Things Could Be Worse (4 page)

A Family Portrait

Renia Bensky's hair was slightly bouffant and stylishly cut short. Blonde, with coppery highlights glinting through – a colour that was very popular in Caulfield that year.

Laid out on the bed were a grey herringbone light wool tailored suit and a black and white spotted silk blouse with a once-again-fashionable Peter Pan collar. The sheer, fifteen-denier Smoky Nights pantihose screamed: ‘High Leg. Sheer to the Waist.'

The herringbone suit sat smoothly on Renia. She patted her tummy with pleasure. It was always flat. Even when she sat down there was no bulge. All her friends admired her figure.

At the dinner parties she hosted every fifth Sunday night, Renia never sat down. All night she rushed between the dining room and the kitchen. Every fifth Sunday she served gefilte fish that everyone agreed was just right, not too sweet. Then came hot fried flounder in a sauce of onion, tomato and dill, followed by an entree of chopped liver. The secret of Mrs Bensky's smoother, lighter chopped liver was simply an extra egg. One kilo of chicken livers, two large onions and five boiled eggs was the recipe she guarded with her life. The main course was a roast shoulder of veal with large, hot, boiled potatoes. If she could find a duck lean enough when she went shopping in Acland Street, she served roast duck.

The meal ended with Mrs Bensky's sponge cake. Mrs Bensky was famous all over Melbourne for her sponge cake. She told anyone who wanted to hear that her sponge cake was not fattening: it had only a tiny bit of sugar and hardly any flour. No-one was quite sure what held it together, but they ate it in large slices with relish, secure in the knowledge that it wasn't fattening.

Later in the evening, when the men settled down to play cards, usually gin rummy, and the women nestled in groups whispering, usually about their husbands and children, Mrs Bensky cleared the table, put out the chocolates and washed the dishes.

On the other Sunday nights, when it was Mrs Ganz's or Mrs Small's or Mrs Zelman's or Mrs Pekelman's turn to have dinner, Mrs Bensky helped. They could rely on her to serve the latkes straight from the frying pan, before the grated potato mixture became cold. Mrs Bensky would swiftly spoon out generous portions of cholent and kishke. Before anyone could say they were on a diet, their plates would be full of oxtail, baked for twenty-four hours in a glue of chicken fat, onions, garlic, lima beans, barley and potatoes.

Very few of the group had ever seen Mrs Bensky have a meal. For that matter, neither had her family. They had watched her chew a crust of toast while she prepared dinner, or have a bowl of semolina to soothe her nerves.

Six nights a week Mrs Bensky served grilled baby lamb chops with salad, grilled calf's liver with salad, grilled whiting with salad or a lean roast chicken with salad. The helpings always came in under five hundred calories. Mrs Bensky washed the dishes loudly while her family ate.

She often told her fat Lola how she herself had no tolerance for sweets. ‘Do you ever see me with a chocolate? I can't eat them. They taste something terrible to me.' While she said this she glowed and looked even more beautiful.

Mr Bensky and the girls were quite self-sufficient. They didn't really need her meals. Mr Bensky kept a large supply of Toblerone bars in the glovebox of his new Fairlane. He did messages for Mrs Bensky willingly: some minced chicken from Rushinek's, some challah from Monarch's. Whenever she said, ‘Josl, can you pick up …?' he rose from his armchair. ‘No trouble, Renia.' On the way he stopped at Leo's for a triple chocolate gelato.

Lola fed herself at Pellegrini's in Bourke Street on her way home from school, and Lina had a fast and accurate aim in and out of the fridge. She could remove a cheese blintz and digest it in ten seconds.

Mrs Bensky stepped into her shoes. Light grey suede, pointy-toed and soaring on six-inch stiletto heels, they were made by Maud Frizon of Paris and bought from Miss Louise of Collins Street, Melbourne. At Miss Louise's winter sale, Mrs Bensky paid £20 for these £79 shoes.

Mrs Bensky had a real eye for a bargain. She saved hundreds of pounds a week. Mrs Bensky personally knew every manufacturer of swimwear, evening wear, hosiery, overcoats, underwear, knitwear, furs, suits and sportswear within a ten-mile radius of Flinders Lane.

She walked briskly into the bathroom, relishing the feeling of power that came with the extra height. Searching in the lipstick drawer, she decided that Unspiced Rose by Estee Lauder was the right shade for today. First she outlined her lips with brown eyeliner pencil. Then she applied a thick, glossy coat of Unspiced Rose. Pleased with the result, she smiled at herself in the mirror.

The bathroom had sixty feet of mirror attached to sliding doors around three of its walls. These doors concealed endless shelves: shelves crammed with cleansers, toners, exfoliating creams, neck, chin and eye creams, thigh creams, day creams and night creams, clay and mud and apricot masks, ampoules for firming your skin and lifting your breasts, cell extract treatments to remove wrinkles and dimples, and chimiozymolsat of yeast, which favourably affects the oxygen balance of epidermal tissue.

When Mr Bensky had built this oversized bathroom, he'd had high hopes of being able to shave in peace. Eventually, in despair, he'd removed his Remington electric razor with four different cutting blade selections and automatic overseas conversions to the small cupboard in the toilet next to the bathroom, and there he found his peace.

Mr Bensky spent two hours a day in the toilet, between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m., and again from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. The seemingly endless stream of volcanic farts erupting from him in there was a source of excruciating embarrassment for Lola, whose bedroom was across the hallway. If she had a girlfriend staying overnight, Lola set the alarm clock for six-thirty. At five to seven she nonchalantly turned her transistor on to full volume. Johnny O'Keefe screaming ‘Shout' at the top of his lungs on 3UZ was barely a match for Mr Bensky's early-morning evacuation.

Touching up her eyelashes, already lengthened and strengthened by Fabulash, Mrs Bensky reminded herself that it was their turn to pay for the pictures this Saturday. She looked up the phone number of the Rivoli and rang straight away, because it wasn't always easy to get seventeen seats on a Saturday night.

The gang, as Lola called them – the Benskys, the Smalls, the Ganzes, the Zelmans and the Pekelmans – were joined by the Feiglins, the Glicks, the Blatmans and poor divorced Mr Berman for their regular Saturday-night excursion to the pictures.

They'd seen almost every film shown in Melbourne since 1952. Mrs Bensky thought of herself as the intellectual of the group. She liked
Wild Strawberries
and
Last Year At Marienbad
, while others enjoyed
The Pink Panther
and
My Fair Lady.

At interval, Mr Bensky liked to be the one to buy the snacks. He could get as much as he needed, and it was dizzyingly satisfying for him to buy scorched almonds for seventeen people. Seventeen people could eat a lot of scorched almonds. Mr Bensky liked to make sure that nobody missed out.

Sometimes after the film they went to a supper dance at the Top Hat cabaret. Mr Ganz, with his lean figure and cornflower-blue eyes, was unanimously recognised as the most handsome man in the group. He danced with Mrs Bensky. The knowledge that they made a stunning couple swept them through the quickstep with even greater grace.

Mrs Zelman danced with Mr Bensky, who could be relied upon to have a few leftover scorched almonds in his jacket pocket. They ate them with a furtive happiness while they foxtrotted in the far corner of the dance floor. Mrs Ganz and Mr Zelman often danced the cha-cha and the rumba together. They both liked the livelier dances.

Mrs Glick and Mrs Small and Mrs Blatman and Mrs Feiglin and Mrs Bensky took it in turns to dance with Mr Berman. In the last few years Mr Berman had become even more nervous and distant. He hadn't gone out with a woman since his disastrous affair with Mrs McKenzie ended in 1962.

Their affair had thrown the entire group into turmoil. The group had all made sure their children had grown up understanding that it was essential to have a Jewish partner. Now, here was one of their close friends infatuated with a shikse, holding her hand in Carlisle Street and grinning like a fifteen-year-old. Mrs Glick and Mrs Feiglin decided that she was after his money. They visited Mrs McKenzie privately. They offered her five hundred pounds to stop seeing Mr Berman. Mrs McKenzie offered the women tea and biscuits. Ten days later she was gone. She had moved to Moe to be closer to her mother, a broken Mr Berman told the group.

The phone rang. Mrs Bensky, who was just about to put the final coat of Imbi's Mellow Mauve on her nails, shook her head in annoyance. It was probably Mr Bensky calling from Myers to say that there was no white Tissus Michel material left. She should have bought it when she saw it there last week, she admonished herself. She knew she looked good in white, and could wear it without any worry about its fattening effect.

She answered the phone. It was Mrs Ganz. Mrs Bensky cradled the phone on her shoulder with her upper arm. She swung her nails to and fro to catch the dry breeze of the air-conditioning. ‘Renia darling, I don't think we will go to the pictures tomorrow, darling. Moishe has a terrible cold. I asked him to go to the doctor because I'm sure he has got a virus, but you know Moishe, stubborn like an ox. Me, myself, I've got a sore throat already. So, Renia darling, make it fifteen tickets.'

Mrs Bensky nurtured a not-so-secret dislike of Mrs Ganz. Mrs Bensky knew that Mrs Ganz thought of herself as highly intelligent and very beautiful. Mrs Bensky reassured herself that anyone could see that Mrs Ganz was no beauty. The fact that the Ganzes' Champs Elysees Blouses had one hundred and seventy-eight retail outlets around Australia did not mean that Mrs Ganz was intelligent. Mrs Bensky bit her lip, thinking about the many very stupid people she knew who were good at business.

Mrs Bensky toasted herself a slice of black rye bread. It was so black it could have passed for pumpernickel. Mrs Bensky liked peace and quiet when she ate. She was comforted by the warm density of the thick toast.

When Mr and Mrs Bensky arrived in Australia, Mr Bensky had wanted to abbreviate their name to Benn, but Mrs Bensky liked the name Bensky. She didn't want to change it. Many people had changed their names when they came to Australia. The Silberbergs, the Rotkleins, the Mokruschkis, the Pirkoskis and the Minofskis had become the Silvers, the Rotes, the Moors, the Pikes and the Mints. They now sounded like a gathering of good Presbyterians.

As Renia Kindler of Lodz, and then Renia Bensky, Mrs Bensky had been the most beautiful girl in the town, some said in the whole of Poland. Her red-brown hair was waist-length and flowed behind her like a dark curtain, framing her high pink cheekbones and intense eyes. Even though she was from one of the poorer families in Lodz, with no dowry to speak of, she was constantly pursued by admirers.

She was also very clever. In later years Mrs Bensky never tired of telling her two daughters: ‘I gave maths tuitions', which she always pronounced ‘choosons', ‘to pay for my schooling, from when I was eight. I was always very good at mathematics. I was the only Jewish girl to finish high school in Lodz and be offered a place at university.'

As Mrs Bensky was about to begin her first year of medicine at the University of Vienna, the war broke out. Six years later Mrs Bensky graduated from Auschwitz.

Mr Bensky was a good husband. He had always been grateful to Mrs Bensky for marrying him. His family were displeased by the marriage, for they were property owners and timber merchants, and one of the wealthiest Jewish families in Lodz. Mr Bensky still felt upset when he remembered the hysteria he'd caused in his family when he had married Mrs Bensky. All that fuss and all that heartache, and all for nothing, because soon they were all in concentration camp and equally poor.

To give Mrs Bensky a break, Mr Bensky took Lina and Lola out on Saturday afternoons. When the girls were smaller they would go to the zoo. Mr Bensky enjoyed those afternoons. He would sit in the small park next to the bandstand and read the latest Perry Mason thriller. Lina and Lola would wave to him from the top of the elephant, which walked round and round the track circling the park. Lina and Lola liked to buy ten tickets each. That way they stayed on the elephant for exactly an hour. This suited Mr Bensky. When the hour was up, the three of them walked to the kiosk and bought six Eskimo Pies. Then they strolled around, looking at the animals. When she was older, Lola looked back on those afternoons as the nicest part of her childhood.

If there was a new show on at the Tivoli, Mr Bensky took the girls there on Saturday afternoons. They saw acts from all over the world. Sexy dancers and all sorts of singers, acrobats and jugglers, exotic striptease artists, a blonde underwater stripper, comedians and performing dogs, magicians and evil-looking hypnotists.

Hundreds of semi-nude, beautiful showgirls decorated the stage. The showgirls wore high heels and high-cut fishnet tights. On their heads they balanced spectacular soaring head-dresses made from hundreds of brightly coloured feathers and sequins. By law the showgirls had to stand perfectly still. They were not allowed to move at all. From their front-row seats, Mr Bensky and the girls had a very good view.