Читать книгу The Unfortunates - Laurie Graham - Страница 18

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 as 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.

‘I think,’ she said, ‘I may take a powder and retire.’

She climbed the stairs, listing gently to starboard.

‘Please be sure to dock all the laws,’ she called, and disappeared into her boudoir.

My appetite restored by the knowledge that I wasn’t an orphan after all, I wolfed down the sandwiches and set to work on creating a love letter from my soldier on the Western Front.

‘My own little girl,’ I began.

Well here I am in Flanders’ field, killing the Boche and having a dandy time. I get off about six every night and I sure wish you were here with me so we could go out dancing. The eats here are pretty good. Still, I can’t wait till we have whipped the Hun and I can return to your loving arms. I know a girl like you won’t lack for gentlemen admirers, but I hope you can find it in your heart to wait for your devoted sweetheart, Oscar.

I wrote it first in a selection of styles until I hit upon a hand that looked manly. Then I made a fair copy on onionskin paper and jumped on it a while. By the time I was finished it had the appearance of having come to me through fire and flood, and for good measure, I slept with it under my pillow that night.

Oscar Jacoby was beginning to take on flesh.

He was good fun, I decided, with just the right amount of seriousness. He was a first-rate dancer, and he had cool hands, not clammy and pink like Harry’s. And he’d take a girl to supper and allow her to choose anything she liked, even two kinds of dessert. He wouldn’t give her a baby and leave her at home with it banging its drum.

Ethel Yeo gave me a sly smile when I showed them my letter next day. I turned away and when I looked again, she was still smirking at me.

‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘my Ma dined with his people only last night.’

‘Yeah?’ she said. ‘And what division did you say he’s with?’

Hellfire and damnation if I just couldn’t remember whether I’d said he was with the 26th or the 28th. I pretended I hadn’t heard her. I excused myself and went to pay a call.

‘Never mind, Hot Stuff,’ she whispered, next time she came near me. ‘I’ll be able to ask him myself, won’t I? When he comes home from the war?’