Alien Son, page 9
Mrs Mendelsohn drew up her robust frame to her full height so that she looked down on Uncle Isaac’s grey curly hair and she shot him a glance of contempt from beneath thick, black eyebrows.
‘And why are you so concerned, pray?’ she said. ‘Are you having the baby?’
‘I don’t know if you have ever read—’ he began, but she interrupted him.
‘I wish you would attend to your own affairs. And read only those books that concern you. Like books on second-hand clothes.’
She placed her Gladstone bag on the hood of the pram and without another word pushed her children down the street. I knew she would never forgive Uncle Isaac for his lack of confidence.
But Uncle Isaac had got Dr McDiarmid into his mind and when he found Auntie Fanny lying down he returned to the subject.
‘What does Mrs Mendelsohn know? Call in a man of science, I beg you. I can’t bear to see you suffer,’ he pleaded.
‘I don’t want your learned men,’ Auntie Fanny burst out. ‘I’m satisfied with my own people. You prefer the strangers, I know,’ she added morosely.
His ruddy face turned pale and only with difficulty did he suppress his vexation in front of Auntie Fanny. But as soon as he ran out of the house he began to shout ugly and hateful words at the inoffensive horse who looked at him with grateful eyes.
I now spent many an hour with Uncle Isaac and even on the sabbath I occasionally drove with him to his shop in the city. The shop was in a back street and there was an iron grille over the window. There were three different locks on the front door and Uncle Isaac complained that he wasted a lot of time opening and shutting them. It was a nuisance having to come at all, though now he opened the shop infrequently. This was the Uncle Isaac who had always been absorbed in his business and who took a delight in his second-hand goods.
There was one special room of treasures he wouldn’t part with, old clocks with pictures on their faces, chairs with strangely carved legs, sets and sets of different-shaped cups and saucers, a long-stemmed German pipe. They were arranged round the room as at a museum. On the wall hung a sword that Uncle Isaac said had been used in the Franco-Prussian war. It had been the proud possession of a German officer.
Uncle Isaac knew everything about his treasures and as he related fact after fact about them he would find himself digressing into the realms of science, the history of mankind or the history of clockmaking.
‘Now take that brooch over there,’ he said, pointing to a glass-topped box, ‘it was made in Paris over a hundred years ago. Paris then was ruled over by a king. The brooch was made by a firm that supplied the royal family. Who can say but that brooch was not worn by the queen herself?’
The more often I came to the shop the more I learned about his treasures, right back to their genesis. Although he talked freely to me I was conscious all the time of his anxiety. It seemed to me his mind was with Auntie Fanny so that he was never able to rest in the shop. He ran from room to room, never dusted his treasures as he kept promising himself he would, and listened with impatience to the odd buyer or seller who came into the shop.
One November day we drove home in the twilight, less than two hours after Uncle Isaac had opened his shop. A blue, rose-tinted haze hung over the house as Uncle Isaac quickly unharnessed the horse, filled the bin with chaff, and hurried towards the kitchen.
We found Auntie Fanny sitting on a chair in the unlit room groaning and holding her hands beneath her stomach, while my sister stood against the wall staring wide-eyed at Auntie’s writhing lips.
‘What’s the matter?’ Uncle Isaac asked in a hoarse voice.
‘Fetch Mrs Mendelsohn. Go, hurry,’ she whispered.
Uncle Isaac fixed dilated eyes vacantly on his wife while seconds like hours passed. Suddenly he ran out of the kitchen, stopped in the middle of the yard, turned his head and shouted to me.
‘Help your auntie to her room.’
She slowly shook her head.
‘You can’t help me,’ she said.
My sister and I walked behind Auntie Fanny, who almost fell at every step. The passageway was in complete darkness and I hurried back to fetch a lamp.
Holding the lamp in front of me, I peered into Auntie Fanny’s room. I was frightened by the sight of her lying in her clothes on the bed, her face distorted, her wet cheek pressed against the pillow. Sweat was pouring into her sunken eyes. Auntie Fanny cast a weakly smiling glance at me and called me towards her. I was suddenly alarmed, for I thought she must surely be dying.
‘Take your sister into the kitchen,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t be frightened,’ she went on. ‘I’ll be all right. I’m in God’s hands,’ she added with great effort, her eyes screwed up tightly.
I clasped my sister’s hand and led her from the room. She whimpered protestingly but I was carried away by Auntie Fanny’s request that was like a sacred command and I almost dragged her the length of the passageway into our bedroom. I was filled with a sense of the importance of the occasion and I felt I was playing a very responsible role in the house.
From the room I heard the voices of women in the passageway. Uncle Isaac must have notified every lady in the community on his wild run for Mrs Mendelsohn, for I never saw so many of them in the house at once before. I walked back into the corridor but the women wouldn’t budge to let me pass. But they all made way when through the open front door came an old shrunken woman followed by a retinue of women much like herself.
The ancient lady wore a frilly white cap like an egg white and she and her followers made for Auntie Fanny’s room, opened the door and went in without speaking a word to anybody.
‘That’s Madame Koch and her retinue,’ one woman said.
Another said, ‘I thought she had long retired from practice.’
‘No one can keep her away from a confinement, added yet another.
But just then Mrs Mendelsohn, the midwife, and Uncle Isaac arrived. With a purposeful, serious expression on her round, swarthy face as though to say, ‘I have arrived in the nick of time,’ Mrs Mendelsohn turned the doorknob of Auntie’s room and I caught a glimpse of the hunched shoulders of the old women hovering round the bed in the streaky, yellowish lamplight.
As the door closed Uncle Isaac turned frenziedly to the women in the dark passage and they to cheer him up began telling him of their own experiences and chiding him for his masculine weakness. I heard one woman out of Uncle’s hearing whisper to another, ‘You can’t blame him for behaving like a frightened child. By rights he should be a grandfather. But better late than never.’
The other said, ‘She ought to be proud of her husband. Now, my man never blinked an eyelid when I had my last. He said to me, “You know the way to the hospital. Let me rest.” ’
‘But of course it was your sixth.’
‘But what has that to do with the matter?’
I no longer listened to the conversation for the door of Auntie Fanny’s room opened again and out came the old women followed by Mrs Mendelsohn dressed in a spotlessly starched gown. They were all arguing loudly.
The shrunken old lady with the frilly white cap protested in a high-pitched, toothless voice against Mrs Mendelsohn’s imperious ways. What right had she to cast her out of the labour room? She had been the first midwife in the community, long before Mrs Mendelsohn wore plaits. She, Madame Koch, had brought many into the world, even some of the people in this very corridor. She pointed a withered hand at several women at the front door. The retinue of old women chimed in with angry voices, Madame Koch knew more than Mrs Mendelsohn would ever know.
Mrs Mendelsohn impatiently tapped a foot on the floor and in a cold, dignified voice said, without even looking in the direction of her ancient rival, that she would have no truck with so-called midwives who practised spells and incantations. She was a real midwife with a diploma. With that Mrs Mendelsohn quickly turned her back on her angry enemies and banged the door in their faces.
The old women clustered round Madame Koch kept to themselves, refusing to stir from their place near the door. The others in the corridor moved closer to Uncle Isaac and stood near the front door and on the verandah. I sidled past the old women and joined Uncle Isaac. He seemed pleased to see me and asked me what I had done with my sister. Before I could tell him she was in bed he had turned away and was staring vacantly at the women talking animatedly round him.
One said, ‘Madame Koch is as often in the death chamber as the labour room now. Both places are the same to her, I should think.’
‘She goes to every funeral,’ said another.
Still another said, ‘These old crones shouldn’t be allowed into a room where there’s a new life. Preserve us from the evil eye,’ she continued in a mysterious voice. ‘Thanks be to God my children aren’t here.’
Uncle Isaac suddenly looked with loathing at the women with their complacent faces. As Auntie Fanny screamed again the blood drained from his face.
‘I can’t stand this any more,’ he said loudly. ‘She’s dying in there and here I stand like a block of wood.’ Then he continued with passion, ‘We live in an age of electricity, of steamships and scientific thought and I have to listen to all these old wives’ tales. The evil eye! Did you ever hear of it?’
Uncle Isaac, stirred by his own words, ran down the passage, through the back-yard towards the stable. Although I was by his side he talked to himself all the while he harnessed the horse, who stumbled sleepily as it was led into the lane.
I climbed into the sulky behind Uncle Isaac and he cracked the whip in the air and swung the reins round the horse’s head. Without looking this way or that he drove fast towards the doctor’s house. The horse responded to his demands as if it understood the importance of the mission and cantered over the uneven stones of the road.
After Uncle Isaac had seen Doctor McDiarmid he drove more quietly and we arrived back a minute or so before the doctor drove up to the house in his open car. The lights of the car shone on a group of men, husbands of the women inside, who stood idly near the edge of the footpath. The clatter of the car brought some of the women to the gate.
Doctor McDiarmid, a stout, red-faced man with curled, waxed moustaches, good-naturedly pushed his way through the women who crowded the path and doorway. He said cheerfully to Uncle Isaac, ‘Where’s the patient?’
Then he asked in a puzzled voice, ‘What are all these people doing here?’
Uncle Isaac began to make some explanation about the different customs of people from other countries but he stopped suddenly and walked hurriedly to the door of Auntie Fanny’s bedroom. He was too anxious to get the doctor to his wife to hold him up with talk.
As the doctor opened the door Madame Koch and her retinue of old women, who had been watching him with darting eyes, stepped behind him into the room from which they had been driven. Uncle Isaac looked about helplessly and for once not a sound came from his mouth. Some men who had come up to him to speak words of encouragement shrugged their shoulders and left him alone. With his pale face, his vacant eyes, and his limp arms hanging by his sides he looked more dead than alive.
It seemed that hours had passed when the door of the bedroom opened and the doctor came out, a large smile wrinkling his red face.
‘Congratulations, a boy,’ he said to Uncle Isaac.
Uncle Isaac stared open-mouthed for a moment. Suddenly he opened wide his arms and weeping for joy kissed me wildly on the face. He shouted to the assembly of men and women, ‘A boy! My wife has given me a boy! Good folk, how can I repay my wife?’
He kept repeating his words until the doctor said, ‘You can go in and see your wife now.’
Uncle Isaac was more like himself when he grasped the doorknob, but suddenly a smile of embarrassment passed over his face and he called to me, ‘Come in with me.’
I joined him and held his burning hand as we came into the bedroom. I could just hear Auntie Fanny’s quivering voice as Uncle Isaac bent down to kiss her mouth.
My eyes turned to the white and red living thing that was stirring in Madame Koch’s arms. The tiny boy was passed from hand to hand, each old woman mumbling a strange-sounding blessing over him. Gradually their strange chorus rose to a rhapsody of joy. ‘Praise God for a new living being!’ Madame Koch cried shrilly. Then, pronounced a perfect specimen, free from all blemishes, the child was delivered from the shrivelled but sure hands of the old lady into Uncle Isaac’s nervous grasp. He gazed down in astonishment and admiration at the tiny mouth from which came a long wail.
Mrs Mendelsohn, the midwife, who had just finished drying her hands at a table near the head of Auntie Fanny’s bed watched the scene with rising anger and finally burst out to Uncle Isaac in a loud and peremptory voice, ‘Give me the child. And please ask those women to leave at once.’
And as an afterthought she added, ‘And go yourself. You have seen your wife and boy.’
A shrill chorus rose against Mrs Mendelsohn as she took the child from Uncle Isaac’s hands and put it beside Auntie Fanny.
‘Why do you give yourself such airs?’ asked Madame Koch in a sing-song voice. ‘You should be thankful for the assistance I gave you.’
‘The assistance you gave me!’ Mrs Mendelsohn gasped as if unable to believe her ears.
‘Yes, the assistance Madame Koch gave you,’ the retinue echoed.
‘This is all your doing,’ Mrs Mendelsohn said into Uncle Isaac’s face. ‘You brought the doctor and he, the fool, let these old women in. The work was done before your precious doctor came near the room. You cowardly men are all the same.’
‘Now be calm, Mrs Mendelsohn!’ replied Uncle Isaac patiently. ‘Are you telling me,’ he uttered each word with emphasis, ‘that Doctor McDiarmid, a man of science with degrees from Edinburgh, wasted his time in this room? Do you know where Edinburgh is? Do you know the school of medicine there has a history that—’
He would have continued in his customary way but Mrs Mendelsohn wouldn’t hear another word. She said, ‘I have asked you to take these women outside. If you have no consideration for me at least show some feeling for your wife. She needs rest. Now, please go,’ she almost shouted the last words.
‘Very well,’ Uncle Isaac said with dignity. But he was a little crestfallen as we left the room, leaving Mrs Mendelsohn alone with Auntie Fanny.
Only a few people remained in the passage as Madame Koch and the old women pattered out of the house, well satisfied with their visit. Uncle Isaac shook hands with them and with all the departing friends. Then he said to me, ‘Come, we’ll eat something. I’m hungry, would you believe it?’
For the first time I felt sleepy. I had never been up all night before. I almost slept with my head on the kitchen table as Uncle Isaac buttered slices of bread and talked about everything that came into his head. He wondered what his son would be. If only one could see the future as one could see into the past! He would like to see his son a great scientist or a professor of medicine or a historian.
I closed my eyes but I could still hear Uncle’s voice and the crow of the first cock in a distant back-yard and a milkcart rattling down the lane.
Father’s Horses
Father’s horses were a troublesome lot. Until he acquired Ginger, the tall chestnut gelding, there was something wrong with all of them. But most of them had good looks. Just as it is said that some men are taken in by any pretty woman, so I believe Father couldn’t resist a handsome horse, even if warned against it.
There was Prince, whom Father had bought at the horse market. An imposing sight he was in our spring-cart, his velvety black hide, white-stockinged legs, and a white star on his face marked him out from every other hack in the neighbourhood. He had once been a racehorse and it was not Prince’s fault that he was now harnessed to a bottle-oh’s cart instead of starring on the track. A trainer and jockey had brought shame on him so that he had been banished for ever from racing. Father could not deny himself the pleasure of telling everyone of his horse’s great past and even Mother was obliged to listen to his stories of Prince.
But so long as he had Prince, Father’s troubles began every morning as soon as he set out on his bottle round. Whether he was asked to or not the horse would break into a canter and, what was worse, he never wanted to pull up at Father’s request. Father shouted at him, cursed him in every language he knew, tugged with all his might on the reins, but Prince could still hear the echoes of pounding hooves and raced on, well past every stopping place.
Then, when at last the horse was prevailed upon to stop, Father had to hurry into back-yards and quickly carry back the empty bottles he had bought. Prince would start suddenly, forcing Father to scramble into the driver’s seat and catch hold of the reins just in the nick of time. Regardless of the precious cargo behind Prince cantered flashly and Father, terrified lest we might meet with some mishap, in turn spoke kindly and roared oaths and even raised the whip over the horse’s back. But he never really intended to use it. Out of the corner of his eye he would shoot a shamefaced glance at me.
‘If I give him the whip he might break into a gallop and we should be finished,’ he would explain.
Both of us knew that Prince was next to worthless as a bottle-oh’s horse, that he was just another one of Father’s mistakes.
Then one day things came to a climax.
Prince had been particularly exasperating. He had enjoyed his wild journey and he whinnied happily and shook his mane when he entered our yard. Father jumped off the cart and fastened the wheel. He stood silently staring for a moment at the cart, half empty because of the horse’s perversity. He mumbled under his moustache something about a horse sent by the devil to destroy his livelihood and then he strode up to the unsuspecting Prince and struck him hard on the face with his clenched fist. The horse reared back and quivered all over, gazing dumbly at Father.
