Mom. I have other names for her, Mi, Meh, Mo, Moom, softer names that are my own to use. I remember this, it speaks to me: resting with my head on her breast, my knees folded just below her armpits. She smells of roses and cigarettes. Her name is Rose too. I feel her soft breast under my cheek, under the pucker of her bra. She sings to me:
Que sera, sera
Whatever will be, will be
The future’s not ours to see
Que sera, sera
What will be, will be.
The future is a dim place, it is badly lit. One day I will wear spectacles and be treated for a lazy eye which will never grow diligent. But now I sit in her lap and cling to her breast, and feel wonderful.
Long before the future, on sunny mornings we go to the beach, to Bird Rock. We go to the Secret Pool, where all mothers and children go. We call it the Cigarette Pool. It is protected from the sea by a reef, and its ribbed sand lies under only two feet of water. It is much warmer than the proper sea. I sit in the middle of the pond, myself warm and salty as the water, digging up mud from the bottom and letting it drift out of my fingers. The light is colourless, hard as diamond. I have to close my eyes. Even then, it spears through my lids, turning red inside.
I do not like to come out of the water. My mother has to stand between me and the sun until her shadow cools me down. She promises me an Eskimo Pie, and I come out at last, sulking. She covers my skin with lime-green Sea & Ski, to protect me from the sun. When an ice-cream boy comes ringing his bell, she calls him over and buys two Eskimo Pies. Brittle shards of chocolate always fall off mine, landing on the sand. Sometimes I lose my temper and cry, and my mother picks me up and sings to me. But she never buys me a new Eskimo Pie.
When our father comes home, he smells of biltong and brandy. The skin of his cheeks and nose is reddened by broken capillaries. His eyes gleam boldly, the skin under them sags into pouches. He has thin lips and a hooked nose, thin shanks and a little potbelly. His forearms are scribbled over with wiry black hair, and he has narrow wrists for a grown man. His watch always hangs a bit loosely around his left wrist. He is proud of the watch, which he calls a Jager Leculter. He found it in the war. It ticks with an odd noise, a double-locking sound that is perfect every time. But you have to hold it up to your ear to hear it tick like this.
In the top left-hand drawer of the dressing table in their bedroom there are nail clippers and cigar clippers, and cuff links, things that men use. His voice is deep and gongs like brass. He is quick to laugh, and when he laughs I often fear that he might cry, because it does not look terribly different.
They go out at night to the Sky Roof, a place where you dance and eat dinner. It is on the fifth floor of the Marine Hotel down the road, at the bottom of our street. Children aren’t allowed to go there. I dream sometimes of the Sky Roof, when they go there for a dinner dance and I am alone with my brothers and Euphonia. I dream of a place in the Marine Hotel that is a wild jungle under a blue moon. Everything there is silver and blue, including the giant armoured crocodile that slithers around on the border of the Sky Roof, cutting me off from my parents. The dream goes on and on, as long as the crocodile that circles round it, sketching its boundary and sending out waves of fear.
When my mother returns from this dream she comes into my room. She sits on the edge of my bed and rubs my back, singing a Perry Como song.
All the stars are in the skies ready to say “goodnight”
Can’t you see your doll is sleepy, too?
Close your drowsy little eyes, mama will hold you tight
While she sings a lullaby to you.
My mother sings me a song by Perry Como. It is soft and kind. When my mother sings it and rubs my back, the blue moon of the Sky Roof fades away. The chorus melts into soft hissing sounds, like waves running up the beach and dying to silence:
Oh, chi-baba, chi-baba, chi-wawa
An’ chi-lawa kook-a la goombah
Chi-baba, chi-baba, chi-wawa
My bambino go to sleep . . .
Simon
Jude and Simon enter the study and wish mother Rose and young Eli good Shabbes. It is a small room with worn green furniture, and a mahogany unit messily lined with books. It is also littered with oddities such as a vibrating electric backscratcher, dusty binoculars, a broken camera, a battery-driven rotating tie hanger, an elegant shoehorn with a knotted leather handle, many golf trophies, an electric foot massager that no longer vibrates, a broken club soda device with several gas cartridges, half a bottle of crème de menthe, and a box of matches that are fully twelve inches long, brought home some years ago from England. These are all Archie’s devices.
Rose stubs out the remains of her cigarette, grinding it thoroughly into the ashtray before she returns their greeting. She smokes exactly ten Viceroys a day. This will have been her tenth, and therefore her last. The sequence is timed to expire just before supper.
“Your father isn’t home yet,” she remarks bitterly.
“How surprising,” replies Jude.
Eli, nine years old, doesn’t look up from the book he is reading.
“How come you’re allowed to skip synagogue and not be bored?” Simon asks him irritably.
“I have a terrible cold.”
“You look well enough to me.”
“I didn’t want him coughing through the service,” interjects Rose. “It can be very distracting for those who take it seriously.”
“Why do we have to go if we don’t take it seriously?”
“Ask your father.”
Eli coughs suggestively.
“So obviously at death’s door,” mutters Simon, and walks to the room he shares with Jude. He flops down on his bed, switches on the lamp and picks up the book he is reading, Youngblood Hawke by Herman Wouk. David Goldberg happens to be reading the same book. Perhaps it isn’t coincidence: he often does things that Simon does.
Simon puts the book down and heads for the study when he hears his father open the front door. He likes being around Archie until he gets too drunk.
“Hi, Dad,” he says. “Welcome home.”
“Hello, old chap,” replies Archie Machabeus absently, preoccupied with fixing his drink. He pours a finger of brandy into a tumbler, reconsiders, and pours in another. He adds ice cubes, a trickle of water, and another half-inch of brandy. He sits down on the green meadow of his vinyl BarcaLounger and slips off his shoes. Then he takes a sip and sighs, so appreciative of this triple blessing.
“So, old man, what did you do today?” he finally asks.
“Went oyster diving.”
“What did you do with them?”
“Sold them to Bernard Kessel.”
“You should have kept them for your mother!”
The joke is so weary that
