Other People’s Houses (23 page)

“She does,” I said. “Her hands are never idle.”

“That’s right. She does the flowers every morning.”

“And her charities in the afternoon,” I said. “She
visited her deaf and dumb today even though she was feeling faint, just because it was her day. Anyway, Mrs. Dillon did the cooking and Miss Douglas took the baby off your hands.”

“Yeah, and she took the cream off the top of the baby’s milk and put it on
her
porridge. If she doesn’t stop eating everybody’s ration, what with her high blood pressure, she’s going to really faint one of these days—phffft!
And good riddance. It wasn’t even her milk! It was the baby’s government milk. And she took the top off your milk, too.” Milly pointed to my glass. “What’s this supposed to be?” she said, waving my lettuce leaf in the air and rattling my three biscuits on a saucer. “And you know what they’re having? Soup, fricasseed chicken, and apple mousse. Stingy old things.”

“They’re not,” I said. “It’s just
that it’s not good for children to have a big meal before going to bed. Miss Douglas says it gives them bad dreams. Besides, if they were stingy, they wouldn’t even have me. Miss Douglas brought me the silk dress from the bazaar and Mrs. Dillon pays for my piano lessons. They are not stingy.”

“So why are they paying me fifteen shillings a month?”

“And room and board,” I said. “Anyway, it’s because
of the baby, Miss Douglas says. In other places, maids aren’t allowed to have their children live in. My mother can’t have me.”

“You really want to know why she lets me have the baby?” said Milly, sticking her face into mine. “I’ll tell you why. She likes to play with her, that’s why. Ouch!” She straightened and massaged her back.

“What’s wrong with being fond of children?” I said, but I was
always in trouble with my arbitrations between the back and the front of the house; I usually knew the kitchen to be in the right, but it was the drawing room that attracted me.

“You go on in,” said Milly, “and let me clear the table and wash up the dishes and fill their damn hot-water bottles and turn down their goddam beds, so I can get done. Go on.”

But I hung around waiting to see what might
be left on the plates from the dining room. I was hungry. The plates came out, but Miss Douglas came out with them and personally put the leftovers away under little nets in the larder.

That evening, I proposed to Miss Douglas that I be allowed to do the housework one day so that Milly could stay in bed and rest, or go out, or do anything she liked for one whole day. I was surprised that Miss
Douglas was not as delighted with the notion as I. “Why don’t you let her, Hanna?” said Mrs. Dillon. “I could do the cooking.” And so Milly was told she could have the whole of next Thursday off, and I overslept and Mrs. Dillon had to get Miss Douglas’s early-morning tea, and Miss Douglas herself came up to my little room under the roof to get me out of bed. Downstairs, Mrs. Dillon had lit the kitchen
fire, dusted the dining room, and laid breakfast. She put her finger to her lips. I burst into tears and threw myself against her bosom. If Mrs. Dillon did not precisely push me away, she seemed to withdraw into herself, shy at having me cry all over her. I let go and cried standing on my own feet.

“And next time,” said Miss Douglas at breakfast, “I hope you will let me run my house and my servants
as I see fit.” I cried some more, out of a deep grievance against the difficulties of doing good. “Run along now, or you’ll be late for school as well.”

That was when I listened outside the door and heard Mrs. Dillon tell Miss Douglas that that was not the way to make a Christian out of me. I felt a sudden furious loyalty to myself:
No
one was going to make
any
thing out of me.

When, the next
afternoon, we were walking the dog on the Downs, I attacked Mrs. Dillon’s Jesús. “Why,” I said, “if he came to earth to save everybody, is there a war going on this minute and people being killed and Jews being persecuted?”

“‘God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform,’” Mrs. Dillon said.

“If he can perform wonders,” I said, “what does he need to send his son to earth for?”

Confusion
filled Mrs. Dillon’s innocent eyes, but she battled it and was left looking obstinate. “Because,” she said. “Anyway, it says in the Bible, ‘God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.’ And there is the Holy Ghost, Three Persons in One. It’s difficult to explain. I wish my dear husband were alive. He was a vicar, you know. He could explain it all to you. All I know is what Jesús
said, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the light,’ and if you would pray to him he would help you to believe.”

“But if I don’t believe in him, how can I pray to him to make me believe in him?”

“That child!” I heard Mrs. Dillon say to her sister when I listened outside the drawing-room door that evening. “She’ll argue the hind legs off a donkey.”

It was my own choice to go to the Christian religious-instruction
class in school—because I always got the best marks for my compositions in this subject—and my ladies would often take me along to peripheral church activities. When Miss Douglas went to help decorate the church for Easter, I went along. The back seat of the car was heaped with lilies of the valley, daffodils, and almond blossom from the garden, and pussy willow we had been collecting
on our walks. Bromley had brought in pink and blue hyacinths and lilies in pots, which would go to the hospital after the services. The verger unlocked the cupboard where the vases, bowls, and watering cans were kept in the back of the church. Here we met Mrs. Montgomery, who had the pew behind Miss Douglas’s pew. The ladies exchanged greetings in decent church voices. Mrs. Montgomery had brought
along another refugee child. I had not seen her before, and yet she looked familiar. She was an exceedingly plain girl. She wore glasses and was stout and had breasts and the beginnings of a mustache on her upper lip. Her name was Herta Hirschfeld. She came from Vienna, too, but was older than I.

It was very still in the sunny church, except for the verger shuffling between the pews, dusting
the deep old polish of the wood while the two ladies in their hats decorated the windows at the ends of their pews. Herta Hirschfeld and I kept passing each other in the center aisle, carrying watering cans that we filled in the vicar’s lavatory, next to his study. I maneuvered to let Herta catch up with me in the back passage. I asked her if she had ever been in Liverpool and she said no.

“There
was a girl I used to know called Helens,” I said.

Herta said her name was Herta, but my experience henceforward of fat Herta was complicated by having tagged on to it the memory of fat Helene.

“Is that your lady?” I asked.

Herta said yes.

“You don’t go to the high school, do you?”

Herta said Mrs. Montgomery sent her to the school where she herself had gone as a girl, in the next town.

“You
never come to the refugee club on Thursdays. I go with my mother. My mother is a cook. My father is in the hospital.”

Herta said she didn’t have her parents in England. I asked her where they were, and she said she didn’t know. They had crossed the Austrian frontier into Hungary illegally and she hadn’t heard from them since, but she had a brother in Palestine working in a
kibbutz
. She asked
me if I was a Zionist. I said I wasn’t sure. Herta said, “When the war is over I’m going to Palestine to work in a
kibbutz
with my brother. We are going to help build a Jewish state.” I said I didn’t think I was a Zionist. I was going to stay and become English.

Canon Godfrey came along the passage with his wide hat and turned-out toes. He recognized me as Miss Douglas’s little girl and asked
me how I did and said he was pleased to see us working so busily.

I met Herta again the following week. At this time, the Jewish Committee began to send a weekly rabbi down from London to give us religious instruction between trains. We met him Mondays after school in the firemen’s hall, which was just across from the railway station, in the office that was used for the refugees’ English classes.
The rabbi’s name was Dr. Lobel. He was a broad-shouldered young man with beautiful olive skin. His cheeks were almost blue under the close-shaved beard. I might have got a crush on him if I hadn’t started arguing instead. I asked him if Jesús was a real person.

“There is historical evidence of a person living in that era who claimed to be the son of God.”

“How do you know he wasn’t?”

“There
have been many false prophets throughout history,” said Dr. Lobel. “Sometimes they were charlatans, sometimes self-deluded cranks. For instance, the god kings of ancient—”

“How do you know,” interrupted Herta Hirschfeld, “that Jesús wasn’t the real son of God?”

Dr. Lobel shifted in his chair. “Judaism teaches us that there is only one God, indivisible,” he said, picking up the Hebrew reader
for beginners.

“It says in the Bible,” I said, “that ‘God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son,’” and was surprised at the sudden taste of tears with the sweetness of the words in my mouth.

“If he wasn’t the son of God,” said Herta, “how could he perform miracles?”

“He healed the deaf and dumb,” I said.

“And he walked on the waters of Gennesaret,” Herta said.

I watched closely,
waiting for the rabbi to pull the water out from under Christ’s feet, but the young man had slipped far down into his chair. He looked harassed and bored. “All right, now, that’ll do. Take your readers. Page twenty-seven. You’re holding it back to front,” he said, putting his hand out to turn mine front to back. “Begin here. ‘
Baruch Hashem …
’”

“‘
Baruch Hashem,
’” I read. “‘Blessed be the Lord
God of Israel.’”

Herta and I walked away from class together. “It’s silly, actually,” I said. “Nobody could walk on water.”

“If he were the son of God he could,” Herta said.

I was taken aback, for I had assumed we were really on the same side. “I thought you were going to Palestine to build a Jewish state,” I said.

“I am.”

I was meaning to call her on her divided loyalty, but the sun was
going down at the end of West Street and the windows of the shops blazed as if they were on fire inside. The crowd walking against us on the pavement was silhouetted black, each body outlined with a fine halo of light. I turned to Herta. Where I expected to see her eyes behind the glasses were two circles flashing red and gold. I was used in those days to signs and visions, and was not surprised to
feel suddenly suspended even as I walked, my self hovering over my right shoulder in an ecstasy of comprehension. I said nothing about it to Herta, but we parted tenderly at the corner, where I turned uphill toward Adorato.

Rabbi Lobel must have reported on the dangerous influences at work on the Allchester refugee children, for the Committee in London decided that we needed the counterinfluence
of nice Jewish homes. Both Miss Douglas and Mrs. Montgomery received letters asking them to see that their Jewish wards spent the upcoming Yom Kippur in the synagogue. Arrangements would be made for each to take the holiday meal with a suitable family.

I was assigned to a family called Rosenblatt and told to meet them at the temple. There were not enough Jews in Allchester at that time to have
a regular synagogue, but a downtown restaurant had been converted for the High Holiday services. I sat with Mrs. Rosenblatt and her daughter, Sheila, a smug little girl with fat, shiny cheeks, dressed in a pink dress and bonnet, and patent-leather shoes. She wore a gold bracelet, which I thought dreadfully vulgar. “Ma,” she kept saying, “I’m bored.” She wanted to go to her father and her brother,
Neville, who sat on the other side of the aisle, with the men. Her mother said she should sit still and be a good girl, but she fidgeted and wriggled until her shoulders rested on the seat of her chair. “So go on,” said Mrs. Rosenblatt. “Go to your father. You want to go with her?” she asked me, but I said no, thank you.

I had seen Herta sitting two rows behind me, like a grownup, absorbed in
her prayer book. I opened mine and Mrs. Rosenblatt showed me the place. I tried to follow in English. “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,” I read. It failed to move me. I wanted to pray, but the place was too noisy. The chanting men didn’t even keep together. They bobbed and bowed like so many rocking chairs going at different speeds. I was glad Miss Douglas wasn’t there to see how Jews carried on
in church as if it were their own home. The
shammes
, walking around with his day-old beard, was remonstrating loudly with Sheila, who had got tired of sitting with her father and was trying to get back up the aisle to her mother. Mrs. Rosenblatt and a neighbor were chatting, comparing the headaches they had from fasting. They looked just like the women in the gallery in Vienna where my mother
had sat. Their big bosoms were pressed high by corsets under their best black dresses. They wore smart hats. They seemed to be passing the same orange stuck full of cloves like a pincushion, which was supposed to keep one from fainting away, and at certain passages of the service their eyes became hot and dark and they cried wet tears.

I did not want any part of them. It grieved me that I did
not love them. It made me feel hard and wicked. I clenched my right hand over my chest and struck it surreptitiously, as I had seen my father do, once for each sin. “God, I’m going home to dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Rosenblatt and I don’t even like them.” Thump. “Sometimes I can’t stand my own mother.” Thump. “Some days I even forget to think about my father. God, I listen outside the door to hear
what Miss Douglas and Mrs. Dillon are saying about me.” Thump. “I steal chicken from the larder and eat it in bed. I love Jesús Christ better than I do you.
Lieber Gott
, take away my sin and make me good.”

It seemed that the service was over. The men were folding their prayer shawls and wrapping them away in velvet, gold-encrusted bags. People embraced. Strangers wished one another “
Shalom Aleichem.
” Mr. Rosenblatt came and took his wife into his arms and kissed her, and they told me to come along, very kindly.