The Unfortunates

by Laurie Graham

  Then, on the eleventh, before we had cleared away breakfast, and long before the polite hour for making calls, the telephone rang. It was Harry.

  ‘The Boche surrendered,’ he said. ‘The city’s going crazy. Listen.’

  At the end of the telephone line I could hear church bells ringing out. But outside, on 76th Street, it looked like any other day.

  I said, ‘It’s probably another mistake.’

  Ma said, ‘Well, Harry is usually right about things.’

  ‘That has not been my experience,’ I said. ‘I shall go to work anyway.’

  ‘You might look a little more delighted,’ Ma said. ‘I’m sure the ending of the war is a most welcome thing. We shall all be able to get help again, and hold dinners and not have to attend educative talks and make jam. Hardship has really grown very tiresome.’

  I said, ‘I thought we were managing rather well without help. Besides, Reilly won’t want her old position.’

  ‘Just as well,’ Ma said, ‘because she will not be offered it. She will have forgotten everything I ever taught her, and bomb-making is sure to have made her more temperamental. There will be plenty of other fish in the sea. Harry told me so.’

  Harry had explained to Ma how all those girls would be thrown out of work when the boys came home, and be grateful to take anything.

  ‘Low wages, Dora,’ he’d said. ‘Like I told Honey, you’ll be able to afford a hundred maids.’

  I said, ‘But Ma, you never liked to throw dinners anyway, so why begin again?’

  ‘The point of throwing a dinner is not enjoyment,’ she said. ‘How little you understand of society, Poppy.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Ma,’ I snapped, ‘I understand silliness when I hear it. The war made you get up from your couch and learn to light the gas range and know where Macedonia is. Haven’t you had a much finer time of it? How can you think of going back to the way things were?’

  ‘Because the way things were was the correct way,’ she said, ‘and that is surely why we went to war. To preserve civilized life. Well, the barbarian is vanquished, so now I think I may at least be allowed to engage a parlor maid. I fail to account for your peevishness, Poppy. One would almost think you were displeased the war has ended.’

  I left Ma on the telephone with Aunt Fish, discussing armistice trimmings for their gowns, and rode a crowded trolley-car down to the depot. It was closed, of course. Fifth Avenue was packed with people singing and dancing and blowing whistles. Bells rang and firecrackers exploded. Drivers tooted their horns, though they knew they’d be going nowhere fast, and they didn’t seem to care. All day I stayed out, tagging along, following the press of the crowd. Once or twice someone linked their arm in mine and we jigged for a while. More than once or twice I was kissed, but I didn’t feel a thrill.

  I only felt flat. I wished the war could have lasted just a little while longer, so I might have done something spunky. I wished I wasn’t always outside, looking in. I wished I had a friend.

  I was cold in my cloth coat. The light was fading as I made my way uptown, pushing through the crowds. The numbers still were growing and so was their loudness and gaiety, and outside the Public Library I became entangled in a rabble of girls and soldiers singing doughboy songs. I caught one of them by the shoulder as I tried to squeeze past her and she turned a moment and looked at me. It was Irish Nellie.

  She fell on me with kisses.

  ‘Is it you, Miss Poppy?’ she screamed. ‘Is it you? Isn’t it a grand party?’

  She took me in her arms and peered at me in the twilight. She had the smell of liquor on her breath.

  ‘Is it you, Miss? Do you know me now?’

  I had known her at once. The last time, that night at the Cunard pier, it had been harder to place her, with her Paris gown and her powdered nose, but this time she was just plain Nellie again.

  I nodded, too cold to speak.

  ‘Look at you,’ she said, rubbing my arms and my cheeks. ‘You’re starved. Here, take a nip.’ She put a little flask to my lips and forced me to swallow the nastiest thing I ever had tasted. It was to take me a while to cultivate a taste for hooch.

  ‘What happened to your gown?’ was all I managed to say. She looked down at her skirt and then back at me, puzzled. But I hadn’t meant that gown. I meant the plum and silver velvet fourreau, trimmed with a satin bias and stained with the salt water that had drowned my Pa.

  Suddenly she understood.

  ‘Got good money for it,’ she shouted in my ear. ‘Do you think Stouffer’s is open?’

  She pushed me ahead of her and we turned onto 42nd Street. Away from the noise and press of the crowd we were awkward with one another.

  ‘I’ve been working for the Red Cross,’ I told her. ‘I would have been going to France any day, but now this peace has come along.’

  ‘Ah well,’ she said, ‘they’ll likely have another war presently and you’ll get your chance. Do you have a sweetheart over there?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I expect we’ll be married as soon as he comes home.’

  I was quite surprised to hear myself say this.

  ‘Listen to you,’ Nellie said. ‘Aren’t you quite the lady now. And I remember you when you were all the while playing with your dollies.’

  We found a booth in Stouffer’s and Nellie advised me to have an egg-flip, the same as her.

  ‘It’ll fortify you,’ she said. ‘You look so pinched.’

  I asked her what she had been doing.

  ‘Dispensing comfort and cheer,’ she said, and laughed.

  ‘Oh, like Mrs Schwab,’ I said, ‘at the railroad station, with coffee and cigarettes.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That kind of thing. I see they gave up on your hair. All those hours they had me trying to prevail over it, and you squawking and wriggling. Do you remember? And Mrs Fish threatening you with a dose of vermifuge if you didn’t sit still? The old witch.’

  Ma had always depended on Aunt Fish to tell her when it was time to send an Irish packing, so I guessed Nellie had disappeared after one of her household reviews.

  I asked her why she was let go.

  ‘Don’t recall,’ she said. ‘Don’t recall and don’t care.’

  But her face said something different, and so, I suppose, did mine.

  ‘Ah, Poppy,’ she said, ‘don’t rake over old troubles. Leave the dead in peace.’

  ‘I only wondered,’ I said, feeling my way, still not quite sure what it was I was wondering.

  She had two more fortifying egg-flips brought.

  ‘I get the night terrors still,’ she said. ‘About climbing into the little boat. I was afraid I’d be tipped out and it was an awful long way down to the water. I was all for staying. I thought they’d fix up the hole and we’d be all right, but he said I must get in line for a place in a boat, to be on the safe side, and he’d be back directly with blankets and my muff. And that was the last I saw of him. They lowered our boat with places to spare and he was left behind. He was a darling man, your daddy. Oftentimes I’ve wished I’d just stayed with him and saved myself these hard times and sorrows.’

  I said, ‘I don’t believe you were his secretary, Nellie, nor his personal assistant. I believe you were an adventuress.’

  ‘I was not,’ she said, quite indignant. ‘I was his sweetie pie.’

  ‘I see,’ was all I could say. It had never occurred to me that old people had such things.

  ‘Well, you’ve no need to look so disapproving,’ she said. ‘Aren’t I pretty enough to have been his cutie?’

  As a matter of fact I didn’t think she was so pretty anymore. Her skin had grown coarse. But that wasn’t what was troubling me. I sensed I had come upon some kind of iceberg, too, and was bound to collide with it, just like Pa’s ship.

  I said, ‘I didn’t know he had a sweetie pie.’

  ‘Of course he did,’ she said. ‘They all do.’

  I asked her whether her pa had one.

  She laughed again.
‘I mean all the gentlemen have them,’ she said. ‘It’s just a natural thing. They have their wives for the one side of the business and their cuties for the other and that way everyone is suited.’

  I said, ‘Does my Uncle Israel have one?’

  ‘Sure to have,’ she said, ‘if he has breath in his body.’

  ‘And Harry?’ The extent of this iceberg was becoming horribly clear.

  ‘Harry?’ she said. ‘Is he your beau?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Harry who’s married to my sister.’

  ‘Oh him,’ she laughed. ‘He probably has a string of them.’

  I hated Nellie for knowing something about Pa that I hadn’t known, and yet I wanted to stay there with her. In the six years since he was lost, she was the first person to speak of him, freely and happily. The egg-flips were my undoing. I began to cry.

  ‘I miss him so,’ I whispered. ‘I can’t remember his face anymore, or his smell. I tried to keep his smell locked in his closet, but it faded away.’

  This touched off her tears and we sat opposite each other, sobbing into our empty glasses.

  ‘You were always his favorite,’ she said. ‘He always spoke of you. And now look at you, all grown-up and engaged to a soldier boy. Well, he’s watching over you, never fear.’

  I had heard of heaven, of course, but I had no more idea what it might be like than I did of Iowa. Nellie though seemed quite familiar with the place.

  ‘He’s up there all right,’ she said. ‘I know your kind don’t believe in it but sure the good ones get sent there anyway.’

  She painted the grotesque picture of a platform, high above the clouds, from which dead people could look down on the living and, if they chose to, guide them away from harm. She was quite unable, though, to explain why no one in heaven, Grandpa Minkel for instance, had prevented Pa from sailing on a ship that would sink. But then, she was only an Irish. Also, I believe she was tight.

  She kissed me over and over when we parted.

  ‘I’m so glad I bumped into you, Poppy,’ she kept saying. ‘And I wish you long life with your sweetheart when he comes home. Long life and a house full of babies.’

  I hurried away from her. She had disturbed me with the idea that Pa, from his vantage point in heaven, might have seen me stealing cake in a time of national austerity and passing off John Willard Strunck as my fiancé. Also, she had revealed certain unsavory facts about husbands. I decided, there and then, I would not marry Oscar Jacoby, no matter how much he begged me.

  SIXTEEN

  On my twenty-first birthday I received a tortoiseshell vanity set from Ma, a garnet bracelet from Harry and Honey, and from Aunt Fish an introduction to a good corsetière. Uncle Israel took me to lunch at Sherry’s and explained to me about my money. I was to have a monthly allowance of one hundred dollars, to be reviewed after I had proven my steadiness and thrift, and I might apply to him for approval of occasional larger expenses.

  This certainly wasn’t the liberation I had expected, but as I had only a hazy idea of what one hundred dollars might buy, I acceded, for the time being. He slid across the table an envelope containing fifty dollars in crisp new bills.

  ‘Just a little something to start you off,’ he said. ‘But take care now, Pops. There’ll be folk who only cultivate you for your money and you must learn to recognize them.’

  I rather liked the idea of being cultivated, for whatever reason. I liked the feel of the cash in my hand, too.

  I said, ‘On Armistice night I met Irish Nellie, that was saved from the Titanic. She said she was Pa’s sweetie pie. She said all gentlemen have one …’

  Uncle Israel had a spoonful of coffee parfait stopped stock still, halfway to his mouth.

  ‘… even you probably. Do you?’

  ‘I do not,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you want one?’ I asked. ‘Nellie said any gentleman can get one, as long as he has life in his body, and it quite suits the wives because then husbands don’t come home every night expecting conversation.’

  He pushed his dish away from him.

  ‘Nellie said Harry probably has a string of them,’ I continued. ‘Do you think so? Honey does find conversation awfully tiring.’

  ‘Poppy,’ he said, ‘this person is precisely the kind I was warning you against, and may I say, this is not polite talk for a young lady. What else did this person say? Did she ask for money? Did she name names?’

  Uncle Israel appeared to have lost his appetite, though I couldn’t see I was to blame. If he chose not to have a sweetie that was his affair. As to Harry, I had already decided I was going to question him myself.

  On the way home I went to Macy’s in Herald Square. I ordered a Singer sewing machine and spent thirty dollars on Vinolia vanishing cream, fruit cake, flesh-tone stockings and a garter belt, scent, a Kolinsky fur collar for my winter coat, and a selection of hatpins which I gave to Ma.

  ‘But I already have hatpins,’ she said. ‘What possessed you to buy me more? Such extravagance. A small tablet of cucumber toilet soap would have been most acceptable.’

  I was a little hurt by her criticism. I had had fifty dollars to dispose of and I’m sure I had done the very best I could. I’m sure, had they been given by anyone else she’d have said, ‘One can never have too many hatpins.’

  At the beginning of December Honey sent word that she felt strong enough to return to New York.

  ‘She will stay with us,’ Ma said, ‘until I’m satisfied as to her recovery. A month at least, I think. How cozy we shall be!’

  We had just engaged, at great expense to Ma’s nerves, a new maid-of-all-work, a foreign girl with rudimentary English. She was put to work scrubbing and airing the room that had once been mine, before Honey’s marriage, but it was soon decided that it was incurably damp and cheerless and quite unsuitable for a convalescent.

  ‘She must have your room,’ Ma decided. ‘It was once hers anyway, so she’ll feel quite at home there, and you always did well enough in the damp room. You are lucky, Poppy, to have been blessed with a strong constitution.’

  Harry was to bring Honey and Sherman Ulysses home in his Packard. As soon as I heard this, I went to 74th Street and made my demands.

  ‘I have to learn to drive an automobile,’ I told him, ‘so it may as well be you that shows me how. Then I shall be able to drive us all from Oyster Bay.’

  He sniggered.

  ‘Drive from Oyster Bay!’ he said. ‘You fool! You can’t just jump behind the wheel.’

  He soon came round to my way of thinking.

  ‘Do you know what I heard about you, Harry?’ I said. ‘I heard you have popsies. I wonder whether Honey knows? I believe I may discuss it with her. I have a feeling she has no idea what a considerate husband she has.’

  ‘Just get into the car,’ he whined, ‘and pay close attention to what I do. It’s a great deal harder than it looks, as you’re about to find.’

  But it wasn’t, of course. It was amazing what an ill-founded reputation Harry had for knowing about things.

  I studied what he did for a while and then, after we were over the Queensborough Bridge, I resumed my questions about popsies until he caved in and allowed me to take the wheel myself. There was nothing to it.

  The nurse and the tutor were dispatched to bring Sherman home by railroad, which still left three of us to squeeze in beside Honey’s luggage.

  ‘Driving!’ Honey cried. ‘How modern you’ve become. And as thin as a pencil, too, with all that rushing around I suppose, fighting wars. Or have you been slenderizing? I shall have to learn your secret, Poppy. I eat next to nothing but I never seem to reduce.’

  When they heard about my driving, Ma and Aunt Fish were amazed and anxious in equal measure. On the one hand Yetta Landau drove, so driving was, by association, a Good Thing. On the other hand, she brought to it a carefulness I could never hope to emulate. I was famously untidy and erratic. What if I had untidily steered the Packard over a precipice and killed us all?’

&n
bsp; ‘Ma,’ Honey said, ‘I don’t believe Poppy took us anywhere near a precipice. She doesn’t even waver when she’s having her cigarette lit. As a matter of fact, I found her to be a more soothing driver than Harry. Now tell me about the Jacobys. I want to hear all the news.’

  But she was hushed, with significant looks from Ma and Aunt Fish, and then Sherman Ulysses arrived, in the care of his nurse, and caused a change of topic. I didn’t care. I was feeling proud and excited about my ability to drive a car all the way to Oyster Bay and back, and, anyway, I was accustomed to the whispers and secret smiles connected with the name of Jacoby. I knew what was going on.

  My nephew had certainly grown some, and that good sea air had given him a fund of energy. He shot through the door, bumped against the credenza and tumbled up stairs to the parlor with his bootlaces flying.

  ‘Now, Shermy,’ Honey said, ‘shake hands nicely with Grandma and Aunt Poppy. He’s learned to shake hands, you know?’

  But Sherman Ulysses’ hands were busy investigating the face on one of Ma’s china shepherdesses, picking at it with a fat little finger.

  ‘Hey, Sherman!’ Harry bent low, holding out his own hand. ‘Come and show us how it’s done.’

  But Sherman blew a raspberry in his daddy’s face and fell back, very pleased with himself, against Ma’s chair. Harry laughed.

  ‘That’s my boy!’ he said. ‘Want to fight? Eh? Eh?’ He put up two silly fists.

  ‘Harry!’ Honey warned. ‘Please don’t get him overwrought.’

  It was too late, of course. Sherman was already beside himself with fatigue and excitement and uncurbed bumptiousness. I observed him. I knew that the sight of a small child, close kin, should arouse tenderness in me but I felt nothing, and he himself sensed there was someone in the room he had failed to enrapture. His eyes kept returning to meet mine.