Family Chorus

by Claire Rayner

  ‘No!’ she said shrilly. ‘No! No money. We ain’t got no money. Lexie, this man’s a bad man — come on outa here — please come out. You can’t stay here, it ain’t right. He’ll kill you, you hear me? I had a neighbour once, she had this slippery elm stuff put in her and she was so sick she near died. She had to go to the hospital, have transfusions — Lexie! No! If I have to call the cops you don’t have this man do nothing to you! I won’t let you. I’ll take you away —’

  But she didn’t have to. As soon as she had said the word ‘cops’ the old man moved so fast they were hardly aware of what was happening. He pushed them both towards the door and then shoved past them to open it and bundled them out into the dark stairwell and slammed the door on them. They heard the bolts pushed home and the key turn and then his thin gruff voice shouted, ‘Go away! I don’t want to have nothin’ to do with you! Go away, or I call the cops, you hear me? I’ll tell ’em you’re hookers makin’ trouble — go away — you hear me? Go away —’

  They stood there in a stunned silence and then, suddenly, Lexie started to retch. But oddly, even though she felt so physically sick, she didn’t feel as bad inside as she had. The panic had gone.

  28

  The snow started late in March and, because it was so bad, the theatre had to close for three nights till the streets were cleared and the out-of-towners could get in to fill the audiences again. That helped because it gave them the extra time they needed. Lily came over to stay, helping them carry the suitcases filled with Lexie’s costumes, and the three of them sat with their heads down over their needles, working as carefully as they could, and with all the skill that Barbara had — which was considerable — to guide them.

  It was a curiously happy time for Lexie, and she would sit there at the table in Barbara’s poky little apartment with the radio on, its jigging music punctuated by the hissing and knocking in the steam radiators, and feel glad to be one of this small enclave of women. From time to time Barbara would bustle away to make coffee and Lily would stop and light a cigarette and tell them outrageous tales of her life in the old vaudeville days when she had been on the road, sometimes reduced to dancing in burlesque shows, making them both laugh till they wept. Then they would settle again to their sewing, making Lexie’s costumes cunning facsimiles of what they had been to start with, but now with all sorts of secret fastenings and tapes and flaps that made them able to expand as much as Lexie might need them to, while still not displaying her state at all obviously.

  For the decision had been made and plans been laid. Lexie was going to have her baby. That morning in Hermann’s dingy little room had done more than frighten her off an abortion. It had filled her with a deep well of gratitude to Barbara, for she knew she had had a very fine escape. She no longer felt the child within her as a parasite; she felt no affection for it, no sense of pleasure in its existence, no joy in the knowledge that she and Max had made it, but there was now a strange sense of wonder. She would look at passers by in the street, and then down at her still flat belly and think — there’s a person in there. A person. And the feeling that went through her at that thought was extraordinary. Not pleasure, not satisfaction, not excitement, but a sort of vast surprise. It was a feeling she quite liked. She learned how to summon it up deliberately, and often did as the show took off and lines formed day after day at the box office, and the weeks sped on towards spring.

  But all the time she had refused steadfastly either to tell Barbara and Lily who the father of the baby was, or to let him know of her situation. Although both of them had at first tried to persuade her otherwise, they had soon given up; she was adamant on that score and they knew it.

  But she was willing — indeed eager — to talk about all her other plans, and they would discuss for hours, long into the night, how it would be. Barbara would stop working at the millinery factory in the summer, when the baby was born. ‘They’re already paying me more than enough to keep us all,’ Lexie said, when Barbara had looked alarmed. ‘And I’ll be getting more after three months. Someone’s got to look after the baby, and if it isn’t you it’ll have to be someone else. And that’ll cost money and —’

  ‘No,’ Barbara had said at once, with great indignation. ‘No, Lexie! You don’t go getting strangers to look after your own! If you’re gonna pay people, so okay, I’ll do it!’ And she smiled then, a tremulous little grin as her nose went a particularly bright pink. ‘I’ll like that. I guess I’m not gonna get married ever, like Melvin and Sidney always said, but to have a baby to look after — I’ll be —’ She had shrugged her thin shoulders and made a face and laughed and sniffed all at once, and her eyes had been very bright. Lexie, embarrassed suddenly, had looked away.

  ‘And I can always get a box of outwork from Mr Guz, if we get a bit short,’ Barbara said then, her voice bubbling with optimism, ‘when he gets busy, it’s real murder there. He’ll be glad to have me, and I can do a dozen hats while a baby’s sleepin’. Oh, Lexie, I am so happy!’ Lexie had lifted her brows at her and said sardonically, ‘Well, I’m glad someone is!’ and then laughed and hugged her briefly as her face fell. ‘No, don’t fret. I’m happy enough.’

  And she was. Once the panic had gone, she knew she could cope. The show was an undoubted hit, and when she had asked for a bigger salary there had been no demur. She had a contract not only for this show but for the one to follow, for she had told them firmly that she loved New York so much she didn’t want to go back to London as Mr Welch had planned, and Pete Capitelli had been immediate with his promise to manipulate Mr Welch and Mr Cochran the way he wanted them to go.

  ‘We’ve got a first-class hit,’ he said jubilantly. ‘And after this one we’re gonna have a grade A tip-top double first-class hit, as long as we got you. Never you mind about London, Lexie. You stay here with us and we’ll sort it all out. With the money you’ll be makin’ you can get yourself a first-class apartment too. Riverside Drive maybe and —’

  ‘No,’ Lexie had said at once. ‘I think I’ll stay in the Bronx for a while.’ He’d shrugged and said, ‘Suit yourself,’ and she had gone back to work happily. That she could hide her pregnancy for several months she was confident. With her costumes modified and Lily to help her, there was no end to what ingenuity could do, she told herself optimistically, and there was the summer break to come, time to have the baby quietly and get back to work. She wouldn’t be the first performer to hide a pregnancy almost till the last minute. Many had done it before her, with judicious use of corsets and careful trimming of costumes, and she could do it too, she was certain. Her own costumes for this show were, fortunately, designed to shimmer and float; they could have been dreamed up to help her hide her changing shape, and now it was all settled she felt much better. The nausea had stopped and she had regained her appetite; now she had to stop herself from eating too much rather than try to force herself to take in some nourishment, and she bloomed. The audiences loved her and sighed over her. Office girls began to imitate her thick bobbed haircut with its heavy fringe and make up their eyes to look as slanting as hers were, and hardly a day went by but a magazine or a newspaper wanted an interview. And the way she lived had a great effect on the journalists who came twittering into her dressing room to gush and chatter and write their fulsome praise of her.

  She had decided to stay with Barbara rather than to seek a bigger, better apartment, partly in order to save money (after all, she would tell herself, I can’t be certain the show will go on, or that the next one will do well, even though deep in her heart of hearts she was so certain) but also because of the anonymity of the Bronx. She could lose herself in that populous neighbourhood as she could never have done in a fashionable apartment building. Once she left downtown with its staring tourists and knowing Broadway journalists and gossips she felt safe from prying eyes, for now that the local people were used to her they paid no more attention to her. She was Barbara Mark’s relation from London, just another of the neighbours, and they got on with their busy lives and
left her to get on with hers. It seemed to balance the evenings spent in the glare of the footlights and the great spotlights, dancing her heart out on the stage, wrapped in those glittering floating costumes while everyone stared at her.

  It was this decision that endeared her so greatly to the journalists. They found her modest style of living democratic, they told her, not at all stuck up as they would have expected a snooty English performer to be. She behaved like a real down-home-style American, and they loved her for it. The articles about her in the magazines and the paragraphs in the gossip columns were always good, and the show’s management basked in the satisfaction of having a hit as spring turned the streets of New York from cold greyness to a more hopeful warmth, and the trees in Central Park lifted their heads and began to breathe again. There were window-boxes filled with daffodils in the Bronx and barrows of them at street corners in midtown Manhattan, and slowly Lexie began to feel as much a New Yorker as she had once been a Londoner.

  It was a metamorphosis that was helped by her determination to shut Max out of her mind. She knew perfectly well that if he knew of her situation he would come at once, that none of her anxiety for her future was justified. He loved her, he wanted her, and would be overjoyed about the child she carried. But deep inside she was ashamed. It was this as much as everything else that sealed her mouth, and made her refuse to let anyone in London know what was happening to her. She knew the shame was irrational; she knew she had done nothing she need feel guilty about. But it was there, and she had to work hard at forgetting London and the people who had once been such important parts of her life.

  So she wrote only the most scrappy of letters to Bessie, telling her that the show was a success, that she had met Barbara, the only one of the Marks family still to live in New York, and adding no more than inconsequential chat about the weather. Bessie would write back long rambling letters full of gossip about Alex Lazar and his niece, about Benny, who seemed to be coping well enough on his own without Fanny to take care of him, and about everything and anything except Max and Dave, and her own feelings about Lexie’s absence. It was clear she had decided that she would play the game according to Lexie’s rules, and Lexie would read the close-written pages and remember the letters that Bessie used to write, long ago, during the war, and she would fold them back in their envelopes and wait a couple of weeks before answering. That way she stopped Bessie from intruding on her awareness too often, and kept that ever-threatening guilt at bay.

  She treated Max in the same way, too. He had answered her first letter, the one she had written on the ship, addressing it to the Cochran office, and it had been linked with a desperate appeal to come back, to allow him to come and get her, assuring her that somehow, somehow they would make an arrangement that would make it possible for them both to be happy. That she could work, of course she could, that he hadn’t realized how much it meant to her, but please, they must be together, must talk —

  But it had been too late by the time that letter had reached her. The time it took for mail to cross the Atlantic meant that when she read those eager pages she already knew she was pregnant. And that meant she had to say no. How could she go back to him now, in this state? So she told herself, and knew she was being absurd. Who better to tell than the child’s own father? But whether it was her own stubbornness, or a new bubbling up of ambition which distrusted Max’s assurance that he would let her work, or whether it was due to an alteration in her thinking caused by her pregnancy, she didn’t know. She only knew that she had to keep quiet and do things her way.

  By May she was having to wear a much firmer corset to contain the bulge in her belly and a tighter breast binder, too, to give her the fashionable skinny look that hitherto she had had naturally. Now, for the first time in her life, she had breasts that needed controlling. She would ease herself out of the tight garments, gently massage the taut, swollen skin and rub away the itching of her darkened nipples, and stare at herself in the long mirror in the bathroom and again feel that vast surprise. Her belly was round but not excessively so, considering she was now around seven months pregnant. There was a fine dark line that ran from her navel down to the smudge of dark hair in her groin, and she ran her finger down it and saw suddenly a vision of herself at five years old sitting on a wall in Jubilee Street with stolen cherries in her pinafore lap, listening to Barney and Sammy talking about where babies came from. She could almost hear the piping childish voice come down the years, lapping against her ears. ‘They come outa their bellies,’ Mossy had said, small Mossy with the adenoids and the big round eyes. ‘They come outa their bellies. They splits open and they comes outa their pippicks —’ She laughed and then, ridiculously, felt her eyes fill with tears. Bessie, she thought. Bessie and Jubilee Street and Madame Gansella and the years before the war when it was all so easy and I was looked after all the time.

  And I’m looked after now, she told herself sturdily. Putting on her wrapper, she went to sit in the little living room so that Barbara could fuss around her with little dishes specially made to tempt her now capricious appetite, and then dozed and relaxed until it was time to dress again and go to the theatre.

  In June the heatwave started: the streets sizzled as water was poured on from the passing carts and the children whooped and shrieked around the hydrants. The theatre was impossible as temperatures climbed steadily into the nineties. Audiences thinned out and at last reached the stage where they fell below the essential level for profitability. Much to Lexie’s relief, the notices went up. The show would close on 11 June and come September, the management promised, they would be casting for the follow-up to this great success: all members of the company invited to keep their names on the lists.

  Now at last she could stop wearing the corset and the bust binders, and she sat about for most of the day as June became July and July limped into August, and found that the surprise and wonderment had all gone now. She was tired all the time, irritable and very, very bad-tempered.

  Barbara did her best to keep her happy, scurrying home from the millinery factory to clean the apartment and prepare their meals, but it was a losing battle, and she became quiet. Her nose seemed to be a permanent pink now as she drooped silently around the apartment doing all she could to keep out of Lexie’s way, while at the same time still looking after her. The fact that Lexie knew how hard Barbara was trying, and how unjust she was being herself, didn’t help matters. It just made her more bad-tempered than ever.

  Then, at last, on a night so hot and stifling that Lexie could only sit out on the fire escape gazing into the thick darkness, listening to the people shouting on the streets below and the crying children in the neighbouring apartments, it started.

  All day she had been feeling restless. Her usual lassitude had been replaced by a spurt of nervous energy, and she had actually prepared a meal for Barbara and herself, which had cheered Barbara enormously. Her face had lit up when she had come in and seen the bowl of salad and the sliced cold corned beef ready on the table. Maybe Lexie had only bought at the deli, but she had done it, that was the point. Barbara had beamed at Lexie and been her old chattering self for the evening, which had made Lexie feel even more restless and irritable.

  When it actually started Lexie felt like an excited child at a fairground standing under a roller coaster which she both feared and wanted to ride. The fatigue, the restlessness and the irritability left her and surprise and wonderment came back in a great wave. She sat bolt upright on her rocking chair so that it swung wildly, with her hand on her belly, feeling the contraction ride across it. She had been having contractions for weeks, of course, the painless kind that did no more than make her breathe a little more deeply, but these were different. These were the real thing, demanding peaks and troughs of tightness that made her feel as though her body were an unoiled machine that was creaking with each long, slow turn of its cogs.

  She let it go on for several hours, sitting there on the fire escape, long after Barbara had gone to bed, coun
ting the creakings and timing them, as the city slept fitfully in the exhausted heat, listening to the occasional wails of the police sirens. Then, as the sky thinned and lost its murky blackness, and the first daylight came creeping through and the colour slowly slid back into the buildings and the children in the surrounding apartments woke and began to cry again, she went heavily indoors to wake Barbara.

  The baby was born at two a.m. the following day, after twenty-four hours of those creaking pains, then two hours of sweating, heaving and desperate pushing as Lexie struggled to free it from her body. She felt sometimes that she was turning inside out, that it wasn’t a baby she was trying to expel but her own heart as the sweat ran down her face and stung her eyes, and she grunted and gasped and grunted again. But it was a baby and not her whole inside, and she lay and stared at it, her face creased with puzzlement, when they showed it to her and told her she had a daughter.

  She looked round the labour room, squinting at its gleaming white tiles and the nurses and the doctor standing there, and said weakly, ‘What?’ The doctor laughed indulgently and said, ‘You have a fine daughter, Mrs Asher. Your husband will be a real proud man.’

  ‘No husband,’ Lexie said. She closed her eyes and then opened them again to stare at the baby. It had a face so crumpled and red it looked furious, and it was streaked with some sort of yellow waxiness that made her grimace with distaste. She said, ‘A girl?’ and the nurse leaned over and gave it to her to hold. Lexie looked down at the crumpled face just as the eyes opened and stared at her.

  Big eyes, they seemed, big dark eyes, full of knowledge and wisdom and a sort of scorn. Almost without thinking she put out her hand and touched the cheek beneath one of those eyes, and at once the small mouth moved and turned sideways. The little head followed the movement too and the yellow-streaked lips reached Lexie’s fingertip, took it in and began to suck furiously. She laughed, a little breathy sound, as the nurse laughed too. ‘Guess she missed her supper, hey? You’ll be able to feed her later.’ At once Lexie pulled her finger away.