The Unfortunates

by Laurie Graham

  ‘A genius,’ Mr Jacoby said. ‘This man can make a garment out of nothing but mink tails.’

  I saw Aunt Fish later, examining the jacket that was Ma’s wedding gift, looking for the joins.

  With Murray they had four to hold the poles of the canopy and the marrying was done with Sherman Ulysses stretched out on the rug, gently drumming his feet. He wasn’t throwing a tantrum exactly. It was simply that Honey had asked him to stand up nicely, so he felt obliged, I suppose, to do the opposite. It was a listless kind of disobedience.

  The brisket was served with potato salad and pickles, and throughout the meal a jar of Minkel’s Mighty Fine Mustard sat on the table. Pa’s ghostly presence. He would not have minded, I had decided. Ma had accepted her widowing and if she had gained new happiness, it wasn’t because she had gone looking for it. Judah Jacoby thought her price was above rubies. He stood up and said as much before the fresh raspberries were served.

  ‘Her candle goeth not out by night,’ he said.

  ‘She eateth not the bread of idleness,’ he said.

  ‘She points with her knife,’ added Murray. He was sitting directly opposite me. Whoever else heard it, Ma was not one of them. She sat in Yetta Landau’s old place, flushed and mawkish and deaf to everything except her husband’s compliments.

  At five o’clock the newly weds left for three days in Sea Bright and after we had waved them off and Honey’s driver had collected her, with Sherman and Aunt Fish, I found myself alone momentarily with Murray Jacoby.

  I said, ‘You’re not obliged to like your new mother, but you’d better be civil to her or she’ll make you sorry.’

  ‘I already have a mother,’ he said. ‘She just went away for a while.’

  I said, ‘Your mother’s dead, you booby, the same as my Pa, and now we have to be family.’

  He narrowed his eyes.

  ‘No,’ he insisted. ‘She just went away for a while.’

  He was a thin, sissy-looking kid. His ears stood out like jug handles and his eyeglasses had thick pebble lenses.

  I said, ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twelve,’ he said.

  I said, ‘Do you go to school?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ he said. ‘I go to Schiff’s. Which school do you go to?’

  I said, ‘I’m twenty-one. I don’t have to go to school. I can do anything I please. Or go anywhere I please. Why does Oscar have black moods?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘What,’ he said, ‘can you go even to Manitoba?’

  And then Miss Landau came and found us.

  ‘Are you really set on staying alone in that house, Poppy?’ she said. ‘You know room could easily be made for you here. And I’m sure Murray would be glad of your company.’

  I said, ‘It isn’t that house. It’s my house and I don’t want to leave it anymore than you’d want to leave here.’

  Out on the stoop, she lowered her voice.

  ‘Oh, but I shall leave here,’ she said. ‘As soon as Dora and Judah return I shall go to Peekamoose, to care for Oscar.’

  ‘Is he very sick?’ I asked. A little ember of hope glowed for a moment. A nurse’s uniform was so very flattering.

  ‘It’s a kind of melancholy,’ she said. ‘There’s a deal of it about, since the war. I hope you’re going to do something useful, Poppy. You have every advantage in life.’

  The boy Murray reappeared.

  ‘Auntsie,’ he said, ‘I shouldn’t be glad of her company. I shouldn’t be glad of it at all.’

  ‘And anyway,’ he shouted, as I slid behind the wheel of my roadster, ‘your mother does point with her knife.’

  Then he ran inside his house.

  TWENTY

  I was alone for the first time in my life, and I liked it. Yetta Landau’s words stayed with me and I began to think about my future. My decision was that I would become a more interesting person. I gave the help notice, closed up my house and on October first I moved into a three-room suite at the Belleclaire Hotel.

  ‘Well,’ Ma said, ‘I see you are determined to drag the family name into the gutter.’

  I said, ‘Which name would that be, Ma? Minkel, or Minton, or Jacoby?’

  ‘You know quite well what I mean,’ she replied. ‘Why must you always be so contrary? Living on a … rented shelf, when there are proper houses at your disposal, at good addresses.’

  I said, ‘You used to say West 76th Street was a ruinous address. You begged Pa not to take us there. I remember.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You are mistaken, as usual. On West 76th Street one was safe beneath one’s own roof, but who knows who may be hiding under the roof of a hotel. French persons. Theatrical types.’

  Mr Jacoby suggested I was old enough to choose my own roof. He had found a way of contradicting Ma without offending her, something I don’t believe Pa ever achieved.

  ‘I’m afraid you don’t know Poppy,’ she sighed. ‘She has always craved excitement and danger. Did I ever tell you, Judah, how she begged to be allowed to go and minister to the unfortunates? It was the Misses Stone who put it into her head.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you did tell me.’

  ‘They encouraged her most unfairly,’ she went on anyway, never afraid of repeating herself, ‘and I was placed in an impossible position. If I stood firm, I was frustrating her wishes and making my child unhappy. A torment no mother can endure. And if I allowed her to have her way, I was placing her in every kind of danger …’

  ‘But surely, Dorabel,’ he said, ‘she was in safe hands and doing good works. And she came home unharmed.’

  Ma ignored this.

  ‘… and as I feared,’ she said, ‘she came home overwrought and impudent and infested. Covered with crawling, biting … creatures. We might all have died of some terrible fever, had I not had the help fumigate the house from top to bottom. And did I ever hear a word of apology or regret? I did not. And now, when I might hope for her to have grown in wisdom, she is moving into … Trust me, Judah, Poppy will never rest until she’s living in the midst of scandal and mayhem.’

  The boy Murray had overheard enough to be interested.

  ‘Are there murderers in your hotel?’ he asked.

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. And he gave me an artful smile. There was something about my stepbrother I was taking to.

  The Belleclaire was just around the corner from the house I grew up in, but it might have been in a different country. There was a wonderful elevator to whisk me to my top floor suite. There was light and space. And it didn’t matter that there was no kitchen because I could dine in the hotel restaurant every evening and choose whatever I pleased. I could skip the soup and have two desserts. No one could prevent it.

  I decided on a witty, interesting look for my rooms. I had my decorator cover the walls with bone-white huckaback. I had Muller’s pick me out fifteen yards of books on assorted subjects. And I purchased a bottle of gin, a bottle of vermouth and a jar of cocktail onions, so that when I had acquired some friends I should be able to invite them up, to drink Gibsons and admire my view of the Hudson River. All I brought with me from West 76th Street were the piano, though I never played it anymore, and the contents of Pa’s vitrine: the fool’s gold, the beaver skull, the Ojibway Indian necklace, Grandpa Minkel’s little silk kippah, as I now knew it was called. The stuffed osprey never made it to the Belleclaire. The moment I tried to move it, it crumbled away to dust.

  Recalling the company I had enjoyed at the Red Cross depot, it seemed to me the best way for me to find new friends was to get a job of work, so I applied for a post at the Fair Lady Company, hand-finishing high-class lingerie.

  They didn’t mind at all that I sewed with my left hand and I believe I would soon have risen to a senior position there, but the other finishers made my life impossible, sniggering when I wore my black Mexican pearls, complaining when I took a day off to drive my sister to one of her houses in Oyster Bay.

  I asked the finishing room supervisor how a person wa
s expected to lead any sort of life if she might not take a day off when she pleased. She replied that from that moment on I might take off all the days I liked, and to close the door behind me on my way out.

  I began to see how small-mindedness held back the working classes. I began to understand why they always looked so glum. And but for a chance encounter, I might well have given up my project to join the masses and make new friends.

  I went out for a spin one morning, called in at an amusing new milliner’s on Madison Avenue and recognized a face I hadn’t seen in about ten years. Bernadette Kearney.

  ‘Minkel!’ she screamed. ‘Is it really you?’

  She was trying on a felt cloche decorated with five fat cherries dangling on stalks.

  ‘Whatever happened to you?’ she asked. ‘Could your Daddy not pay the fees?’

  The last time I’d seen her was the day I was hurried away from the Convent of the Blessed Redeemer covered in scarlatina and Ma decided I had had enough education. I never went back.

  The Kearneys were not the usual kind of Irish. They were the kind who themselves employed Irish below stairs. The Kearneys had feet that were accustomed to shoes and a father who was an attorney at City Hall. They were Irish in the size of the family though. There was a Kearney girl in every class at Blessed Redeemer and I knew there were brothers, too. Dozens of them.

  I said, ‘What do you mean? My Pa could have bought the whole convent. I was kept at home, that’s all. I hated that place anyway.’

  ‘Love your hair,’ she said. ‘Crazy.’

  I had had it bobbed and hennaed.

  I said, ‘Are you married?’ She had turned out pretty.

  ‘Managed to avoid it so far,’ she laughed. ‘Keep them wanting, that’s my motto. Keep them on the run. How about you?’

  ‘Same as you,’ I said, wondering whether there was any more mileage to be had out of Oscar Jacoby. I decided there was not.

  We went for layer cake at Child’s. Bernie – she preferred not to be called Bernadette anymore – loved to talk. She had lost a brother, Ambrose, in the Battle of the Marne, and a sister, Celia, from the influenza, and her mother was bearing up as best she could but her father was a broken man. During the war she had worked as a stenographer at the New York bureau of the National Food Administration and after office hours she had seen a good deal of military action.

  ‘Nothing below second lieutenant,’ she said. ‘I have my standards.’

  I said, ‘I was thinking I might learn stenography myself, and typewriting.’

  ‘Don’t do it, Minkel,’ she said. ‘It’s a short cut to insanity. And anyway, why would you? Aren’t you busy enough spending your money?’

  As I explained, my mustard millions were all well and good, but I felt the need to get out more and mix with different types of people.

  ‘I was at home so much,’ I said, ‘just being there for Ma. I never had the chance to go around with a crowd. Honey did, but all that ended after we lost Pa. I’d like to have a place to go where there are other girls, you know, maybe of a lower class, but we’d be able to have a lark? Like I did sometimes at home, when we had a nice Irish. Sorry. I didn’t mean all Irish are of the lower class.’

  ‘I’m not Irish,’ she said. ‘I’m American. Well anyhow, there’ll be no larks if you’re a stenographer. You’ll just be “taking a letter Miss Minkel!” Why don’t I see if I can get you a start at the Keynote. Can you do the grizzly bear?’

  Bernie was working as a taxi-dancer at the Keynote dance hall on Seventh Avenue.

  ‘Only a dime a dance,’ she said, ‘but you never know who you’ll meet. A lonely guy can find all kinds of ways to show his appreciation.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. I didn’t like to tell her the only dances I knew were the tango and the two-step.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I see what you mean. You’d have to loosen up a little before they’d look at you at the Keynote. How about shop work? My sister Ursula does that and she meets all kinds of people. Of course, she’s on her feet all day. Minkel, did you never think of doing anything with your eyebrows?’

  And so Bernie plucked my eyebrows for me and I got a job selling neckties in Macy’s department store. Most days I went with Ursula Kearney to the Woolworth lunch counter, and sometimes Bernie would join us. She was right. I did meet all types and I found I had a special knack for dealing with ladies of advanced years who ventured in, looking to buy a gift for someone. I was more nervous around gentlemen customers, not being accustomed to such casual contact with the opposite sex, but gradually I grew more confident. Gradually I became able to look a gentleman directly in the eye and advise him on his choice of neckwear. Eventually I didn’t even shrink from handling a customer’s collar and helping him tie a perfect knot. Which was how I met Gilbert Catchings.

  TWENTY-ONE

  He must have tried out a dozen different spotted silks and still couldn’t decide.

  ‘Cutting a figure’s a damned puzzling business,’ he said. ‘What time do you get off? We could go someplace. Get a little something.’

  Gil Catchings was a tall, broad-shouldered johnny, strong-looking considering how an asthmatical chest had prevented him from going for a soldier in the Great War. He had lion mane hair and the palest blue eyes I ever saw. I thought he meant to take me to Woolworth for meat loaf and a soda, but that wasn’t his plan at all. We went to the Knickerbocker Hotel and drank a number of dry martini cocktails.

  ‘Those are some pearls for a shop girl,’ he said.

  I never saw anything wrong with wearing good jewelry to work. I never encountered any envy or thievery, even when I wore my diamond pin. And pearls improve with wear, so I always figured it was a crime to leave them lying in a drawer at home.

  He said, ‘You somebody’s cutie?’

  I said, ‘I’m a mustard heiress. I buy my own pearls.’

  He whistled.

  ‘Well, that’s just dandy,’ he said. ‘So you’re just playing at being a shop girl? You’re like Marie Antoinette. And you don’t have a fiancé or anything like that? Because I have every respect for another man’s property. I don’t care for complications.’

  He touched my knee.

  We went upstairs and he paid a chambermaid for the key to a room.

  ‘Half an hour,’ she said.

  He laughed. He said, ‘Is it cheaper for less?’

  It was an ugly room. The rug smelled stale. But I had my first squeeze from Gil, without going through all the worries of introducing him to Ma and wondering what to wear when he took me on our first date and all that. We were doing things the modern way.

  Gil took off his necktie and stuffed it in his pocket, and afterwards, when he went to put it back on, he put his hand in the other pocket and pulled out one of the spotted silks from Macy’s.

  ‘Well, will you look at that!’ he said. ‘It must have dropped in there while I was busy admiring your lips.’

  He thought it all a tremendous lark.

  I was only fifteen minutes late getting back to my post, but I was called in by the supervisor and dismissed. She didn’t give me the chance to explain myself, and just as well because I’m not sure what I could have said.

  I wasn’t sorry. I had still had no lunch, my head was spinning, and I felt in need of washing and changing my clothes. I was also eager to talk things over with Bernie. Ursula said she had talked of getting her hair finger waved, so I might try looking for her at Regine’s Salon.

  ‘Not sticking at the job, Poppy?’ she said. Ursula always was a goody-two-shoes.

  I said, ‘The hours are discommoding me. And anyway, I’m probably getting married.’

  That silenced her.

  I found Bernie just finishing up at Regine’s. Can’t say I cared for her new look.

  I said, ‘Let’s go get cake and tea. I think I just lost my virginity.’

  The styliste gave me a pretty cool stare considering I hadn’t been addressing her.

  Bernie said, ‘Want to w
ait till I’m out of this chair?’ She turned to the girl. ‘Cancel my manicure,’ she said. ‘Something came up.’

  It was a raw afternoon. We ran in arm in arm, too cold to talk until we were snug and warm at a corner table in Sadie’s. Then I told all.

  ‘On your first date!’ she said. ‘My, aren’t you the fast one! Was it wonderful?’

  I wasn’t sure what kind of wonderful it was meant to be.

  I said, ‘I haven’t been too modern, have I?’

  ‘No, no,’ she said. But I wasn’t convinced she was being candid with me. ‘Did you really go all the way?’

  That was just the problem. I had pieced together certain facts given me by the Irish, after I discovered my sister was with child, but I still wasn’t absolutely sure what ‘all the way’ involved. I hesitated.

  She said, ‘Poppy, did you lie on a bed?’

  We had lain on a bed.

  She lowered her voice. ‘And did you take off your bloomers?’

  Gil had partially removed my bloomers but then lost patience.

  ‘Did it hurt?’ she asked.

  ‘Not at the time,’ I said, ‘but I’m feeling awful sore now, and I have a hole in my stockings.’

  She dipped a macaroon in her tea.

  ‘I think you went all the way,’ she decided. ‘Did he tell you he loved you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I lied.

  ‘And is he real handsome? And rich?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘And he wears a scrumptious cologne.’

  I didn’t tell her he had stolen a necktie from Macy’s.

  ‘Gracious, Poppy,’ she said, ‘now you’re a woman of the world. When do I meet him? Is he taking you out dancing tonight? Oh do bring him to the Keynote. I can’t wait to see him.’

  But Gil hadn’t offered to take me dancing, or anything else that night. He had told me to expect him at the Belleclaire the next afternoon at three o’clock.

  Bernie frowned. ‘That’s not so good. No dancing, no dinner. I’d hate to think he was two-timing you. Are you sure he’s not married or anything?’