Читать книгу The Unfortunates - Laurie Graham - Страница 20

Toward the end of July Mrs Considine received a Western Union telegram informing her that her son had been killed during the Battle of the Marne. I didn’t know him, of course, and I never much liked Mrs Considine but, still, I did feel sad for her, him being her only boy and now he wouldn’t be coming home. He had been a bugler, which sounded like a safe kind of soldier to be, so when I heard I became anxious about Oscar who was probably doing far more dangerous things.

A night nurse and a tutor were engaged for my nephew Sherman Ulysses and they accompanied my sister Honey when she went away to Long Island for her health. She had seen a number of doctors but every one of them gave her different advice and none of it helped. She tried sitz baths. She ate charcoal biscuits till her teeth turned black. And she had her magnetic fields adjusted by a person from Brooklyn who only ate nuts and berries.

It was my belief that Honey’s problems were the result of lying too much on her couch, but Ma believed quite the opposite.

‘Now she can really rest,’ I heard her say to Aunt Fish, after Honey had left for her convalescence, ‘because she won’t have Harry bothering her.’

As Honey faded, so I bloomed. I was much happier in my work because I could almost count in days when I would come into my money and be able to buy a field hospital and take it to France and be talked about, like Cousin Addie. Also, Ethel Yeo, who had become a thorn in my flesh always inquiring after Oscar and trying to catch me out, had left to become a manicurist at the Prince George Hotel. Junie Mack was gone, too, having caught a baby from a soldier, and although I missed her, this left me more at liberty to talk to any good-looking boys who passed through the depot. I had no intention of being unfaithful, but I welcomed the chance to gauge my powers of enchantment. I wanted to learn to spoon, so that when Oscar came home from the war I should be word perfect. I allowed one boy to walk me to the trolley-car and light my cigarette and everything seemed to be most satisfactory, but he never offered again nor was even especially friendly when he saw me.

Then an older man called Albert began to make love to me. He was thirty-two and couldn’t go to war because he had rickety legs, but in every other respect he was a handsome devil.

He took me to Riker’s for an ice-cream soda and asked me all about my fortune. Everything was going along just fine until he tried to put his arm around my waist. I told him to keep his distance. I told him I had no wish to catch a baby just when I was about to go to war, and the people standing nearby seemed to find this amusing.

I said, ‘I’m sure I don’t know what any of you find so droll. I’m one of the mustard Minkels and I’m going to buy a hospital and take it to France.’

This made them laugh all the more.

I said, ‘And I’d sure like to know why all of you are leaning on this counter, drinking sarsaparilla when you might be volunteering.’

That quietened them. I held my head high and made my exit, but I heard that Albert say, ‘Crazy kike.’

Of course, I hadn’t meant it about him not volunteering. I knew he was too old and crippled. It made me realize, though, how easily I might have gone the way of Junie Mack. Men seemed to believe treating a girl to an ice-cream soda entitled them to certain liberties.

Ma, meanwhile, was forever leaving off her knitting to go to any charity bazaar Yetta Landau might recommend, and sometimes to lectures on subjects relevant to the war effort. These, I know, she found as draining as she had once found the giving of dinners, but she tried to bear up and listen attentively, because she knew this would earn her Miss Landau’s respect.

‘As Dear Yetta says,’ Ma would report, rubbing her temples to ease her aching brain, ‘education is our hope and insurance against another war.’

Harry said he believed a safer bet was to shell the Hun until they came out with their hands raised.

‘President Wilson,’ Ma said, ‘has laid down Fourteen Points for peace.’

‘What are they Ma?’ I asked.

‘Poppy!’ she said. ‘There are fourteen of them! He has also devised Four Ends and Five Particulars, but I’m sure he doesn’t expect us all to have them by heart. And then there are all these new countries one has to know about. Montedonia. And Macenegro. It was all so much easier when there was just America and the rest of the world and one didn’t have to concern oneself with the little places. Aha! I have remembered one of President Wilson’s Points. Serbia must have a corridor to the sea!’

She produced this with a flourish.

‘I say, Dora,’ Harry said. ‘I’m impressed!’

Ma blushed.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘it may have been one of his Particulars, or perhaps one of his Ends, but anyway, there you have it.’

‘Never would have taken you for a bluestocking,’ he said. ‘Abe wouldn’t know you.’

‘What do you mean?’ she asked, sharper suddenly.

‘No. Nothing,’ he said, retreating as usual. ‘Nothing at all.’

I didn’t care for the way Harry was laughing at Ma. I knew she was doing all this for me, raising our stock with Miss Landau, paving the way to Oscar becoming my beau. I was proud of her and I told her so.

‘Why thank you, Poppy,’ she said. ‘I must say, sometimes I quite surprise myself.’

We sat for a while, after Harry left us, basking quietly in mutual contentment.

‘It occurs to me,’ Ma said, after a while, ‘that you might accompany me to Madame Paderewski’s lecture next week. It would broaden your education. Madame Paderewski is very desirous of Polish independence, you know?’

‘Will Miss Landau be there?’ I asked.

I cared nothing about the Polish. They might have their independence without bothering me over it. But I was avid to get any member of Oscar’s family in my sights. And so I fell in with Ma’s suggestion and hurried up to my room. I had only five days in which to prepare myself, and I wanted to strike the right note, or rather, a pleasing chord of spirited patriotism, savoir faire and unusual beauty. I decided I would leave off my turban, which Ma found worryingly foreign, and make a feature of my hair.

There was standing room only in the Fairway Hall. The Germans and Mr Lenin, Madame Paderewski explained, were picking over the remains of the Polish nation, but a committee had been formed, in Paris, to call a halt to this. Committees had really become quite the thing since the war started. Before that I don’t believe I had ever heard the word.

The Polish National Committee were getting up an army, and Madame Paderewski showed us on a large hanging map the places she said belonged in a united Poland. Silesia and Galicia. Poznania.

‘More countries to remember,’ Ma shuddered.

President Wilson, it seemed, was a true friend of the Polish nationalists, and one of his Fourteen Points was – here Ma dug me in the ribs – that an independent Poland must have a corridor to the sea.

‘Didn’t I tell you so?’ Ma whispered.

I said, ‘No. You said Serbia.’

‘Why, Poppy,’ Aunt Fish interrupted, a shade contemptuously, ‘everyone needs a corridor.’

Yetta Landau had been identified for me as an earnest-looking woman in a boater hat and a high-collared shirtwaist. She was sitting some distance from us, so Ma and Aunt Fish could do no more than smile and flutter their hands until the lecture ended and the donation buckets had been passed around and we were free to circulate.

Miss Landau shook my hand and hoped that I would do what I could for Poland.

‘Poppy is with the Red Cross, of course,’ Ma said. ‘In bandages.’

‘Important work,’ Miss Landau replied, ‘but we all have to ask ourselves what more we can do.’

She had a dry mouth that crackled when she spoke, and slightly gamy breath.

I said, ‘I shall be of age in November. Then I’m going to do something really important.’

‘Indeed?’ Ma said. ‘This is the first I heard of it.’

I said, ‘I’m going to buy trucks, like my cousin Addie, and drive them to the Western Front.’

Ma looked quite stunned. Miss Landau was studying my hair. I had allowed it full rein, and wound through it a twist of satin ribbons in lemon and raspberry. What could not be subdued should be emphasized, I had decided.

‘Don’t vex yourself, Dora,’ my aunt said. ‘Money for madcap schemes will not be forthcoming. I shall speak to Israel about it as soon I get home.’

I opened my mouth to protest, but over my shoulder Aunt Fish had spied another means of silencing me.

‘Mr Jacoby!’ she cried. ‘We had no idea you were here with Dear Yetta. What a pleasure!’

He had separated himself from the crowd and was heading toward us, smiling a little. Judah Jacoby, the real live father of the boy I dreamed about.

I turned scarlet, and Ma and Aunt Fish, in sympathy with me perhaps, glowed pinkly.

‘This is Dora’s girl,’ Miss Landau told him. ‘Seems to have her head screwed on, even if it is trimmed up like a circus pony.’

Mr Jacoby took my hand and bowed. Then he did the same to Aunt Fish and Ma. He was a small, soft, silver-haired man. His skin was buttery and his eyes were dark. He was, in fact, not at all what I had planned him to be. And Oscar had his father’s looks. Aunt Fish had said so.

‘Which lot is your son with, sir?’ I asked him, trying to retrieve something of the Oscar I had created. ‘I heard he volunteered.’

Mr Jacoby seemed pleased by my interest.

‘He’s with the 27th,’ he said. ‘In France, as far as we know.’

‘I pray he’ll come back to you safe and well,’ I said and I caught sight of Ma and Aunt Fish exchanging saccharine smiles, which faded as I declared, ‘I’ll be over there myself before long. I’m going to buy a field hospital, you see.’