Sarah’s formidable reputation was enhanced by the ejection of Auntie Rivka from David’s life. When the family teased her about it she would laugh with them, but her private thoughts she kept to herself. Being a mother didn’t get easier when your children left the nest, the way you’d imagined it would when they were still young. You no longer had to cook and clean for them, but their problems were still yours.
Sometimes she thought about this at her Shabbos tea parties, when she looked at Esther with two small boys tugging at her skirts and a baby girl on her lap. Miriam and Bessie were mothers now, too, and Sarah would listen to the three of them discussing their infants’ teething troubles as if this was the biggest worry in the world and smile to herself because their real worries hadn’t begun yet.
But if being a mother was sometimes painful, to be a grandma was ecstasy. “So!” she said with satisfaction from behind her teapot one Shabbos afternoon. “Just look at those beautiful babies!”
“The year 1924 was a very good year for our family,” David laughed.
Sigmund’s eyes twinkled behind his pince-nez. “In more ways than one!” He eyed his chubby grandson whom Miriam was cuddling on her lap. “Without our Martin would we all be here like this together again?”
“You had to come to your senses sometime.” Sarah could never resist telling him so.
“I never lost them!” he retorted as he always did. “I only made it up with you for Martin’s sake, so he wouldn’t be saddled with grandparents not speaking to each other, like I told Abie when I spoke to him at the Brith.”
“Sure you did,” Abraham said comfortably, exchanging a smile with Sarah and Rachel. They knew Martin’s birth last September had been a welcome excuse for Sigmund to end the rift without losing face, but nobody expected him to admit it.
Sarah sipped her tea contentedly and watched Bessie lift the edge of little Shirley’s diaper to show Miriam a patch of rash on the child’s bottom. Children drew people closer as nothing else could and her daughters-in-law were now able to be in each other’s company without strain, each fitting into her own place in the family.
“Who’s a little angel?” Bessie cooed planting a kiss on Shirley’s ginger head, happier than she had ever been in her life. Being the mother of David’s child made her marriage feel secure and she exchanged a parental glance with him as the object of their mutual adoration threw her teething ring on the floor.
David hastened to retrieve it and give it back to her, shaking the silver bell attached to it to amuse her. She dropped it and gurgled when he bent down and picked it up again, not yet six months old but already aware her father was her willing slave.
Esther’s baby was lying on the rug playing with her fingers, a grave expression on her tiny face. She did not smile much and her dark eyes always looked thoughtful. Marianne had come into the world with the umbilical cord twisted around her neck and according to medical opinion ought not to have been alive. At first she was considered delicate, no amount of feeding succeeded in transforming her into a chubby child; then it had occurred to Esther that her daughter was a minute replica of Sarah, whose birdlike proportions had always belied her strength. The resemblance became more marked as time went by and now everyone noticed it.
Sammy sat gazing affectionately at his wife and son, but Miriam seemed unaware of it. Her baby was the centre of her world and nothing else mattered. The inner glow, missing for so long, had returned to illuminate her lovely face and blazed like a lantern whenever she looked at Martin. She stroked the soft brown fuzz on his head, exulting that she now had someone she loved whom nobody could take away from her.
“Let Shirley and Martin lie on the rug with Marianne and kick their legs, it’s good for them,” Esther instructed her sisters-in-law to whom she was the voice of experience.
The two babies set up a howl immediately and Marianne joined in.
“Such fancy names these little ones have got, I can’t get used to it,” Sarah told Rachel above the din. The children had Jewish names also, to be used on religious occasions, but were called by the English ones on their birth certificates. “Their parents think they’ll grow up to be film stars!”
“A Charlie Chaplin in the family’d suit Dad fine,” Ben laughed.
“So I like the pictures,” Abraham defended himself. “Everyone needs to relax.”
“Such a relaxation I can do without!” Sarah snorted. She had been to the cinema once and pronounced it a waste of time. “Who needs to pay money to be made to laugh and cry and get nervous palpitations from seeing nice young girls tied to railway tracks?” She watched Bessie and Miriam lift their babies from the rug and was not surprised when Marianne was left to continue howling. Esther was a strict mother.
“How can you let her?” David reproached his sister.
“When she finds out it gets her nowhere she won’t do it. Why d’you think my Harry and Arnold’re so well behaved?” She glanced approvingly at her two little sons. Three-year-old Harry was shaking a cocoa tin full of dried peas to amuse Arnold. The Kleins had no money to spare for toys, but Ben, who had not had any when he was a child, made sure they were not short of improvised ones. “There! What did I tell you?” Esther added triumphantly to David when Marianne’s screams petered out.
“I thought she’d never stop!” Nathan exclaimed. Being uncle to five was something to boast about at school, but at home on Saturdays he would gladly have disowned them. He was sitting by the window reading The Iliad. Carl sat beside him and was also reading. They occupied the same spot every Saturday and it had become known in the family as “bookworm’s corner.”
Sigmund never read when Martin was there, but sat feasting his eyes on him.
Sarah got up to offer a dish of strudel and paused for a moment surveying the human web which the years had woven around her. How clever Nature was, the way she arranged things; a headful of red hair here, a short nose there and a long one somewhere else, mixing and blending this way and that, making each new person in some way or other the continuance of their line. And how could it happen that her grandson Martin had Rachel’s face? That David’s Shirley looked nothing like him or Bessie, but resembled Esther? Who had decreed that Marianne would be the image of herself? The wonder and mystery of it overwhelmed her.
“What’s the matter, Mother?” David asked when he saw the expression on her face.
“I was just having a little think.”
“Hm,” he said ominously and everyone laughed. Sarah’s “little thinks” could have shattering consequences.
“So, Rachel,” she said to her friend hiding the sorrow which welled up when she looked at her. She began refilling the many teacups. “We’ve got a nice big family now, eh?”
Rachel smiled contentedly. Her own family had only been extended by the addition of a son-in-law and one baby boy, but she thought of the Moritzes and Sandbergs as a single clan, as they all did. She was now unable to walk and had to be wheeled to the Saturday gatherings in her bath chair, but her spirit still burned bright. “The Almighty is good, Sarah,” she declared. He had given her a grandchild who’d brought them all together again.
“Sure He is, Rachel. And you’ll soon be better, out of that chair and dancing again,” Sigmund told her.
“Since when did I dance?”
“So you won’t dance, you’ll make the Sachertorte. Helga’s isn’t as good as yours.”
Helga smiled stiffly as she always did when her father spoke to her mother this way, and continued playing with Esther’s boys. She loved children, but life had dictated she wouldn’t have any of her own and sometimes she thought of the marriage offers she’d had during her years of widowhood. One had been from Moishe Lipkin, whom she liked, but she knew she could never leave her mother. The chances had come and gone, but while she was needed she had no regrets. She saw Miriam glance at her and knew it was because their father was still going on with his ridiculous talk.
“Remember how you used to walk faster than me, Rachel?” Sigmund was saying. “You’ll do so again, my dear.”
Why doesn’t he stop it? Miriam thought desperately. Mother knows she’ll never walk again, she’s accepted it. Why can’t he? How did Helga bear it? Seeing Mother slipping away and Father pretending she wasn’t really ill, never being able to forget it for a minute because she lived with them.
It was not just in his wife’s presence that Sigmund maintained the pretence. From the beginning he had refused to admit she was seriously ill, joking and laughing as he had when Rachel first showed Sarah her trembling hands.
He had not changed his habits, or paid her more attention, but still sat immersed in his books while she lay on her sofa, as if she was only inert because she felt tired and would soon get up to pour him a cup of coffee. It was as though believing it would make it real, that denying it meant it was not the case. How he had explained to himself his wife’s absence from their marital bed nobody knew. Helga heard him walking the floor every night, but passed no comment.
The family found his behaviour unnerving and his daughters suffered because of it. Only Rachel understood. The one concession he had made was to move house, so she could see more of her grandchild, but Miriam suspected he had agreed because it was what he wanted himself.
They now lived opposite her and she took Martin to visit them every day. But sometimes Sigmund would take him out in the pram whilst she did her housework and Helga would have to go looking for him if a customer arrived for a fitting.
David had moved his parents from Strangeways shortly after his daughter’s birth. It was inconceivable to him not to have them nearby. He had found them a spacious home on Heywood Street, which stretched between two points on Cheetham Hill Road, and Sarah was momentarily speechless when she saw the three-storey house with a much larger front garden than David’s. It had one at the back, too.
“All this for your father and Nat and me? You could fit six families into it,” she had exaggerated.
“What about Esther and Ben and their kids?” David had taken it for granted that his sister would continue living with them.
“They want a place of their own and why not?”
“So your grandchildren’ll come to stay the night and fill the rooms. And I’ll pay the rent.”
“You think your father would allow you to?”
“It’s you who gives the man his money when he calls. Father doesn’t have to know.”
The new house had a large dining room and David had bought an enormous table to be used when all the family came together for the Passover Seder and other Festivals. His mother had told him to return it to the shop, she did not own a cloth big enough for it. He bought her an enormous tablecloth instead; he was not going up in the world without taking his family with him, though the climb was not proving easy.
Sarah’s Sabbath tea parties were held in the front parlour and Salaman’s sofa was much sat upon these days.
“So how’s business, David?” Ben asked when the women had gone to the kitchen to wash the dishes.
“How can it be?” David replied cryptically.
“People have to replace their crockery when they break it, but even for me it could be better,” Ben complained. “The folk who come to Flat Iron Market these days only come to look, they don’t have a penny to spare in their pockets.”
“A lot that Ramsay Mac did to make things better!” Abraham snorted.
Sigmund smiled. “You expected him to, Abie?”
The Labour Government had been and gone, Mr. Baldwin was currently beset by troubles with the miners and the economic climate abysmal. David had never been more glad the factory was not a union shop. His employees were on short time, but the personal bond between him and them had helped soften the blow. Nobody had called him a bloated plutocrat whose greed had brought about their plight, as was happening in other factories. They knew that when times were good again for him, they would also be good for them.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” Carl said lifting his head from the Manchester Guardian which he had been perusing. Abraham’s remark and his father’s reply had just filtered through to him. Politics interested him, but he viewed them dispassionately as he did life and seemed to have no desire for active participation in either. “It’ll take years for real Socialism to come to this country.”
David, who did not want it to, cut the discussion short by turning his attention to Nathan. “How’s school going, Nat?”
Nathan looked hesitant.
“Not getting bad marks are you?”
“Could we go into the dining room, David? I have to talk to you.”
Nathan could not recall when he had first known for certain he didn’t want to be a doctor. The sight of blood, or being with someone who was ill, always distressed him. He couldn’t look at Rachel without feeling guilty because he was healthy and she was going to die. And the thought of cutting up a human body in order to learn how it functioned sickened him.
This was how the deepening conviction that medicine was not for him had begun, but lately something positive had been added to it. Latin and Greek were his best subjects and the head of the school classics department had spoken of entering him for an Oxford Scholarship. Manchester Grammar sent boys to Oxford and Cambridge every year, but it had not occurred to Nathan that this was within his reach.
For a week he had existed in a euphoria, seeing himself capped and gowned cycling beneath the dreaming spires. He would devote his life to Homer and Plato instead of to the dreaded Hippocrates. But he had arisen this morning gripped by apprehension. Medicine was the goal the family had set for him and today there would be the Shabbos tea party. How was he going to tell David?
Somehow he found the courage to do so.
David stood by the window looking out into the back garden, then drew the curtains across with a swift, sharp movement though it was not yet dark. He had listened without interrupting, but the stiffness of his stance prepared Nathan for the worst. He had not been scared of David since he was a small child, but the fear returned now and the drawn curtains made him feel shut in.
“Are you out of your mind?” David thundered.
“Please don’t shout at me.”
“I’ll do more than shout if necessary, to bring you down to earth! Latin and Greek all of a sudden!”
“That isn’t true, I’ve always loved Latin and Greek.”
“Suddenly he doesn’t want to be a doctor!”
“That isn’t true either, I’ve never wanted to be one.”
“Well let me tell you something we both know is true, Nat.” David’s voice had sunk to a low pitch which was more alarming than his shouts. “The family’ve scrimped and sacrificed. All of us. Mother. Father. Esther. Sammy. Not to mention me. So you can be Dr. Sandberg.”
Nathan averted his eyes. This was the part that made things so difficult.
“What have you to say about that?”
“I appreciate it. But wouldn’t it have been better to wait and find out what I wanted to be?”
David took an apple from the bowl of wax fruit on the table and stared at it. “The scrimping and saving to educate you began the day you were born, Nat. Mother decided your schooling wouldn’t be cut short like mine was.”
A small bell rang in Nathan’s mind.
“Her youngest son was going to college if it took every farthing we’d got and in those days we had bugger all. I can remember Sammy and me walking around in shoes that let water in during the war, when we were all earning good money.”
“Why didn’t Father mend them? He was a cobbler in Russia, wasn’t he?”
“Have you any idea of how hard he had to work? All he was fit for at the end of a day in the pressing room was to flop into bed, it used to break my heart seeing him like that. But even if he’d had the energy, Mother wouldn’t have let him spend money on leather to mend them with. She hoarded every penny for you. Other people had new this, new that, but not the Sandbergs. Times aren’t good right now, but there’s still something going into the bank for you every week. I see to that. Esther and Sammy stopped giving when they got married, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t got a share in you.”
Nathan had paled as David loaded the weight of responsibility onto him and the bell in his mind was still ringing. “What d’you mean by a share in me?”
“A doctor’s a somebody and Mother wants a somebody in the family. The rest of us won’t mind having one, either.”
“It’s bleddy disgusting!”
“You’d better watch what you’re saying, our kid!”
“Snobbery, that’s what it is!”
“Is that how you see it?”
“Yes! I do!”
David polished the wax apple on the sleeve of his jacket and replaced it in the bowl. “Well you haven’t roughed it like the rest of us, have you, Nat?”
Nathan sat down and put his head in his hands.
David wanted to tell him what it was like to scrub the scaly slime off Mr. Radinsky’s fish counter every night so your family wouldn’t go short of fruit and vegetables; to say goodbye to school when you were fourteen and spend your days in a hell-hole like Salaman’s used to be; to have your hopes and dreams trampled to dust and be left with nothing but ambition. “The somebody in our family might have been me,” was all he said.
Something in his voice made Nathan raise his head and look at him, then the bell in his mind awakened a long forgotten childhood memory. He was sitting at the kitchen table in Moreton Street, kicking and screaming because nobody would tell him what had happened to David which could also happen to himself. He had not found out what it was until years later, when he’d learned his big brother had had to leave high school to work in a factory.
“It might have been me, but it’s going to be you,” David said flatly.
“I’m not going to be a doctor. I can’t.”
David had bent his own life with the wind of circumstances when everything he yearned for lay in the opposite direction and the sacrifice was being flung in his face. He grabbed Nathan by the shoulders. “There’s no such word as can’t! Look at me, I’m a living example of it!”
“Let go of me, David!”
David was trembling with emotion. He dropped his hands and Nathan slumped back into the chair. “You’ll damn well be what the family wants you to be, you owe it to us after everything we’ve done for you,” he said curtly and strode to the door.
“I’m sorry,” Nathan whispered.
David turned to look at him, studying his forlorn countenance. He hadn’t meant to let fly at him, but the boy had to get his feet on the ground or he’d end up an intellectual nothing like Carl Moritz and break his mother’s heart.
Nathan tried to smile. “I’ve let you down, haven’t I?”
“No you haven’t. And you’re not going to. Tell your teacher Oxford’ll have to manage without you, Manchester University’ll do fine. And forget about Homer and Plato, they’ll get you nowhere. Start swotting to get into medical school.”
The confrontation had brought David face to face with the past again and he was not himself for the rest of the day.
“Don’t you love me anymore?” Bessie asked him. He had hardly spoken to her during the walk home from his parents’ house and was moody all evening. They had just come to bed and he was lying with his hands folded behind his head, gazing at the orange-box bookcase.
“Why do you think everything I do or say’s got something to do with you, Bessie?” he said without looking at her.
“I’m your wife, aren’t I?”
“But you’re not my whole life.”
Bessie’s mind leapt to Miriam and her new-found security slipped from under her. But David was not thinking of Miriam, he was remembering the far-off days before he had forcibly grown up, his daily escape from the ghetto to the world of school and books and his friendship with Jim Forrest.
“I’ll kill her!” Bessie said feelingly.
He could not summon the energy to tell her she was on the wrong track. Women, he had learned, functioned only on one level and could not understand that men did not. He was still gazing at the orange-box.
“And I’ll set fire to that thing!”
But you can’t destroy the part of me you don’t even know exists, he thought.
Shirley cried out in her cot beside the bed.
“You’ve made me wake her up!” Bessie rebuked him.
David laughed and touched his wife’s plump cheek, affectionately. “You’ll never change, will you, love?” Her characteristic reaction had returned him to earth.
She got up and brought the baby into bed with them.
“But it doesn’t matter. I’m used to you the way you are,” he told her. She was the mother of his child and he felt tenderness for her, the more so when her new confidence occasionally deserted her and made her seem ridiculous and vulnerable.