The family stood huddled together watching the Britannic sail away, oblivious to the cold March wind gusting around them. It was Sarah’s first visit to Liverpool Docks, but she would remember it for more than that reason. She could feel David and Nathan gripping her arms. Esther was holding on to Abraham. Did they think their elderly parents would capsize under the strain of this painful parting? She glanced at her husband’s set expression and knew her own was the same. The years had schooled them both to withstand anything.
In her mind’s eye, she could still see Sammy waving goodbye from the deck rail, a tall and handsome figure with more red than grey in his hair, despite the knocks life had meted out to him. Looking up at him, she had been struck by his resemblance to his father when Abraham was in his late forties. Their characters were alike, also. Kind and gentle. Which went hand in hand with their lack of drive. Lacking the strength to be master of their own household, too.
Whilst Martin was alive, Miriam had been too wrapped up in him to divert her attention to Sammy. But Sarah had always known she was capable of ruling him and this had now been proved so.
Miriam had not waved farewell, but had stood erect and unsmiling beside her husband, gazing down at the family group. As if she wanted to imprint the picture on her mind. This had brought home to Sarah that they might never see each other again. She would not forget the moment, either. Her son clad in a brown overcoat, with a yellow scarf around his neck. Her daughter-in-law wearing the elegant, grey suit Sigmund had made for her. He had sewn every stitch with a heavy heart, he’d told Sarah, but had wanted his daughter to look as fashionable as the American ladies when she walked down Fifth Avenue.
“We may as well push off. They’ve gone now,” Ronald said from behind her. His tone was gruff and had a note of finality that jolted the others from their thoughts.
The quayside had lost its bustling excitement. Most of those who had come to see passengers off had already left and the porters were stacking empty luggage-trolleys near the entrance to the customs hall. But the family had lingered on in the lonely aftermath that hangs in the air when an ocean liner has departed, unable quite to believe what they were doing there.
Miriam and Sammy’s emigration to the States had assumed a dreamlike quality from the time it was first mentioned at a Sabbath tea party. Possibly because it seemed to be happening for no reason. Sammy had a good job with David. They owned their home and everyone who meant anything to them was in England. Their only child’s grave was in Manchester. To begin again in their middle years in a new country, when they did not have to, appeared inexplicable. And Miriam had made it more so by refusing to discuss it.
Even David, who had booked their one-way tickets, and telephoned Malka Berkowitz’s cousin Chavah in New York to ask her to meet the ship at the other end, had not thought they would go through with it and was stunned by the fact that they had. You did not leave your whole family and your home country just to escape from everything that reminded you that you had once had a son. This was Sammy’s private explanation to his brothers, but it did not satisfy David.
He thought about it again as they left the quayside. And tried not to think about what Miriam had said after kissing everyone goodbye except himself, which had felt like a parting stab in the back.
“Why did they have to do it?” Helga demanded.
She had never gained weight, and her petite appearance and small round face had kept her looking youthful. Today she looked like a bewildered old woman and it seemed incongruous to see her trudging along holding her father’s hand.
Sigmund eyed her anxiously. “All I need is for you to go to pieces on me.” Helga had been his support along the craggy path his life had been since her dead mother became an invalid. She was not one to show her feelings and it was a shock to find her unable to contain them now.
“I’ll never forgive Miriam for leaving us,” Helga declared tremulously. Then she pulled herself together, as if the resolve had given her strength to do so. “Let’s hurry up and get out of this wind,” she said, quickening her pace. “I’ll just have to get used to not having Miriam and Sammy around. But the whole thing will always be a mystery to me.”
Ben shrugged his agreement as he shepherded Esther, weeping copiously, towards the car park.
Leona was walking between the Moritz twins, her emerald coat and flaming hair strident as a bird of paradise in the drab, dockside surroundings. “Maybe they won’t like America and then they’ll come back, Auntie Helga,” she said hopefully. “It’s awful for me, too. Uncle Sammy was my favourite uncle.”
David tried not to feel slighted. Leona had not realized he was within earshot, or she wouldn’t have said it, but that didn’t soothe away its effect. What was it about him that didn’t endear him to the younger generation? Since his revealing talk with Arnold, he’d noticed that Leona and the twins seemed to be wary of him. Probably they always had been and the young adults in the family, too, but he had mistaken wariness for respect.
His two-year-old granddaughter was trying to leap from Peter’s arms to his.
“Lawa want to go Gwandpa!” she piped. Shirley had not allowed her to call her grandparents Zaidie and Bobbie.
David stroked her ginger curls and was rewarded with a gurgling kiss. Here was one child who loved him!
“Grandpa’ll come and help to bath you, pet,” Shirley told her.
“Pwomise?”
“Don’t I always on a Sunday, Laura darling?” David smiled. It was a treat to which he looked forward all week.
Shirley was trying to make her ocelot swagger coat meet across her pregnant stomach. “It’s a date, Dad.”
“That’s how they talk in America,” Leona said mournfully.
“Do stop behaving as if you’re at a wake, Leona,” Henry rebuked her.
“And what is a wake?” Abraham inquired in a tetchy voice. “I never heard of it.”
“How could you, when you never learned to read English,” Sigmund interceded. “Me, I found out what it means from James Joyce.”
“In 1905, when we first met, he made me feel like an ignoramus,” Abraham snorted. “And now in 1947 he’s still trying to do it! So who is this Mr. Joyce? He’s Jewish?”
“Oy vay,” Sigmund groaned.
“The way people are changing their names, nowadays, you can never tell.”
“He’s an Irish novelist,” Henry, who had begun dipping into his grandfather’s library at the age when other children read fairy tales, supplied.
Abraham coughed up some phlegm and transferred it to his handkerchief. “I should know from Irish novelists, when I don’t even know from English ones!”
“And a wake is a gathering the Irish have after a funeral,” Henry explained.
“Bridie’s never mentioned it, but I suppose it’s their way of sitting Shivah,” Leona surmised.
Henry smiled at her patronizingly. “Why do you put a Jewish interpretation on everything?”
“Probably because I’m Jewish,” Leona replied with a withering glance.
“But you don’t have to let it colour all your thoughts. And also there’s no need to relegate our departed relatives to the past tense as you’ve been doing.”
“What is Henry talking about?” Sarah asked hoping he was not speaking ill of the dead.
Henry had a vocabulary and assurance beyond his years and the family had already marked him out as a future barrister. He gave Sarah the special smile he reserved for his elderly relations. “Ever since the ship sailed, Leona’s been using the word ‘was’ when she refers to Auntie Miriam or Uncle Sammy. Unless it hits an iceberg crossing the Atlantic – and I don’t see how it could in March – they’re on their way to New York harbour, not the gates of Heaven.”
Leona retaliated with barbed sweetness. “If only it were you who’d gone for ever, Henry. Then I’d be jumping for joy instead of dragging my feet in sorrow.”
If the family’s ideas for girls had included the professions, they would doubtless have cast her in the role of future advocate, too. The fist-fights and hair-pulling that had once characterized her relationship with Henry had been superseded by lengthy, verbal duels as they grew older and sometimes, at Sarah’s tea parties, everyone would sit with bated breath to see which of them would win.
Frank put himself between them to stop them from glaring at each other. “Pack it in, you two,” he said with a long-suffering sigh. He seemed to have been saying it to them all his life.
“I’ll ride with Sarah and Abraham, in David’s car, like I did coming,” Sigmund told his branch of the family when they reached their vehicles.
Henry winked at Hannah. “Zaidie doesn’t approve of women drivers.”
“Which man does? But if we waited for a male one, the Moritzes’d go everywhere on foot,” Hannah chuckled, settling herself behind the wheel of their second-hand Ford. “Until you and Frank are old enough to chauffeur us.”
“We’re the only lads in our class whose father doesn’t drive,” Frank grinned.
Henry chased after his Manchester Grammar School cap, which a gust of wind had carried off, and returned with his fair hair awry. “Won’t is the correct word, isn’t it, Dad?”
Carl smiled at them mildly. “It wouldn’t be safe. I’m too absent-minded.”
“That’s been your excuse for all things all the years I’ve known you,” Hannah said, patting his cheek affectionately as he got in beside her.
Sarah had listened to their comfortable chatter whilst she waited for David to unlock his car doors. But her thoughts were still with Sammy and Miriam setting forth to a new life. Would they have uprooted themselves if they’d shared the kind of contentment Hannah and Carl did? Since Martin’s death, Miriam had been beset by restlessness, lashing out at Sammy as she had never done previously. And Sarah had no reason to suppose a different environment would change this. What was ailing Miriam came from within and would go with her wherever she went.
“Tuck the car rug around Mother and Father’s knees,” David said to Bessie as they set off for home.
“What about mine?”
“The rug is big enough for all three of us,” Abraham said. “And if it wasn’t, you could have my share, Bessie.”
She smiled sourly. “But David isn’t worried about me being warm enough, is he?”
“I don’t have to be. I bought you a mink coat.”
Bessie wrapped it closer around herself and clutched at her hair as the breeze from David’s window blew upon it. “All the time we were out in that wind I wore a scarf on my head to keep my hair set nice and the minute I get in the car my husband gets it blown all over the place!”
“You should’ve kept the scarf on.”
“Wind your window up and I won’t have to.”
David obeyed her command, but Sarah saw his shoulders tense and knew he had bitten back a sharp retort. Nathan didn’t bother controlling his feelings, he said whatever came into his head when Rebecca angered him. Most of their conversation funded like bickering. Sarah often felt like telling them to stop it but had learned it was wiser to hold her tongue; that a mother could intercede in matters affecting the whole family, but not in her married children’s personal squabbles. Why did they have to squabble? Even Esther and Ben, whom she had once considered an ideal couple, weren’t above being sharp with each other these days.
David was leading the six-vehicle convoy and Sarah glanced through the rear window to make sure nobody had been left behind. Even her grandsons had their own cars, though Ronald was still a student. Harry’s was a big, two-tone one and Ronald’s a little red sports model, his twenty-first birthday present from David. David had bought Peter and Shirley their car for a wedding gift; their house near Heaton Park, too, when Peter was demobbed.
But would all the luxuries the young people had acquired help them to be happy? Sarah had begun to doubt it. Harry had worn a worried expression since he’d married Dr. Smolensky’s daughter, Ann, who was also Yankel Cohen the furrier’s grandchild. Probably because he had to keep her in the style her wealthy family had. And Shirley always seemed to be criticizing Peter, telling him to take a leaf out of his father-in-law’s book, as if she expected him to acquire David’s business acumen overnight. Perhaps she didn’t know how her dad had struggled. That getting where he was now had taken years and years.
“What a nerve, overtaking our Jag in that old tin can!” Bessie exclaimed, cutting into Sarah’s reflections.
Hannah had just honked her horn and shot past them in a cloud of foul-smelling smoke issuing from her vehicle’s exhaust pipe.
Money the Moritzes didn’t have, yet they were more carefree by far than her own brood, Sarah reflected.
Bessie launched into another spate of nagging that confirmed the thought.
“Must we go to that meeting tonight, David?”
“You don’t mind enjoying yourself at the ladies’ coffee mornings, do you?”
“We raise funds for Palestine by holding them, don’t we? So don’t try to make out I’m not doing my bit!”
“There’s more to being a Zionist than just raising funds,” David said vehemently. “We’ve got to raise our voices, too. Where it counts, with what’s going on at present.”
Abraham shuddered. “When I think of those poor refugees from the concentration camps not being allowed in there – as if they haven’t suffered enough.”
“Turning away their boats, even,” Sigmund said with feeling. “Where do the British Government expect them to go?”
“They don’t give a damn,” David answered. “They’re not keen on letting many into England, either.”
“If England had had this Government forty-odd years ago, the Sandbergs would be pushing up Russian daisies now,” Sarah said to Abraham.
“So go and argue with them, David,” Bessie said sourly. “A big shot like you I’m sure they’ll listen to!”
David ignored her sarcasm. “The Jewish Board of Deputies is doing so.”
“In that case we don’t need to ruin our evenings going to meetings,” she snapped, returning to her original point.
“You don’t have to come with me.”
“Maybe you’d rather I didn’t.”
Sarah shut her mind to the words they were flinging at each other. Their quarrel had turned full circle and had now begun on a different tack, as her children’s quarrels with their spouses invariably did. Usually, they were rowing about something completely different by the time they had finished. What was the matter with them all? She could no longer pretend to herself that any of them had harmonious marriages.
“All right, Mother?” David asked, catching sight of her expression in the mirror.
“Sure.” How could she be all right? With one of her sons on his way to what seemed like another world. And the discord that had surrounded her the whole afternoon. When she and Abraham arrived in Manchester with their young family and journeyed to Strangeways by horse-and-cart, they had not known what was in store for them. The material comfort that was their children’s today they couldn’t have even dreamt of. But what had it brought with it?
Bessie stopped nagging David and noticed her mother-in-law’s pensive silence. “A penny for your thoughts, Ma?”
Sarah kept them to herself and laced her fingers through Abraham’s as she had that long-ago evening in the jogging cart. They had always been happy together. Even when a penny was all they’d had.