The Unfortunates

by Laurie Graham

  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 and 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.’

  FIFTY-FIVE

  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?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘nor that. Not as such.’

  I said, ‘Then what did you talk about?’

  ‘Integrity,’ he said. ‘He questioned the integrity of our galleries.’

  Our galleries! They were my galleries. And my stepbrother wasn’t meant to be questioning anything. He was meant to be providing answers in exchange for lunch.

  Murray said, ‘I never ate a thing. They had chicken parts that belong in a trash can not in an eatery. Also, I suspect that sodomite was making love to me.’

  ‘By the way,’ I said, ‘I’d hate for you to have the wrong idea. Humpy is my employee. Those galleries are all mine.’

  ‘So much the worse for you,’ he said. ‘They’re not the kind of thing I’d brag about, personally.’

  I said, ‘How short your memory is. Didn’t you promise to cease criticizing my life?’

  ‘I did,’ he said. ‘But I find it’s deteriorated further in my absence so I’m releasing myself from my promise. I don’t understand why you do it. It’s not as though you need the money. And you’re not exhibiting a damned thing that isn’t an insult to intelligence. You’ve got a list full of hoaxers, Poppy.’

  I said, ‘You’re behind the times. My galleries have redefined the avant-garde.’

  ‘Bunch of phoneys,’ he said. ‘Bella Yaff! I was getting paintings better than that from Alan Mordecai when he was no more than four years old!’

  It was hard to be good-humored in the face of such ignorance. I had heard it all a hundred times before and I wasn’t sure I had the patience to explain, yet again, how Yaff’s work liberated us from the fallacy of perspective.

  He said, ‘Well, I see you’re set on being famous. I know I’m not going to persuade you against that. But couldn’t you be celebrated for something decent? What about those fine originations you used to create? Or at least sell paintings that would grace a person’s home.’

  I said, ‘Murray, you have been too long out of circulation to understand any of this. Gracing homes is old hat. The frontiers of art are on the move and wherever they’re heading I arrive first.’

  But Murray returned to his shingle garden without ever seeing the point of Brunnenbaum’s grids or Wagy’s rubber extrusions.

  By 1960 I had reorganized my galleries and dispensed with Humphrey Choate. As so often happens, he grew resentful of his subordinate position. We had cross words once too often and he returned to England and set up on his own, in a very small way, of course.

  He opened with a charmingly passé little stable. Hoche, who did portraits in oil, Lamb, who did small bronzes, and that fool Oca, still flogging
his pianola roll jokes after all those years. I suppose it was the only idea he ever had. Choate and Oca were welcome to each other.

  I moved a few doors along Leonard Street to a larger building and turned Tenth Street over to Sapphire. The whole world had opinions about what should be done about Sapphire. Murray said she needed motherly love. Em said she needed a good shaking. Honey said she needed Jesus. But I was the one who threw her the life-saver.

  She renamed my old gallery Witness, had the walls covered with black felt, and showed a permanent collection of gloomy photographs with occasional special exhibits. Pictures of dejected types traveling with bundles. Grimy street vendors. Whole families of unfortunates huddled under greasy coverlets. There was never anything gay or witty. It was no wonder to me that some days she simply couldn’t face opening up.

  Leonard Street couldn’t have been more different. I named it The Place and I was there all the time. I loved to see people stopped in their tracks by the vastness of it. In my first year I showed a divine set of ballpoint drawings by Rommer, an installation of basalt trouvé by Erik Boe, and Kenny Porter’s painted absences. I could sell Kenny Porters faster than he could paint them and he could paint them fast.

  I must also confess, Humphrey Choate wasn’t the only one to try his hand with a has-been. Hannelore Ettl walked into The Place one morning, as cool as you like and asked me for a show.

  I said, ‘I don’t do macaroni.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ she said. ‘Haven’t done in more than thirty years. I do hair.’

  First thing she showed me was a noose woven out of horsehair. The next thing she showed me was a collage of human hair. The private kind.

  I said, ‘I’m surprised you have any to spare at your time of life.’

  ‘Poppy,’ she said, ‘does this have to be personal? Are you still sore about Gil leaving you for me?’

  I said, ‘As I recall, it was me who left him. And you must have nearly fallen over my luggage, on your way in. I’ll bet you never even bothered having the sheets changed.’

  ‘You are still sore,’ she said. ‘How infantile.’

  And she would have been on her way, only Jerry Sacks arrived. He had quit being Jerome sometime before.

  I saw his eyes light up when he saw Ettl’s stuff, and Sacks’ eyes were always worth watching. I recognized in an instant that hair was going to be big. Especially private hair. By the spring of 1961 there can’t have been a dinner table in the world where the audacity of my gallery wasn’t being discussed.

  Emerald took up a position, of course.

  ‘And you wonder why we never drop by?’ she said.

  I said, ‘Emerald, it’s only hair.’

  ‘It is only hair,’ she agreed. ‘It certainly doesn’t belong in an art gallery. But I’m not going to debate it with you. I’m just glad I changed my name to Boon. If you want to see us you’ll have to come to Brooklyn. Do you remember where that is?’

  Of course, I was always compared unfavorably with Miriam Boon, no matter that I did go to Brooklyn, as often as my schedule allowed. I sat with those kids a whole afternoon one time, stringing cranberries for their Sukkot party. Some party. Drafts and insects. Dinner in a home-made shed.

  I said, ‘At least let me buy them a top quality playhouse.’

  Em said, ‘It’s not a playhouse, Mom. It’s a tabernacle. And home-made is the point of it.’

  Nothing I did was right. I was a household name, I had kept an amazingly youthful line through self-control and submission to the beauty doctor’s knife, and I was fun.

  But it was Mrs Boon who picked up the bouquets, baking cookies, churning out her shapeless handknits, driving them home from Talmud Torah.

  As I remarked to Murray, a less fulfilled and resourceful person than myself would have become embittered.

  ‘And thank goodness too for your humility,’ he wrote.

  But enough of your problems. I am being compulsorily purchased by the government. They’re expanding the Banana River Proving Grounds so they can send a man into outer space and they say they need my backyard.

  Xenia claims she already knew. She might have told me before I made my asparagus bed.

  Yours

  Murray

  PS: What is private hair?

  FIFTY-SIX

  In 1962 a most annoying thing occurred. Irish Nellie became a television star.

  I was in Daytona Beach, Florida, supervising the convalescence of my stepbrother Murray from a compound fracture of the thigh bone, sustained while he was resisting eviction from his hovel, and so had time to watch the shows ordinary people depended on to bring excitement and variety into their lives.

  A special program had been got up to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the loss of the Titanic, and certain parties had been invited to tell their version of things. No one had thought to invite me.

  They gave her name as Helen Gorman and her face was as wrinkled as an old paper bag, but I knew who she was even before she’d opened her mouth and started her bunch of lies.

  ‘I lost my fiancé,’ she said. ‘We were coming home to be married.’

  I telephoned Honey from Murray’s bedside.

  I said, ‘Just look at her! I’m writing it all down. Every lying word. I’m going to sue.’

  ‘Good governor, Poppy!’ Honey said. ‘What does it matter? She’s an old woman. We’re old women.’

  I said, ‘I’m not an old woman. And that Irish is besmirching our Pa’s name. We shouldn’t take that lying down. You were always way too meek.’

  My sister had grown to resemble one of those pale milch cows with the dark eyes and upturned nose. She rarely moved, except to amble between the couch and the feeding trough. Mainly she just sat around, reaching for candies and chewing over her scriptural pamphlets.

  She was well cared for. When Coretta had commenced having visions of six-winged many-eyed seraphs and had had to go home to Jamaica, a niece was sent in her place. Coretta II. Emerald always called by on Wednesdays, which was Coretta II’s day off. And Sherman Ulysses was a most attentive son. He had had a handrail fitted alongside her bath, for the prevention of falls, and devised a special box for her medicaments, with a compartment for each day of the week, which he refilled on Sundays, doling out the next seven doses and reviewing the past week’s improvements and reversals. He had become an avid reader of those small-print advisory notes that come with a jar of pills. I sometimes feel he has been a loss to the medical profession.

  Irish Nellie was saying, ‘I never did marry. After Abe, there could never be another for me … I still dream about him. I still see him disappearing into the crowd. He went to fetch my muff, you see. It was so cold that night.’

  I heard Murray sniff.

  I said, ‘I hope that’s me you’re weeping for? That’s my father’s good reputation she’s sullying.’

  He said, ‘I didn’t hear any sullying. She makes him sound kind and considerate.’

  I said, ‘It’s not her place to make him sound anything. She was just an Irish. He was my Pa. They should have asked me.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘how about if I ask you? You never told me about your Pa.’

  I said, ‘You’re not the television.’

  He said, ‘What’s so important about television? It’s only a noise in the corner of the room.’

  I said, ‘It’s important because everybody sees it.’

  ‘Oh, stop whining,’ he said, ‘and tell me about your Pa.’

  It’s very easy for a person to say ‘Tell me.’ I didn’t know quite where to begin.

  Murray said, ‘When you think of him, what do you remember?’

  I remembered a dark gray three-button suit. And cigars he smoked somewhere else. And cologne.

  Murray wanted to know what kind.

  I said, ‘I don’t know. I was only fourteen. And gradually it faded away.’

  ‘Poland water probably,’ he said. ‘Do you look like him? You don’t look like your Ma.’

  Sometimes
Murray knew the right thing to say.

  I said, ‘Pa was so handsome. He could have had any showgirl. Why would he choose a stupid Irish? She had crooked teeth.’

  ‘She looks all right to me,’ he said. ‘Anyway. If it was love … If it was passion.’

  Then again, sometimes he could just open his mouth and ruin everything.

  I said, ‘Pa was forty-nine. That’s what Sherman Ulysses is now. Forty-nines don’t do passion.’

  ‘You’re mistaken, Poppy,’ he said. ‘Passion is like being able to waggle your ears. Either you can or you can’t, and if you can, you never lose it. Doesn’t matter how old you get.’

  Murray had always been oddly proud of this party trick.

  Nellie had disappeared from the television screen. They were showing a photograph of two old marrieds who had perished. She was offered a seat in a boat, they said, but she wouldn’t leave her husband’s side. Not like some. Running to save their lying Irish neck.

  I said, ‘That would have been me. I’d have stayed with Reggie and drowned, if we’d been there.’

  Murray was quiet for a while, gazing at those jerky old pictures. Men moving about like clockwork soldiers, milling outside the White Star offices. If I had paid closer attention maybe I’d have spotted my Uncle Israel or that fool Harry Glaser. But I was still trying to conjure up the smell of Pa’s cologne.

  ‘Of course,’ he said eventually, ‘a person never knows, until it’s asked of them. They might imagine they have a fund of courage, till they come to draw on it. Then they find they’ll do pretty much anything to save their own miserable hide. Best not to make too many noble plans.’

  I said, ‘Nothing would have parted me from Reggie. I don’t expect you to understand.’

  He patted my hand. I hated it when he did that.

  I said, ‘You don’t know anything about passion. You wouldn’t even romp with your own wife.’

  He blushed.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I can waggle my ears.’

  The doctors at Brewer Memorial said Murray was a man who had neglected himself. They said it was a pity he didn’t have family to watch over him.