She's Leaving Home (29 page)

Helen took the plunge but tried to sound off-hand. ‘Not exactly. I don’t know. I see my mother, and I know I don’t fancy her life. She’s nothing but a housewife – a drudge, of sorts. I wouldn’t be so different from most of my friends if I preferred a career, and not merely as some boss’s secretary. Or as a nurse. I don’t want to spend my time cleaning up after other people.’

‘That’s quite a rejection of motherhood, my dear,’ mused her aunt. ‘You don’t have to do it your Ma’s way, you know. Don’t have to martyr yourself. And motherhood can be a joy, especially if you’ve a happy partnership.’

So many questions came rushing into Helen’s head. Was her mother a martyr? Or perhaps she acted one? And if so, was the marriage perhaps – not happy? Was that Gertie’s view – and on what evidence? Helen had tended to assume that her own home was a normal model. Certainly it had been held up to her as such by both parents. What she had just heard disturbed her. For the moment however she held her peace: caution was essential. From Gertie right now she needed something else. She spoke again, choosing her words with great care.

‘I wanted to ask you. D’you think it’s possible to love somebody quite different from yourself – successfully, I mean? Everyone says it’s safer in the long run to stay with what you know. But I get so bored with that. Is it bound to be a failure?’

Gertie sat on the edge of her bed and began to cream off her make-up. The circular motions gave her time to consider.

‘That depends. I fell in love with somebody from my own street, but at the same time we struck out into the wide blue yonder. My Joe and me. Never regretted it for a second.’

Helen took a deep breath. ‘My mother said you were quite wild when you were young. Especially around my age.’

‘Did she now! I was a lot wilder than she was, that’s for sure.’ Helen bent her head: she was not about to get involved in any personal battles. Gertie wiped her hands on a Kleenex and reached for
the hairbrush.

‘Oh, Gawd. It’s a million years ago. The family scandal – or one of them. D’you really wanna know?’

Helen nodded. ‘All they ever do in this house is nudge and talk in half-sentences. Nobody ever tells me anything, Aunt Gertie. My mother seems to believe ignorance is good for the soul. It gets so that I want to keep secrets myself: it begins to feel like the natural thing to do. But I want to know about my family history, not just riddles. You seem the most – honest and open person about. So I am listening.’

‘And you understand that you don’t go spraying it around, yes? Fine. So listen.’

The elderly lady composed herself. She did not look directly at her niece.

‘I was a kid. Your age, I guess. One day I couldn’t stand it at home any longer. I was suffocating – I had to scram. So I ran off with a sailor – not hard to do in Liverpool! We got as far as Cherbourg. I’d hoped to board a steamer to New York from there though I hadn’t a bean. Thought I’d sign on as a kitchen hand or whatever. Got hauled back pronto. My mother was hysterical.’

‘Was he Jewish?’ She hardly dared ask.

‘No. Matthew Campbell, his name was – hardly kosher. No Jewish boy would’ve run away. He’d have got engaged and married me.’

‘What was he like?’

A nostalgic note came into Gertie’s voice. ‘Matt? Drop-dead gorgeous, if truth be told. Ten years older than me. Tall and skinny with grey-blue eyes. Stomach flat as a board. He was Scottish, from the lowlands, from a dirt-poor background – ten of them in a two-room hovel, he said. Off to make his fortune, and more than willing to have me tag along.’

‘Were you in love with him?’

‘I thought so at the time. Ah, to be young and in love.’

‘I mean,’ Helen continued slowly, ‘were you – lovers?’

Gertie stopped brushing. ‘I suppose I should be flattered that you want to talk to me like that. But if I tell you, I don’t expect to hear it repeated in the parlour downstairs.’

‘’Course not. I promise.’

‘Sure we made love. He was terrific at it. I dunno who tutored him – not me. But I was a fast learner. You know, Helen, when you’re young, fit, got enough to eat, when those limbs start to entwine and the ol’ heart starts pumping – Jeez, there’s nothing on earth to match it. Ecstasy – you wait. Human beings were built to enjoy it, you know. Little buttons in the right places – press them and –
pow
! That’s how Mother Nature guarantees the survival of the species.’

Helen stared at her fascinated. Gertie laughed.

‘Hell, kid, if it wasn’t fun, nobody’d bother. Take your parents, for example.’

‘What do you mean?’ The girl was suddenly defensive.

‘Well – maybe I shouldn’t say this. But those cousins of ours who were closer to her age got the impression your mother thought sex was a bit – well, dirty. Beneath her. Plenty of women thought like that in those days. Your Mom’d put up with it to have children, and to satisfy her husband but she didn’t believe it was possible to have fun in bed. Miriam told me Annie was quite shocked at the idea that women could get completely carried away. But our side of the family – the females anyway – have healthy lusts. It’s good for you, is my view. Always has been.’

‘Do you still do it?’ Helen could not hide her curiosity.

Gertie sighed. ‘Joe and me? Not as much as we did – you get decrepit, the joints creak and you need your rest more. Once I’m recumbent I’m in the land o’ nod. But if it’s once a month, so what? It’s still wonderful. I’d say I have a lively sex life for my age.’

‘I don’t think my parents do it much,’ said the girl softly. ‘I’m right next door and I think I’d hear. Mostly it’s Dad’s snores, or I hear him pace around when his legs are bad.’

Her voice dropped to a whisper as if her mother might be hovering nearby.

‘D’you see what I mean? I don’t want to get trapped like that. Stuck. Dependent on a husband for my money, and on my children and relatives for my hopes of the future. Living through other people, with my head filled solely with who’s getting married, who’s having a baby, have I enough to pay the milkman. Mum’s horizons are so foreshortened it drives me nuts. I’m interested in what goes on
beyond
these four walls. It’s not her fault, it’s me – I don’t think I’m cut out to be a conventional Jewish momma.’

Gertie climbed into bed. ‘That’s quite a confession for the weekend of your brother’s barmitzvah. You don’t have to be the same as your own mother.’

‘That’s easier said than done, Aunt Gertie. Your approach is much more open. You seem so much more alive.’

‘Hm. Well, I try. Life’s great – but it’s what you make of it. Say, though. I meant to ask you when we had a moment alone. Those American boys we met at the restaurant. They were real cute. They come to your club?’

‘Well – that’d be an exaggeration. They’ve been a couple of times. They’re a lot more sophisticated than us and can go to pubs and that.’

Gertie cast a veiled glance in Helen’s direction. ‘You might make a play for one of them. Did I catch the name Cohen?’

‘Them? Buzz and CC’s family are Lubavicher Chassids. I don’t think they’d be interested that way.’

‘But the others?’ Gertie persisted, her eyes bright.

Helen paused a long time. She could confide, now. She could take a chance and trust this elegant, unconventional aunt. She could seek advice, as she had with Mr Mannheim. Yet something held her back – perhaps that natural reticence inherited from her mother, or a more British reserve picked up at school. Most likely it was a deeper instinct that Michael was too precious to be a suitable subject for idle chatter.

‘I think that’s a matter of ask no questions and you’ll get told no lies, Aunt Gertie. But I don’t want that to surface in the parlour either.’ The assumption that the other GIs may well be suitable was allowed to lie uncorrected.

‘Poor Helen. You don’t fit into any of this, do you?’ Gertie leaned across and patted the girl’s knee. ‘I need my beauty sleep, so goodnight. And you can escape, you know. If you planned to emigrate to the States I’d sponsor you and so would your other family. You don’t have to stay put and be miserable. In fact you can do whatever you want, honey. The world’s at your feet, don’t you realise that?’

By Sunday afternoon the Marcus Liversham Hall had been transformed. A huge red and gold banner was pinned to the wall:
HAPPY BARMITZVAH – MAZELTOV
. Between the lights and the windows hung streamers and bunches of white and blue balloons with ribbons. Trestle tables had been decked out with blue linen, flower arrangements and pretty white crockery. Everything had been hired from the synagogue as both accessible and cheap; most items had been bought by a committee in a fit of patriotic zeal for an Independence Day supper, so were in the colours of the Israeli flag. That too was present, tacked up on the far side.

Helen had decided against an invitation either for Brenda, Meg or Colette, or for the GIs. Her schoolfriends would have been treated with distant condescension by other guests and would have required endless explanations and shepherding. As for Michael: once his origins had been established his appearance would have been courting disaster. It was unthinkable to invite the other boys without him. Though she felt lonely and missed him, she concentrated instead on the active role as dutiful daughter. The alternative was to hover at her mother’s elbow and be greeted as an afterthought, mostly with a comment about how big she had grown.

Conscientiously she slipped into the kitchen to meet the hired staff, then walked round to check. On the stage the four-piece band were setting up their instruments: drums, saxophone, bass, and an innovation – an electric organ. Her mother’s own candlesticks were on the top table for the blessing. The microphone was in place and appeared to work. As the caterer bustled about, the girl fingered the serviettes, specially printed for the event in silver on white, with the date, Barry’s full name, and ‘Mazeltov Daniel and Annie’. The five Hebraic characters for ‘mazeltov’ were beneath.

Quite suddenly two hundred people turned up at once, it seemed. Not for Jewish people any exaggerated delay or dramatic late entrances at a
simchah
. Where there was food and wine going, Helen reflected wryly, her kith and kin were bang on time.

Most she knew: her father’s friends, every in-law that could be traced, the usual pillars of local society. Gertie swanned about, magnificent in a gold sheath dress which showed off her still lithe shape and red hair; Annie by contrast looked bland and a little tired. Others were less familiar, such as a young second cousin over from Israel whose family had escaped the Holocaust, and a ‘dear lady friend’ wheedled in at the last minute by Sylvia Bloom. Yet as guests filed in and found their seats, as the band began to play songs from the shows, with a glass of wine inside her and compliments received about her dress (pink shantung with a tiny waist from Blackler’s) and hair (in a French pleat like her aunt’s and very grown-up), Helen began to relax.

For the photos, the meal and the speeches she stayed demurely on the top table. As the musicians struck up waltzes and foxtrots she moved away. She did not want to dance if it could be avoided.

Maurice Feinstein was not noted for his dancing skills either but Vera Wolfson, the lady to whom he had been introduced, obviously expected it of him. It’d been no accident that the two were on the same table and facing – a phone call from Sylvia to Annie had seen to that, in return for a marginally fatter cheque as a barmitzvah present. Sylvia herself, a vision in navy satin (a bit excessive for a mere barmitzvah, Maurice thought), was located at the table end to keep a motherly eye on her charges. His son Jerry was mercifully out of earshot in the young people’s corner near the drummer.

Maurice Feinstein felt extraordinarily shy. Stupid, really, a grown man. Vera was thirtyish, though Sylvia had insisted she was twenty-seven. Not married – had been working abroad. That sounded fishy: but he would explore the matter further when they had time to themselves. Not pretty, exactly – the nose was a mite too long and pointed – but presentable. Quite smart: a cream dress and jacket, genuine pearls, make-up. Hands clean, nails varnished in pink. Gold bracelet watch on slim wrist. No rings.

Maurice sighed inwardly. That was the trouble. His soul did not leap. Nothing about her called to him. She seemed determined to play down anything dramatic about herself, yet her manner had an eager hopefulness that made his heart sink. He risked a look at Sylvia who nodded vigorously. Better get on with it.

‘Dance?’ he asked heavily and in a trice Vera was in his arms. Not till they were well out on to the floor did Maurice realise he hadn’t the faintest notion how to do the cha-cha. He shuffled and jiggled in approximate time to the music. His partner however was on her toes, bending neatly at the knee, twisting and turning. Her face bore a bright smile. He noticed her fine calves and trim ankles. She seemed to know what to do.

‘You’re a lovely dancer,’ he puffed as the music came to its closing bars, and added ‘Cha cha cha!’ without much enthusiasm. He turned back towards their seats but she held his fingers tightly and did not budge.

‘Yeah, I love it. Got prizes for it. Let’s do the next one.’

Thus it was a heavily perspiring Maurice Feinstein who, half an hour later, announced firmly that he was not going to attempt the Black Bottom and plodded to their table without her. Vera took the hint and headed demurely for the ladies’. Maurice sat and poured a beer from the jug, drank it in
one greedy gulp and poured another.

‘So? You like?’ Sylvia was instantly at his side. Her eyes darted from his reddened face to the door of the toilet.

‘Up to a point, Sylvia,’ was the guarded answer. ‘We’ve not had much chance of a conversation.’

‘She’s perfect for you. Such a delightful couple you make. Everybody’s talking.’ After a couple of drinks Sylvia began to speak like her mother, whose language had been Yiddish. She prodded Maurice’s belly. ‘She’d be superb for you, a younger wife. Get some of this off.’

Put me back in hospital, was the desperate if unspoken reply. The ladies’ toilet door swung open and the cream dress began to emerge. Maurice rose and headed doggedly to the top table.