Rose Greenhill, who usually loved to give a party, felt doubt and apprehension as she looked at the long table, made up of several different tables united under a white damask cloth. The eight places set for dinner had required every mismatched plate and glass in the house, including some hastily bought that day at the Central Square dime store.
“The Silvers, and Dave Solomon,” Rose thought, “the Jacobs’, Dr. Petersen, and ourselves. That’s eight.”
At either end of the table was a platter with three matzos, on which rested egg, bone, and the bitter herbs known as parsley and celery. Rose had just been around the table putting at each place a small paper-covered hagadah such as come in letters from orphanages.
“Why did I make it a Seder?” she thought. “Here in Cambridge, it seems like putting on an act. I never felt worried like this about a party before.”
By the time her husband came home from the hospital, still in his white interne’s suit, Rose was feeding Peter. Milt kissed Rose and said, “I got some Passover wine, also alky from the lab for cocktails, if you remembered to get the grapefruit juice?”
“In the icebox,” said Rose.
Milt looked at his son’s supper plate and raised his eyebrows. “Liver soup, not chopped liver? What kind of a party is this?”
Peter was a vast blond boy, who looked like a Russian diplomat, and who beat a coca-cola bottle on a string against the legs of his chair as he ate. He was dressed for the Seder in an embroidered white suit his grandmother Rosen had sent. He also wore red rubber boots from which he would not be disengaged while awake; he was rapidly developing traditions of his own.
Milt turned to look at the table. He had heavy-lidded eyes, and it seemed a serious examination. “Is that how it should be?” he asked. Usually he trusted Rose completely—she had sharper sensibilities than he had, and he knew it.
He caught the tone of worry in her voice. “You can do it different ways. It’s all right, Milt.”
_____________
At home in Chicago, tonight’s Seder would be in charge of Rose’s many aunts and her mother, with enormous quantities of food waiting in dining room and pantry and kitchen. The Rosen pattern included leavening the thick family sandwich with strangers—visiting buyers, Jewish or Gentile, caught in the Passover holidays, and strays of various kinds invited to share the feast.
When Milt, on the other hand, thought of feasting, he thought of the corner delicatessen, near his folks’ cleaning and dyeing plant in Detroit: hot pastrami sandwiches, mustard in a paper twist; there was no center to his house, after his grandmother died, and no cooking, nor welcoming of guests.
“You know everything,” he said. “And you look wonderful in that black dress.” She did. She had a delicate, pale, Eastern look, from her clear white skin and the slight tilt to her eyes. Her brown hair waved back from her forehead, and she had a white flower behind one ear.
The Greenhills were poor this year, and lived on the first floor of one of those no-color wooden houses in which the side streets of Cambridge abound. For twenty-five dollars a month, they had a porch and yard for the baby, and a room for Dolores, the maid, not very bright, who dragged her feet, also encased in rubber footwear. Rose had water-painted the walls yellow and hung dark blue denim curtains, and the floor was blue instead of landlord-brown.
Milt interned at the City Hospital, which meant that for zero dollars a year, he worked from seven AM until two AM with every other night and weekend off, if the work was caught up, and no desperate circumstance detained him. Rose earned the family income by working as a secretary in the Hood Rubber Company, and was always bringing home what Milt called preventive footwear — galoshes, or boots, or red rubbers made to look like shoes—which she bought at employees’ discount.
Milt swung his son into the air a few times, and dropped him back into the highchair, murmuring, “I’d hate to lug him all the way out of Egypt,” and then went in to change his clothes. When he came back, he made drinks from lab alcohol and canned fruit juice and powdered sugar. ‘These are good—something like daiquiris, only stronger.” He handed a sample to Rose, but she only sipped at it. “What are we eating?”
“Different things,” Rose said. “I used my Mom’s recipes, and everything will be good, don’t worry.”
“So long as there’s enough,” Milt said.
He walked around, definitely uneasy, and Rose said, “I wish we hadn’t asked such mixed people, some we know, some we don’t. And I was thinking, maybe it isn’t good in these times to go out of one’s way to be different—”
“What’s so different about a Seder?” said Milt.
She smiled, but Milt worked chiefly among Gentiles, and perhaps giving a Seder would stand in his way. It wasn’t as if they were religious at all, because they weren’t. “After all,” Milt said, “we hung up the kid’s stocking at Christmas.”
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The Silvers arrived first. Louis was a doctor. When he met Frances Macomber, Ph. D., she was a Boston Irish girl who combed her orange hair flat, wore tortoise shell rimmed glasses, and was resigned to being an underpaid lab assistant at the City Hospital all her life. Then Louis discovered her, wrote some medical papers with her, fell in love, and married her. Francie loved him almost terribly, for he was all her loves together, and she longed to immolate herself on some Jewish altar for his sake, if she could only find one. Louis’ father was a socialist, but Francie desperately absorbed Jewish lore from his rather stem mother. But she knew that no matter how hard she tried she could never manage to have been born a wealthy, beautiful Jewish girl.
“Such a skinny girl, too,” said old Mrs. Silver. “How could she be a good cook for my poor Louis? And you know no Gentile can keep a clean house. Still, they say she has brains.” Another sniff.
No wonder Francie prayed for children, and comforted herself with Bible memories of conception long delayed and late-born sons. She had come tonight in the way of lighting one more candle to her hopes—she turned any ceremony into another prayer for a son.
“How nice it looks,” she said, mournfully, to Rose. “The herbs, and everything.”
“You going to read the service in Hebrew?” Milt asked Louis. “You’re the only one who knows enough, besides Dave.”
Louis shrugged. “Dave can read it, if it’s going to be read.”
He was irritated with himself for having come to what he knew perfectly well was a religious ceremony: however well disguised, or watered down, that was what it was, and he had his principles, Besides, Francie was worried about making mistakes at a Jewish festival.
“Poor Louis, married a shicksa!” said old Mrs. Silver. To this day Francie was not sure whether a goy was the same as a shicksa, nor exactly what either word meant.
Dr. Petersen, a Swedish doctor on a Rockefeller Fellowship, arrived next. He was round-faced, a noted eater, and looked forward cheerfully to the new foods; and if ceremonies went with them, well and good. He could add to his mental notes on American customs, He drank three drinks in almost no time and remained imperturbable, trained on schnapps.
“Sh—,” said Milt, peering out through the window as the bell rang. “Here’s our class clientele.”
“Tact!” said Rose.
Still, it was true, Milt thought: it was probably because the Jacobs’ were coming tonight he felt so edgy. It made him shudder to remember the elegance of several of the Jacobs’ cocktail parties in their fine, old house just off Harvard Square.
“Come in!” he shouted, and his natural warmth returned. His manners were crude, but he was genuinely hospitable, “It’s good to have you here, at last.”
“How nice to be here,” said Eloise Jacobs, and all of them at once felt rather shabby and untidy. She was a small-headed, long-legged blonde, and she wore a brilliant green silk dress.
She also wore emeralds, and did psychiatric social work. Leo worked in the field of nuclear physics at Harvard, and tried not to look surprised when he tasted his drink.
The Jacobs’ had found it amusing to leave the exterior of their enormous house much as it had been when vines covered it and pigeons murmured in the barn, now a three-car garage. But, such is Cambridge style, their modern furniture seemed slight and lost its balance in the great rooms. They used the color range apparently obligatory for Jewish intellectuals—gray, white, brown, with an occasional stripe of chartreuse green—owned a few fine French modern paintings, one of which, museum-lighted, took up an entire wall of what was definitely a drawing room,
The Jacobs’ had an elaborate, smoothly geared social life. They lived brilliantly, well-adjusted to a kind of suspension. (It made some people nervous.) People they had known long ago never seemed to visit them, and it seemed unnatural not to find one old raincoat in the closet, or one album of family snapshots in the leather-topped desk. What were they leaving out, you wondered? Not their Jewishness. Not that at all. They had seven-branched silver candlesticks on their dining table.
“It’s so interesting to look at ritual like tonight’s,” Eloise said to Louis Silver, “in the light of what Freud has taught us.”
“Just what has he taught us?” Louis inquired, leaning forward.
Eloise quoted at random, “ . . . the outstretched arm: this denotes the sword . . .” with a smile that recognized all phallic symbolism, everywhere.
Dave Solomon, plump and dark-eyed, was the last to arrive, and he was welcomed accordingly.
“Thank God, now we can eat!” said Milt, who was Dave’s junior on the Fourth Medical Service at the hospital. “I suppose you want a drink first?”
“Save time,” Dave said amiably. People who wanted to praise him said you would never know he was a psychiatrist, but his enemies said the same thing. “Give me all my drinks at once.” Milt obligingly poured a tumblerful and handed it to him. “Start on that,” he said.
Dave talked easily, but a certain awkwardness fell over the gathering when Rose left to put Peter to bed, and when Milt went into the kitchen to make more drinks. They could hear Rose promise her son she would not remove his rubber boots. “Certainly, you can sleep in them if you want,” she said, soothingly. “Why not? Isn’t this night different from all other nights?”
“Why is that?” Dr. Peterson asked, interestedly. “What is this celebration?”
“Today,” said Louis, in his dryest tones, “we celebrate the outgoing from Egypt. Matzoh stands for the poor bread which our fathers ate in the land of Egypt.”
Glancing over at Eloise’s emeralds, he added, “This year, we are slaves: next year we shall be freemen.”
But perhaps, for an instant, most of them thought of Jews in Europe that night, people who had, literally, and recently, been slaves, and who were now freed, but who still walked strange roads, looking for a homeland.
Dave raised his glass, and bowed to Louis, whom he knew well. “Next year, in Jerusalem,” he said.
_____________
The words wove their own spell. Some of the phrases had beauty of their own, and to those who had heard them many times, they could not help but bring out, from the mat of past experience, memories, like bright, particular threads.
Dave, who did the reading, amiably, in a Southern accent, was startled to have his childhood return. His grandfather, a scholar and an embittered man, lived among unmarried, vengeful daughters, from whom he took refuge at the movies. He wore a beard and a black cap, and taught Dave Hebrew every afternoon. Once he bought his daughters an icebox, since they complained of the old: but their complaints rose to unearthly intensity when they saw the new one. “Who ever heard of a round icebox?” they cried. “You did,” their father replied. “There’s one right in your kitchen, nu?”
Dave read the service pretty steadily, while food was brought on, and Milt poured wine, and Dr. Petersen spread butter thickly on his matzoh.
Francie listened attentively, made all the replies in English, and looked shocked when Louis murmured, “When hagadah go, hagadah go,” and he could not explain that this was not like mass: you could laugh, if you wanted to. He touched her hand under the table, so she would not have hurt feelings, but he was, as often, mildly annoyed at Francie’s attitude.
The tumblers full of wine made from Concord grapes were lifted and set down, lifted and set down, while Dave read, “This bitter herb, what reason has it? The Egyptians embittered the lives of our forefathers . . . .”
There were other slaves. He remembered an old Negro who sat on the post-office steps. Had he weighed two hundred, three hundred pounds? He had elephantiasis, and his vast parts, which could no longer be called private parts, rested on the warm stone of the post office steps. He held a cane between his hands, and when townspeople greeted him, traditionally, “Dr. Doss!” (he sold witch charms and philtres) he replied, responsively, “Yes, suh, boss!”
Nan, the Solomon children’s nurse, wore a bag of herbs around her dark neck, and said, on hearing of a neighbor’s disaster, “Better him than me!” and he thought of Bessie Brown (who later killed a man with a razor) who put all her food—soup, meat, pudding, gin, and coffee—into one bowl, stirred, and ate it with a spoon. And of the half-witted boy who jerked in a kind of fit whenever someone shouted, “Dance, Caesar, dance! Mama’s goin’ buy you a new pair of pants!”
“What would Dr. F. make out of them?” he wondered.
From thinking of magical Viennese theories and how they blocked his way in his psychiatric research, his mind somehow moved to other words, familiar as those of the Seder, which he found sustaining. “It cannot be that axioms established by argumentation can suffice for the discovery of new works, since the subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of argument.” Francis Bacon wrote them, and Dave wished he had found them while his grandfather was alive.
Rose, gradually soothed by the way her guests ate the food she had cooked, only hoped that Dave, on his fourth helping, would not fall asleep the minute dinner was over. Internes and house officers ate to please any cook, but they also fell asleep with deadly ease. And what would the Jacobs’ think?
Leo Jacobs was startled by the flavors of the food into what amounted, for him, to personal revelation. “My mother used to make just such chicken,” he said. Eloise smiled faintly. Everybody knew about sons and mothers.
_____________
Louis Silver found himself, like Dave, troubled in mind. Religion was bad: he believed that, in the core of his heart. Yet he felt disturbed as he saw these disparate people around a table being united with ancient words so that, in spite of themselves, the occasion took on significance, and the wine became more than wine, and celery a bitter herb.
“Maybe people have to have occasions, with meaning in them, to celebrate,” he thought, as if it were a new idea. “If I’m sure religion’s the wrong thing to get them together, what’s my alternative? A beer joint isn’t enough: God knows sports-palasts were too much. Where are people going to meet, and to celebrate what festivals?”
People wanted words, and needed symbols: but none of the radical causes Louis had believed in had provided even one song that people could sing and remember. How could you use—but to good ends—what happened to people at certain sounds in music, or certain lines of poetry, or when, in a foreign place, they saw the flag of home? Maybe it was the most important thing in the world to know that, thought Louis suddenly.
Even Milt, who had persistently kidded as Dave read aloud, looked around at the table, and remembered that there had been a tableful of people at home, when his grandmother was alive, and that, after she died, kindness went, for him, and the home disintegrated within its walls.
He was a natural and easy father, and now he thought of Peter. If Jewish traditions would give him a feeling of substance, he would have them.
To Rose, he said, “Let’s get the kid up, and give him some chicken.”
“Later, Milt,” she said. “He’ll never get back to sleep.”
She was tired now. At the kitchen end of the long table, she had kept jumping up because there was only Dolores to hinder—certainly it could not be said that she helped. Rose took plates and brought clean ones, carried in new platters and bowls of food, filled water glasses. But she was happy, in spite of her weariness. Tonight, for the first time since she had left Chicago, she had the feeling of belonging to a group, which she needed. The Rosens were a large, present-giving family, and she missed them.
Dr. Petersen was talking about Juletta, in Sweden.
“A very beautiful ceremony, also,” he said. ‘With large eating. On Christmas morning, you walk out in the snow. Still dark, with stars. Bitter cold. The snow creaks. Everyone carries lighted candles to the church, and afterwards, we come home and have a big, big breakfast. Wonderful foods, all traditional, too, like at this feast.”
He bowed to Rose.
Dave and Louis looked at each other across the table.
Dave said, “What about it?”
Louis shrugged. ‘There’ll be other traditions,” he said. But when?
“Now is concluded the ceremony of Passover after its law, according to all its customs and prescriptions,” Dave intoned, yawning. “As we have lived to arrange it this time, may we live to celebrate it in the future . . . .”
“Amen,” said Francie, getting the tone, but faltering back to the wrong religion. She blushed miserably, and looked over at the absent-minded Louis. “If it would only happen tonight,” she thought.
Eloise, bored now, wanting to go home, read the small explanatory print on the last page of the hagadah. The kid was Israel, so the Jew always remembered . . . he could never be slaughtered. And suddenly there came to her mind what she usually forgot: the cousins, the uncles and aunts, in countries that had been other countries, with all their possessions only dogeared papers, a book once written, stocks in a business that was no more, passports that took them nowhere.
She thought of how she would see her analyst tomorrow. “I must tell him how guilty I feel,” she thought.
But would the guilt go away?
_____________
Dolores, who dropped things, at last D finished dish washing, and came shuffling through the living room, on her way to bed. She wore cossack-style galoshes, now, and carried a plate on which was stacked a dozen thick slices of bread and peanut butter. A bundle of funny papers Milt had brought her was under her other arm.
“Good night, all,” she said, very dignified, and, when the door was closed, Rose said, “She had dinner, but she’s got a custom. Every night, regularly, she takes a plate of food to bed with her. Like clockwork.”
“She grew up in a state home,” Milt explained. “Maybe she never got enough before.”
Dr. Peterson was the first to leave, “I enjoyed the freedom dinner very much,” he said.
Dave thought, “Once we were slaves.” Once there was ignorance, now, in some fields, there was knowledge. It would be true in all fields, some day.
“What the hell,” he thought. “All you can do is try to find out, and that’s enough.”
They were slow to depart. For a brief time, no one quite knew why, they had been joined together, around food, and perhaps by words: they had remembered a past, and hoped for a future: and no one wanted to break the spell.
A complicated business, Louis Silver thought, going home, feeling Francie pale and quiet beside him.
But Rose made it simple, as she always had to do. “It turned out a good party, didn’t it?” she said, and then she walked into Peter’s room and pulled off his rubber boots.
But she put them beside his pillow, so he would see them the first thing in the morning.
_____________
