The Unfortunates

by Laurie Graham

  Aunt Fish was shocked until she learned that no less a person than the prudent Miss Yetta Landau had herself invested fifty thousand dollars in Liberty Bonds.

  ‘One’s money is quite safe,’ Aunt Fish allowed, ‘and as Yetta rightly says, better we fill the war chest this way or we shall be taxed and taxed until we are wrung dry. Dora, I should very much like you to know Yetta. Perhaps the B’nai Brith Charity Bazaar would be the time for you to meet.’

  Ma pleaded pressure of Comfort Packet handkerchiefs to embroider, but Aunt Fish would have none of it.

  ‘It will take you out of yourself,’ she insisted. ‘A person can be too much in their own company. Solitary needlework can leave one prey to thoughts.’

  ‘Very well,’ Ma said, amazing us with her decisiveness. ‘I’ll be happy to attend your bazaar. But have no fears, Zillah. I have never been prey to thoughts. What about Poppy? Is she invited?’

  ‘Poppy may come, too,’ Aunt Fish said, looking at me menacingly over Ma’s head, ‘though I’m sure she must have a hundred other things she would sooner do.’

  It was all the same to me. Whatever my aunt’s reasons for not wanting me along, they were nothing to the benefits of staying home alone. I could try out, in a looking-glass, the effect of shortening my skirts. I could dance a silent tango and imagine what it might be to be squeezed by a man. I could so load a slice of bread with jam that it would take two hands to lift it to my mouth.

  ‘How soon is the bazaar?’ I asked. ‘How charming for Ma to have an event to look forward to.’

  Aunt Fish continued to eye me. ‘Whatever you are up to,’ her look said, ‘you don’t fool me.’

  ‘Likewise, I’m sure,’ I shot back to her, without a word being spoken.

  ‘Yetta Landau has raised single-handed the money for two ice machines to be sent to the front,’ Ma hurried to tell me upon her return. ‘Few people realize how essential ice is for the field hospitals, or would think it worth their attention, but she cares nothing about the popularity of her causes. Indeed the less they are known, the harder she works at them. And then there are her family responsibilities. It is no exaggeration to say she has raised her sister’s family as if it were her own. How many aunts would do as much as Dear Yetta has done?’

  Miss Landau had become Dear Yetta on the strength of two hours’ acquaintance. Not only had Ma freshened up her gray lawn and attended the B’nai Brith Sisterhood Combined War Charities Craft Bazaar, but she had also circulated. Cards had been exchanged, some from as far afield as East 92nd Street, and visits were presaged. Visits appropriate to a period of national austerity, of course.

  I heard the door creaking open on Ma’s narrow life and I was glad. The pace of her days quickened and filled with Thrift Drive rallies and fund-raising teas. Weeks passed without our boys receiving monogrammed handkerchiefs or any vegetables getting canned. And when I came home from bandage rolling she was no longer inclined to listen to my news. She wanted me to listen to hers.

  Yetta Landau was sister-in-law to Judah Jacoby, and Mr Jacoby had been ten years a widower, left with two sons to raise.

  ‘It was Oscar’s bar mitzvah,’ Ma started on the first of many tellings of the story. Oscar was the elder Jacoby son. I had no idea what a bar mitzvah was.

  ‘It’s a special kind of birthday,’ Ma said, hurrying on.

  ‘How special?’ I asked. Since Pa’s death my own birthdays had become the occasion of muted, utilitarian giving.

  ‘Special for boys,’ she said. ‘Now, please don’t interrupt. Mrs Jacoby had not been feeling well but no one suspected she was mortally ill. It was only when she was missed during dinner and found collapsed in her boudoir that the gravity of the situation was realized. By the time she was seen at St Luke’s Hospital it was too late. She had suffered a fatal torsion of the insides.’

  Ma refused to tell me how they knew what had killed her if it was inside, or to explain why boys had special birthdays. Only that Oscar Jacoby was now twenty-three years old and had just completed basic training at Camp Funston.

  I asked Honey if she knew about bar mitzvahs.

  ‘It’s a Jewish thing,’ she said. ‘They have to go to the temple and read an old scroll and then they get gifts and money and a dinner.’

  I asked her how she knew.

  ‘Because Harry did it,’ she said. ‘But Sherman Ulysses won’t. We’ve progressed beyond that.’

  Giving up dinners and gifts didn’t sound like progress to me.

  I said, ‘Is Harry Jewish then?’

  ‘Poppy!’ she said. ‘What kind of a question is that?’

  I had no idea whether it was a stupid question or merely an embarrassing one, so I took it to a person who already knew the extent of my stupidity and lack of savoir faire. I left home an hour earlier than usual and stayed on the trolley-car as far as Uncle Israel’s office.

  ‘Don’t tell me the Red Cross have run out of work for you,’ he said when he saw me. Simeon had left Uncle’s door open when he showed me in and was hovering just outside, remembering my earlier show of spirit, no doubt.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I have something to ask you and if you don’t mind I prefer not to do it with that person eavesdropping.’

  ‘Pops!’ he said. ‘Simeon is my right-hand man.’

  Still, he sent him away and closed the door.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘what is it? Are you sure I’m the person to ask? Mightn’t Honey be more suitable? Or your aunt?’

  ‘Uncle Israel,’ I began, ‘I want to know if Harry Glaser Grace is Jewish.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I see. Well, I suppose it all depends what you mean by …’

  ‘I don’t know what I mean by it,’ I said. There was a little tremor of frustration in my voice. ‘I’m not even sure what Jewish is.’

  He lit a cigarette.

  ‘Let me see,’ he said. ‘Shall we begin with Moses? No. Let’s begin with Abraham.’

  So my uncle told me a story about people who lived in tents and sacrificed sheep and listened to the Word of God. It was a rather long story. By the time he mentioned the Free Synagogue on West 68th Street the urgency had gone out of my question. Harry had many faults but I was certain he’d be too scared to sacrifice a sheep.

  I said, ‘Honey says Oscar Jacoby had a bar mitzvah party because he’s Jewish?’

  ‘Yes,’ Uncle Israel replied.

  ‘And Honey says Harry had one too. Does that mean he used to be Jewish?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘So you can stop being Jewish? Like biting your nails?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ he said, and got up and walked around behind his desk. I suppose he knew what was coming next.

  ‘Are we Jewish?’ I whispered. ‘Am I?’

  I suppose I had actually worked out the answer already.

  Uncle Israel weighed something invisible, first in one hand, then in the other, then sighed deeply.

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ he said. ‘But it’s really not a thing to get bothered about. These days …’

  I said, ‘Oh I’m not bothered about it. Do you know, I always thought it would be nice to be something, apart from just an heiress. Like Junie Mack is Scotch and Mrs Lesser’s kitchen maid was albino. And now it turns out I am something. What fun.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘my advice is not to make too much of this. No need to make, what shall we say … a feature of it. One needs to rub along in society. And in business. There are degrees of Jewishness. Yes. It’s really a question of degree. How are the bandages going?’

  ‘Very well,’ I told him. ‘It does me very nicely until I come into my money and can buy a hospital to take to Flanders.’

  Something occurred to me.

  I said, ‘Is Cousin Addie Jewish too? I suppose she must be.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose she must.’

  I gave Uncle Israel a most affectionate kiss.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ I said. ‘I knew you were the person to ask.’


  ‘Pops,’ he said, as I was leaving. ‘Another word of advice. I wouldn’t trouble your Ma with this Jewish business.’

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Doesn’t she know?’

  TWELVE

  Uncle Israel need not have worried about Ma. She knew all about our Jewishness but had simply never gotten around to discussing it.

  ‘It wasn’t the fashion,’ she said. ‘And one was always so busy. Running a house. Raising one’s children to be good Americans. Your Pa and I were agreed that those were the important things.’

  I said, ‘So you’re not vexed at my mentioning it?’

  ‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘Indeed I was only saying to Dear Yetta, when this war is over and we are not all so occupied I should very much like to attend Temple Emanu-El. They say the chandeliers are quite exquisite.’

  Yetta Landau and her adopted family now featured as much in Ma’s conversation as they did in Aunt Fish’s. As far as I was aware neither my mother nor my aunt had ever met Mr Jacoby and his sons, but they were discussed with proprietorial familiarity.

  ‘How Murray must miss his brother now he is gone for a soldier,’ Ma would observe.

  ‘Oscar will break hearts,’ Aunt Fish would predict, ‘with his father’s looks and his aunt’s sweet manner.’

  I cannot say for sure which occurred first; the idea that the sweet and handsome Oscar Jacoby might be the one destined to give me my first squeeze, or the suspicion that Ma and Aunt Fish were hatching a scheme. I only know it began to happen that whenever I walked into the parlor their excited voices would fall silent. Also, that I revealed Oscar’s name to my friends in bandaging.

  ‘We’re Jewish, you see,’ I told them.

  ‘You don’t say!’ Ethel laughed.

  They wondered why he hadn’t given me a ring before he left with the American Expeditionary Force.

  ‘We want to test our love first,’ I explained.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ Junie said. ‘First you get the ring. Then you test the love.’

  I could have kicked myself. I had a pink tourmaline at home that would have served. It had been Grandma Plotz’s. Honey got the brilliant-cut sapphire because she was the eldest, and I got the tourmaline.

  Next the Red Cross girls wanted to see Oscar’s picture. I played for time, day after day pretending I had forgotten to slip it into my pocketbook.

  ‘I should have thought,’ said a person called Mrs Considine, ‘you would carry him next to your heart.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ethel, throwing down the gauntlet. ‘Seems pretty odd to me. No ring. No picture.’

  That night I set to work. I carved up an old photograph from Honey’s debut year, took from it the head and shoulders of John Willard Strunck, and fitted it to my gold locket. John Willard Strunck once danced a cotillion with my sister but he had subsequently died of thin blood and dead men tell no tales.

  At the Red Cross next day everyone huddled around admiring my beau.

  ‘He’s cute,’ Junie said. ‘Real blond and wholesome looking, for a Hebrew.’

  ‘Does he write often?’ Mrs Considine wanted to know. She said she got letters from her son all the time. That woman was trouble.

  I pleaded Oscar’s slow passage across the Atlantic Ocean while I considered what to do next. I had no idea how often a soldier might write to his sweetheart. Nor did I know what kind of things he’d tell me. How often he would fight the Hun, or whether I should allow him to be wounded. I thought perhaps a minor wound, about three months into his tour of duty. Something large enough to excite admiration, but too small to warrant repatriation.

  I had a slight unease, which I pushed repeatedly to the back of my mind, that I might be playing with Oscar Jacoby’s real fate. What if I said he was wounded and then fact followed fiction? What if he became a famous war hero? How would I explain not being at his side when he returned in triumph? And what if he was killed? What if he sensed that somewhere his courage was being talked up, and he ran blindly into battle, anxious to live up to his reputation?

  I began to have a nightmare in which Aunt Fish and Mrs Considine were playing trumpets and a bandaged man forced me to dance the tango. His bandages kept unwinding and getting under my feet. Sometimes underneath the bandages I seemed to see John Willard Strunck and sometimes there was no one under there at all.

  I was relieved when someone from the Women’s Bureau telephoned Mrs Brickner and asked for the loan of a bright and willing person who understood French.

  ‘Looks like I’m on my way to join Cousin Addie,’ I said, as I waved Ethel and Junie goodbye.

  ‘Heck,’ Junie said, ‘wouldn’t it be the wildest thing if they sent you the same place they sent your beau? I sure hope he’s behaving himself.’

  ‘You take care now, Hot Stuff,’ Ethel called. ‘Don’t you go getting shot or anything.’

  ‘So far as I am aware,’ Mrs Considine said, ‘enemy fire has not reached No. 5 Depot.’

  And so it turned out. It wasn’t the front I was bound for at all, but Front Street, where a fissure had appeared in American – French relations, caused by badly judged shipments of nightwear.

  A large perspiring woman handed me two pages of close-written mystery. ‘Please translate,’ she said. ‘I have boxes here waiting to be filled and shipped.’

  I’m sure I might have made shorter work of it had she not stood over me, wheezing and dabbing her brow.

  ‘It seems to be about pajamas?’ I ventured.

  ‘Well I know that,’ she snapped back.

  I threw her morsels of information as best I could.

  ‘They require larger sizes. No. They require no large sizes. They want small sizes, and medium. And they prefer blue cotton. Not stripes.’

  Gradually she stopped perspiring and treated me with the respect due to an interpreter.

  ‘What a gift to be able to puzzle out such gibberish,’ she said. ‘Do they mention nightshirts at all?’

  By the time I had wrung all the meaning I could from the French requisition she had quite taken to me.

  ‘If only I could hold onto you,’ she said. And I permitted her to do so for the remainder of the day, helping to finish up packing twelve hundred pairs of leatherette bedroom slippers and making a start on pajamas and convalescence suits.

  It was gratifying to know that I’d helped ensure that the more capacious sizes of hospital wear went to our fine American boys instead of being wasted on small Frenchmen. And it was good to make new acquaintances and hear new stories, especially from one sweet girl who read us her husband’s latest letter. He was with the 212th Field Artillery but she didn’t know exactly where. A soldier was not allowed to say.

  On the trolley-car home I began composing Oscar’s letter. ‘My own little girl,’ it began. I was hoping that Ma might have had another fatiguing day preserving root vegetables. I hoped she would favor an early night so I would be left in peace to practice styles of handwriting.

  The house was silent. The more I called for Ma the more she didn’t reply, and all I found were jack cheese sandwiches, cut on the diagonal and left under a dainty chain-stitched cloth. I had been abandoned.

  I called Honey, but Harry answered and before I could tell him Ma was missing he said, ‘Ah, Poppy. Just the person I need. Could you possibly run over and give us a hand? Our help’s doing war work, you know, and it’s all getting rather too much for Honey.’

  I said, ‘Why can’t you help? I’ve just put in a day’s war work myself.’

  ‘Oh be a sport, Poppy,’ he begged me. ‘Just an hour. Honey’s been caring for Sherman Ulysses all day but she’s just had to go and lie down. You have no idea how taxing it all is, and there’s no sign of dinner.’

  But I had a very good idea. I could hear my nephew playing his drum, right up close to the telephone. Still, Honey never did have much vigor.

  I said, ‘I can’t help you. I have to send out a search party for Ma. Why don’t you get dinner at your club?’

  ‘I intend to,’ he said, ‘just as soon a
s Honey rallies enough to put the boy to bed. Seeing as his aunt isn’t willing to put herself out a little.’

  I replaced the handset on its cradle. That was the beauty of telephone conversations. One click and you could disconnect Harry.

  I tried Aunt Fish next, but there was no reply. Neither were the Misses Stone at home, and Mrs Schwab had not yet succumbed to the vulgar intrusion of a telephone in her house. I resorted to calling Mrs Lesser, who adored the telephone and stayed by it every moment she wasn’t at Penn Station pouring coffee for doughboys in transit.

  ‘How right you are to worry,’ she said. ‘One hears such horrors. Have you checked the kitchen stairs? She might so easily have missed her footing.’

  We discussed other possibilities. Murder. Kidnap. I believe she was quite disappointed when I mentioned the sandwiches.

  ‘Then her absence seems to have been anticipated,’ she said, ‘and I must ask you not to occupy the line any further. I expect a call from my sister in Nyack momentarily.’

  Ma appeared at the unwontedly late hour of half past seven and interrupted me just as I had decided to stop pacing the floor and exploit such rare solitude. When Ma was at home she never found it convenient for me to sing or lie stretched on the hearthrug.

  ‘Where have you been?’ I yelled. ‘I was all but ready to look for you in the morgue.’

  She had the dull flush of a person who had been drinking sherry wine.

  ‘Poppy,’ she said, ‘I told you last night and again this morning, I was invited to Dear Yetta’s crush for starving Polish babies. How inattentive you have become.’

  I’m sure I would not have forgotten such a thing. Had I been told, I’m sure I might have hurried home sooner from Depot No. 5 and accompanied Ma myself, to the house Yetta Landau shared with her brother-in-law, to the very home and hearth of my secret sweetheart, Oscar Jacoby.

  Ma and Aunt Fish had been driven home in Mr Jacoby’s Studebaker automobile, but I was unable to find out much more than that. For a woman who had crossed Central Park twice in one day and partaken of intoxicating drink, Ma had surprisingly little to say for herself. She could give me no account of the people she had met, or the style of the Jacoby house, and when I asked whether she might arrange a little affair of her own, whether Miss Landau and her family might pay us a return visit, she only gave a contented sigh.