The Mighty Walzer (41 page)

But of course for a moment it looked beautiful, like another proof of the ancient Venetian gift for decoration. A bold aesthetic coup — red on white, liquid on cloth, flesh on stone.

I suppose I ought not to have walked my party in the other direction. Isn’t death in Venice what they have come to see? For certainly no one does it better.

So no, except in so far as everything worries me now, the death part of Venice doesn’t worry me unduly. There’s been more of it in Manchester. Too much death in Manchester for me ever to go back willingly to the place. The city itself had the heart ripped out of it long before the IRA did its bit. Torn apart to make room for tsatske precincts for the post-industrial poor. Tickle the poor into town with tsatskes and they take over the town. Mate, multiply, bebop, stick needles into themselves, put pistols to your head. Try Manchester after midnight today and you’ll think you’ve walked into the Book of Revelation. I’d say wall it up and forget it exists if there weren’t some of my own still in there. Not many. Not as many as there used to be. The heart has been ripped out of the Walzers and the Saffrons as well. And that’s the only reason I ever return: to bury another of us.

Fay was the first. Suddenly and in her sleep. Of fright.

Routine check-up, routine recommendation that she come back in for a second opinion. Just in case what they’d found was a tumour. They named it, you see. They spoke the word. Only
just in case
, but the word was out and once the word’s out there’s no taking it back.

She died dreading.

The old Saffron fear of sphericality — whatever was round and incalculable.

And the old Saffron horror of our own insides.

Poor Fay. I know how she must have felt. If only we’d been born hollow. With our giblets in a removable plastic bag.

I flew back from a conference for her funeral. It was November, as it always is when we bury our northern dead. The ground cold but not yet hard. We die soggy in the North. We come apart like cardboard.

My mother was scarcely alive herself. She had wept for
thirty-six hours. No sleep, no food, just tears and telephone calls.

‘I feel as if I’ll cry for ever,’ she told me. ‘Poor Fay. She was just a kid. She was barely older than my own children. She hadn’t started to live yet. I won’t ever get over it.’

Too cruel when it’s the youngest who goes first. But there was an over-and-above cruelty which no one could bear to put into words. No, she hadn’t lived, but she
was
just starting to. She died, as though to satisfy some spite at the very core of things, just as she was putting a life together. She was in love, skippingly in love with her nuisance caller and engaged to marry him. For years she’d rejected every suggestion of a face to face encounter, content to go on talking over the blower, afraid of what he would be like in the flesh, afraid of what
she
would be like in the flesh. Then finally they did it, met for tea and cucumber sandwiches at the Midland Hotel, pink carnations in their buttonholes, a palm court orchestra playing, and my father hiding behind the palms in case of trouble. There was no trouble. How could there be? They were already good friends, knew everything there was to know about each other — favourite book, favourite walk, favourite short piece of music, favourite long piece of music, favourite colour, favourite smell, favourite fear — and had learnt to understand the meaning of every hesitation and intake of breath. The telephone teaches you to listen if nothing else. And they’d been on the telephone a long time.

Had she lived, she would have changed her name to Fenwick, moved into a house with verandahs on Alderley Edge, woken to the sound of birdsong, and become a stepmother, maybe a mother in her own right. It was all just beginning for her. She wasn’t even forty yet.

We had to tear my grandfather away from the television for the funeral. Put a suit on him, empty his pockets of sweet wrappers, brush his hair and shove him into the hearse. For a brief moment
all sides of our family thought as one: it should have been him we were removing from our sight.

That we were changed by Fay’s death goes without saying. But what changed us most was the depth of Duncan Fenwick’s grief. He was inconsolable. He hung on to my mother when the coffin was carried out of the house, and then joined the remaining Saffron women when the time came for them to throw themselves upon it. He called her name over and over — ‘Fay, Fay, oh Fay!’ — a bloodcurdling lament which made her unrecognizable to us, not ours at all in death, because at the last she had not been ours but someone else’s in life. We made room for him, even Fay’s sisters parted, so that the last kiss on the coffin could be his.

We let him have her.

No one could have looked less like us, less like either side of us. From the way he dressed and carried himself you would have picked him for a market gardener, a small landowner in corduroys and green waterproofs, smelling of turnips and rabbit fur. But there was something of the New World pioneer about him too, an optimism in the way he took his time and moved his stringy joints, deceptively pared down, like a nutcracker. He was lightly freckled, with a tumble of pale orange hair and piercing powder-blue eyes. He spoke slowly, and nicely. A Manchester distinction.
Doesn’t he speak nice!
It was his gentle well-spokenness that had attracted Fay to him in the first place when he’d rung at random to ask the colour of her pants. None of us bore such confident leisureliness in our voices, as though there weren’t a thousand other things happening that you had to be heard over, as though there was no reason in the world to rush your words, because where you lived everything had stayed the same for centuries, and marauding Cossacks were few and far between. And yet here he was, among us, grieving with us, sorrowing
for
one of us. Forever to miss Fay as much as we would. Maybe more.

And maybe with more reason. Because Fay’s queer unaccustomedness, her absence of all worldly competence, had saved him from God knows what fate. Who else but Fay would have kept the phone to her ear and listened to all that filth in the first place?

So we let him have her, and more to the point, we let her have him. There was the change: we conceded they’d been lucky in each other.

Whenever one of my sisters next took home a floppy-prepuced white man the name of Duncan Fenwick would be invoked to prevent either my father or my mother — depending on whose turn it was — getting the platz. Hadn’t Duncan Fenwick, against all the odds, turned out to be a shtik naches? Hadn’t he shown himself to be a mensch, a gentleman, a person of the deepest feelings, capable of a loyalty to one of us that maybe none of us could match? So why shouldn’t this latest treife gatecrasher turn out to be the same? Duncan Fenwick had adored our Fay, alav ha-shalom, and would have made her deliriously happy: why shouldn’t Gordon le Goy do likewise with our Hetty? And in the end, as though we’d gradually stopped noticing the difference, as though it had ceased at the last to matter, that was precisely who we welcomed into the family — Gordon le Goy. Followed by Benedict von Baitsimmer. My brothers-in-law.

I say ‘welcomed’, but you know what I mean. Didn’t offer a thousand pounds in used flims to vanish out of sight. Didn’t set about with an axe. Didn’t say prayers for the dead over Hetty and Sandra as a consequence.

You know —
welcomed
.

But even that would have been a welcome too far in the eyes of some. All very well being accommodating, but wasn’t our neighbourliness bound to spell the beginning of the end of the Saffrons and the Walzers?

You know the game: change Walzer to le Goy in four moves, altering only one letter at a time. You have twenty seconds.

Baruch and Channa Weinberger
née
Walzer’s view exactly. In fact in their view the twenty seconds were already up. The dreaded thing had happened. What Hitler hadn’t achieved in Auschwitz — I know, I know: there’s no bottom to the vulgarity of the Orthodox — we Walzers had done to ourselves in north Manchester.

Well I’m their father and it’s my duty to tell them what I think. Shem zikh in dayn vaytn haldz. You should be ashamed to the depths of your throat.

To be humane means to stay calm and wait your turn. What goes around comes around. The goyim thicken our soup, we thicken theirs.

That’s always been the way of it. How otherwise do you explain the tristful warrior aspect of the Kazakh which you’ve inherited from my side of the family, and that inane insensate Junker expression which you’ve been cursed with from your mother’s? Why do you think you still don’t look like fucking Abraham?

I don’t mind admitting, though, that I’d have liked to see Gordon le Goy married to my Channa, thereby signalling the beginning of the end of the Weinbergers. But what father ever gets to live to see his fondest hopes realized? My little Channa returned full circle whence she’d came and married a Vulvick. I flew in to Manchester from Venice especially for the wedding. The full frummie monty. Bride waiting on the chuppah in her new sheitel, just come from a vaginal scrutiny in the ritual baths, hopeful as a morning flower with all her petals open. Bridegroom wrestled to her side, his fringes flying, putting up a fight — Don’t make me, don’t make me! — the one with everything to lose. How’s a father meant to feel when he sees that? You’re lucky to have her, you kuni-lemele. A boy with pin wheels stuck to his ears is lucky to have anyone, never mind my lovely Channaleh. But then I was lucky to be invited. The whole shlemozzle at the party after, too. Some party! Men on one side of the screen, women on
the other, for the women must not be inflamed by the sight of the black hats dancing. But I’m coming to all that. And in mitigation of the horror of it, I must say that if I hadn’t flown to Manchester for Channa’s wedding to Shmuelly, I wouldn’t have known about the Ninth World Veterans’ Ping-Pong Championships, in town at the very same time I was.

But I’m coming to that too.

After Fay, they were lining up to drop.

My grandfather went next, of an infection brought on by ingrowing toe-nails. He had stopped cutting them and was bending them over and pushing them back inside instead. We laughed about it at the funeral.

And a few years after that, Gershom of bowel we don’t say what, quickly followed by poor Dora of loneliness. She’d got to know no one in south Manchester. Gershom had kept her locked up in his ex-boarding house, made her butter bagels and cook lokshen soup for him, made her play ping-pong with him, and once in a blue moon took her out to bingo. Her body wasn’t found until about five days after her death. Still relatively fragrant, apparently, because of how cold her bed was. Gershom had forbidden her to use the heating, except for an hour on the most freezing mornings, and she was still obeying orders.

But then I have reason to be grateful she wasn’t splashing his hard-earned spondulicks about.

Dolly died of fright, like Fay. The t word again. She too didn’t make old bones, but her passing was somehow less upsetting than the others’. Perhaps because we had mourned for her already. ‘I take consolation in this,’ my mother said, ‘she did better than any of us ever expected she would. At least she had a life.’

She had a life. She started her own dancing school in Rusholme in partnership with her shlemiel map-reading husband and was engrossed in Old Tyme every day she was alive thereafter. ‘I’m never bored,’ she told me on one of my visits home. Her voice
was like a needle skidding across vinyl. ‘I don’t know what people mean when they say they’re bored. I think boredom is a betrayal of life.’ By life she meant ballroom dancing. Boredom is a betrayal of ballroom dancing. And when my mother said at least Dolly had a life she meant at least she had ballroom dancing. Whether she ever got over Dora’s betrayal of her we never knew. But Dora stopped dancing once Gershom took her south, never swirled under a spinning ball of light again, and that must have made it easier for Dolly.

So they were all gone, all the Shrinking Violets, and my box was empty now. Not an S for spinster Saffron left for me to cut to pieces even in my imagination.

My mother took the passing of her sisters hard. It was an accumulation of grief. With the death of each sister she had to mourn afresh the death of the sister previous, and the death of her mother in all of them. She carried her head slightly aback, like a boxer, knowing only too well where the next blow was coming from, but not knowing when. ‘Aloof,’ some members of my father’s family called her, but no one could have been less aloof. She was punch-drunk.

My father’s side lasted longer, as they were built to do. And when they did go they were so old you scarcely noticed. The first exception to this was uncle Motty who passed away in the lavatory, no doubt still trying to bang the last drop out of his penis. And then, before anyone could recover from the shock of Motty, my father himself.

The fight had gone out of him after he went mechullah. You might not have known that had you never met him in earlier days. On the face of it he was still a great pleaser, still carried toys around in his pockets, was still waiting for the big something, still parked his van — that’s to say Sheeny’s van — in some odd places, still had ants in his pants. But he wasn’t the same man. He’d lost his cheyshik for life. His will for it, his desire. The big thing wasn’t
going to happen; he knew that even though he still waited. He kept his ear cocked, just in case, but it was force of habit more than anything else. The big thing had passed him by.

He worked for Sheeny Waxman for two or three years, then they parted amicably. Enough. Enough, for both of them. In the end it was Sheeny who called it a day. Medical reasons. Pitching was wearing out his throat. He kept losing his voice. If he went on going berserk from the back of a lorry much longer he would lose his voice and not get it back. I heard rumours that he had bought a car showroom with a Jaguar concession in a partnership of the hoarse with Benny the Pole, but by then I’d lost contact with him. Cambridge and Sheeny didn’t mix. For his part my father was relieved to be out of it. He hadn’t been able to bear not being his own boss. Yes, yes he could just about accept the idea of working for my mother — since no one would believe he really
was
working for her anyway — so yes, a little swag shop on Victoria Avenue was just the ticket; but it turned out he didn’t have a lot of heart left for swag either. As his only biographer, I designate these his Wilderness Years. He just wandered around. He shmied arum. He patshkied. He’d knock up a set of shelves for my mother, then he’d go for a wander. He’d install a new security grille, then he’d be off shmying again. The grille was one thing but the lock, the lock … Looking for just the right lock with just the right barrel, inspecting the stock of every locksmith in Manchester, could take a week, a fortnight, a month. You never knew where he was going to turn up. You never knew where you would see him next. I was hardly ever at home but the few times I did come back I had to organize search parties to find him. Salford was where we always started. He seemed to like it there. Salford suited him. The junction of Great Cheetham Street and Bury New Road, past the Rialto, down through Albert Park to Pendleton, taking Cromwell Road between the Racecourse and the Greyhound Track, neither of which held the slightest intrinsic interest for him, turning right at Brindle
Heath for Irlams O’ Th’ Height or left to Seedley and Eccles and all points west. The functional part of town. The hinterland of the city. But also the way out. Definitely not warehouse or cash-and-carry territory, and not the nest-hot Salford of his birth either. It was unassociational Salford he liked. Big barren spaces. Wide roads. Colliery views. Places where he could buy timber. Weigh out nails. Pick through locks. Measure lengths of iron. Test alarm systems. Stop for a toasted cheese sandwich. Patshky about. Shmy arum.