Read Online The Rowing Lesson by Anne Landsman - Free Book Online Page B

point in telling him about the Hippocratic Oath because he doesn’t know anything about the Father of Medicine. The oath he knows is the covenant with God, the promise to circumcise your sons, and the mysteries of the Five Points of Fellowship. Your father is a Jew and a Freemason. He loves both his temples. He’s a man of mystery and friendship, do-as-you-would-be-done-by. Shame and love swirls between you, and you almost want to laugh when he gets on his stupid, wobbling bicycle, this father of yours who’s not Doctor Brown, the elegant English doctor who comes to your house when someone’s ill. He comes in his car. So what if the boys on the street touch the windscreen and stand on the running board. He doesn’t care.
    He doesn’t care! You want to run after your father and shout, He doesn’t care! But you can’t really shout these days, not too loudly, since across the seas there are blackshirts and brownshirts and here there are greyshirts, special South African Nazis, picked and pickled in our own backyard and they’re on the streets and at school and you don’t even know where else you might find them, marching and goosestepping and acting like the sour Krauts. It’s no joke when you’re two bricks and a tickey high and you turn the corner and there they are, thick and blond, a band of Afrikaans boys furious about the Boer War and the Depression and English money and Jewish shops. No one has thrown the first stone although you’ve seen plenty of glass all over the newspapers, Jews in Germany sweeping up glass and of course the ones who died that night, the Night of Broken Glass.
    You can’t look at the window of “Joseph Klein” on the corner of Meade and Hibernia without hearing the sound of glass breaking. Of course, nothing is going to happen. How could anything bad happen in this neck of the woods, where necking in the woods is all you really want to do, with Gertrude or Hilda or any other sweet girl who will do the Lambeth Walk with you. She’ll be the Peanut and you’ll be the Toffee King and you’ll walk the Lambeth Walk.
    Mum left the East End when she was ten but even then she loved musicals. Her half-brother, Sam, still sends programs and records from London and you’ve just learned to sing “Any evening, any day, when you’re walking Lambeth way. . . .” It’s a tuck-arm, roundabout, happy-go-lucky dance-and-dip, lift up the leg and laugh a lot. Knees up, Mother Brown, and you poke Mum in the ribs and she has her happy face on, smiles for miles. You and Maisie go to Mrs. Giles’ Bioscope and Oh, God, that’s where you can see women! Ten pence on a Saturday, usually seven and a tickey to get house seats. Jean Harlow slipping in and out of your dreams, the smoke from her cigarette sharp in your nostrils. She moves and your heart flops. She swaggers and you stop breathing. Maisie laughs at you in the dark and she has the same smile as Mum, and the same mad up-and-down temper. You’re all up-and-down people and Look, it’s a monkey’s wedding, a sun shower. After the film, you and Maisie walk home together in the lances of rain with the sun poking through the clouds and don’t you just wish this black-haired, brown-eyed girl was your girlfriend and not your sister!
    Maisie’s up early listening to the wireless and once you caught her practically upside down. Physical Jerks was on and she was touching her toes and standing on one foot and then she bent over backwards and that’s when you came in and she almost choked on her foot. Chamberlain saying “it’s peace in our time” came on after Physical Jerks and you remember both together, the promise of peace and your sister’s foot halfway down her throat. It’s amazing what the human body can do.
    * * *
    WHO IS THE little girl standing over there? Is it my sister? you asked Ma last week before I came, before the coma dropped you into the pitch-dark. You were still cuckoo then, not OK in the top story. But now it’s me not