To Live in Peace (12 page)

He said good night to Debbie and Lisa, and kissed Mathew who was already asleep, and went into the bedroom where Carol was getting into the bed which had been her mother’s. The room depressed him with its thirties furniture – he dismissed an image of the cottage – and he didn’t much like sleeping in his late father-in-law’s bed.

“I’ve missed you,” Carol said, but he could tell by the way that she had secured her short hair with silver clips that she intended going straight to sleep. He undressed and put out the light.

“By the way,” he said into the darkness, “I’ve found an interior decorator. She can take over all the furnishing if you like so that you won’t have to worry.”

“They’re terribly expensive,” Carol said.

“Not this one.”

“It would be a big help,” Carol said. “It’s very difficult choosing everything from here and I still feel too sick to get about much. I’d have to discuss my ideas with her.”

“She wants to meet you.”

“Fix it up then. Rachel’s offered to look after the children.”

It was too easy. He had expected there to be some opposition, for his sins to be found out.

“Will you take Debbie and Lisa to shul in the morning? I’m not too good first thing.”

To stand in synagogue would be to accentuate his flouting of the fourth commandment for which he felt not the slightest remorse. He said goodnight to Carol and
dreamed of Jessica. It was midsummer madness although it was the end of summer.

While Kitty presided over her New Year dinner in Maurice’s kitchen, a massacre was taking place on the other side of the world for which the Israelis were not responsible but for which the blame, both by direct accusation and by subtle innuendo, would be laid at their door.

At the very moment that Kitty served her tsimmes (the genuine article) and thought wistfully of her family at home round Sarah’s table, Lebanese Christian militiamen were murdering score of Palestines, including women and children, in the Chatila and Sabra “refugee” camps in the Lebanon. The Israeli cabinet denied responsibility for the incident. They knew that the Phalangists were planning to enter the camps but never imagined that a blood bath would occur. Their protests were not believed and in the eyes of the world the people of the Book were as guilty as if they had perpetrated the atrocities with their own hands.

Unaware of what was taking place in Sabra and Chatila (names henceforth to add fuel to the undousable flames of antisemitism), Kitty dispensed apples dipped in honey to her guests in Maurice’s kitchen in anticipation of a “sweet” year.

It had not started badly. Watching her make the preparations for her dinner – flitting from her pots on the stove to the salads she was preparing – Maurice followed her every move.

“What’s so interesting?” Kitty said, sculpting radishes expertly and dropping them into iced water where they would open like flowers.

“I was thinking how in tune women are with the harmonies of living.”

Kitty smiled at the tribute.

“We’re not much of a family for you,” Maurice went on, meaning Ed and Herb and Mort who were sharing the celebrations with them, and Bette who had also been invited. Kitty said nothing. That it was company was undeniable but it was not the same. The motley crew was no substitute for Rachel and Josh and Carol, and for the unmitigated pleasure of the grandchildren who would be growing up without her. It was at times like this that she really dwelled upon how much, in coming so precipitately to New York, she had given up.

“If it’s any consolation,” Maurice said, “I’ve never been so happy. I used to think that if you’re in good health, have enough money, and nothing is bothering you in the foreseeable future, that’s as much as you can hope for. Now I wake up in the mornings and look forward to the day. I might not say much, Kit, I find it hard to express myself in words – I could paint it for you – but from the moment you walked out of customs at Kennedy my life has been transformed. You’re not going to believe this, but since they took my parents away, I haven’t felt, had feelings. I imagined they were dead. That my heart was ice. It’s been melting at the edges, Kit.”

It was the nicest, the most romantic speech anyone had ever made to her and Kitty cried into the tsimmes. Maurice had looked at her, then out of the window.

“I’m not much good with women, Kit. I don’t know what to do when they cry.”

“You don’t have to do anything.”

“‘Never make a women cry, God counts the tears’.”

“I thought you were an atheist.”

“So did I. I’m beginning to wonder. If he sent you to New York I may be willing to reconsider.”

Kitty arranged the flowers Maurice had given her in the vase she had had to rush out and buy – he had never had occasion for one – and placed it in the centre of her table, smiling her thanks.

“A small token of my appreciation for sticking it out so long,” Maurice said. “I don’t know how you put up with me.” He meant his dark moods and silences.

“I don’t take any notice,” Kitty said, and she didn’t. On the days when Maurice found it impossible to speak, when she was aware that he was totally engaged in his struggle with the dark forces which occupied him at his easel, she’d leave him alone and go shopping, or sit in her own apartment writing her letters or go out with Bette until he had rid himself of his abstraction with the past which tortured him, which would not let him rest, and he would see her in the evening – although she had been in and out all day – as if for the first time.

He was not like Sydney, for whom she had been the traditional helpmeet occupying but never testing the boundaries of her clearly defined role. Here, nothing was expected of her and although she supervised Maurice’s flat and cooked his meals because so to do had been the pattern of her life for so many years, her life was assuming novel and interesting dimensions about which she wrote, covering pages of airmail paper, to her family back home. Apart from the cinema, the opera, the theatres and the concerts she went to with Maurice, the sessions with Bette and the aerobic dancing classes (which already were making her feel fitter) and Ed’s literature classes at NYU which she had started to attend, the most exciting change which had come about was that which she noticed within herself.

She was reluctant, almost, to admit it, it seemed somehow disloyal, but Sydney’s death had presented her with a newfound freedom, a sense that she was no longer accountable, with its rider that anything was now possible. Sydney had restricted her neither practically or financially but she could see now from her transatlantic distance that beneath the weight of his opinions her own had been stifled; against the demands of his uncompromising life-style her private wishes were both denied and suppressed. Although the words had never been spoken, Sydney had always given her the impression that she would die the second that he left her, but paradoxically since his death her life had turned out to be unbelievably exciting.

To be mistress of her own time, her own thoughts, gave her a sense of power and at times she became quite drunk with it. She was still lonely (as she recognised each night when, having said goodnight to Maurice, she went into her studio and double-locked the door), still aching from the wound, now cicatrixed, that Sydney’s death had left, but a joyous sense of self-awareness, of freedom, had forced its way through what she had once considered to be permanent despair. As, in her
skintight
leotard, she lunged and snapped and shimmied to the music in the church hall, or sat, an entranced tyro, in Ed’s class listening to him talk, and making notes, about literary genre, she felt with the tiniest sensation of regret that perhaps she had been too wrapped up in the raising of her family, in the meticulous running – according to Sydney’s guidelines – of her home. Where had it got her? To aerobic dancing and an Adult Education Class when properly trained she might have been a physician, or a lawyer, or a senior executive.

As she activated muscles she had forgotten she possessed or discussed Faulkner’s use of allegory, she
considered such thoughts out of place and ungrateful, blasphemous almost, but was convinced (although she missed the children dearly) that in spiriting her away to New York, Maurice had given her, in her late middle age, a new lease on life. Her feelings towards what Bette referred to as her “young man” were hard to define, perhaps because she did not look at them too closely. That he was not Sydney she had established – God forbid anyone should take her late husband’s place, preserved for all time in her heart – but there was about him, despite his often patent despair and his melancholy, a sweet and loveable caring quality which, although Maurice was not demonstrative, shone through his quiet demeanour. As she moved about his apartment, picking her way among the books and the canvases, she would look up to find him watching her, and his expression said more than any torrent of words. If she was not clear as to her own thoughts on their relationship it was because she had not taken them out and examined them, possibly because she was afraid of what she might find.

The “boys”, Ed and Herb and Mort, wearing suits in honour of the occasion, were the first to arrive. They had bought a giant pot of chrysanthemums (she still hadn’t got used to the size of everything in New York) and kissed her, each in turn, Herb awash with aftershave, wishing her a happy New Year. She had a momentary sensation of guilt – of wondering what she was doing so many miles away from home, surrounded by these strange men, when she should have been with her family – which she sent summarily packing, then settled down to enjoy her evening. As they helped themselves to Maurice’s Southern Comfort and juice from the refrigerator, as if it were their own home, she noticed that Ed had had his hair cut and Mort was wearing a new bow-tie, or at any
rate one she hadn’t seen before, and guessed that both were in honour of Bette whom none of them had met. When Kitty had broached the subject of inviting her to Maurice, he had said “sure”, not wanting to upset her, but from the look on his face she could see that he wasn’t at all keen.

Bette herself had been ecstatic and had talked of nothing else but Kitty’s invitation for the past few days. When Maurice opened the door to her, Kitty could see that in preparing herself for the occasion Bette had tried too hard. Herb swallowed, Ed and Mort stared wide-eyed at the apparition in the doorway, and Kitty could hardly recognise her friend.

“Hi!” Bette breathed, in a passable imitation of Marilyn Monroe, raising one hand in greeting, and it was obvious to Kitty that in her apprehension, before she set out, Bette had made inroads into the gin bottle.

She was dressed in a silver lamé sheath – the daring décolleté of which revealed glimpses of her bra with its wired under-cups – with silver shoes and, inappositely, had twined a camellia into her newly dressed and heavily lacquered blonde hair. As Bette kissed Maurice, leaving a double arc of vermilion on his cheek, Kitty could see him recoil.

Determined to put everyone at their ease, although it was clearly she who needed reassurance, Bette, having shed the long gloves beloved of New Yorkers which Kitty privately considered a solecism, went straight to Maurice’s easel and said: “Isn’t that just darling?” when the haunted face of a hungry child cried out from the canvas on which Maurice had been savagely working all day.

Nervous and overdressed as she was, Ed and Mort took to Kitty’s friend immediately and as they fought to pull out a chair for her at the white-clothed kitchen table,
Kitty exchanged an amused and knowing glance with Maurice. This brittle and painted lady was not the Bette she knew and, watching her flash her capped teeth at Ed or flutter the synthetic eyelashes, with their overkill of mascara, at Mort, Kitty’s heart went out to her. Maurice did not address her directly and as he pointed out to Kitty that Bette’s plate was empty, or enquired of her, “Does Bette want some more wine?” Kitty realised that he was as ill at ease as her friend.

The conversation was lively. Sharpened by the sauce of Bette’s presence, Ed and Mort vied with each other in a mordant display of wit. Flattered by the dinner companions either side of her Bette did not forget Herb and leaned across the table, with a plentiful display of cleavage, to draw him into the conversation although he was impervious to her charms. Bette was one of those people who said everything, verbalised it, as soon as it came into her head. There was no clutch – as Sydney used to say – between her brain and her mouth, no secrets. Between the tsimmes and the honey cake with its spiking of slivered almonds, Bette had treated the table, as she had Kitty when first they met, to a resumé of her life. Despite the sophistication of her dress and the artifice of the face she had applied, there was, Kitty thought, a refreshing innocence to Bette. Ed and Mort were captivated. She fluttered between them like an attentive moth, making Kitty feel quite superfluous.

Bette’s conversation, her monologue really, which erupted from her painted mouth like a silver stream, was animated, but it was when the time came for the prayers, for thanking God for the New Year meal and enabling his people to reach that particular season, that she surprised them all. She not only joined in with Kitty’s recital of the Grace but she sang the hundred and twenty-fourth psalm which preceded it with a voice so
pure and a Hebrew so fluent that the kitchen was filled with melody and the company reduced to silence. Afterwards Bette told them that not only had she studied Hebrew into her late teens but had sung in the temple choir, and, although she no longer practised them, had not forgotten her accomplishments. With her virtuoso performance Bette seemed to relax. Kitty would not – pace the silver lamé – let her help with the dishes, and while she loaded the dishwasher with Maurice, Bette sat quietly on the sofa between Ed and Mort, and showed them pictures of her grandchildren. When Maurice came in with the coffee, a ritual in which he took pride and with which he would never allow Kitty to interfere, Bette asked if she could see his paintings, and reluctantly – he did not much care for the public baring of his soul – with a glance for help from Kitty, he agreed.

Bette didn’t say they were “darling”. She didn’t speak. As he turned over his catalogue of wretchedness, his sombre chronicle of his people’s descent into the inferno, so that the skull-like heads, the bodies in their tattered rags, were caught for a moment in the lamplight, Bette watched in silence and could not have uttered if she had wanted to because in the face of such human degradation, there were not, even for her, any words.

Afterwards, she did not ask Maurice about Kandinsky, it would have been like talking of birdsong to a man who had dwelled in hell. She sat on a chair by the window and told him about her former husbands and the illnesses
from which each had died. It was after midnight when the telephone rang and Kitty rushed to take it.

“Rachel,” she said excitedly into the receiver, and to the assembled company: “It’s Rachel! And a Happy New Year to you. Where are you?” She put a hand over the mouthpiece: “She’s in bed.”

“They’re five hours ahead,” Bette said.

“How was Sarah’s dinner?” Kitty said. “What do you mean you walked out?… Who brought the subject up?… Trust Beatty! He didn’t mean it, Rachel. Maybe Josh did say it but he didn’t mean it… Yes, we’ve had a lovely evening… Herb and Ed and Mort and my friend Bette. Bette used to sing in the temple choir. She’s got a wonderful voice. How are the children? Give my love to Patrick, and Carol and Alec, and Sarah. And Rachel…give your brother a ring in the morning and apologise, it’s not fair to Sarah in her condition… I know you’re in the same condition. I think of nothing else but the three of you… Don’t say you’ve no intention. Sleep on it… All right… And a happy New Year to everyone. Thank you for phoning, darling. God bless.”