Turn Us Again (26 page)

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Authors: Charlotte Mendel

Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Contemporary, #Women's Fiction, #Domestic Life, #Humanities, #Literature

BOOK: Turn Us Again
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Grandma Golden didn't extol the virtues of Bertha's little girl quite so much after that.

Then there was the famous occasion of the poison.

As usual, Daniel appeared just in time to partake of the first course — bowls of mushroom soup arranged before each person. Grandma Golden always tried to serve dishes that Sam loved, and he adored mushroom soup.

Madelyn took a couple of spoonfuls and leapt to her feet, rushing in the direction of the bathroom with her hand clasped to her mouth. She slammed the door behind her, but the violence of her vomiting filtered out to the group around the table.

“Is she pregnant again?” Grandma Golden asked Sam.

“Not that I know of.”

She stayed in the bathroom until dinner was finished, retching until she felt that her very innards would appear in the toilet bowl. Sam knocked on the door and popped his head around. “Are you all right?”

“We have to go home, Sam. I feel terrible.”

She glanced at her reflection on the way out. So pale.

Sam supported her with one hand and clasped Gabriel with the other. Madelyn hunched over a bowl as she walked, waiting for the next attack.

She started to retch in the bus, and again when they reached their apartment.

“Don't you think this is strange? I felt fine this morning.”

“Extremely odd.”

“Could it have been something in the soup? I became sick as soon as I swallowed it.”

“But we all ate the same soup.”

“Maybe she put poison in mine.”

She expected Sam to howl with derision, but to her surprise he considered her answer, supporting his large head with his hand as he balanced on the bed.

“I think that she poisons you with hatred,” he said at last. “‘Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.'”

Madelyn began the classes designed to convert her into enough of a Jew to belong to the Golden family. She enjoyed them. The rabbi was kind and she studied hard. Anything of a spiritual nature interested Madelyn, and she took the conversion seriously.

After six months, Sam and Madelyn celebrated their second wedding in the synagogue. Grandma Golden and Daniel came, but Madelyn's parents did not. It was difficult for them to travel so far and they didn't quite grasp the reasons behind this second wedding. Madelyn wore a black costume and a straw hat which Grandma Golden had bought for her. Afterwards they went to a restaurant and ate salt beef sandwiches.

Sam, who combined great bursts of energy with a lazy streak, began to loathe getting up and going to work in the morning.

“I am so bored that I sometimes bang my head against the desk,” he told Madelyn, who could not understand how he expected her to be sympathetic, since this tedious labour was his own choice. He became anxious about money, poring over lists of sums at night. “Do you think I'll ever make enough to support my family in a reasonable fashion?”

“Of course you will. You are already.”

“I'm not really, you know that. Can I support us all and save for the future at the same time?”

“You're always making money calculations. You must learn to trust that everything will be okay.”

Sam gave a short bark of laughter. “If I were to trust to that, it would hit me twice as hard when we ended up in the poorhouse.”

“Oh for God's sake. Perhaps now is the time for me to go back to work. As a matter of fact I miss midwifery. I could work nights only — most babies are born then anyway — and you'd be home to look after Gabriel.” Madelyn leaned forward, suddenly excited about the prospect of returning to her beloved work.

“Gabriel is still too young, Madelyn. When he wakes up in the middle of the night he wants his mother, not me. Maybe in another year or two.”

Madelyn knew that Sam was worried about his precious sleep. With a mind like his, every solution was fraught with dread. “You worry too much.”

Sam strangled his head with his hands. “It's my worry that keeps this family going. If I stopped worrying everything would fall apart.”

“That's the stupidest thing I ever heard. How sad to think like that.”

“Don't call me stupid, woman!” Sam yelled in one of his abrupt changes of mood.

Madelyn bent over her book and did not answer him.

“Don't you bloody ignore me!” Sam banged his hands on the table, and white lists fluttered to the floor. “Oh God, look what you made me do!”

Madelyn wet her finger and turned a page in her book.

“You think you're so in control and superior, just because you don't yell. Who decided that shouting was bad? Let's all strive towards frigidity and coldness and repression!”

Madelyn could feel how badly he wanted her to respond. Power was so pleasant.

“Don't you see that it is your contempt which goads me? You are as guilty as I am for these outbursts, you limited, self-satisfied woman!” screamed Sam and rushed out the door in a passion of anger.

I have found a wonderful way to cope with Sam's anger
, Madelyn wrote in her diary,
I ignore him. He's bored with his job and anxious about the future so Gabriel and I have to put up with his irritation every evening. Last night he was enraged about insufficient meat in his steak and kidney pie, for God's sake. Today it was about money; he's always ranting about money. Such a Jewish trait. Marital fights always sound stupid when you write about them. Will we read these diary entries together in twenty years and laugh at ourselves? Or will we still be at it?

At least I have matured in my handling of such fights. I treat Sam with a deferential silence, even though it doesn't seem to curb his conduct. Actually, he behaves as his feelings dictate, and though I am sure the expression on my face is deferential, he sees contempt. He gets more and more angry; he is so paranoid!

He explains himself once we have made up. (I turn my back to him in bed, and he curls around me like a spoon. This is just as it should be, since I have done nothing wrong and he has behaved badly). ‘I could see disdain on your face,' he says to me, while I deny it. ‘My irritation is exacerbated by a growing sense that your deference veils a sort of contempt,' he says, and I ask him what I might do to lessen his irritation, since everything I try seems to exacerbate it. I think he wants to answer ‘Do not feel contempt for me,' but I have already denied that I feel this. I cannot do otherwise, even if it is not the whole truth. Of course I regard his outbursts with an element of disdain. I do not behave like that. Nobody in my family behaves like that. But I do all I can to present a blank mask, marked only by deference. I wish his paranoia would not drive him to dwell endlessly on my expression. I suppose that's the only thing he has to work on. Anyway, I do not see an alternative to deference; any other reaction would fuel his irritation even more. I am doing as he once requested. I am moulding my behaviour to fit his personality, rather than demanding that he change
.

Madelyn did re-enter the world of midwifery, but the long, unpredictable hours did not suit either of them, especially when Sam had to get up with Gabriel in the night. Though Gabriel had long been cured of any expectation of food during the dark hours, he now saw boogie men in every crevice and would scream until somebody came to vanquish his terrors by switching on the light.

Neither of them was happy. For Madelyn, there was the boredom of long days in the company of a child, with an erratic social life. Both Philip and Louise came for visits, but while it was lovely to see them it was not the same as the casual ‘dropping in' that had gone on in Cambridge. Twenty-four hours of company, no matter how pleasant, is not as congenial as an hour here and there. There was the anxiety of providing decent dinners and the nuisance of making oneself look beautiful at ungodly hours of the morning.

For Sam, a long week of unbearably boring work was capped at each end by horrendous family visits. He did not know how to escape from the misery that was his lot for the rest of his life. He was determined not to finish his law internship, but if he wanted to teach he would have to get further degrees at the university, and who would support his wife and child in the meantime?

Then he saw an ad in the paper.

Teachers wanted in the University of BC, Canada
.

With uncharacteristic reticence, he did not tell Madelyn about the opportunity until they phoned him two days after the interview. Then he showed her the ad and said: “They were so impressed with me that the fellow who interviewed me cabled the university with the words ‘Hire Golden.'”

The next day they phoned and sent telegrams to everyone with the news. Their excitement transmitted to others, and both families made a fuss of them. Grandma Golden threw a huge party, while Madelyn's parents insisted that they come and stay before ‘taking off to the other side of the world.'

On the day that Sam left his job, he rushed home and picked Madelyn up in the air, whirling her around and around and laughing like a madman. “Everything is possible, all prospects are filled with hope!” he shouted at her. “A new country, a job as a professor — which I could never have got here on the strength of a BA — the end of all our money worries and stress, Mummy!'

‘Our money worries?' thought Madelyn, but she said nothing, thankful that her husband had found a decent job without compromising his principles.

The last few weeks in England were a whirlwind of packing, planning and seeing old friends and acquaintances for the last time. There was no sadness in their hearts at these partings — there was only room for the excitement of the adventure. In any case, they were sure that they'd be popping back and forth to England often.

Those left behind were not so blasé about the approaching departure. Every Sunday, Grandma Golden dragged Sam into her bedroom for a private tête-à-tête. Madelyn found these absences restful, sitting back and watching Gabriel playing with the little wooden squirrel that he was forbidden to touch, even though it was unbreakable. She had no idea why these interviews needed to be private. After all, Grandma Golden could hardly be blaming her for this change in their circumstances.

“What did she say to you?” she inquired on the way home.

“She invested the first onslaught of energy in begging me not to go, listing all the potential dangers lurking in the Wicked West, about which she knows nothing. Then when I point out that I will be a professor in a university, where the Wicked West cannot penetrate, she tries to extract promises that I will write every week.” Sam yawned hugely, his face pale with fatigue.

“Did you agree to write every week?”

“I say I will be too busy. Then she implies that if I loosen my ties with my family there will be dire consequences.”

Madelyn could only think of positive consequences. Indeed, freedom from the obligation of those nightmarish weekly visits were one of the main attractions to immigration. “What consequences?”

“She says I will see how anti-Semitic the world can be. As if one could be unaware of that, after the recent war. She says I will see how much the family has protected me.”

“I will protect you!”

“She says you will throw it in my face that I am a Jew, the first opportunity you get.”

Madelyn was surprised. She had thought that her recent conversion had put an end to all that. “What rubbish,” she said.

The visit with Madelyn's parents was also peculiar. When they arrived, Eddie and even Mary displayed an excess of affection that was unlike them. Pippa, not to be outdone, rushed in and out between various legs, barking madly. Madelyn was immersed in chaos and emerged after several moments to see Sam standing awkwardly on his own, recipient only of the affections of Pippa, whom he ignored.

Such insensitivity was unlike them, and Madelyn stepped back and took Sam's arm. Eddie turned towards him and extended his hand to shake. “Hello son.” Madelyn realized that it was not rudeness, they just didn't know how to take Sam. He had always baffled them.

In their own way, they opposed the upcoming trip as determinedly as Grandma Golden. The whole idea seemed to paralyze them with fear and grief.

“You'll be so far away from everything you know. Why, even buying a piece of cheese might be a different process over there.”

“I promise you that I will teach Madelyn how to purchase cheese successfully at the first opportunity,” Sam said.

Eddie smiled at him, casting about in his mind for something to say that would not invoke unwanted comments from his daughter's strange choice of husband.

“We will miss you. You might be lonely.”

“I expect we'll come over in the summers. Sam gets almost three months off every summer.”

“Will he be making so much then?”

“Oh yes! So much more than he makes here.”

Sam cleared his throat, as if he didn't think much of this conversation.

Mary tried to change the subject. “Did you know that Anne used to work in a shop near here when she was a girl? There was a Jewish salesman came to the shop every day. Sometimes he didn't buy anything at all, just looked around the shop and left. One day Anne asked him if she could help him with something, and he blurted out, ‘No miss. I just come to see your pretty face.”

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