The Counterlife (44 page)

I said to him, “My wife and I have had a very nice dinner and we'd like our coffee now, but it's extremely unpleasant with someone in the restaurant intent upon making a disturbance.”

“I understand, sir.”

“A window!” she called imperiously, snapping her fingers high in the air. “A window, before we are overcome!”

Here I stood and, for good or bad, even as I heard Maria entreating me—“Please, she's quite mad”—made my way out from behind the table and walked to where I could stand facing the woman and her husband, who were seated side by side. He didn't pay any more attention to me than he did to her—simply continued working on his port.

“Can I help you with your problem?” I asked.

“Pardon me?” she replied, but without the flicker of an upward glance, as though I were not even there. “Please, leave us alone.”

“You find Jews repellent, do you?”

“Jews?” She repeated the word as though she'd not come upon it before. “
Jews?
Did you hear that?” she asked her husband.

“You are most objectionable, madam, grotesquely objectionable, and if you continue shouting about the stink, I am going to request that the management have you expelled.”

“You will do
what?
”

“Have—you—thrown—out.”

Her twitching face went suddenly motionless, momentarily at least she appeared to have been silenced, and so rather than stand there threatening her any longer, I took that for a victory and started back to our table.
My
face was boiling hot and had obviously turned red.

“I'm not good at these things,” I said, slipping back into the seat. “Gregory Peck did it better in
Gentleman's Agreement.
”

Maria did not speak.

This time when I waved for service, a waiter
and
the headwaiter came hurrying over. “Two coffees,” I said. “Would you like anything else?” I asked Maria.

She pretended not even to hear me.

We'd finished the champagne and all but a little of the bottle of wine, and though I really didn't want any more to drink, I ordered a brandy, so as to make it known to the surrounding tables and to the woman herself—
and
to Maria—that we had no intention of curtailing our evening in any way. The birthday celebration would go on.

I waited until after the coffee and brandy were set down, and then I said, “Why aren't you speaking? Maria, speak to me. Don't act as though I was the one who committed the offense. If I had done nothing, I assure you it would have been even less tolerable to you than my telling her to shut up.”

“You went quite crazy.”

“Did I? Failed to observe British rules of dignified restraint, did I? Well, that stuff she was pulling is very trying for us people—even more trying than Christmas.”

“It isn't necessary now to go for
me.
All I'm saying is that if she meant that about the window, literally, to you, about you, then she is clearly
mad.
I don't believe any sane English person would allow themselves to go so far. Even drunk.”

“But they might think it,” I said.

“No. I don't even think they think it.”

“They wouldn't associate stink with Jews.”

“No. I do not think so. There is no general interest in this occurrence,” Maria said firmly. “I don't believe you can—if that is what you want to do—extrapolate anything about England or the English, and you mustn't. Especially as you cannot even be sure, much as you seem to want to be, that your being Jewish had anything even to do with it.”

“There you are wrong—there you are either innocent or blind in both eyes. She looks over here and what does she see? Miscegenation incarnate. A Jew defiling an English rose. A Jew putting on airs with a knife and a fork and a French menu. A Jew who is injurious to her country, her class, and her sense of fitness. I shouldn't, inside her mind,
be
at this restaurant. Inside her mind, this place isn't for Jews, least of all Jews defiling upper-class girls.”

“What has come over you? The place is full of Jews. Every New York publisher who comes to London stays at this hotel and eats in this restaurant.”

“Yes, but she's probably slow on the uptake, this old babe. In the old days it wasn't like that, and clearly there are still people who object to Jews in such places. She meant it, that woman. She did. Tell me, where do they get these exquisite sensibilities? What exactly do they smell when they smell a Jew? We're going to have to sit down and talk about these people and their aversions so that I'm not caught off guard next time we go out to eat. I mean, this isn't the West Bank—this isn't the land of the shoot-out, this is the land of the carol service. In Israel I found that everything comes bursting out of everyone all the time, and so probably means half as much as you think. But because on the surface, at least, they don't seem to be like that here, their little English outbursts are rather shocking—perhaps revealing too. Don't you agree?”

“That woman was
mad.
Why are you suddenly indicting
me
?”

“I don't mean to—I'm overheated. And surprised. Sarah, you see, tried to make clear to me, back in the church, something else that I didn't know—that your mother, as she put it, is ‘terribly anti-Semitic.' So much so that I'm mystified I wasn't told about it long ago so as to know what to expect when I got here. Not terribly anti-American, terribly anti-
Semitic. Is
it true?”

“Sarah said that? To you?”

“Is it true?”

“It doesn't have to do with us.”

“But it's true. Nor is Sarah England's greatest Jew-lover—or didn't you know that either?”

“That has nothing to do with us. None of it does.”

“But why didn't you
tell
me? I do not understand. You've told me everything, why not that? We tell each other the truth. Honesty is one of the things we have. Why did it have to be hidden?”

She stood up. “Please stop this attack.”

The bill was paid and in only minutes, leaving the restaurant, we were passing the table of my enemy. She now seemed as innocuous as her husband—once we'd faced off, she hadn't dared to go on about the smell. However, just as Maria and I stepped into the passageway joining the dining room to the hotel lobby, I heard her Edwardian stage-accent rising above the restaurant murmur. “What a disgusting couple!” she announced, summarily.

*   *   *

It turned out that Maria had been embarrassed ever since her adolescence by Mrs. Freshfield's anti-Semitism, but as she'd never known it to affect anything other than her own equanimity she'd simply endured it as a terrible flaw in someone who was otherwise an exemplary protector. Maria described her mother's family as “all crazy—a life of drink and boredom, total prejudice overlaid with good manners and silly talk”; anti-Semitism was just
one
of the stupid attitudes by which her mother could hardly have been uncontaminated. It had more to do with the imprint of her times, her class, and her impossible family than with her character—and if that seemed to me a specious distinction, it wasn't one that Maria cared to defend, since she herself knew the argument against it.

What mattered, she said, what explained everything—more or less—was that so long as it had looked as though we'd be living in America, in a house in the country with Phoebe and the new baby, there'd been no need to bring any of this up. Maria admired her mother's strength, her courage, loved her still for the full life she'd worked so hard to make for her children when there was virtually no one around who would seriously help her out, and she couldn't bear me despising her for something that wasn't going to do us any harm and to which I couldn't have been expected to bring, from my background, even the simplest sort of social understanding. If we had been able to make America our home, her mother would have come for a couple of weeks each summer to visit the children and that would have been all we ever saw of her; even if she had wanted to interfere, she would have been too clever to risk her prestige in a struggle she could only lose, opposing me from such a distance.

And then once we were legally pledged to live in London, the problem was too big for Maria to confront. She felt that by adapting to the stringent custody guarantees extracted by her ex-husband, I had already taken on more than I'd bargained for; she couldn't bring herself to announce that in addition there was waiting to pounce upon me in England an anti-Semitic mother-in-law waving a burning cross. What's more, she hoped that if I weren't prematurely antagonized, I could probably dislodge her mother's prejudice just by being myself. Was that so unrealistic? And had she been proved wrong? Though Mrs. Freshfield might seem to me inexplicably aloof, so far she had said nothing to Maria even remotely disparaging about marrying a Jew, nor had she so much as hinted that she expected our infant to be christened. That might please her, Maria had no doubt that it would, but she was hardly deluded enough to expect it, or so fanatical as to be unable to survive without it. Maria was desolated about Sarah; she still had trouble believing that Sarah could have gone so far. But Sarah, whom everyone accepted as peculiar—who had been known all her life for her “petulant little outbursts,” for being “cross and mean,” who never was, as Maria put it, “a purely likable person”—was not her mother. However perturbed her mother might be about the implausible match her daughter had made in New York, she was being positively heroic in suppressing her chagrin. And that wasn't only the best we could have hoped for—for a beginning it was extraordinary. In fact, if it hadn't been for that woman turning up at the other end of our banquette, a rather tender evening would have taken most of the sting out of Sarah's misbehavior down in the crypt, leaving relations between Maria's anti-Semitic mother and her Jewish husband just as respectful, if remote, as they'd been since our arrival in England.

“That dreadful woman,” Maria said. “And that
husband.
”

With Phoebe at Mrs. Freshfield's sister's London flat and the nanny off till the following noon, with just the two of us alone together in the living room of the rented house, I was reminded of Maria lying on the sofa of my New York apartment the year before, trying to convince me how unsuitable she was. Unsuitability—what could be more suitable for a man like me?

“Yes,” I said, “the old guy really let her go.”

“I've seen a lot of that where I come from,” Maria said. “Women of a certain class and disposition behaving terribly, talking very loudly, and they allow them to get away with absolutely every last comma.”

“Because the men agree.”

“Could be, needn't be. No, it's their generation—you simply never contradict a lady, a lady is not wrong, and so on. They're all misogynist anyway, those men. Their way to behave to women like that one is to be civil toward her and just let her rave. They don't even hear them.”

“And she meant what I thought she meant.”

“Yes,” and just when it seemed that the restaurant incident had been completely defused, Maria began to cry.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I shouldn't tell you.”

“The moral of this evening is that you should tell me everything.”

“No, I shouldn't.” She dried her eyes and did her best to smile. “That was exhaustion, really. Relief. I'm delighted we're home, I'm delighted by this bracelet, I was delighted by the shade of crimson you turned while telling that woman off, and now I have to go up to bed because I just can't take any more pleasure.”

“What shouldn't you tell me?”

“Don't—don't pump me. You know why it may be that I never explained about my mother? Not because I thought it would antagonize you, but because I was afraid it would be too intriguing. Because I do not want my mother in a book. Bad enough that's my fate, but I do not want my mother in a book because of something that, shameful as it is, is doing no one any harm. Except herself, of course—isolating her from people like you whom she has every reason to admire and enjoy.”

“What made you cry?”

She closed her eyes, too exhausted to resist. “It was—well, when that woman was raving on, I had the most awful memory.”

“Of?”

“This is terrible,” she said. “It's shameful. It really is. There was a girl in our office when I was at the magazine—before Phoebe was born. She was a girl I liked, a colleague, my age, a very nice girl, not a close friend but a very pleasant acquaintance. We were out in Gloucestershire working on a picture story, and I said, ‘Joanna, come and stay with us,' because Chadleigh isn't far from the village we were photographing. So she stayed at the house for a couple of nights. And my mother said to me, and I think Joanna may even have been in the house at the time, though she was certainly out of earshot—and I should add that Joanna is Jewish—”

“Like me—with the unmistakable genetic markings.”

“My mother wouldn't miss it, I wouldn't think. Anyway, she said to me exactly, but exactly what that woman said in the restaurant. They were her very words. I had forgotten this incident entirely, just put it completely out of my mind, until I heard that woman say, ‘They smell so funny, don't they?' Because I think my mother had, I don't know, got into Joanna's bedroom, or in some perfectly normal way—oh, I don't know what, this is all very difficult to go into, and I just wish to hell I hadn't remembered it and it would all go away.”

“So it wasn't entirely accurate to tell me at dinner that no one would say that unless they were mad. Since your mother is clearly not mad.”

Softly, she said, “I was wrong … and wrong despite my knowledge … I told you, I'm ashamed of that. She thought it and she meant it—is it mad to say it? I don't know. Must we go on about this? I'm
so
tired.”