‘Yeah, OK,’ he said, ‘but I don’t get it. Why extra this year . . . Nothing’s different, is it?’
From the rear seat, Jake watched as Ben turned slightly to his right and nodded. Addie could do it, she was better at that sort of thing, had more of an anxious child in her, could respond to the uncertainty, get the tone right. He would be too matter of fact, too calm, too reasonable. There’s nothing more worrying than being reassured.
It wasn’t clear what to tell the kids, or how, or when. They’d avoided the moment until plans were further advanced, to spare them the anxiety of knowing both too much and too little. But the boy was already on edge, and likely to get more so. Becca thankfully was asleep, though she would take the news and accommodate the changes more easily than Jake.
‘We’re moving, aren’t we? That’s it!’
His voice was unsteady, and rising in volume. ‘I don’t want to! I won’t!’
Addie didn’t want to either.
Leaving Washington, renting an apartment in Huntington on Nathan Hale Drive (God forbid), where Frankie and Michelle lived, the loss of income and status, the dependency on Poppa’s random largesse. Removing the children from their happy, progressive school in the Virginia farmlands, enrolling them in the Long Island public-school system with the suburban dopes. How utterly dreadful for them, for all of them. She searched in vain for someone to blame. They’d done nothing wrong, done things well and rightly and justly, believed in what was good. Son of a bitch!
‘I’m not going!’ said Jake. ‘You can’t make me!’
At the weekends Maurice worked on the bungalow, made it more comfortable, more attractive, more his own. Dug a flower bed along the southern hedge, planted two hydrangeas and some phlox, installed a double swing at the bottom of the yard, paved an area for a swinging seat for the children, made wooden planters for the side of the house and filled them with red geraniums. He spent most of his time in his workshop in the garage, emerging occasionally to measure this, adjust that or install the other.
Put on the radio, listen to the news – though that was depressing enough – perhaps catch an afternoon Yankee game. Sometimes Jake would wander in and he could teach the boy, who was fidgety and had a short attention span but was greedy for the time the two of them spent together, could teach him how to use a lathe, a chisel, do simple joinery.
Last year he’d taught the boy how to hammer in a nail: took a good piece of sawn-off two by four, fit it into the vise, turned the handle firmly, then told Jake to finish it off with the final twist. The boy tried to show how strong he was, heaved and grunted, got it to move a little, gave a satisfied little smile.
‘Good boy!’ He passed him the hammer – not the titchy ball peen, a proper hammer with a hefty wooden handle and large head – and a two-inch nail.
‘Here you go. Remember what I showed you?’
The boy took the hammer, gripping it halfway up the handle, fearful concentration on his face.
‘Not like that, down at the bottom.’ He shifted the boy’s grip, the hammer sagged slightly from its own weight.
‘Now don’t just go tap, tap, that won’t drive the nail in. You have to hit it. Like Mickey Mantle!’
‘Mickey Vernon!’ said Jake. He was a Senators fan and loved their great first baseman, and though he was stuck with the Yankees for the summer, he didn’t like them. Big show-offs! Mickey Mantle! Yogi stupid Berra!
Jake raised the hammer, holding the nail tense against the wood, his fingertips whitening. Poppa took it back from him.
‘Let me show you again.’ He held the nail just below the top, its point against the wood, raised the hammer, cocked his wrist, drove it three-quarters of the way into the board. He left the rest, handed the hammer back.
‘Now you. No need to hold the nail.’
It took the boy three taps, but the head of the nail now rested against the wood.
‘Good!’
Knowing he’d been spared, the boy felt patronised.
‘I want to do it myself! Let me do it!’ He gave a girlish pout that made his grandfather’s heart contract.
Yet Maurice had adored him from the moment he was born; would have, indeed, once the pregnancy was announced, but it was unclear who 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