Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [115]
Moses looked at the list and turned pale and angry. She wanted kitchen utensils, linens, towels, flatware, material for curtains, clothing for the boys, mattresses.
“You are furnishing the Dublin Castle?”
“This place is wretched. I am only trying to make a home for you and your sons.”
“Gevalt! What is this business here?” he said with the paper trembling in his hand. “Suits for Saul and Lazar.”
“They are shabby, like orphans. If you don’t want to spend for them, at least you could sew them a few pairs of knickers. Buy me the wool and I’ll knit them sweaters.”
“What is this item? And this? And this? Eggbeaters, upholstery material, a knife sharpener, mattress pads, window shades. This is some kind of madness!”
“I won’t live in such filth with your boys dressed in rags. And you might as well think about hiring a shvartzer to do some painting and paperhanging.”
“Maybe,” he cried, “if you had brought in a dowry like a proper wife!”
“My dowry has nothing to do with dirt. What is more, I am keeping kosher and I am going to sleep in a bed that doesn’t have rocks in the mattress.”
He glared at her list again, croaking incoherently. Hannah had had the gall to ask him to make an outlay of over a hundred dollars. And this would only be the beginning with such a woman!
“I don’t have the money,” he lied. “And I don’t know where you get such royal ideas. Maybe you’d better go ask for some money from your Uncle Hyman. He spent a fortune for the reception in China Hall and what have we got to show for it?”
And so it went. Moses’ stinginess went to war against Hannah’s determination. Within a few months, permanent battle lines had been clearly drawn. He oozed, bled, and whined out a few dollars.
Hannah resorted to taking in sewing and advertised to make wedding gowns, but Havre de Grace was not Baltimore and the dimes and quarters came in grudgingly. By her deft management and scrimping, the place took on a new appearance by the end of the year and Saul and Lazar had lost most of their scruffiness.
What happened in the bedroom did not change. After fast, brutal, animal thrusts, he’d roll over, his back to her, and the snoring soon followed. At least, she reasoned, he didn’t prolong the agony.
Saul and Lazar loved their stepmother as they had never loved anyone before. Although Hannah was only ten years the senior of Lazar, she was the light of their lives, their redemption from the loneliness and fear of being ignored and slapped, from a life of constant hurt. Hannah was bosom and hugs and kisses and pinches on the cheek ... and laughter. Hannah was cookies and big plates of soup filled with matzo balls and clean shirts and trimmed hair and studying poems and churning ice cream and butter and the smell of bread baking and an angel, as she lit the candles on the Sabbath. She positioned herself between the boys and Moses to protect them whenever his vile spells consumed him.
“Momma, can I call you Momma?” Lazar asked. She beamed. Lazar was changing, accepting her affection, doing things to please her and make her proud. Almost like the first friend the boy ever had, certainly the first love of his life.
Saul remained wild and troubled, but some light had entered his life through her. Slowly, painfully, he responded to her, but opened up only a tiny crack at a time.
It was in the third month of her pregnancy when Moses plunged into the blackest of spells. Hannah had spent some money to start a layette for their expected child. In an outburst of rage, he demanded to know why she didn’t sew the baby gowns herself.
“So don’t worry, Moses,” she retorted. “Expect to spend more. We’ll need a crib, a carriage, diapers, bottles—”
“Borrow from Sonia! She has all those things. I’m not made of money.”
“You’re made of dreck,” she told him in unvarnished Yiddish. He silenced her with a punch in the mouth. The next morning she was gone.
A very fine good riddance, Moses thought when he read her note. However, it was not very long before he began to miss her. So many things had changed while she was in the