To Live in Peace (17 page)

They decided to get married at once, as soon as the ceremony could be arranged. They would call the rabbi of the Kehillath Jeshurun, which Maurice knew was what Kitty wanted. There was nothing to wait for.

It was two in the morning when Kitty said: “What time is it in England?”

“Nine p.m. You want to call your children?” Excited as a young girl Kitty hadn’t thought what she would say, had not anticipated their reaction.

“Married!” Rachel said. “You can’t!”

“Why not?”

“You just can’t.”

“It’s what I’m going to do. You want to speak to Maurice?”

“No I don’t. What about us?”

“What about you?”

“Don’t you want us to be there?”

Kitty didn’t. She just wanted to get married quietly as they had decided. Not to make a big thing of it. They were too old.

“We’re going to Florida on honeymoon.”

Rachel was speechless.

“I’ve got to answer the doorbell,” she said stiffly. “It’s Patrick.”

Carol was incredulous.

“I don’t believe it,” she said when Kitty announced her intentions.

“People get married all the time,” Kitty said. “What is there not to believe?”

There was silence on the line while Carol digested the news.

“Mummy?”

“I’m still here.”

“I hope you’ll be happy.” Her daughter’s grudging tone belied the words.

Josh, surprised in the midst of a dinner party, said: “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. We’re getting married – Maurice and I.”

Against a hubbub of animated voices Kitty heard Sarah call: “Who is it, darling?” Then Josh said: “I suppose you know what you’re doing,” when it was perfectly obvious that he didn’t think that she did. He congratulated his mother then spoke to Maurice in a civilised manner, but the coolness with which he had greeted her announcement was patent across the Atlantic. It was
Sarah, who insisted on speaking, who had wished her mazeltov.

“It was a mistake to phone,” Kitty said, her enthusiasm dampened as she sat cradling the telephone.

“They’ll come round,” Maurice said.

Kitty knew her children. None of them, when Maurice had come to Rachel’s wedding, had made any attempt to hide how they felt about him. The joy of the evening was dispelled.

“I’d better go to bed,” she said.

Maurice looked at her, touching the bruised forehead. “I shouldn’t have kept you up for so long.”

He kissed her mouth and it was more than compensation for Rachel’s rudeness, Josh’s coolness and Carol’s disbelief. They were at the door to his flat when the telephone rang.

Maurice went back to answer it. He held the receiver out to Kitty who had followed him.

“It’s Rachel.”

“Mummy?” Rachel said.

Kitty waited.

“I’m sorry. I was upset for a moment.”

“It was my fault,” Kitty said. “I should have broken the news gently.”

“Congratulations, anyway.”

“Thank you.”

“I really mean it. Do you believe me?”

“Of course.”

“You deserve a break. I’d like to speak to Maurice.”

It was typical of Rachel to have called back when she had got over her tantrum, not to have let her mother lose sleep over her daughter’s churlish reception of the news.

The conversation with Maurice seemed to go on for a long time. When it was finished and he had hung up, Kitty said: “What was all that about?”

Maurice chuckled. It was the first time Kitty had seen him so carefree.

“Instructions about how I was to take care of you, you are the only mother she has…and something else.”

Kitty looked straight at him.

“She’s going straight to the travel agent to book her flight. She says we’re not to dare to get married without her.”

Kitty leaned over the polished rail of the “M/S Song of Norway”, trying to convince herself that she was actually here, on board ship, one day out from Florida (a thousand miles long and one inch high), a bride for the second time in her life. The passenger list, left by the steward that morning in her stateroom together with the daily news bulletin and a printout of the day’s shipboard activities, had brought the fact home to her. Her name, Kitty Morgenthau, beside Maurice’s, sandwiched alphabetically between Buck and Serita Matheson of Tom’s River, and Gerald and Monica Thomas of Albuquerque, had given some substance to the dream in which she had been living for the past three weeks when her life, seemingly set on a dull and uneventful course after Sydney’s death, had miraculously changed tack.

The morning after Murice’s proposal, exhausted by the unaccustomed late night, and the excitement generated by her decision, Kitty had slept until noon. As she opened her eyes, her head was throbbing but she found that she was smiling although there was no one to see and she couldn’t remember why. Then she did, and stopped smiling because she was thinking of Sydney. She could see him as clearly as if he was in New York in her studio. He was not reproaching her.

“I’m sorry,” she said aloud.

Sydney put his arms round her and she could feel them as surely as if he were there in the flesh. “Be happy,” he said, and then he was gone.

She lay there for a long while, treasuring the moment, before she got up to dress in the cream-coloured two
piece she had been saving for a special occasion and crossed the landing to Maurice’s flat.

Herb and Ed and Mort were there, as she had thought they might be, and to her surprise Bette Birnstingl, too. In front of them all Maurice had taken her in his arms and held her for a long, long time, almost lifting her off her feet, then he had opened another bottle of champagne and, amidst the congratulations, announced he was taking everyone out for lunch. She had hardly recognised Maurice. He had not been working for the first morning since she had been in New York, and was not wearing his paint-spattered slacks and his cotton sweater but a black, pin-striped suit from the days when he had practised as a physician, and a formal white shirt with a silver tie which echoed the hair which had been freshly cut and brushed back smartly, and she saw what a handsome suitor she had agreed to marry.

Bette, flushed with the excitement of the occasion (as if she were to be the bride), had brought her camera and she posed Kitty with Maurice, their arms around each other happily, then Kitty and Maurice with the “boys”, then Herb took the camera so that Bette could be in a picture, and they finished two more bottles before they left for the Windows on the World where Maurice had reserved a table. Kitty didn’t remember much about the lunch except that there was a great deal of hilarity and Bette flirted outrageously with Ed and Mort, and Maurice, although he ate little and said less, let go her hand only to pick up his fork and had never looked so happy. Afterwards, back in the apartment, having left Herb and Ed and Mort and Bette to sober up in Central Park, Kitty had been clearing the glasses away to the music Maurice had put on when he said: “Come and sit down, Kit.”

She had felt suddenly shy, as if she had to face him, her future husband, for the first time alone, and had fussed with the glasses and the empty bottles until he had taken her by the hand and led her to the sofa. Maurice had taken a small box from his pocket and laid it in her lap. Kitty, a middle-aged woman, had forgotten about rings – it was only afterwards that she realised

Maurice was playing “take this ring” from La Sonnambula – the traditional trappings of engagement which she associated with youth. She opened the
velvet-lined
box and saw an emerald in an antique setting of pearls which made her heart miss a beat.

“Nothing fancy,” Maurice said, and removing the ring from its box, put it on her finger over Sydney’s worn wedding band. Kitty was suddenly afraid. That she might get ill and die. That Maurice might get ill and die as Sydney had, leaving her alone again. That their future together might be short lived. The moment passed. She must not be greedy. She embraced Maurice and forgot her throbbing head, and her doubts, and the fact that she was in New York, and had the curious sensation that for the first time since her widowhood she had come home.

Later Maurice said: “There’s something been bothering me, Kit.” He circled the room, his hands in his pockets, and Kitty waited for him to speak.

“The past is over,” he said, and Kitty knew that he meant the concentration camps in which he had lost so much. “But it doesn’t go away…”

He was looking out of the window, at the rooftops of New York, seeing things which she could not.

“…a door banging. Smoke from a chimney. A train moving off…”

He turned to face her. “I have nightmares. I’m sitting naked in a tree with the snow on the ground while they
hose me with icy water. Being buried alive. Sometimes I scream.”

“It will be all right,” Kitty said. She had slept for months beside Sydney while his frontal lobe tumour made remorseless inroads on his brain. She was no stranger to suffering.

“I just wanted you to know,” Maurice said.

Afterwards everything seemed to have happened so fast. The rabbi from the Kehillath Jeshurun agreed to marry them and Maurice finalised the arrangements for the cruise. While Kitty wrote letters to her family – including Beatty and Mirrie and her nephew Norman who was getting married himself at Christmas time – in England, Bette, in her element, insisting that Kitty was nowhere near well enough to go shopping herself, indulged her role as “image maker” and brought home boxes of clothes from Bloomingdale’s for the bride’s approval.

“I don’t need anything,” Kitty said. She was not extravagant and had a wardrobe full of clothes at home suitable for Florida which she would ask Carol to send her but she allowed Bette to bring her some appropriate outfits from which she would choose one to wear at her wedding. Bette tried to get her into eau de nil or old rose but Kitty, being practical, insisted on something she would get some wear out of afterwards and settled for a classic grey suit, letting Bette have her head over the accessories and her own outfit as Kitty’s attendant.

There was one disappointment. Rachel was not coming. In a graphic letter to Kitty, in which she had explained how she had been packing up her belongings so that Patrick could make the move to Putney, where they had found a flat, while she was in New York, she described that suddenly moving her legs had felt like dragging around two lumps of wood, and that her normally tiny face had become puffy. She had made an appointment at the clinic where it was found that her blood pressure was raised and they had said that she must on no account travel, and that it was unwise to move house and that she must either come into hospital where she could rest or go where she could be looked after. At Patrick’s insistence – and against her will – Rachel had gone to stay with his parents in Winnington Road where his mother could wait on her. She was devastated not to be coming to New York for Kitty’s wedding.

It had cast a blight on Kitty’s happiness.

“What do you think is the matter with her?” she asked Maurice.

“Sounds like toxaemia.”

“Is there a cure?”

“Birth.”

“She’s got another six weeks,” Kitty said.

While Maurice was out picking up the travel documents for the honeymoon trip she had taken his medical encyclopaedia from the shelf and found “toxaemia” in the index. When he returned with the tickets – “The Royal Caribbean Cruise Line welcomes Dr and Mrs Morgenthau to the ‘Song of Norway’ and wishes them Bon Voyage” – Kitty was sitting with the appropriate volume on her lap.

“‘One in ten women suffer from toxaemia in their first pregnancy’,” she quoted, “‘and are considered at risk’.” Maurice took away the book, but Kitty could see
from his expression that Rachel’s symptoms must be considered seriously. That she would hate it at the Klopmans’ Kitty had no doubt. While Hettie was kind enough – there was not a selfish bone in her body – her lifestyle was anathema to Rachel who would not take kindly to the enforced proximity with Herbert and his jokes.

So it was that at her wedding Kitty, like Maurice, had had no one of her own. Rachel’s discovery of the complication of her pregnancy had come too late for Josh to cancel his dental patients and Carol was in no condition to travel had she wanted to.

Two days before the wedding Kitty had attended an identification parade at the 19th Precinct. A row of youths with numbered placards round their necks were lined up before a two way mirror and she was asked to point out her assailants. She thought one of them looked vaguely familiar and he was asked to step closer, then she was by no means sure and shook her head. The men were marched away and Kitty was not sorry for she did not want to be responsible for putting any mother’s son in prison, but she was glad that she would have the respite of Florida before she must once more face the New York streets.

The wedding had been dignified and simple: the most moving moment when Maurice unequivocally stepped on the glass. Bette had insisted on providing the wedding breakfast and the little party had gone back to her flat for a sumptuous buffet catered by Fraser-Morris, after which, in an embarrassing shower of confetti, they had left for the airport.

The days following the wedding had not yet resolved themselves in Kitty’s mind which was awhirl still with new and unusual sensations. By the time they had left Palm Beach for Miami and boarded the “Song of
Norway”, on which they would spend the next seven days, Kitty’s last doubts about the wisdom of her decision had been resolved, and when she looked at her reflection, if she half closed her eyes she could convince herself that the face which regarded her, alight with happiness, was that of a girl. She did not think about Sydney. He was laid to rest peacefully, for all time, in her past. As the ship, cutting its way through the grey, uncompromising water, steamed in the direction of Cuba, Kitty, her face buffeted by the wind, looked forward with relief and contentment, to her new life.

That it would not be without problems she did not delude herself. They had already run into difficulties. Maurice, an inexperienced cruiser, was not gregarious, and the knowledge that he and Kitty must sit at a table with others in the “King and I” dining-room had filled him with alarm.

The only activity in which he had so far joined (in accordance with International Law which required that all passengers be mustered at their lifeboat stations to be instructed in emergency procedure no more than twenty-four hours after leaving port) had been the boat drill.

Their table companions proved to be pleasant enough. Chuck (“What you all doin’ today?”) and Marlene (whose fourteen stones were not minimised by stretch pants by day and gossamer layers of pastel chiffon by night) from South Carolina, and Wayne and Susan, an ingenuous couple from Milwaukee with anti-seasick patches behind their ears, who had won the trip playing “Guess the Price”. Kitty, all the way from England, with her funny accent and her hesitation the first night over the broiled fillet of Caribbean grouper about whose kashrut she had doubts, was the centre of attention. When the curiosity of their table companions – “Are you
retired?” and “What line are you in?” – was directed towards Maurice, it was Kitty who answered. After the dessert he excused himself, telling Kitty to take her time over coffee and that he would see her on deck.

“My husband’s not very sociable,” Kitty said when he’d gone – it was the first time she had used the nomenclature in reference to Maurice. “He likes his own company.”

“My father’s the same,” Marlene said. “They get like that when you’ve been married a long time.”

“We’re on our honeymoon,” Kitty said without thinking, and realised her mistake the moment the words were out. She didn’t tell Maurice of her slip but the next evening, after the Cherries Jubilee, the white jacketed maitre d’ from Manila, flanked by a posse of waiters, entered the dining-room bearing a miniature wedding cake which to Kitty’s mortification he put on the table in front of them, with “the Captain’s compliments.”

The band struck up with a chorus of “Second Time Around” and the entire second-sitting rose to its feet and applauded. Kitty, wishing the decks would open up, consigning her to the deep, looked at Maurice. He took it like a man. Afterwards, in the cabin, she apologised.

“I’ll get over it,” he said, but she could see that it was not easy.

He did not avail himself of the ship’s diversions. While Kitty went to the Welcome Aboard talk (“Turn to the person on your left and say, hi!”), the Grandmothers’ Bragging Session (where she circulated pictures of Debbie and Lisa and Mathew and announced proudly that her quota of grandchildren was shortly to be doubled), and the daily Walk-a-Thon, where she strode round the deck determined to win her yellow ship’s sun visor and tee-shirt, Maurice sat with a book in the lee of the Promenade Deck or in a sheltered niche, protected
from the sun by his white hat. She went alone to the South Pacific Lounge where the moustached cruise director (together with his “lovely wife and singing partner, Sheree”), masterminded the Bon Voyage Get Together, to the Friday night service for the Jewish passengers in the Carousel Lounge where they served matzoh ball soup beneath a star of David sculpted in ice, to the Bridge Tournament in the Lounge of the Midnight Sun, and the afternoon screening (curtains closed over the portholes) of Barbara Streisand in “Yentl”.

Maurice’s withdrawal did not perturb her. She appreciated his tolerance of her own foibles and did not expect him to alter the habits of a lifetime. While he was happy for her to enjoy to the full the life on board ship, Kitty was content in the certainty that when she went in search of her new husband she would know instinctively in which secluded corner of the vessel she would find him.

There was one distraction on offer of which Maurice availed himself. Each evening after dinner would find him at the blackjack tables or watching the roulette wheel in the Casino Royale. Kitty was not a gambler. She stood behind the silent Maurice as he threw his chips on to the baize cloth, and it was only when they had been at sea for three nights that she realised that he always bet on the same numbers. The familiar sequence of them bothered her until with a shock she realised that the 2 and the 9 and 5 and the 3 and 1, monotonously repeated, were the numerals of the concentration camp number she saw nightly engraved on his arm. When she realised what he was doing she no longer cared to watch him play. She’d wait for him on deck and, to the faint sounds of “My Way” or the “Tritch Tratch Polka” coming from the dance floor, they’d stroll arm in arm beneath the stars,
and Maurice’s tongue, for Kitty alone, would become unleashed and in the mutual shorthand of small talk and ideas they would pass the time until bed.