Oy schtinksi!’
What do the children know of such things? He remembered the voyage clearly enough, in a series of images and feelings that had become constituent elements of his adult incarnation. The smell of hot iron and machine oil, vomit and urine, rotting sauerkraut and the rancid odour of unwashed bodies, the heat, the constant rolling of the sea, stumbling and tripping on the stairwells and decks, clutching the handrails wet with spray and sweat. It was such a long way from the bowels of the ship to the decks, and he felt so ill during the eleven days of the crossing, that he spent most of his time in his hammock, green and listless, as the ship tossed about like a toy in a hyperactive toddler’s bathtub.
What little he could eat and drink came back up soon enough. His mother wiped his face with a filthy cloth and let the older children look after themselves. He was the youngest, and her darling, born some eighteen years after her first.
It was hardly possible to sleep, save from pure exhaustion, after an interminable night kept awake by the deep throbbing of the insistent engines that sounded like they were next door, the snoring of the people around them, the vomiting and moaning, the indescribable stench. A few feet away an elderly man moaned ‘Oy vey iz mir’ through the night, ‘Oy gottenyu!’
He shook off the images, looked at the kids, whom he understood as little as they, him. Post-war – post two wars! – children of privilege, everything so easy that it had no value, had not been suffered for or earned. If they had souls, nothing would hone or refine them, they would get sloppy with lack of use. Best just to play, to tease and be teased, to keep away from what they could never understand, please God they would never have to.
They liked teasing Granny, too. Most evenings, when they had meat for supper, one or the other would ask if they could have bread and butter with it.
‘Please, Granny, please?’ they’d insist. ‘It’s to mop up the gravy!’
She never caught on, each time explained to them that it wasn’t kosher, wondered why they could never remember. Even Die Schwarze had learned within a week! That it was a childish joke would never have occurred to her. She was literal-minded, lacked any sense of humour, always asked to have a joke explained to her. Ben, who loved telling jokes, had long ago learned not to tell them in front of Perle.
‘Explain it to me . . .’ she’d begin, and since no explanation of a joke is funny, was confirmed in her lifelong opinion that they were stupid.
Unlike her mother, Becca wasn’t high and mighty, she was low and biddable. The little one was always delighted to help Granny in the kitchen, learned what was kosher and what was treif, stirred the bowl of cake mixture and got to lick the spoon (so did Jake, that wasn’t fair!), set the table for dinner, filled the glass dishes full of Jordan almonds and sugar-coated fruit slices, red, yellow, green and orange, and placed them on the side tables in the living room. She sensed that she was already a better woman than her mother, and rather regretted it.
She loved being with Granny and Poppa. You didn’t have to make your bed or clean up your toys or unset the table – constant areas of conflict in their apartment – because the Negro girl did that. She had the tiny bedroom next to the bathroom. She didn’t come out much, ate her meals in there, listened to the radio, read her magazines. She came out to clean the house, do the dishes and the laundry, wearily do the endless ironing, sometimes babysit if the grown-ups went to town. She never came to the beach, she hated the water, couldn’t even swim. She had a friend, Agatha, who worked in a house at the top end of their yard. She couldn’t swim either. They knew each other from the city.
The girl was called Ruby, but Poppa and Granny called her Die Schwarze, which meant a Negro like on Amos ’n’ Andy on the radio, but Ruby didn’t listen to that, made a face, went to her room and closed the door. Becca had no idea why; it was such a funny programme. ‘Ah loves you, Sapphia!’ Andy would croon. Or perhaps was it Amos? They both talked funny, the same. Ruby didn’t talk like that. She hardly talked at all.
In the back of the car, as they passed through the city and onto the Island, Becca gazed out the window, thought of going to the beach as soon as they got there, it was so hot, and sighed with anticipatory pleasure.
‘Are we almost there?’ she said.
‘Only an hour,’ said Addie. ‘Just hang on.’
But the kids were bored and restless, had eaten too many candies and drank too much Coke, and were beginning to push and nag at each other.
‘I know,’ said Ben, ‘let’s have a singsong!’
Addie looked alarmed. ‘We discussed this. No singsongs, you know how it yugs them up!’
A clamour arose from the rear of the car.
‘Yug us up! Yug us up!’
The kids had finished their sandwiches and jellybeans, demanded stops to have a siss, which they didn’t really need but used as a way of checking out the service stations for Twinkies and chocolate kisses. They were getting fractious, pushing the stick back and forth in fraught imperial combat.
‘I think we need some rules,’ said Addie. ‘The first rule is no more sisses till we get to the bungalow.’
‘What if I have to do a doody?’ Jake asked, loving a chance both to make a point and to say a rude word.
‘Yeah,’ said Becca, ‘me too! A doody!’
‘And the second rule,’ Addie said, ignoring them, already irritated beyond endurance by Ben’s constant humming of his arias, ‘is no more humming. And NO singing . . .’
‘That’s so unfair!’ interrupted Jake. Ben hummed on. Becca looked perplexed.
‘You didn’t let me finish! No singing “Doggie in the Window”!’
It was the latest hit, Becca sang it to herself all the time. Once it was in there, you couldn’t get the goddamn doggie out of your head.
There was a protest from the back.
‘OK,’ she said, ‘in that case, we can also have “Every Little Breeze”.’
On holiday in Florida last year Jake had been smitten by a little blonde girl whose name was Denise. Ben had teased him to the point of tantrum on the way home in the car, singing that popular love song about ‘Louise’, only substituting the name ‘Denise’.
That shut Jake up. If the dreaded Denise was the price of the doggie, goodbye mutt, and as for Becca, merely the incipient rendition of that dreaded song (the one that upset her so much) was enough to put the pooch in the kennel.
So Addie didn’t need to employ her ultimate threat: that she would sing herself, all alone and loudly, which would have caused shrieks of dismay as the children held their ears and went ‘UMMMMMMMM’ at the top of their voices. Addie didn’t hit an occasional false note, she didn’t hit any at all: or more accurately, as Ben had once computed, she hit more or less one in eight. Eight notes in the scale, random success. And that didn’t count the sharps (ouch!) or the flats (ooch!).
Ben began his song slowly, voice increasing in volume as the first stanza unfolded. It was their favourite song, and they loved it almost as much as Addie pretended to disapprove of it. It was a potent combination, irresistible.
‘OOOOOH
