so that the baby could get her milk without choking, learned how to boil the rubber teats that replaced the rag one that had started her on her life (Bessie had demanded the most expensive of items from Dave, implacable in her determination to have the best she could get for her baby out of Fanny), learned how to pin her into her heavy terry towelling nappies with the minimum of fuss.

  By the time Alexandra was a month old, and had begun to look more like a normal baby girl and less like a ferocious old man, Bessie was beginning to realize that Fanny had, for once, given her something that would really give her pleasure. She may have arranged matters according to her own profit — and Bessie knew perfectly well that it had been Fanny’s idea to annex her two younger brothers as extra workers for Dave’s flourishing business as a market trader — but in so doing she had filled Bessie’s life with something that it had always lacked. Someone who cared for her and needed her and relied on her. Someone who thought she was perfect just as she was, in spite of her ugly face and thin, dust-coloured hair and crooked back. The leftovers Fanny had given her this time promised to be the best gift that Bessie had ever had.