“—D’you know what’s wrong with Atherton?” I grumbled to Joel as he came back. “Not one splendid thing about it. Every place should have one splendid thing — a fountain, one building, a wide street, even. We haven’t even got a real tree.”
“Poor old Atherton,” he said affectionately.
As soon as I walked into the Aarons’ house I saw that Sunday-night supper was an occasion with them. They were all already at table, under the bright yellow lights that were used in every room, high up on the ceiling, glittering on the shabbiness, the peeled, stained, worn or tawdry. Joel’s sister Colley and her husband were there, with their nine-year-old girl, and an old relation who looked like Mr. Aaron and was given the courtesy title of Auntie. There was another relation, a very thin old man whose flesh was knotted and twisted stringily over his features and his hands, and who, as he stared at us when we came into the room, looked as if he were going to whistle, because his mouth had sucked in over toothlessness.
“I told Helen we’d have enough supper for her,” said Joel, flourishing me in.
But no one took up his tone. Mrs. Aaron got up in some bewilderment, pushing the others along, urging them to make room (she snatched up the cutlery in front of the thin old man and moved it for him) and began apologizing dubiously: “Will you eat a piece of nice brisket? I’m sorry, I haven’t got something … A piece of chicken, if I had … — Joel, what’s about I make a piece of haddock …?”
The father, who had been talking animatedly over a mouthful, died out and, not taking much notice, nodded at me, looked about as if he thought he should move, but left it to the others. While the adjustments were being made he hunched sullenly over his plate, now and then grunting for pickles or salt. The sister, Colley, smiled, signaling to establish the ease of contemporaneity in the old-fashioned parental atmosphere, and her husband, not quite happy in the fat that begins to build up round many young Jewish men when they are thirty-five and in business, nodded a conventional acknowledgment, more for Joel than for me: I was young once myself, with an eye for Gentile girls. … Joel and I were seated between him and the aunt. The table was spread with an untidy abundance of delicatessen foods, mostly things I had seen in shops, but never eaten: my parents had a horror of what they called “made-up” foods and we always ate simple, fresh things, home-cooked; on Sunday evenings we had ham-and-tomato sandwiches, eaten with milk (beer for my father) on the veranda in summer, or with cocoa before the fire in winter. Mrs. Aaron did not seem to sit down again at all, although everyone kept urging her: “What’sa matter with you, why do you keep running about?” “For goodness’ sake, Mommie—” “What is it”—and was now out in the passage at the refrigerator, now pushing past the backs of our chairs with some new offering. Horse-radish sauce and fish paste filled up the few empty spaces on the tablecloth. Not all the attention was for me; she pressed a confusion of tastes on her grandchild, and when the little girl accepted something, bent over and pressed the child’s round cheek to her side: “Oh, she’s a lovely girl! Oh, bless her!”
The aunt showed the formal overtures of the intensely curious. If Joel’s mother and father drew away into a shell at the sight of me, she was the kind that bristled out. There were touches of worldliness about her; her body, of the homely shape of Mrs. Aaron, was corseted, and she wore an American teen-ager’s brooch that was something between a mouse and a rabbit, where I would have expected to find a cameo. “Go on—” She offered sardines, still holding the mold of the tin. Her eyes were carefully turned away from me, giving a pained look to her weighty cheek. She gestured with her mouth full; when she had swallowed she said to Joel, drawing back from me: “The young lady, your … perhaps she wants a tomato? Lily, haven’t you got such a thing as a tomato?”
“But you had—?”
“Well, it’s finished. Five or six people, y’know; it doesn’t go so far.” There was the inference that she knew how to do things. “The young lady — you must excuse me, I didn’t catch the name. …” It was true I had not been introduced to those who had not already met me before; there was the feeling that I was known indirectly, through discussion.
Joel waved it away, as though he were clearing a troublesome fly from my plate. “All right. We’ll have beetroot instead. Colley, ask Ma for the beetroot—”
The awkwardness of my being there did not melt; it became accepted. The table re-formed itself, irresistibly, over me, the room itself took up again the sounds and gestures of people talking and eating that belonged there with Sunday night. There was the feeling that perhaps they should not talk in front of me — not that there was anything said too personal for me to hear, but out of half-shyness, half-irritation. Between them and me was uncertain ground; they did not know what would be familiar and normal to me, and what strange; among more sophisticated and less genuine people, there would have been little joking remarks made to me about the food, and one or two unusual habits, such as the old relative’s way of sweetening his tea by sucking it up through a spoonful of jam, might have been explained, forcing me into the position of a tourist. But as it was, their naturalness came in gusts that swept over me and made them forget all these considerations. I remained, ignored but intact. Now and then in a drop in the talk, I would appear, like a stranger in the parting of a crowd; their forgetful, vivacious exchange of food and talk faltered — and then someone would ask a question that set them off again.
Only the thin old man, receding from all that was immediate except the food before him on his plate, was as vague about my presence as about that of anyone who had not belonged to the clear hard times of the Russian village he had left forty years before; when he saw the faces of Mrs. Aaron or her husband, brightness came into his small eyes (they were two tears on his face) like recognition in the face of an old dog. But I was no more alien to him than all the other sons and daughters whom he was supposed to know.
At last Mrs. Aaron had wedged herself back into the circle and was spreading a mess of gray wet fish (it was marinated herring) on a roll. Sometimes her uncertain eye fell upon me, not hostile, but with an uneasy appraisement in passing: Do you really want to be here? The family evidently had been to a party that afternoon, and she called out to Joel with real pleasure: “What a lovely affair. Really very nice.”
“Did you stay late?”
“They wouldn’t let us go. I’m telling you, we still could have been there.”
Her daughter reproached her: “Why didn’t you stay? Couldn’t we have eaten at home for once?”
The old woman smiled and shrugged at the unthinkable. “Joel, what does it mean, an F.R.C …? After the wedding, the young couple’s going to England, he’s going to study something else there … I don’t know.”
“F.R.C.S., Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. Is Maurice’s girl nice?”
“Pretty girl,” said the aunt. “No question.”
Mr. Aaron roused from his food. “Maurice’s a fine boy.” He shook his head in fatherly pride that such a person could exist, no blood of his own, but a matter for pride that he, closely confined to interest in the welfare of his own family, only knew how to show as a fatherly reaction.