exactly was in there. Might be anyone. Might even be a girl. So he waited, and when the announcement came – from a thousand miles away, for Jacob was born in St Louis – he was quite overcome. It rather surprised him, this genetic fundamentalism. A firstborn (grand) son! What was that old Hebrew word for it? Been a long time since he’d been a member of a shul; though he went on Yom Kippur, he could hardly be described as attentive, just attending. Like most of them, going through the ritual but indifferent to it. Atonement? Yeah, yeah.
Bekhor? Something like that. Firstborn: with extra rights to property, to respect. To love. The announcement of the arrival was complicated by the difficulty of using the telephone during the war; even telegrams were reserved for military and industrial purposes. Ben had got round this with lawyerly wit. The ensuing telegram announced the arrival of ‘new merchandise with hose attachment’. His following letter gave details, with surprisingly adept cartoonish images of himself, first smoking a large cigar and in the next picture bent over, turning green. It was the cigar, wasn’t it? He wouldn’t have meant to suggest that babies made him sick.
It would be unfair to claim that it was the hose that Maurice fell in love with; though a no-hose addition to the family would have been celebrated, it would not have been a brocheh of the same order. Even before he’d seen the boy his heart had gone gooey at the very thought of him, and his was not a heart that gooed very frequently. And like most babies, Jakie (as he was first known) was rather more loveable in the idea than in the flesh. He was a colicky baby, crying most of the time, red-faced, insistent, what one of them would have called a perfect incarnation of original sin.
Maybe it was the difficult birth, the difficult baby. Who knew? But after she tottered home from the days at the hospital, clutching Ben’s arm desperately, the baby in a pram gifted by his loving grandparents, Addie took to bed, silent and miserable, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, refusing to eat, wasting. Ben fell into the breach. They travelled cross-country by train, to the utter dismay of their fellow passengers, and inflicted the bekhor on his grandparents, soon after which Ben, a smile on his face, headed straight back to St Louis – needed immediately at work! Addie got herself up and dressed, and spent her days on the porch, gin and tonic in one hand, cigarettes in the other. ‘It’s a life,’ she observed wryly, disbelieving. The drinks made her feel better for a time, then worse.
The indissoluble grandparent-bond with the new arrival was founded then, in spite of the fact that even Perle didn’t entirely warm to the bundle of screaming neediness. ‘A brocheh,’ she said repeatedly, often enough to convince herself, though Maurice was not so easily misled.
But the baby became a boy and, though still restless and needy, developed charms of his own, of which the major one, in Maurice’s eyes, was that he adored his grandfather. Maurice played catch with him, invented games, taught him pinochle, watched baseball on TV, had twice taken him to Yankee Stadium. Poppa Mo adored being adored, as long as it didn’t take much time or effort. He was utterly compelling in half-hour bursts, amusing, engaged, delightful. But he soon tired of the very needs that he created.
‘First one to fall asleep gets a quarter,’ he’d say, resting his head on the sofa and closing his eyes. The children did the same, but never won the quarter. Occasionally he’d give them one anyway in order to be able to ask: ‘Friends to the finish?’
They didn’t even bother to reply.
‘Lend me a quarter?’
He paused for a moment.
‘That’s the finish!’
His feelings for Jake were archetypally pure, but more ambivalent in fleshy incarnation. He was a spoiled little boy, Addie and Perle constantly giving in to him, all he had to do was insist and he could have anything he wanted, just to shut him up. Still red-faced and crying really, only more subtly.
And so he let him have the hammer: let him, knowing that he was weak-wristed and the hammer too heavy; let him, knowing that it was dangerous; let him, knowing he might well hurt himself. Let him. It would be good for him. He was prone to crying over scratches and poison ivy, stubbed toes, bumps, bruises, frightened of wasps and jellyfish and sounds in the night. His fingers were covered with Band-Aids, his scuffed knees yellow from application of Mercurochrome – he was frightened of iodine. Ow! It hurts! No, it would do him no harm if harm it was to be.
It was. The hammer came up, not very far up, and down, not very hard, but it was high enough and hard enough to give the boy’s thumb such a whack that, if it couldn’t have been heard in the kitchen, the resulting screams certainly were.
Ten years old, making a fuss.
Perle came rushing across the lawn in her apron, waving her hands in her ‘It’s a disaster’ motion, like a marionette operated by a spastic. Jake was lying on the floor holding his hand, screaming, face soaked, snot-ridden. Making a meal of it, Maurice thought unsympathetically.
‘Maurice! What have you done? How many times have I told you!’
She leant down and lifted the crying boy, who was too big now to carry back to the house but seemed incapable of standing up. Unwilling, really.
‘Let me see, let me see!’ she said, unwrapping the one hand from the other to reveal the red swelling thumb.
‘Don’t touch it!’
‘Don’t worry, my darling,’ she said. ‘Come with me, we’ll put it in cold water and then put a lovely ice pack on it. That’ll make it all better.’
She glared at Maurice, who was sheepishly putting his tools away, and propelled the boy gently back to the house, brushing past Becca, lurking to the side, making herself simultaneously invisible and available.
‘I’ll turn the cold water on!’ she said, running back to the house. ‘And wake Addie!’
Perle loved to be needed, to make sure the children had everything they wanted, and then to worry after they had it. She spoiled them, and then worried they’d spoil, or worse. Being alive was dangerous. In the meantime die kinder needed to be watched over and protected. They’d eat too much fruit and get a stomach ache, go into the water just after eating a hotdog and drown of cramps, fall out of the tree, get stung by a bee or bitten by a dog, get a poison ivy rash, prick themselves on the blackberry bushes. Or get sucked into the septic tank. This was a fiction of Jake’s that Perle, who knew nothing of such tanks save what they were full of, curiously colluded in. If you got too close to the septic tank area, behind the garage, the ground would give way and you could fall in! Jake said so, it was like quicksand. Perle never went near it, and Becca wouldn’t go into the garage at all – which was, of course, Jake’s aim – for fear that the quicksand would reach out and grab her by the ankles, and in she’d go to the most horrible death she could imagine, drowned in poo-poo. Worse than being eaten by the Great Danes up the hill, who howled all night and ate children. At least they were in their cage!
Becca slept for almost an hour, and woke up irritable and thirsty, rubbing her eyes.
‘Are we almost there?’
Jake knew she would say that – she was always asking, never satisfied.
‘No! It’s a long way still. You’ve got to learn to be patient!’
It was what Addie kept telling her, but Becca had no need to defer to her brother.
‘You be patient! I’m hungry and I feel sick!’
It was her
