Authors: Rosemary Friedman
Looking around the waiting-room with its plastic cyclamens in hanging baskets, its notices: “Step by Step to Bathtime” and “Please make sure your children are not left unattended at any time during your visit”; its free handouts concerning milk and vitamins and the activities of the Laleche League; the attendant fathers deep in old copies of Mothercraft, she was amazed that what seemed no time at all ago her only concern had been the concept of a God – which Protagoras ignored, Socrates revealed and Plato placed in the realm of ideas – and whether she would pass her philosophy exams, and now she was lining up for the eternity stakes. With an empathic exchange of smiles with the other prospective mothers, rendered bovine by their fecundity, she made her way to the cubicle with which over the weeks she had become familiar, where the Midwifery Sister was waiting with her blood-pressure machine.
“Mrs Klopman.” The girl smiled.
Rachel climbed up on to the bed.
“Ms.”
Kitty had an urgent need to empty her bladder but could not find a lavatory. It was a recurring dream. She was in a crowded theatre with Sydney and at the interval hurried away promising to be back before the bell. She climbed the stairs – red carpeted with brass rods – to where she thought she had seen a door marked “Ladies”, which turned out to be a private box occupied by several security officers waiting to check her baggage who looked at her in amazement and directed her to the street. She left the theatre and ran along the pavements, pushing aside the crowds in her urgency. There would be so little time and Sydney would be waiting, worried. Down Regent Street and along Oxford Street as far as Marble Arch. A woman with a slippery green Marks & Spencer carrier told her helpfully that there was what she called a “convenience” in the Edgware Road. At Marble Arch there was a demonstration, a marching column carrying banners which Kitty could not read. She met it head on and, fists flying, fought her way through its ranks, heavy army greatcoats getting into her mouth and threatening to smother her. She managed to extricate herself but lost her handbag with her passport in it and her front door keys. There was no ladies’ lavatory that she could see. The butcher, whom she sometimes frequented, was in his shop serving a queue of women. Kitty waited patiently while he instructed a housewife in front of her in the art of oxtail stew but he kept putting rabbits in the pot and Kitty wanted to tell him that they neither chewed the cud nor had cloven hooves and that she would report him for selling meat that was not kosher,
but no words came. Suddenly she was on a ledge with the pigeons, high up on a skyscraper, and had to work her way gingerly along the parapet to reach her destination. Down below the street undulated. She climbed in to the building through a tall window and to her relief found a queue of women standing docilely in line. She tried to explain to them that Sydney was expecting her back – he always got so agitated when she was away for any length of time – but they just smiled and she had to wait her turn for the one cubicle guarded by an overalled attendant, who looked suspiciously like her sister-
in-law
, Beatty, holding a filthy piece of towel. The queue moved slowly, seeming to take days. After each customer the attendant cleaned the toilet bowl in slow motion with polishes and sprays, although by the time it was Kitty’s turn the pan was overflowing with detritus and the floor flooded, and there was no way she could relieve herself.
She awoke to find herself in bed but she did not know where. She got up hoping to find a bathroom and recalled suddenly where she was. New York. She made for the open door through which she could see the pine-panelled bath. First things first.
Back in her bedroom, her room, she remembered there was only one, she looked at her watch. Two a.m. which was really seven, her normal breakfast time. No wonder she was hungry. She opened the blinds. Outside it was dark, the lights in the tall buildings like so many illuminated postage stamps. Maurice would still be sleeping. In the cupboard at the kitchenette end of the studio she found instant coffee, a packet of Hi-Ho crackers, some Land O Lakes Sweet Cream Lightly Salted Butter and a jar of Smuckers grape preserve. She opened the cooker out of curiosity. The rotisserie and baking tray were wrapped in transparent bubble pack and had never been used.
She was shivering in her nightdress and examined the heater on which she could see no means of adjustment, although Sydney, she was sure, would not have been so foolish and would have known immediately how it worked. She was about to give up when her fingers encountered a panel within which there was a battery of buttons marked “hi”, “lo”, “duct”, “fan”, “vent”, “air”, “warm”, “cold”, “boost”, “on”, “off”, “exhaust”, “comfort range”. She had always seized up in the face of anything mechanical which offered more than two options so she slid the panel shut again and wrapped herself in her dressing gown.
She managed to make some coffee but there was no milk in the fridge. A packet of “non-dairy creamer” contained a white powder which she swirled into her cup. She thought about leaving a note for the milkman and then perhaps not, she couldn’t imagine him climbing fifteen floors and then having to go back for a raspberry yoghurt. She felt strangely detached, alone in her head, and imagined it was the effects of the time change.
She began unenthusiastically to unpack her cases but the clothes seemed to belong to somebody else and were unfamiliar. It was toom to much of an effort. She took the blue imitation leather writing case which her granddaughters, Debbie and Lisa, had given her as a going away present and climbed back into bed.
D
EAR
R
ACHEL
…
Although she got on well with Josh, who was so like his father, and Carol, in whom she so often saw with uncomfortable clarity herself, it was Rachel, headstrong as she was, with whom she had the most rapport.
I am writing this at seven o’clock our time, although of course here it is only two in the morning. The flight was uneventful, and I was so excited I quite forgot to be afraid. I sat next to a nice young man who was travelling to Poughkeepsie (he collected the plastic cutlery for his camping holidays). He asked me why I was going to New York and it was difficult to know what to tell him. It sounded ridiculous for someone of my age to say I had a boy-friend (gentleman-friend?) so I pretended it was a business trip and he said what business and I muttered something about fashion and started to get myself all tied up.
Why am I here? I ask it now of myself. A bit late perhaps, I hear you say, but I followed my instincts which have always stood me in good stead. You probably won’t understand, I remember thinking my mother immune from the heart-searchings which plague young people, but since your father died I have felt like a lost lamb (sheep!). I know you thought I was all right because I had a cheerful face and managed to carry on doing all the things that I had done when he was alive. The difference was that when we were together the activities had some meaning, but for the last two years I have done everything mechanically, as if I was a robot which had been programmed, and I was afraid to stop being busy because then I might have to face myself and the empty landscape of the future. I had several roles – mother, grandmother, friend, neighbour, committee woman – and I tried to play them, changing one hat quickly for another to avoid the confrontation with what lay underneath the activity. I know that I appeared to be functioning
properly but in actual fact I was outside myself, watching myself live.
It’s funny how I can say all this to you on paper and not face to face. In this strange room, in the limbo of the day/ night, I feel that of the three of you I want you, Rachel, to understand. I am not being disloyal to your father. No one can ever take Sydney’s place and you know it. We were childhood sweethearts and grew up together and had a very special relationship. I know that you saw your father as rather stern and authoritarian at times, but believe me, Rachel, he only had your interests at heart and wanted nothing more than for you all to be happy and good and caring human beings. He was uncompromising but he applied the same strict standards to himself that he expected of you so I don’t think you really had anything to complain about. There will never be anyone to take his place. This does not mean that I must live for the rest of the life God grants me by myself. I know I wasn’t alone, with you and Josh and Carol, and Addie, and Beatty and Mirrie and everyone else around but inside I was alone. It wasn’t until I met Maurice in Israel that I felt for the first time that someone was relating to me as me, Kitty Shelton, not wearing any of my hats.
You can’t see why I have to stay for six months? About the babies. Of course I want to look after Debbie and Lisa and Mathew while Carol is in the Clinic. Of course I want to be there when Sarah gives birth to Josh’s first child. Above all I want to be with you, my baby, when you have yours. But if I’d stayed, Rachel, or came back without giving New York and Maurice a chance, I would be sucked in again to my life on the periphery of things, chopped
in little pieces, at everyone’s beck and call, to be returned – when you’d all finished with me – to the emptiness of my own flat with only my memories and the television for company. I have to give this a try. Do you think I like it, so far away from you all?
About Maurice, I realise that he seems an old man to you (I’m not so young myself), but there is something between us, both in the flesh and on paper, which we both immediately recognised as important. It’s almost as if I’d known him all my life. If I hadn’t felt that there was something strong here, something compelling, something worth pursuing, would I have come all this way? I’m not crazy. Although just now instead of sitting here in this strange room with none of my familiar things around me and the air-conditioning driving me mad, I long to be back in my own bed, my own room where I put out my hand and know just where everything is. I’m not pretending New York will not be an effort – God knows I’m no Columbus – but what sort of life is it to sit around waiting for the next instalment of ‘Dallas’ or a visit from the grandchildren like the other bridge widows? I am going to live again. Or try. Of course I love you all. I think I love Maurice. Don’t laugh, Rachel, the emotions don’t age…
When Kitty awoke for the second time, although the sun was streaming into the room through the window on to the writing-pad which had fallen to the floor, the room
was icy. She looked at her watch, struggling to gather her mental and physical whereabouts. It was morning, New York time, and she had been writing to Rachel, and judging from the number of pages which had spilled out across the floor, at unaccustomed length. She had never been much of a letter writer, communicating regularly only with a distant cousin in Greenock – who was now in an old people’s home – and was surprised at her nocturnal loquacity. It was Sydney who had done most of the writing, when writing there was to do, most of the talking really, while she got on with raising the family and her voluntary work. Collecting up the close-written pages she wondered if Rachel had perhaps been right, that with Sydney to think for her she hadn’t bothered to think – throughout her married life she had scarcely dared an opinion, believing with Sydney in a united front as far as the children were concerned – and that there were unplumbed depths in herself.
All that was past now anyway. Sydney, with his uncompromising views, was gone, and of his children only Carol in Godalming ran her household in accordance with tradition. As far as her own life was concerned Kitty carried on as she had been used to but there had been erosions, which Sydney would not have tolerated, in her performance of the precepts which seemed somehow to be lacking in significance now that he was no longer around. Maurice of course, although the son of a Frankfurt rabbi who had perished along with every other member of his family as a result of Hitler’s “Final Solution”, was an atheist. This would have bothered Sydney more, she felt, than the fact that she might be in love with him.
The emotions do not age. She had written it in her letter to Rachel, and it was true. When she considered Maurice there was a quickening of the pulse and a
sensation of joy indistinguishable from that which she had felt as a young girl for Sydney. There had been no other men. How anachronistic it seemed now when to be on one’s first husband after more than a few years seemed rather quaint and lacking in initiative. She shuddered sometimes when she thought of the offspring of the next generation, a rag-bag of odds and ends with an assortment of parents or petrie dishes from whom they were supposed to derive some vestige of stability. She felt profoundly sorry for all the little AID and IVF mites who would be running around, and although she sympathised with the women unable to have children – she’d had to listen to her sister-in-law Frieda on that subject all her married life – she didn’t hold with tampering with the innermost mysteries of nature even if it were for the benefits of technological progress. What about the violation of children’s rights, orphaning them by using frozen sperm and eggs, deceiving them about their paternity?
In the Jewish scale of values every innocent human life was of infinite worth, one human being was worth no more or less than a million others, and there was no justification for their sacrifice, in vitro or out of it, on the altar of science. She was glad that she’d had her family, her children, before the ingenuity of the scientists had presented so many options. According to Rachel the sum of scientific knowledge was doubled every eight years and man acquired as much new knowledge in this time as he had accumulated over all the millennia of human inquiry and discovery in the past. She’d soon forget all that when she had a child of her own to look after although Rachel was convinced that other than feeding it now and again she would be free to pursue other interests, just as she had always done.
Kitty hadn’t disillusioned her about motherhood; the broken nights – when one must always be listening for the child’s call, the child’s cry – the practical demands (their inescapable dailyness and unavoidableness) and the necessity of meeting them; the sapping of the energies, the whittling away of the resources until one’s entire world became invaded, bounded, by a tiny defenceless, facsimile human bundle. She would have liked to make her youngest daughter a present of more than half a century of experience, to pass on to her the knowledge that having children altered the whole texture of reality, changed the shape of the world, but Rachel had to find out for herself, that much Kitty had learned.
She put the letter on the table to finish later and wondered whether she should put on clothes appropriate to the external heat or the internal chill to face her first New York day. She showered (once she had worked out the complicated vagaries of the unfamiliar plumbing) and dressed, not crediting the sun, in a warm skirt and sweater, and although she should have gone at once to tell Maurice she was awake, unpacked her cases and arranged everything, with the precision she had learned from Sydney, in the walk-in closet which was large enough to accommodate the wardrobe of a film star. She hadn’t brought too much luggage, hedging her bets she supposed, the size of her suitcases demonstrating her doubt about the new life she was contemplating.