To Live in Peace (6 page)

Kitty had never seen so many books. Sydney had had a glass-fronted bookcase in the hall in which he kept his sets of dark blue Festival Prayer books lettered with gold (one for himself and one for Kitty), his Pentateuch with its commentary by a former Chief Rabbi, the three volumes of the Laws and Customs of Israel (everything from Rules of the Morning Prayer to the Laws concerning certain forbidden foods, the customs surrounding birth, and the precepts concerning death), a Maimonides reader which had been his father’s and the dark blue volumes of the Jewish Encyclopaedia.

Maurice’s books – which provided him, he said, with the company and spiritual presence of the best and greatest of the human race – climbed from floor to ceiling in both living-room and bedroom and spilled out into bookshelves along the corridor. They were written in Yiddish (Scholem Aleichem and Mendele Mocher Sforim), German (Heine – who with Mozart, according to Maurice, brought man closest to the ultimate mystery of the universe – Goethe, and Schiller, as well as the twenty volumes of Der Gross Brockhaus), and English (late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, and Rashi and the Christian Scholars), and touched upon the fields of literature, religion, sociology, psychology, medicine, history and ethics. Apart from Cora, the twelve stone maid from Atlanta who came once a week to clean (and would not let even a cup of coffee pass her lips before pronouncing grace) and flicked a desultory feather duster over their spines, he did not like anyone to touch them.

He had in his sitting-room a complicated looking music centre with giant speakers which flanked his easel though no television (Maurice said he was very particular about whom he let into his room) but he bought one with a remote control switch for Kitty so that she could operate it from her bed. He wanted to but her everything. She only had to ask.

He was, he told her, a rich man. He had worked all his life, had no extravagances other than his library and his music, no one on whom to spend his money when he was alive, no one to leave it to when he was dead. His loneliness – he cared for few people other than Herb and Ed and Mort, had nobody – seemed strange to Kitty who had spent her whole life surrounded by family. Everything seemed strange. It had not been easy. She had been in New York for three weeks and there had been moments when she had taken out the return ticket Josh had insisted that she buy and fingered it longingly; moments in her studio, a world away from her friends and relations, that she had sat down and unashamedly wept. There were times when she thought she must have been out of her mind when she accepted Maurice’s invitation, a little deranged by the excitement of the wedding, and others when she imagined that late in life a new Kitty had not only been born but had taken wings.

She was, she knew, Rachel was always telling her so, a creature of habit. At home she was used to having her flat exactly as she wanted it and for her life to proceed, as it had unchanged for many years, according to routine. As far as housekeeping was concerned, before her arrival Maurice had not bothered. On her weekly visits Cora vacuumed as the fancy took her – taking care to keep out of Maurice’s way – sprayed silicone polish indiscriminately wherever she saw a surface, took Maurice’s personal washing down to the machines in the
basement and sent out the laundry. When there was dry cleaning to be done or shoes to be repaired (Kitty was amazed that they came back polished) it was Joe who arranged it, hanging the clothes in Maurice’s closet as they were returned. The German restaurant on 86th and 2nd kept a window table for him at lunchtime and he did not need to ask the waitress, who had been serving him for years, for his sauerbraten and red cabbage with its tennis ball of potato dumpling. When he did not feel like going out Joe fetched a sandwich – shrimp salad or liverwurst – from the corner deli.

“A strange way to live,” Kitty thought, and tried in as non-intrusive way as possible, to make a more comfortable domestic life for him, hindered only by the fact that Maurice was as set in his ways as she was in hers.

While Maurice painted, catching the morning light, Joe, whose fund of knowledge was invaluable, took Kitty under his wing. He directed her to the nearest Post Office (Gracie Station) where she seemed to spend much of her time (although Joe would have gladly taken the letters for her), the public library on 79th Street from which she borrowed books and gleaned recipes from Gourmet magazine – and the local shops. From the technicolour display in the Paradise Market on 83rd Street (run by Koreans who had, according to Joe, revolutionised the New York fresh fruit and vegetable trade), Kitty – eschewing the unfamiliar rhutabagas and spaghetti squash – selected red onions and Boston curly lettuce and delicious vineripe tomatoes and Simka plums in an effort to supplement Maurice’s diet, and thought longingly of her High Street greengrocer’s where they picked out the choicest produce as soon as they saw her coming and greeted her by name.

At the kosher butcher’s (not so different from the one at home) Lennie and Charlie in their kappels were fascinated by her foreign accent and initiated her into “Hanging Tender” and “Kolichel”, to their frozen “Franks ’n Blankets”, and razor thin slices of “Beef Fry” about which she did not disillusion Maurice who thought it was bacon.

She shopped daily at Gristedes on Madison with its “specials” of Solid White Tuna and Sara Lee Pound Cake, and Bremen House where she bought Maurice his Bergarder Blue and German cheese and Bobka, and weekly in the giant Food Emporium where the aisles where unfamiliar, she didn’t know a soul and was jostled right and left by impatient New Yorkers who never seemed to look were they were going. From the cornucopia of goods on offer she loaded her trolley and was amazed to find that unlike in England the goods were not only packed for her but delivered to her door.

At first she ventured no further than a few blocks either way of Maurice’s apartment building but she soon grew tired of the windows of Bolton’s Designer Clothes at Discount Prices, and Venture Stationers (the manageress of which came from Israel), and Mr Mad Rags, and David’s Cookies, and Maury’s Children’s Shop, and Little Bits (where she kept her eye open for bargains for her grandchildren) and in a brave moment of decision, remembering her co-ordinates – 85th and Madison – as Mort had cautioned her, took the bus downtown where she had never seen so many greeting card shops, so many matching sheets and comforters and towels, so many derelicts wandering the streets among the smartly dressed women or so many ordinary people walking along muttering to themselves.

She moved slowly, battling against the heat – which seemed to rise suffocatingly from the pavements and
from the subway vents in the road, taking in the snarled up goods vans (“The Messiest Department Store”, “Nice Jewish Boy Moving Company” and “The Pickle Man – Our Pickles Make You Sexy”), the summer sale bargains displayed on Adèle Rootstein models, the impressive towers of single titles in the thriving markets of the book shops, the corner newspaper and hot-dog stands, and looked into passing countenances reluctant to believe that amongst them there was not a single one that she recognised. Once she stopped off for a pair of shoes expecting it to be like Golders Green where you sat with your foot raised on a little stool and a nice young man or woman listened sympathetically to your requirements and cared if the model into which they eased your foot was comfortable or not.

In the chrome and glass temple – where it was a relief to be out of the heat – a ferocious looking matron had demanded her size, with an expression that suggested she had a cheek coming into the shop at all, and after about fifteen minutes, during which Kitty stood wondering whether she hadn’t perhaps gone for lunch and forgotten to come back, had thrust a box into her hand and disappeared behind a curtain. When she eventually returned and Kitty had pronounced the shoes too tight, the woman had snatched them away, declaring indignantly that “shoes stretch,” and disappeared once more and Kitty, not sure whether she would ever reappear, had left the shop.

Isolated and dissolving in the fricassée of the pavements where designer clothes jostled with singlets and sweat bands and lightweight business suits and cripples in wheelchairs and baby strollers and single roses in cellophane and brown grocery bags and
tee-shirts
– “Give Blood” and “Touche Ross & Co.” – and boob tubes and melting ice-cream cones, she traipsed the
streets and criss-crossed the avenues trying to get her bearings and welcomed the injunctions, as if of all the passing crowd they addressed Kitty Shelton personally, “Walk” and “Don’t Walk”.

She was glad to get home. Home. It was hard to believe that in three weeks the studio, in which she had at first felt so awkward, was her refuge, the newfound centre of her world. Each time she turned into 85th, past the doctors’ plates by which she measured her approach – David Guttman, Mark Pruzansky, SK Fineberg, AH Weiss – and saw the familiar canopy and Joe with his uniform hat and his welcoming “Hi, sweets, how are you?”, rushing to relieve her of her packages, she breathed a sigh of relief.

In Maurice’s kitchen which he had commissioned Herb to furnish with new pots and pans from Zabar’s – a ceramic Apple Baker and Electric Wok! – she had applied herself to cooking nutritious meals for Maurice. With the help of Herb and Joe and Cora she acquired a working knowledge of transatlantic ingredients, from scallions to cornstarch, and forgot her homesickness in the creation of the familiar dishes which she set on Maurice’s table. It was not like cooking for Sydney who had greeted her every effort with paeons of eloquent praise. Maurice, his mind on the morning’s gouache in which he had tried to encapsulate cold and terror, or a passage from Schiller which he would translate for Kitty, seemed uninterested in the good things that she prepared and she was glad when Herb or Ed or Mort turned up (unerringly at
mealtimes) to sample appreciatively the stuffed cabbage leaves which had been her nephew Norman’s favourite, or her sweet and sour fish.

She had at first resented the trio’s attachment to Maurice and their presence in his apartment but as she came to know them better she had been glad of the company while Maurice insulated in the cocoon of his past was at his easel, and enjoyed Ed’s dissertations upon literature, Mort’s wry humour and Herb’s interest in cooking which coincided with her own. From him she learned to bake angel cake and brownies and in return initiated him into the minced mysteries of gefüllte fish, which he had never sampled, and her Eve’s pudding which had won Sydney’s heart. Maurice himself seemed not to notice the presence of his friends and it was always Kitty who had to indicate that it was time for them to go.

They left goodnaturedly to reappear with magazines or candies, small gifts over which they’d put their heads together to make her feel at home. They were very kind and she grew used to having them round the place, but home, however hard they tried, would never be anywhere in which Josh and Rachel and Carol and her grandchildren were not nearby. They had all written. Rachel, in an avalanche of green ink, demolishing the claims made by Josh that peaceable Arabs had been forced to flee from “Palestine” where they had lived from “time immemorial”. Exiled Jews, she told Kitty, had sat by the waters of Babylon and sung “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem…” a thousand years before Mohamet was born. There seemed, she said, to be one rule for refugees from a Jewish state and another rule for refugees from all other kinds of states. A hundred million people had been displaced since the Second World War – Ethiopians, Ugandans, Kurds, Vietnamese, Czechs, Iraqis, Afghans, Indians… Their resettlement and integration by the host
countries had been considered by the world to be the normal and humanitarian course of action. The Arab world alone had refused to take in its homeless, wilfully maintaining them in camps and turning over their support to western countries and the United States.

In a postscript she told Kitty that she and Patrick were to be evicted from their council flat and that as far as her pregnancy was concerned she didn’t know what Carol and Sarah made such a fuss about, there was nothing to it.

Carol wrote about Debbie and Lisa who were being taken by friends’ parents to discover London (the British Museum and Madame Tussaud’s) while she nursed her nausea and Mathew, and missed Alec, whom she had left on his own in Godalming; Josh, that Rachel (perhaps affected by her pregnancy), had taken leave of her senses; Sarah that she had completed her course of instruction with Mrs Halberstadt necessary for her conversion to Judaism and that she would shortly be called to defend her beliefs to the Rabbinical Court of the Beth Din; Debbie and Lisa sent postcards (“Mummies” and the “Chamber of Horrors”), kisses from Mathew at the bottom. All her children conveyed regards to Maurice in which Kitty detected a distinct half-heartedness.

She’d read the letters aloud to him as he stood at his easel, averting her eyes from a barrack row that stretched blackly into infinity, a hanged man. Sometimes, busy with the selection of a brush, with the daubs of paint, like sombre wormcasts, on his palette, she thought he wasn’t listening and was surprised when later in the day he’d come out with “What did Rachel mean by…?” or “Why don’t they try Carol on some…?”

She’d had to get used to Maurice and his strange silences which had at first made her uncomfortable. Sydney had always answered her chatter with comment of his own, although she realised now after only three
weeks of living with (well, next door to) Maurice, that what she had discussed with her late husband were not so much issues but the fine print of other people’s lives. She had been unaware of it at the time but now she could see that the problems of Sydney’s sisters, Beatty and Freda and Mirrie, together with the nieces and nephews, their own children and grandchildren and the various members of the synagogue congregation had defined the limits of their têtes-à-têtes. She had seemed to spend much of the day on the telephone to her family or friends and when Sydney came home from the office she’d paraphrase Beatty’s diatribe, or regale him with secondhand stories gleaned from Carol in Godalming of the children’s antics, or of Rachel’s intransigence. Much of their conversation, she realised, now, had centred upon where they were going, or where they had been, whether she had sewn the button on to Sydney’s suit or remembered to phone the plumber. Maurice had little small talk – he had after all had no one to talk to – and seemed not to hear while Kitty rattled on with the news from England, his expression appeared not to change, but he missed nothing. If the everyday gossip to which Kitty was used did not trip lightly from his tongue – there was a place for silence as well as conversation in every relationship, Maurice said – his eyes were eloquent, even at his easel, following her every move.