“I'm only here on account of Uncle Murray,” she said. “So don't get any big ideas.”
Sapphire was never one to let go of a grudge.
I suppose Murray had grown accustomed to people being shocked by the change in his appearance. Now it was his turn to be surprised. Sapphire had the tired, gray look of a person who attracts misfortune and never gets a facial.
“Uncle Murray, Uncle Murray!” she said, squeezing his hands. “I want you to tell me everything. Absolutely everything.”
“Everything?” he said, most alarmed.
“About the camps,” she said. “You'll feel better if you talk.”
He looked to me for help.
I said, “Murray, were you in camps?”
“No,” he said. “No.”
“It's OK,” Sapphy said, starting the hand-squeezing routine again. “It doesn't have to be now. Whenever you feel strong enough. I lost someone, you see. That's why it's so important you tell your story. You're our witness.”
“Sapphy,” he said, “I'm so sorry you lost someone. That's a terrible thing. But I don't have a story, you know? I've just been…roaming around. That's all. But why don't you tell me your story? I'd like that.”
“He's very sick, you know?” she whispered to me over the drinks tray. “It could take years.”
“She's crazy, of course,” he said to me, after she had gone.
I said, “You're both crazy. She has roaches. You own one pair of pants. As far as I can see neither of you has done a damned thing with your lives except ruin your looks and live like unfortunates.”
He was quiet.
I said, “And just give me one good reason why you won't move in here. It's the best address in town. It's the best view in town. Or let me buy you the Pearlsteins' duplex, then at least we'll be neighbors.”
He said, “I'm going to live somewhere I can make a garden. That's what I'd like. A garden by the sea.”
I said, “If you live here I can introduce you to people who'd adore to have one of your gardens. The best people. I know everyone who's anyone in this town. You'll be the talk of the Hamptons.”
“I don't want to be the talk of anywhere,” he said. “I want to live quietly and not have to wear my dentures.”
I was so frustrated with him. I said, “Why won't people be helped?”
“Poppy,” he said, “it's the funniest thing. As far as I can see, Sapphire's the one needing your help but you don't seem interested in attending to that. I watched you, and you never even kissed her goodbye.”
I said, “We don't kiss. And anyway, she's a hopeless case. She's a Catchings through and through. She'll never amount to anything.”
“I see,” he said. “And what's your big success story?”
I said, “My galleries are in the absolute vanguard. I helped Humpy Choate when he didn't have a pot to piss in, and Sokoloff and Yaff and all those other dreary little daubers. Who brought them here? Who fed and clothed them?”
“Yes,” he said. “I'm sorry.”
I said, “I do my duty. I found Coretta for Ma. I found a mind doctor for Sapphire. I made a trust fund for Alan Mordecai and what thanks do I get? Emerald treats me like a stranger.”
“She does not,” he said. “You are ridiculous.”
He didn't know the half of it. How they insisted on living in the suburbs and having dinner with Mortie's people all the time. How they never came to my openings.
“I just think,” he said, “Sapphire still needs you to be a mommy. That's all.”
I said, “She's twenty-nine. I've been a mommy, now I'm a phenomenon.”
“You certainly are,” he said.
I said, “And don't preach to me. I get enough of that from Honey. I did a whole lot better than any of them said I would. How do you think I got where I am today?”
“I'm sure it's an interesting story,” he said, “but not tonight, please. I want to go back to my hotel and sleep. I'm tired and I have gas pains.”
I said, “You need a digestion doctor.”
He said, “And you need to take a look at yourself.”
I have often noticed how hard people find it to be gracious about one's success.
53
By November of 1953 Emerald and Mortie had another child on the way and Murray was well advanced in his plans to run out on me for the second time.
“I can't take New York winters anymore,” he said. “I'm going to Florida.”
But he stayed on long enough to participate in a falling-out I had with my son-in-law. Mortie didn't like it that I had ordered a Hornby train set for Baby Alan's Christmas.
“We don't do Christmas,” he said. “You know we don't.”
I said, “I don't see why not.”
He said, “Because we do Hanukkah.”
I said, “Heaven's sakes Mortie, the child's two years old. He doesn't care about all that.”
“Well, he's going to,” he said, “if I have anything to do with it.”
Murray said, “Maybe he could have the train set for Hanukkah?”
“No,” Mortie said. “It's too much. You should just give him a little something at Hanukkah. A little candy. A little gelt. He can get the train for his birthday.”
A little candy. A little gelt. This was the way Emerald lived since the Boons got her into their clutches. Always volunteering at the Temple Sisterhood and shining up her candlesticks and following Mrs. Boon's recipe for chopped liver. I hardly recognized my own child.
I said to Murray, “Personally, I'm an open-minded kind of person.”
“You are,” he said. “Minds probably don't come any opener.”
So I had the train wrapped in reindeer paper anyway, plus an electric menorah for Mortie and Em, since they were so set on being Jewish. I'm sure I don't know what the pair of them found so amusing about my gift.
Early in the New Year Murray bought himself an ancient Buick and packed it with everything he owned in the world. He was going to Florida to live in a hovel. He had only ever had a small fortune compared to mine, and somewhere along the way he seemed to have lost even that.
I said, “I suppose that was the communists' doing.”
Judah Jacoby had often said they'd be the death of him. There was the house though, with Ma and Coretta rattling around in it, barely using more than one room.
I said, “Why don't I tell Ma to sell 69th Street? She can go live wth Honey. I'm sure that house ought to be yours by rights.”
“No,” he said. “It belongs to the bank. And, I wouldn't dream of it. It's Dorabel's home. And you can't just move people around like they're pieces on a chessboard. Honey has had a hard enough life.”
My sister was born with the ability to attract sympathy. She was pitied because Harry bankrupted her. She was pitied because her glands prevented her from reducing and keeping an attractive line. She was pitied because Sherman Ulysses had married such an uncongenial person.
“I believe Vera thinks me rather silly,” Honey confided in me one time, and Sherman himself confirmed it.
“Vera finds Mother a little…light,” he told me. “It makes me very sad.”
The longer I lived the closer I came to agreeing with Ma and Aunt Fish on this point at least: education is a greatly overrated thing.
I would have bought Murray a place myself. A nice apartment in a good building in Miami Beach, but he wouldn't have it. He wanted to live on some kind of salt marsh and get tormented by bugs and murdered by the neighbors or blown out into the ocean and I was too tired and too busy to argue with him anymore. I was about to open Art As Gesture, with a Yugoslav unfortunate named Dragomar who ripped posters off walls. It was called Décollage and Jerome Sacks was predicting it would be very big indeed.
I waved Murray off. He had put in his dentures, just to please me I suppose. I guarantee they were in his pocket before he was through the Holland Tunnel. His Roadmaster was a dingy shade of ivory and its radiator grille looked for all the world like a mouthful of nightmare teeth
. They say dogs grow to look like their owners, and I believe the same may be true for automobiles.
Baby Maxine Miriam was born in June. She had the Minkel ears but I saw a definite look of my darling Reggie flicker across her face which caused me a moment of sadness.
I took Ma and Coretta and Honey to visit while Em was still lying-in at Mount Sinai.
“You have all the luck,” Honey said to me. She was monopolizing the cradling of her great-niece, burrowing her nose into the folds of Baby Maxine's neck.
I said, “Let me give her to Ma to hold.”
“Now sit nice and steady, Miss Dora,” Coretta said. “And I'll stand with my arms at the ready in case you have an hattack and drap the child.”
For help Coretta had grown very self-important.
I placed Maxine Miriam in my mother's arms.
I said, “Don't you think she favors her grandpa Merrick a little, around the mouth?”
“Grandpa Merrick?” Ma said, playing at being old and forgetful.
“Are they giving you milk puddings, Emerald? Are they feeding you well? Your grandpa Jacoby did so much for this place, you know? He paupered us with his good works. You make sure they know that. And you'd best start binding her ears, too. Start it directly you get her home. Coretta will make you some bandages. We all know what happens if that gets neglected, don't we Poppy?”
Mortie came in with Baby Alan and Mrs. Boon, followed by a nurse who said we were too many around the bed, too tiring for the mother.
Em said she wasn't a bit tired and Ma sat tight until Coretta whispered something in her ear, reminding her about one of the shows they liked to watch.
“Poppy,” Ma said. “I believe we have an appointment to keep.” Em said, “Mom, did you see what Uncle Murray sent?”
MAXINE MIRIAM
Hai can't write haikus
Hany more. Here's an Israel
Savings Bond hinstead.
“Of course,” Ma announced, as she swept past Mrs. Boon, “we are able to visit at any hour we choose. My late husband practically built this hospital.”
54
Ma passed away the day after Baby Maxine's first birthday. If she ever suffered any of those hattacks Coretta alluded to I never witnessed them. She simply fell asleep in front of the Perry Como Show and never woke up.
Emerald went with me to view her in the chapel of rest, and seeing her that way, so dwarfed by the casket Mortie had picked out, I felt regretful that the only time we had gotten along was when the Great War had given us common cause. In death she looked like quite an agreeable person, and her skin was still good. This was a consequence of her easy life, I suppose. She had been doted on by two good husbands, and two good children, then grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She had started off a Plotz, become a Minkel, sidestepped to Minton and ended up a Jacoby. She had braved out two widowings, two wars and the financial ruin of Harry Glaser. She had learned to answer the telephone and overcome her fear of crossing Central Park. And the only other thing I might have wished for her was that she could have been born late enough to enjoy more fully that important dividend of television, the extinction of conversation.
Murray had been correct about one thing. The house was mortgaged. Either the bank had to be paid or the house emptied and the vultures allowed to take possession. So I presided over the breaking up of the Jacoby home, but not before I had saved Ma's bone amber pendant for Sapphy, a step-cut peridot ring for Em and the lavender pearls for Baby Maxine.
Emerald said, “What about Uncle Murray? It was his home.”
I said, “Help me go through Judah's old stuff.”
Em suggested sending him his pa's prayer shawl, but what would a person want with that, living like a wild man on Merritt Island? I had in mind something I would like to find for him but it took us days, sifting through drawers and closets.
Then Em said, “I think I found her.” She had opened a package of brown photographs tied with string, and there she was, with Murray in her arms and Oscar kneeling beside her, and a young mustachioed Judah standing behind them all, with his hand on her shoulder. Rosa Jacoby. She had a little heart-shaped face and a fuzz of hair, not unlike my own, and a mouth I liked, wide but firm.
I said, “Shall I send it? Do you think he'd like to have it?”
She said, “I think anyone would like to own a picture of their parents. Don't you, Mom?”
She was using a tone of voice.
I said, “Don't start on that again. It's been hard for me to keep pictures. I've moved around a lot in my life. I've been too busy for making up albums. If Sapphire's so grieved about not having pictures let her go to Scranton, Pennsylvania, and plague the Catchings family. And if it's yourself you're hinting at, write to your uncle Merrick. Or your aunt Angelica. She'd be sure to have photographs.”
Em said, “I want to take something for Alan, too.”
I'd already decided about that. Whenever Emerald took him visiting at 69th Street Alan had loved to look in Pa's old vitrine, marking the glass with his little fingers, asking what things were.
I said, “I'm going to keep all these treasures safe for him. When he's old enough he can have them. Everything except the piece of shrapnel. I'll give that back to Sherman, if he'd like it.”
But Sherman wasn't allowed it.
“Keep it for the boy,” he said. “Vera doesn't care for clutter.”
I didn't hear from Murray for the longest time and I feared the one and only picture of his ma must have gone astray, which is no more than you might expect when a person doesn't even have a proper address. But then one day his letter came.
“Dearest Poppy,” he wrote.
I've been very hard on you, I think, and now I come to consider, you deserve only thanks from me. I got a sister in you, which I never expected to have. You gave me haiku by way of Gil Catchings and my English garden by way of Reggie, and Angelica, who was more than I deserved. Then you gave me a second chance when I walked back into your life and you didn't press me with questions. And now you've given me my mother. When I add it all up, you've done a lot of giving and I've done a lot of taking, so it seems to me the very least I can do is refrain from criticizing your way of life.
I am hard at work in my new garden. There's no fence around it so it's as big or as small as I want it to be, according to how the mood takes me. The main thing that grows here is Bermuda grass, but I have scrub papaya clinging on pretty well and a kind of rosemary, which is for remembrance you know, and after the hurricane season I'm going to try poppies again. You need long roots to survive here.
I drive into Titusville once a week, or oftener if I get a craving for candy, and sometimes I give a ride to my nearest neighbor. Her name is Xenia. She tells me she was brought here by star travelers and that she can communicate with pelicans. I have asked her to communicate to them that they should stay away from my garden.
I have an indigo snake living outside my door. He doesn't bother me and I don't bother him. I really hope you'll come and see all this for yourself when you can be spared from the front line of art. I'll give up my bed for you.
I send you love which you must pass along to Sapphy and Em and the babies, and may peace be upon Step-Ma Dora.
Yours
Murray
I had no intention of visiting with him until he quit living in a cabin with snakes and star travelers for company.
So Pa's treasures finally came home with me. The fool's gold, and the silk cap, and the beaver skull, and the Ojibway Indian necklace, and a book I had loved to look at on those lamp-lit evenings before he went out for a cigar and a blintz. The Story of Our Wonderful World. It had pictures of how you get maple syrup from a tree, and people who shoot fish with a bow and arrow and don't wear drawers.
The final thing to dispose of was Coretta, whom I gave to Honey. I already had satisfactory help and Emerald declined to have anyone who wasn't family living in her house. Two babies and all she had was a person to rake leaves and keep the yard tidy a
nd a sitter when it was Young Marrieds evening at temple.
She was always busy with something. Table decorations, alphabet friezes for the nursery.
I said, “You never come to any of my openings. I'm setting the art world alight and the whole business is passing you by. You need to get out more. Have some kind of life.”
“Mom,” she said, “I have a life. The best kind.”
55
I didn't see Murray again until the winter of 1958 when he came home to bury his aunt Yetta.
He said, “I get the feeling you're never going to visit with me. Was it my mentioning the snake?”
I said, “It's my firm belief you've taken leave of your senses and sharing a shack with a madman is not my idea of a vacation. My idea of a vacation, if I ever had the time to take such a thing, which I don't, is a place where they iron your sheets and you can get a Bloody Mary any hour of the day. Besides, you can get used to not seeing a person. When they've been written off for dead it makes a pleasant change to know they're only in Florida wasting their lives.”
“I see,” he said.
While Murray was in town it was my intention to get some answers from him, so I instructed Humpy to take him to lunch and quiz him on the following points. Was he a secret pansy? And where precisely had he been all those years, doing what he called “roaming”?
“Just roaming, Poppy,” was as far as I ever got with him.
Humpy said, “Why me? Ask him yourself.”
But I no longer did lunch. One reaches a certain stage in life where one pays for every calorie and I had no wish to go the way of my sister, in the direction of ever-increasing circumference.
I said, “He may confide in you, man to man.”
Humpy took him to an amusing oriental place on Mott Street but the occasion failed to amuse either of them.
Humpy said, “He's not a natural conversationalist, is he?”
I said, “He requires practice. Did you ask about the missing years?”
“Not as such,” he said. “It seemed rather an intrusion.”
I said, “And what about the other thing?”
The Great Husband Hunt Page 30
