Lucy’s husband Isaac scurries in, a tightly-packed little man, Lithuanian like Lucy; if you ever saw the two of them standing together you’d be hard pressed to imagine them ever having been apart, they’re such an obvious, everlasting couple. He’s always in a passion over something—to be fair, he is having difficulty establishing himself and his family here; nevertheless his constant exertions come across as more comic than tragic, though perhaps we laugh because we’re nervous. Isaac still hasn’t taken on the habits of the Englishman, doesn’t say “all right?” again and again over the course of the day as Henry does (expecting what sort of answer, exactly? And he won’t quite commit to the full cockney version, either—hangs on for dear life to his consonants, does ‘enry, who estimates we won’t be living in Brick Lane for very much longer, so he lets his accent hover somewhere between Old Street and Regent’s Park, a barely discernible Poland lurking underneath if you have the ear for it.). Isaac rushes over to his wife, acknowledging me with a guttural, yet oddly gracious little grunt, a gentleman in a soiled apron, something fine beneath the sweaty reddened features. I opt to not reply in kind and give him a nod instead. Though her English is infinitely better than her husband’s, Lucy’s marriage will always keep her with one foot in the old country. Iris—you will soon meet her—showed me what Franz Kafka wrote in a letter to his friend: “With their posterior legs they were still glued to their father’s Jewishness, and with their waving anterior legs they found no new ground.” Only I don’t think Lucy is reaching out beyond her realm too strenuously; she accepts who and what she is, or at least she feels she must and is resigned to it. She and her husband confer now in furrow-browed Yiddish near a display of straw brooms, and I have to keep myself from leaning in to listen the way I used to do with my parents, who would immediately switch to English when they noticed me doing that, as though they abhorred the idea of hearing the mother tongue—the mamaloshen, people called it, with infinite sadness—in their own child’s mouth. An escalating series of theatrical gestures and exclamations that peaks in a world-renouncing sweep of Isaac’s arm and the conference is over. He salutes me with a nod and a moment—neither too long nor too short—of eye contact before swinging his little body out the door, and I nod again in return. The door shuts with a jingly song behind him.
“They are doing the sugar biscuits,” Lucy says, her face softer now than when she arrived. “Little sandwich biscuits with jam in the middle. First we bake the two halves: one plain, the other flower-shaped with a hole in the middle. When they are cool we squeeze jam onto the plain halves, and dust the other halves with sugar. Then we assemble them, sugar side up, and wrap them in packets of twelve. The jam comes up through the hole a bit. People love them.” She indicates the door with a flick of her head. “His family is having trouble getting out. We can’t afford to pay their passage. Besides, his mother is old and unwell. She can’t travel.” She drums her tough round fingernails, which are always clean. “He says he wants to take the biscuit sheets, the ones with the halves that have their jam on and are waiting for their frilly tops, and tip them off onto the floor. He anticipates the sound and the sight of it would be so pleasurable as to make him forget his frustration. Especially if they all landed jam side down.”
For some reason this makes us both laugh too hard in a way we both know is ugly, and such is the condition Henry finds us in when he blows in with the rain from the afternoon squall. He makes a noise that sounds like the word “argyle” but is really just a cough or a clearing of the throat as he pats down his wet coat and hat. He regards us with suspicion as we splutter and chortle on, it being so hard to stop merely because someone else has entered the room—the shock to the insides of laughter when you haven’t laughed in a very long time overriding what allegiance we might have pledged long ago to ladylike behaviour.
“All right, then?” he says. “Make a cup of tea. Be in the back. Did you bring us any biscuits, Lucy?” This of course sets us howling once more, as Henry begins to shuffle away.
“Oh, Penny,” Henry adds with a nimble quarter-turn of his body. He looks the same as he did the day I met him, standing there with palms against his belly. “We’ve got it. We’ve got the house on Barn Rise. We can have it in time for the baby.” And his face breaks into a full-on grin. Into which he pops his pipe, holding it there between his teeth, waiting.
I am formulating something appropriately celebratory to say and arranging my face accordingly, but Iris bursts through the door. Seeing us, she retreats back outside, and after a moment she pushes through again, radiant. My smile finds its key. Iris teeters slightly, touching the rim of her jaunty green cloche.
“Oh!” she cries, the expression held with her made-up eyes and lips a perfect film still, three perfectly delineated circles subtly echoed in slightly flared nostrils (Iris is the lucky heiress of a distinctly small nose. Not true for either Henry or I.). This particular stance is usually a sign that Iris has encountered something she approves of in her investigations of the city. She likes to hover on the outskirts of things, take assiduous inward notes, and report back to her friends and family, as though she were officially in our service as a civic correspondent.
Our laughter abates once and for all and Lucy and I both sigh as the last few chuckles dribble out. A word floats up from my subconscious: peroration. Lucy looks at Iris as though she were completely mad, a theory that has often been put forward though never proven. She excuses herself, adding in sober tones “Congratulations on the house, Pen,” and slides her way past Henry’s youngest living sister, who comes all the way in and swoons across the counter as Henry starts to protest but throws his hands up instead, muttering to himself as he goes off to his dusty room in the back with its rows and rows of gadgets and tools and its window overlooking the vats of varnish and wood dye that bubble away like witches’ cauldrons behind the shop. Eye of bat and toe of newt? Helmet of vanquished German soldier?
“How are you, Iris?” I begin—for a second I am an attendant in a booth with a revolving door, through which successive people pass in order to pour out their cup of thought into the receptacle I provide. I admire the elegant curve of Iris’s white throat as she positions herself so that her upper body rests on the counter, propped at the elbows, face turned up toward the chandelier with legs stretched out, her delicate ankles somehow crossed and at ease.
“I’m really quite swept away at the moment, Penelope,” she murmurs. “What’s that he said about a house? Such an upwardly mobile little thing, my brother. Little thing.” (For Iris is tall.) “Do you remember when Nijinsky did his last dance here?”
“Oh, does Mr. Diaghilev have a new ballet out then?” And I want so much to keep up when she answers. And I want so much to be swept away along with her.
“No. It’s a poet. He’s an American.”
“American?”
“His name is Pound. Ezra Pound.”
“Well, in for a penny.” I think that’s an exceedingly clever comment which as a bonus makes use of my own nickname, but Iris simply gushes on. Perhaps I’m not the first to have made it, then.
December 15, 2008
Goose Lane Editions Launches New Online Media Resources
December 15, 2008
New From Gaspereau Press
