LAURIE GRAHAM
The Unfortunates

Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by Harper Perennial 2006

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate 2002

Copyright © Laurie Graham 2002

Laurie Graham asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover illustration © Rachel Ross

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007234066

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007390694

Version: 2017-03-30

Praise

From the reviews of The Unfortunates:

‘If you see people creasing up with laughter on public transport, this is probably what they’re reading’

The Times

‘Fresh, funny and smart, a novel that reels from the Titanic to jazz age New York’

Observer

‘Epic and very, very funny’

Daily Mail

‘A wildly funny novel, which is often on the brink of being a wildly tragic one’

Sunday Times

‘Set in New York, France and England, this witty book is brimming with irony while an understated sadness bubbles just under the surface. Laurie Graham’s last novel, The Future Homemakers of America, was a bestseller. With deft prose and a Nancy Mitford style, her seventh novel looks like repeating that success’

Irish Independent

‘Laurie Graham is a writer with a remarkably malleable comic voice … Poppy, like Nancy Mitford’s Linda Radlet and The Bolter, is a thrill-seeker with a penchant for romance, brightly coloured clothing, elaborate cocktails and effervescent company’

Guardian

‘A compelling read’

Hello!

‘A fantastic, engrossing read’

Glamour

Dedication

To Joan Fitzgerald

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Forty-Three

Forty-Four

Forty-Five

Forty-Six

Forty-Seven

Forty-Eight

Forty-Nine

Fifty

Fifty-One

Fifty-Two

Fifty-Three

Fifty-Four

Fifty-Five

Fifty-Six

Fifty-Seven

Fifty-Eight

Fifty-Nine

Sixty

Sixty-One

Sixty-Two

Sixty-Three

Keep Reading

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

ONE

It was just as well I had ripped off my Ear Correcting Bandages. Had I been bound up in my usual bedtime torture-wear, I would never have heard my mother’s screams.

The bandages were part of my preparation for the great husband hunt. I was only fifteen years old, but my mother recognized a difficult case when she saw one. She had taken up the challenge the day after my twelfth birthday and never spared herself since.

‘The early bird, Poppy,’ she always said, when I complained. ‘The early bird.’

And so, assisted by my aunt, she began an all-fronts campaign to catch me a worm.

I was forbidden candy and other waist-thickening substances. I was enrolled for classes in piano, singing and cotillion dancing, and spent an hour every day in a backboard, during which I practiced French pronunciation whilst a series of Irish maids tried to straighten my hair, or at least, defeat its natural wiriness into the kind of soft loose curls preferred by husbands.

On alternate days my neck was painted with Gomper’s Patent Skin Whitener, to coax out of it a certain oriental tinge. The label advised using the paste no oftener than once a week. But as my mother said, what did they know? They hadn’t seen my neck.

As to my nose, she knew the limits of home improvements. I was to go to a beauty doctor in Cincinnati, as soon as I was sixteen, and have a little cartilage shaved off.

Meanwhile she applied herself to the correction of my protruding ears. She designed an adjustable bandeau to hold them flat against my skull while I slept and had the Irish girl make them up for me in a selection of nightwear colours.

‘So you can choose, you see?’ Ma explained. ‘According to your frame of mind.’

And, gauging my frame of mind all too well, my aunt informed me that some day, when I had grown in wisdom, I would be grateful for their efforts.

The alternative to all this was that I would be left an old maid.

I knew what an old maid was. My cousin Addie was being one up in Duluth, Minnesota, riding around all day with her dogs and not wearing corsets. And I knew what marriage was too. My sister Honey had recently married Harry Glaser and as soon as the marrying was done she had to leave home and put up her hair. As far as I could see she wasn’t allowed to play with her dolls anymore, and she had hardly any time for cutting out pretty things for her scrapbook. She had had to go to tea parties all the time, but never appear too eager about cake, and whenever she came to call Ma would make mysterious inquiries.

‘Honey,’ she’d whisper, ‘how are Things? Are you still using the Lysol?’

To avoid the fate that had befallen Honey, I decided on stealthy sabotage rather than outright rebellion. As long as things appeared to be satisfactory my mother took them to be satisfactory. Surface was her preferred level. Hidden depths were unattractive to her, therefore she behaved as though they did not exist. So, every night, I took off my ear correctors, but only after the house had fallen dark and silent.

Then, that night, someone came to the front door and rang the bell with great persistence. I thought it had to be a stranger. Anyone who knew us knew the hours we kept. They knew our disapproval of night life and lobster suppers and men who rolled home incapable of putting a key neatly in a keyhole.

I heard the Irish slide back the bolt, eventually, and voices. And then, leaning up on my elbow, holding my breath so as not to miss anything, I heard my Ma scream. This signaled excitement. The late visitors were Aunt Fish and Uncle Israel Fish, come straight from the opera, still in their finery, because they had seen newsboys selling a late extra edition with reports of a tragedy at sea. ‘At sea’ was where my Pa was, sailing home from Europe.

Aunt Fish was my mother’s sister and she always seemed as at home in our parlor as she did in her own. By the time I had pulled on my wrapper and run downstairs she had already arranged Ma on a couch and was administering sal volatile.

‘Are you sure he sailed, Dora?’ she kept asking, but my mother wasn’t sure of anything. ‘Maybe he didn’t sail. Maybe business kept him in London.’

My father had been in Berlin and London, inspecting his subsidiaries.

‘Israel will go to the shipping offices,’ Aunt Fish said. ‘Israel, go to the shipping offices.’

Uncle Israel was stretched out with a cigarette.

‘Nothing to be done at this hour,’ he said. Aunt Fish turned and looked at him.

He left immediately. And my mother, released from the constraints of being seen by her brother-in-law dressed only in her nightgown, collapsed anew.

‘Poppy,’ said Aunt Fish, ‘don’t just stand there. Be a comfort to your mother.’ And so while she plagued the Irish for a facecloth soaked in vinegar, and more pillows, and a jug of hot chocolate, I stood by my mother’s side and wondered what kind of comforting to do.

I tried stroking her arm, but this appeared to irritate her. I looked at her, with my head set at a compassionate angle, but that didn’t please her either. I was altogether relieved when Aunt Fish returned from harassing our help and resumed her post as couch-side comforter.

I said, ‘Aunt Fish, is Pa lost at sea?’ and Ma resumed her wailing.

‘Poppy!’ said Aunt Fish. ‘Don’t you have even an ounce of sense? Your poor mother has received a terrible shock. If you can’t be quiet and sensible, then please return to your bed.’

I’m sure it wasn’t me that had rung the doorbell in the middle of the night with news of shipwrecks.

‘And send the Irish in, to build up the fire,’ she shouted after me.

We had stopped bothering with names for our Irish maids. They never stayed long enough to make it worth learning a new one.

‘And Poppy,’ my mother called weakly, from her couch, ‘don’t forget to strap down your ears.’

I lay awake, waiting to hear Uncle Israel’s return, but eventually I must have dozed, and then it was morning. But it was not like any other morning. Our family was suddenly part of a great drama. The first edition of the Herald reported that though Pa’s ship had been in a collision, all hands were saved and she was now being towed into Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Aunt Fish returned, having changed into a morning gown, and then Uncle Israel, with news that the White Star Line was chartering a train to take relatives up to Halifax to be reunited with their loved ones.

I said, ‘I’ll go. Let me go.’ This provided my aunt with further reasons to despair of me.

‘For heaven’s sakes, child!’ she sighed, and Uncle Israel winked at me.

‘Out of the question, Pops,’ he said. ‘Too young, you see. But why not write a little note? I’ll see he gets it as soon he sets foot on land.’

‘There’s no need for you to go, Israel,’ my mother said. The morning’s brighter news had restored her appetite and she was eating a pile of toast and jam. ‘I can always send Harry, if it isn’t convenient to you.’

‘Of course it’s convenient,’ said Aunt Fish. ‘It’s Israel’s place to go.’

I went to the escritoire and started composing my letter to Pa, but I was still more haunted by the idea that he might have drowned than I was uplifted by the prospect that he was safe. I had no sooner written the words ‘Please, never go away again’ than I burst into inappropriate and inconsiderate tears and was sent to my room.

Soon after, my sister arrived with her husband. Honey came up to my room and lay on my bed beside me.

‘Don’t cry, Pops,’ she said. ‘Pa’s safe. And you don’t want to get swollen eyes.’

I said, ‘Why did he have to go across an ocean, anyhow?’

‘Why, because that’s what men do,’ she said.

I said, ‘Would you allow Harry?’

‘Allow?’ she said. ‘It isn’t my place to allow. Besides, I know everything Harry does is for the very best.’

I had often suspected that marrying had caused a softening of Honey’s brain.

Uncle Israel left that afternoon on the special train to Halifax. And Harry went downtown, first to his broker with instructions to buy stock in the Marconi wireless company whose wonderful shipboard radio had helped save so many lives and bring comforting news to the waiting families. Then he went to the White Star offices to inquire when the passengers might be expected back in New York.

Honey and I were pasting scraps, just like old times, when Harry walked in, looking smaller and flatter and grayer than usual. He scratched his head.

‘It’s gone,’ he said. ‘The Titanic has sunk, with heavy losses. A boat called the Carpathia is bringing the survivors home.’

It was eight o’clock. Up in Massachusetts Uncle Israel’s train was stopped, directed into a siding and reversed. There had been, he was told, a change of plan.

My cheeks were hot from the fire, but something deathly cold touched me. My mother fainted onto a couch. My sister uttered a terrible little cry. And Harry studied the pattern on the parlor rug.

‘Marconi stock closed up one hundred and twenty points,’ he said, to no one in particular.

TWO

My Grandpa Minkel and his brother Meyer arrived in Great Portage, Minnesota, in 1851 intending to set up as fur traders, but they were too late. The beaver pelt business was finished. They stayed on though and changed their plans and did well enough trading in lumber to build a fine house on top of a hill in Duluth. From Grandpa Minkel’s house you could see clear to Wisconsin. So they said.

Meyer and his wife were never blessed with children. This was somehow due to the accidental firing of a Winchester ’73, but I was never allowed to know the details. So when Grandpa headed south, looking to buy a spread and turn farmer, he left behind one of his own boys, Jesse, as a kind of second-hand son. Gave him away near enough, though he was a grown man and might well have had plans of his own. Grandpa took his other boy, Abe, to Iowa to be a mustard farmer. And that was my Pa.

Uncle Jesse stayed where he was put, married one of the Zukeman girls and had a number of obedient children, plus Cousin Addie, the one who refused to knuckle down to marriage. Grandpa Minkel grew so much mustard he had to buy a factory. Grandma Minkel told him he should make mustard that had a fine flavor but a short life, and she was right. Folks just had to keep coming back for more and Minkel’s Mighty Fine Mustard did so well Grandma and Grandpa had to send Pa to New York City, to invest the profits and keep his finger on the quickening pulse of finance.

My mother’s people were Plotzes. They sold feathers and goose down, in Cedar Rapids. She married Pa in 1890 and came with him to New York soon after, in a delicate condition with my sister Honey. Ma took to her new life as if to the city born. She sent directly for her sister Zillah and fixed her up with Israel Fish, and from then on a veil fell over the Iowa period of their lives. Cedar Rapids had been a mere accident of birth, and was never discussed. As far as Ma and Aunt Fish were concerned everything from the Hudson shore to the Pacific Ocean was nothing but a social wilderness.

Minkel’s Mighty Fine Mustard was to be found on every discerning table and the profits were invested in railroads and mining, and the consequence was Honey and I were mustard heiresses, more or less.

Pa, though, kept his finger on more than the pulse of finance, and was often absent from his own table, indulging, as I had overheard discussed by my mother and Aunt Fish, in ‘a man’s needs’. I understood these to be cigars and blintzes, two things that were not permitted at home. For these comforts Pa went elsewhere. We lived on West 76th Street. My mother bore the impediment of this address as bravely as she could. Pa and Uncle Israel Fish assured her that before too long New York society would abandon their houses on Fifth Avenue and follow her there.

‘We’re setting a trend, Dora,’ Pa used to say.

But my mother didn’t want to set trends. On the steep climb to good society, novelty was one of those hazards that could pitch us all back down where we’d started. Her plan was to keep us as unremarkable as possible. Correct and unremarkable. Let no Minkel be a protruding nail. I don’t think Pa ever appreciated what a close watch Ma kept over our reputation and standing. And no matter how much she protested, he bought that rose pink low-stoop house and encouraged the architect to add as many turrets and finials as could be accommodated.

My aunt, who still lived safely within visiting distance of The Right People, should the call ever come, said, ‘Never fear, Dora. Marriage may be a sacred institution, but if Abe tries to drag you any further into the wilderness, you may depend on having a home with us.’

On evenings when Pa was home, a fire was lit in the library and I was allowed to sit in there with him and look at the things on the shelves of the vitrine. He had a beaver skull, and a rock of fool’s gold, and an Ojibway Indian necklace, and a little silk cap, brought by Grandpa Minkel from Germany. There was a rubber plant, and a stuffed osprey, and books. I was allowed to take them down off the shelf and read them, as long as I sat in a good light and didn’t scowl or screw up my eyes. Careless reading can cause the setting in of ugly, permanent facial lines. For this reason my mother never risked opening a book.

When the lamps and the fire were lit and Pa and I sat, cozily turning the pages, it was the best of times. I hated to hear him clear his throat and take out his watch. It meant my time was nearly up and he was preparing to go out into the night.

‘Pa,’ I’d say, ‘don’t go for a blintz tonight.’

But he’d snap shut his watch case and go anyhow. I wasn’t altogether sure what a blintz was, but I knew Pa’s favorite kind was cherry, and I liked the sound of that. I knew, too, that for the best blintzes you had to go to Delancey Street, a dangerous place teeming with something Ma called ‘the element’. I worried that one of those nights Pa wouldn’t come home. Murdered by ‘the element’, and all for a cherry blintz.

THREE

It was Tuesday night when Harry brought the news. There was no sleep. Honey cried until she made herself sick. Aunt Fish said she had always doubted the flotation principle. Harry steadied himself with a hot buttered rum, advising us against plunging into despair before the list of survivors had been published. And the Irish, who could hardly keep her eyes open, was kept from her bed, letting out the side seams on Ma’s mourning wear. Unaccountably, every gown had shrunk in the years since Grandpa Minkel’s passing.

Wednesday, there was still no news and Ma was on her second bottle of Tilden’s Extract, a tonic she usually only resorted to in order to face the rigors of giving a dinner. By Thursday our house was in a permanent state of receiving. Mrs Schwab and Mrs Lesser called, and the Misses Stone and Mrs Teller. Maids came with soup. And Uncle Israel drove down to Broadway three times in search of information and came back with none.

Aunt Fish was exasperated with him. ‘Go back, Israel,’ she said, ‘and stay there until they tell you something.’

My poor uncle. Sometimes he seemed to be as much of a disappointment to my aunt as I was. Once again, it was Harry who delivered the goods. He called by telephone, a device my mother had never wanted in the house because of the extra work it would heap upon her. She refused to answer it, and Honey would never do anything Ma wouldn’t do, so I was the one to take the call.

‘Poppy!’ Ma chided. She was at a loss to know what to do with me. Two whole days had passed without my hair being straightened or my slouch corrected, but she was too distracted to insist. And now there I was, crossing the room at an unseemly pace, snatching up the hated telephone and chewing my fingernails.

‘Tonight,’ Harry said. He was breathless. ‘The Carpathia’s expected tonight.’

Aunt Fish loosened Ma’s collar.

‘Bear up now, Dora,’ she said. ‘Israel will represent you. There’s sure to be a crowd and it’ll take a man of Israel’s standing to get to the head of the queue.’

‘Harry will go,’ was all Ma would say. ‘Harry will go.’

Harry didn’t realize he had a passenger in the back of his automobile. I waited until he turned onto Columbus before I emerged from under the pile of blankets Ma and Honey had had brought out. They seemed to imagine Pa might still be wet from the sinking.

‘What the hell are you doing there?’ he said. ‘Get out! Get out at once!’

‘Make me,’ I challenged him.

‘Oh please, Poppy,’ he whined. ‘You’re going to get me into hot water.’

For all his talk of turning around and taking me home, he carried right on driving. He knew who’d win if it came to a fight. Harry’s trouble was he didn’t have any backbone.

I said, ‘When Pa steps off that boat I want to be sure the first thing he sees is my face.’

‘There you go,’ he said. ‘Getting your hopes up. Well don’t come crying to me. I never invited you along.’

Around 32nd Street we began to see people. Hundreds of them hurrying down to the Cunard pier. Harry parked the Simplex and we joined the crowds. There was thunder rolling in over the Palisades and the Carpathia was on her way up the Hudson, with tugs and skiffs and anything else that would float swarming round her and blasts of magnesium light flashing from the newsmen’s cameras. She was making slow progress, and then word came up she had paused, down by Pier 32, so that certain items could be taken off. Lifeboats. Property of the White Star Line.

Harry whispered, ‘They’ll fetch a pretty penny, as curios.’

But they didn’t. As I heard years later, they were picked clean by human vultures before anyone could start the bidding, and the name Titanic was rubbed off them with emery paper and that was the end of that.

Slowly the Carpathia came home. Some people had cards bearing the name of the ones they were hoping to see. I wished I had thought to make a card. They held them up, praying for a wave or a smile, but nobody at the rail was smiling or waving.

It was half past eight by the time they began to warp her in, and then the thunderstorm broke. We waited another hour, in the rain, until she was moored and the gangplank was lowered, and lists of survivors were finally posted. That was when I got separated from Harry.

There was such a crush I could scarcely breathe and I was wet to the skin.

‘Please,’ I asked the man in front of me, ‘can you see if Minkel is there?’

But he gave me an elbow in the ribs and I never saw him again. A woman said she’d find out for me if I gave her a dollar, but I didn’t have a dollar. And so I just found a place to lean, against the customs shed, figuring the best thing was to stand still and allow Pa to spot me easily.

Then a Cunard porter noticed me.

‘Are you all right, Miss?’ he said. ‘Is it First Class you’re looking for?’

I said, ‘Mr Abraham Minkel. I can’t pay you though. I don’t come into my money until I’m twenty-one. But my father will tip you.’

He touched his cap and disappeared, and I didn’t expect to see him again. A sense of service was a thing of the past, as Ma and Aunt Fish often remarked, and everyone expected something in their grubby hand before they’d stir themselves.

And so I waited, shivering, wondering at the uselessness of Harry Glaser, trying to draw up a balance sheet of my standing at home. I believed my crimes of disobedience, ingratitude and impropriety might just be offset by the triumph of being the one to bring home Pa.

The ladies from First Class began to file into the echoing shed. There were children, too. Some were crying, most were silent, and the ladies still had on their hats. ‘How odd,’ I thought. ‘A sinking must be a good deal gentler than I imagined.’ And then this happened. I saw a face I knew.

The very moment I looked at her, she sensed it and looked back at me, quite directly. Then she turned her head away and disappeared into the crowd. I was still puzzling how an Irish, dismissed without references, could have sailed first-class and in such Parisian style, when the Cunard boy reappeared beside me.

‘Miss,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid to say I couldn’t find a Mr Abraham Minkel listed, but Mrs Minkel is there, alive and well. You should be seeing her any moment now.’

But the women had all disembarked. The men filed through next, but my Pa was not amongst them. They all had downcast eyes, and a hurried step, and somewhere in the crowd I heard somebody hiss. Being a survivor isn’t necessarily a happy condition, I realized later. There would always be the question, hanging in the air, too awful to ask, ‘And how were you so fortunate? What other poor soul paid for your life with his? Or hers?’ If you were an able-bodied man, it would have been better form to perish nobly.

‘Not spotted her yet, Miss?’ the porter asked. ‘Well, that’s a mystery.’

He was now taking more interest in my case than I liked. He was like a stray dog, eagerly padding along at my side, on the strength of one brief expression of gratitude.

I said, ‘It’s not a mystery. It was a cruel mistake. There was no Mrs Minkel. Only my Pa, but he’s not here. Is there another boat? Are there more following on?’

He looked away.

‘I don’t think so, Miss,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t think so at all.’

People milled around us, plucking at him, wanting his attention.

‘My Pa’s lost,’ I said. I knew it.

And he was glad enough then to make his getaway.

A woman said, ‘There’s to be a service of thanksgiving. Right away.’

What did I care? Thanksgiving for what?

‘Not just thanksgiving,’ she said, reading my expression. ‘To pray for the ones that were lost as well. A prayer is never wasted.’

The third-class passengers had been directed to another shed, and a group of them were leaving, and some first-class ladies, too, walking to the nearest church.

Over the heads of a hundred people I thought I saw the feather trim of the Irish’s hat, and I decided at that moment to add another item to the list of my transgressions. I abandoned all thoughts of Harry Glaser and followed the throng, walking as quickly as I could so as to catch up, trying to remember whether I had ever known her name.

We had had any number of Marys, several Annes and a Videlma Teresa who broke, against stiff competition, all previous records for brevity of employment with us, but on the whole, their names disappeared. They were, to a girl, impertinent, uncouth and given to ‘carrying on’ so that Ma often predicted her death would be certified as ‘caused by Irish’.

I had never been in a church before. Ma and Aunt Fish had formulated a plan for their concerted rise in New York society, and a key decision had been to keep a low profile vis-à-vis God.

‘Religion gives rise to intemperate opinions, Dora,’ Aunt Fish advised, ‘and a hostess does well to keep those from her table.’

So we avoided any association with God as carefully as we avoided cold drafts, and, with regard to this, nothing could have made Ma happier than Honey’s choice of Harry Glaser as a husband.

‘A good thing about Harry,’ I had often heard her say, ‘is that he doesn’t go in for religion.’

I knew therefore, as we came to the doors of St Peter’s Episcopalian church, to expect dangerous excesses inside, and I resolved to stay in command of myself. I kept my eyes downcast for five minutes at least, for fear of coming face to face with this God who was too controversial to have to dinner.

All around me grown men wept and crumbled, and candles were lit, and a song was sung, in poor cracked voices, for those in peril on the sea.

‘Too late now for that,’ I thought, aching for the smell of my Pa’s hair tonic. But I liked being there, close to people who had been saved from the dark and deep. I liked how determined they had been to walk to 20th Street and pray when they might have gone home directly and been cosseted with warm milk and cake.

She was kneeling, across the other side of the church, busy with some Irish hocus-pocus. I kept her in my sights and moved a couple of times, to get nearer to her, squeezing past people who complained and people who were too lost in their sorrow to notice. I had remembered her name.

When the singing and praying was over I moved quickly, to be sure of blocking her path as she made to leave.

‘Nellie,’ I said, ‘is it you?’

She gave me a stubborn look I recognized, but her face colored. She may have been dressed by Mr Worth, but she still had the look of a maid caught trying on her mistress’s gown.

I said, ‘My Pa was on the Titanic. Did you see him, by any chance?’

Still she resisted me, and I felt my chance slipping away, to know the worst, or to find new hope.

‘Please, Nellie,’ I begged. ‘Can you tell me anything at all?’

Her pertness dissolved.

‘I’m so sorry, Miss Poppy,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss. He went back for my muff. I begged him not to, but he would go …’

We stood face to face but at cross purposes, and people flowed around us, away, out of the church and back into life.

‘… it was my Persian broadtail muff,’ she said, ‘and it was an awful cold night.’

I said, ‘So you did see him? Were you close to him? Did he say anything?’

‘He said “Go to the boat station, Nellie. I’ll come to you there.”’

Then her tears started.

‘He lived and died a gentleman,’ she said. ‘Whatever people may say, there were no irregularities between us. I was there by way of secretary to him.’

I said, ‘How could you be? Mr Levi was his secretary. And anyway, can you read?’

‘I can,’ she said. ‘Well. I was more of an assistant. A personal assistant. There was no one could take away his headaches the way I could. And that’s how things stood. I’d swear to it on the good book.’

They always said that when they were lying. Next thing she’d be asking for wages still owed.

I said, ‘Where do you live? Where are you going?’

‘To my sister,’ she said. ‘Or maybe to my cousin.’

The slipperiness of the Irish. How right my mother was.

It was a long walk home. Three miles, I now know, but then I had no idea of distance or time. My shoes rubbed holes in my stockings and my toes were pinched and sore, but I pressed on as fast as I could. I knew the streets were full of robbers and murderers and women who drank sherry wine.

It wasn’t exactly fear kept me hurrying along. Now my Pa had died, dead seemed an easy thing to be. Still, I wasn’t sure I’d be as brave as he had been. ‘Go to the boat station, Nellie.’ When the moment came, I might squawk, or not quite die, and lie in agony in the gutter.

I knew, too, I’d be the subject of a full inquiry at home, and I preferred to face it as soon as possible. There was no predicting what grief would make of Ma. She might forgive all, in a fit of tenderness, or she might turn on me, like a wounded beast. In any event, it has always been my nature to take whatever I have coming to me as quickly as possible.

As I passed the New Theater, nearly home, I heard an automobile chugging toward me and I knew it was a search party in the shape of Harry Glaser. He all but threw me into the car. I didn’t think he had it in him.

‘You damned fool,’ was all he could say. ‘You goddamned fool!’

I said, ‘You were the one abandoned me. I waited for you. And does Honey know you use language?’

‘Don’t we have hard enough times ahead of us with your Ma,’ he said, ‘without you disappearing and putting me in a bad odor? What’s your game?’

I said, ‘I lost you in the crowd, that’s all. Why are you so afraid of Ma? What did she say? What’s my punishment?’

‘Consider yourself mighty lucky,’ he said. ‘So far you haven’t been missed, but you’re not home and dry yet. You’ve still got to get back into the house and into your bed, and I suppose you’ll be expecting my help? You’re a brat, no two ways.’

‘Harry,’ I said, ‘a porter told me there was a Minkel on the list of survivors. Did you see that?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I definitely did not, and neither did you if you know what’s good for you. Anyway, it was clearly a clerical error.’

A lamp was burning in the parlor, but it was only Uncle Israel Fish, smoking a last cigarette. He appeared in the doorway as I tiptoed up the stairs but seemed not to notice me. We only see what we expect to see, I suppose. It was another lesson for me, and I had learned so many in just one day. I listed them as I lay in bed, too tired for sleep.

1. My Pa was not indestructible.

2. Personal assistants got Persian lamb muffs and trips to Europe.

3. I was blessed with powers of invisibility.

4. Harry Glaser was a half-wit, my sister married him, therefore I would be expected to marry a half-wit, therefore I would not marry.

I got up, lit a candle, and one by one I committed to its flame my ear-correcting bandeaux. First the pink one, then the apricot, then the eau-de-Nil. They created an interesting and rather satisfying smell.

FOUR

It was Aunt Fish who came into my room next morning. She was wearing her black bombazine.

‘Poppy,’ she said, gravely, ‘a terrible sadness has come to this house, so you must now make great efforts to be a good girl, for your dear mother’s sake.’

I said, ‘I’m sure I always do try to be good.’

‘There is all the difference in the world between trying and succeeding,’ she said, ‘and quibbling with me is not a promising way to begin.’

I said, ‘I know Pa is drowned, Aunt Fish. I know Ma is a poor widow now.’

She leapt up and knotted the ends of her shawl in despair.

‘That is precisely the kind of heartless remark good girls do not make,’ she said. ‘Your duty is to spare your mother from harsh reminders.’

I got up and put on my wrapper. Aunt Fish was looking at my ruined stockings and muddied shoes.

I said, ‘Am I to pretend then that Pa isn’t drowned? Am I to pretend he may come back some day?’

‘You are to wash your face and show respect,’ she said. ‘You are to go to your mother, and try to persuade her to sip a little peptonized milk, to keep up her strength. And you are never ever to speak of drownings, or steam ships or … oceans. How worn out your shoes are, Poppy. I’d suggest a new pair, but you’ll be going out so seldom now it hardly seems worth the expense.’

And with those words, Aunt Fish raised the curtain on a whole new period of my life.

Ma was propped up with extra pillows. Her night table was cluttered with various bottled remedies, her little helpers. I could see she had been crying. I suppose she could see I had, too. She patted the bed beside her.

‘What a blessing I have you, Poppy,’ she said. ‘I see now, this was all meant to be. If you had been as favored with beauty as Honey you’d soon make a good match and then what would I do, left all alone in the world?’

I opened my mouth to say I didn’t think Honey was all that favored with beauty, but Ma was getting into her stride.

‘But it’s so clear to me now,’ she continued. ‘I was given a beauty for the consolation her children will bring me, and I was given a plain one for companionship in my old age. How wise Nature is!’

I said, ‘Does this mean I don’t have to go to Cincinnati for a new nose?’

‘The nose is cancelled,’ she said. ‘And the singing lessons and the French and the cotillions. There’s no sense in exerting ourselves in that direction anymore.’

The husband hunt had been called off. Still, I had rather enjoyed my singing lessons.

I said, ‘Shouldn’t you like me to be able to sing for you sometimes, Ma?’

‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘I should like you to read to me sometimes from the Home Journal. And mend stockings.’

She tried to stroke my hair, but her fingers caught in it. Standing in the rain had given it a particularly vicious kink.

‘We’ll just live quietly now,’ she said. ‘No more dinners.’

Dinners had always been a trial to her, as she clambered the foothills of society. She had once committed the solecism of following a potage crème with creams of veal en dariole. It was only the dessert, a Prune Shape, produced by Reilly, our cook, in a moment of whimsy, as a substitute for the Almond Shape that had been ordered, which saved Ma from the social ruin of presiding over a completely beige meal.

As far as I know she never descended to the kitchen. Her negotiations with Reilly were conducted entirely through a speaking tube that connected the parlor to the scullery. The temperature of their exchanges rose as the dinner hour drew near, and neither party ever seemed to understand that they could not only hear and be heard. They could also be overheard.

‘Reilly has been nipping at the brandy,’ was one of Ma’s favorite asides.

Reilly herself was fond of the prefix ‘fecken’’, as in, ‘I’ll give her fecken’ fricandeau of sweetbreads, all right.’

I took this to be a quaint usage from Reilly’s home country and sometimes repeated it, in imitation of her. I had no idea what it meant, and neither did Ma, so no harm was done.

On the day of a dinner, Ma required an extra dose of Tilden’s, for her nerves. The day after a dinner, her shades were kept tightly closed and she took nothing stronger than seltzer water. That Pa’s death meant an end to all this was no cause of regret to me.

I said, ‘What about the backboard? Do I still have to wear that?’

‘Good posture is always an asset,’ she said, ‘even in a homely girl.’

I sensed, though, that this was the moment to strike as many bargains as possible, and I was just about to sue for a ceasefire in the war against my protruding ears, when Aunt Fish appeared in the doorway. In her hand were the ashes of my corrective nightwear bandeaux.

‘Dora!’ she said. ‘I have had the candle removed from Poppy’s vanity table. I fear she is not yet to be trusted with unguarded flames.’

FIVE

Like Great Uncle Meyer, Aunt and Uncle Fish had not been blessed with children of their own, and perhaps they had expected Ma and Pa to follow Grandpa Minkel’s example and hand over their spare. At any rate, Aunt Fish seemed to believe she had some lien over me and the bigger I grew, the more forthcoming she was with her advice and opinions.

On the subject of molding and polishing Honey, she had deferred to my mother. Clearly she, the elder sister, understood better than Aunt Fish, a younger and childless person, how to raise a daughter, especially a daughter as perfectly pink and golden as Honey. But my aunt sensed the moment would come when her talents for, as she put it, ‘the handling of more difficult cases’ would be gratefully received. If Aunt Fish ever had a career, it was me.

After Pa’s death she deemed her normal daily visits to be inadequate and she moved into our house for an indefinite period, to spare Ma the burden of household decisions and make good my deficiencies as a tower of strength. Ma suggested that this might be a great inconvenience to Uncle Israel, but he insisted that nothing could be more convenient to him. He would dine at his club, he said, and be occupied until late every night going through Pa’s complicated business affairs with Mr Levi, ensuring everything was in order.

Complicated was a word that filled Ma with terror.

‘Are they not all in order, Israel?’ she asked him, handkerchief at the ready.

‘Nothing to worry about, Dora,’ he said. ‘I’m just going through things to make sure. Abe would have done the same for me.’

I said, ‘Are we ruined, Uncle Israel? Am I still a mustard heiress?’

‘Poppy!’ Aunt Fish said. ‘That is a thing to have said about one. One should not say it of oneself!’

‘Never fear, Pops,’ Uncle said, ‘you’ll come into a handsome amount.’

Ma said, ‘Not that you’ll have any need of it, since you will always have a home here and be provided for. You might think, Poppy, when you are of age, of making donations and helping with good works.’

‘There’ll certainly be plenty for that,’ Uncle said. ‘The Education Alliance is doing fine work with the immigrants. And The Daughters of Jacob. Both very worthy causes.’

Aunt Fish said, ‘Dora didn’t mean that kind of cause, Israel. One has to be careful in selecting one’s charities. They reflect on one so. Poppy might do better sending money to the little black babies in Africa.’

I’m sure it’s very easy to spend someone else’s inheritance. I didn’t bother to tell them I intended spending mine on silk harem pants and a gasoline-powered automobile and cake.

So Uncle dined at the Harmonie Club every night and Aunt Fish moved in with us and began nursing my mother through a carefully planned convalescence. At first, no callers were received. Ma stayed in her room and toyed with a little calf’s-foot jelly. I was allowed to brush her hair for fifteen minutes each day, and sometimes Honey came and read to her from Fashion Notes.

The name Minkel had only appeared in the first list of survivors published in The New York Times. By the time the next edition went to press, the phantom Mrs Minkel had disappeared and Ma seemed to be none the wiser. Harry Glaser had done something useful for once in his life.

By the middle of May, Ma had progressed to a small, baked fillet of sole with bread and butter fingers, followed by vermicelli pudding or perhaps an orange custard, by way of variety, and she felt able to receive Mrs Lesser and Mrs Schwab, and eventually the Misses Stone.

Mrs Schwab was herself a widow and understood what was appropriate, but Mrs Lesser was unpredictable. Sometimes she simply reported on the refreshments and gossip at her latest crush – she was very keen to be known for her afternoon teas – but sometimes she would canter off into more dangerous territory. Would there ever be a funeral for Pa, she would suddenly wonder out loud. If not, could there be a funeral monument? And if there could, what form should it take?

One of my duties was to anticipate this kind of conversational turn and head off Mrs Lesser at the pass, but sometimes my attention wandered and before I knew it Aunt Fish would be fanning Ma and tutting at me and suggesting to Mrs Lesser that she had already given us more than enough of her valuable time.

The thing was, I had questions myself, most of them far more macabre than Mrs Lesser’s. I knew, for instance, that the bodies of drowned persons were often hooked out of the East River and the Hudson, but I suspected things worked differently in an ocean. Still, sometimes I imagined Pa’s poor body, slowly finding its way to Pier 32. And other times I imagined he had never boarded that accursed boat. That he was still in London, inspecting his subsidiaries, and Irish Nellie had been, as usual, telling whoppers.

None of these ideas could ever be aired, of course. They were merely evidence of the unhealthy state of my mind and I knew better than to draw that kind of attention to myself. Apart from my sleeplessness and loss of appetite, daily life had become easier with Pa gone. Since April eighteenth my hair had been left au naturel. This alone gave me such a fierce appearance, I doubt even Aunt Fish would have dared to suggest resuming the applications of neck-whitener. We had reached a kind of accommodation. No one troubled me with beauty regimes, and I troubled no one with my questions. Then the Misses Stone came to call.

‘It occurs to us,’ one of them began, ‘we might be of assistance, at this sad time, in the … disposal of … unhappy reminders.’

The Misses Stone were collecting unwanted clothes for their Immigrant Aid Fund. It had never crossed my mind that Pa’s things wouldn’t hang forever in their closets. I visited them every day and buried my face in the cloth of his coats, to smell his cologne. The possibility that the Misses Stone might bundle them away and give them to strangers hit me much harder than the news of the sinking. I sprang from my chair while Ma and Aunt Fish still sat, pudding-faced, absorbing the request.

‘We have only happy, treasured reminders of my dear father and there are no plans to dispose of any of them’ was what I intended to say. But it came out as ‘They’re mine, you hateful crows! Pa’s things are mine! And no one else shall ever take them.’

They were unnerved by the sight of me, I know. Even diminished by grief, there was enough of me to make two of the birdlike Misses Stone, and then there was my hair, which weeks of neglect had turned from a deformity into an instrument of terror. They fluttered toward the door under cover of Aunt Fish’s bosom.

‘Unhinged by our loss,’ I heard her whisper. ‘Perhaps, when a little more time has passed …’ and the Misses Stone made little gobbling noises of sympathy.

Ma was looking at me in amazement.

‘Don’t let them take his things,’ I yelled at her. ‘Don’t let anyone take them. I miss Pa. I have to have the smell of him.’

‘Oh Poppy,’ was all she said. ‘Oh Poppy …’

‘Well!’ Aunt Fish said, when she returned from seeing off the Misses Stone. ‘That was a fine display you made of yourself.’

Ma struggled to her feet. I realize now she was only forty-two and not at all the old lady she seemed. She put out her arms and held me stiffly to her jet stomacher.

‘Oh Poppy,’ she said, ‘how stricken you are. I think perhaps one of my powders …’

She turned to Aunt Fish, who was all for smacking me, I dare say.

‘Zillah,’ she said, ‘I think poor Poppy needs a powder. Or perhaps some of my special drops?’

‘Hmm,’ said Aunt Fish. ‘And time alone, in her room, to compose herself and consider what embarrassment she has caused.’

I said, ‘I’m sure it wasn’t me who came begging for a dead man’s clothes. I’m sure we are not the ones who should feel embarrassed.’

Ma released me from our awkward embrace.

‘They are crows, Aunt Fish,’ I cried, as I fled the room. ‘They are crows and you are a gull for allowing them.’

I hid for an hour inside Pa’s closet, comforted a little by its smells but anxious, too, that they might be fading. When I returned to my room, a small bottle had appeared on my night table. Pryce’s Soothing Extract of Hemp, recommended for cases of nervous excitement.

SIX

All through June and July our household was run by Aunt Fish, and then she stayed on through the worst of the August heatwave because we had an electric fan and she did not, and she feared she might expire without it. Uncle Israel struggled on without her, quite weary I suppose of having to dine out every night and drink champagne and play cards with other poor bachelors.

The days hung dead and hopeless. We visited no one, we had nothing to refresh our conversations, and every exchange was hobbled by unmentionable subjects. Water, travel, Europe, mustard, Iowa, money, joy, happiness, unhappiness; these were the main taboos. But to those I added my own secret list: Irish secretaries, gowns by Mr Worth, death by drowning and ghosts.

I was employed in a series of sewing assignments, trimming handkerchiefs with black ribbon, and turning slightly worn sheets sides to middle, a pointless exercise made all the more absurd by the fact that I had ten thumbs. In the privacy of my room, when I made clothes for my dolls and stitched them with my preferred left hand, I sewed very well indeed, but in the parlor, of course, only the use of the correct hand was permitted.

‘How awkward you look, Poppy,’ Ma said. ‘But you must persevere.’

While I stitched, Ma and Aunt Fish conversed. In the morning, dinner was discussed, and the social events none of us would be attending. Just once a week my aunt would tear herself away from us to attend the opera.

‘It gives me no pleasure, Dora,’ she always said, ‘but a box cannot go to waste.’

Otherwise the evenings were spent considering next day’s luncheon and reviewing our health, two not unconnected subjects.

‘An omelette is very binding,’ Aunt Fish would bid.

‘But celery is invigorating,’ Ma would counter-bid.

My only release from this was that once a week I was allowed to visit Honey. She and Harry had a red-brick on West 74th Street with a bay window high above the street that made it lighter and more cheerful than home. The serviceable, dark plum chintz had been picked out on Ma’s advice, and I now recognize, recalling the abundance of valances and frilled portières, other signs of her hand. If society abhorred a naked door frame, who was she to argue?

Still, I loved to visit there and play Chinese checkers and try on Honey’s new hats, and she enjoyed my being there. Sometimes, without Ma around, or Harry, she could be quite gay.

But in the fall of 1912 something changed. On my weekly visit there was no gaiety. All afternoon Honey just sat in her cushioned rocker and sucked peppermints. And the next week, and the next. It was December before I found out why. A baby was coming to live with Honey and Harry.

This news made me very happy. I had often wished to have a brother or a puppy and Honey’s baby seemed to promise a good alternative.

‘Where is it coming from?’ I asked, and Honey turned scarlet.

‘A little star fell from heaven,’ Ma said, ‘and has come to rest under her heart.’

I had noticed that the area beneath and around Honey’s heart had expanded recently, but I’d attributed this to the quantity of violet creams she ate.

‘And then what?’ I asked.

‘The stork will bring it from a special baby garden,’ Aunt Fish cut in.

‘Yes,’ said Ma, abandoning her story about the star, ‘and give it to the nurse and she’ll place it in the cradle.’

I was confused. So next time I was down in the kitchen, looking for company and cookies, I asked the Irish. We had a rosy-cheeked one at that time, quite pretty.

‘I wonder where Honey’s baby will come from?’ I said, drawing on the oilcloth with my wetted finger.

The Irish put down the silver cloth.

‘How old are you, Poppy?’ she asked.

I was just fifteen.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘you know you get your monthly health …?’

Reilly slammed down a tureen in front of her.

‘Wash out your mouth and get on with your work,’ she said.

The Irish grinned at me and polished on in silence until Reilly disappeared into the pantry. Then she leaned across the table.

‘’Tis very simple,’ she whispered. ‘Mr Harry had his way with her and put a bun in her oven and now she’ll blow up and up till her time comes and then she’ll be brought to bed of it and scream and scream and drop it like a sow-pig, and then there’ll be a grand pink little baby.’

I ran to my room and tried to compose myself before luncheon. I vowed, on my next visit to West 74th Street, to tell Honey what I’d learned. She seemed so calm, languid even, I couldn’t believe she understood what a terrible fate awaited her.

‘Harry will do it,’ Ma always said. ‘Leave it to Harry.’

Leave it to Harry indeed. I might have guessed he had something to do with it.

My sister was brought to bed of a baby boy on May 28, 1913. Three weeks before, she had taken up residence in her old room, so Ma and Aunt Fish could keep watch for the stork, so I supposed. In the event, things turned out much as the Irish had said they would, with Harry being sent away and Honey screaming, and a nurse arriving who drank quantities of tea, and finally a doctor in a top hat, with something in his bag that put a stop to all the yelling.

I was allowed to see my nephew when he was two hours old, and then it devolved to me to start breaking the news to Ma that he would not be named Abe, for his dear departed grandpa.

‘How well he suits “Sherman”,’ I said. Honey had suggested this as an opening.

‘Sherman?’ Ma said. ‘Sherman? As usual you are quite mistaken, Poppy. In this family we do not name our children after … hotels.’

‘Not after the hotel, Ma,’ Harry tittered, when he was finally admitted to see his wife and child. ‘Sherman, as in General William Tecumseh Sherman.’ And he attempted to sing ‘While We Were Marching Through Georgia’, as though that explained everything.

Ma was quiet for a while.

‘It seems to me,’ she said, returning to the battlefield, ‘that if you wish to name my grandson for a public figure, it should be for our new president. Abraham Woodrow Glaser sounds very well.’

‘’Fraid not, Ma,’ Harry said. ‘Can’t tar the boy with a Democrat brush. His name will be Sherman Ulysses, and that’s my final word on it.’

Ma’s knuckles whitened round her handkerchief.

‘Tell you what though,’ he said, backtracking a little at the prospect of tears. ‘Tell you what. If the next one’s a girl, we’ll name her Dora, for you.’

From what I had seen and heard that day, I doubted there would be a next one. I planned to consult the Irish again and see whether such things could be prevented.

Meanwhile ugly little Sherman Ulysses Glaser cried and slept and cried some more, and eventually I was allowed to cradle him.

‘I’m your maiden aunt Poppy,’ I told him, and he curled his little fingers around my thumb. Honey had three weeks lying-in before she took him home to West 74th Street, and Ma didn’t waste a moment of it.

‘Abraham,’ she kept whispering to him as he slept. ‘Grandma’s special little Abraham.’

Down in the kitchen I heard talk.

‘Is Mrs Honey’s baby to be cut?’ the Irish asked me.

‘Why?’ I asked, and she and Reilly exchanged annoying little smiles. I took the question straight to Ma, who was sitting with Aunt Fish and Honey and Harry’s mother, the senior Mrs Glaser.

‘Poppy!’ Ma said. ‘Not in the parlor!’

I had to wait until the company had left. Then I was taken to Ma’s bedroom to have it explained that some baby boys underwent a procedure, but the Minkels and the Glasers were unanimous in judging it quite unnecessary.

‘It’s just an old-fashioned racial thing,’ Honey said, ‘and we are civilized New Yorkers.’

I said, ‘I wish you could stay here, Honey. I’d help you with Sherman Ulysses and we could make dolls’ clothes and have fun.’

‘I’m a mother now, Pops,’ she said. ‘I don’t have time for fun.’

So the party was over. Honey took Sherman home, and time slowed down again, crawling past me while I read to Ma from Collier’s Weekly, and danced imaginary cotillions, but very quietly, so as not to tire her.

Mrs Schwab visited, and Mrs Lesser, and even the Misses Stone returned. They had forgiven me my hysterical outburst and after I turned sixteen they seemed more inclined to take me seriously. They knew better than to mention the distribution of second-hand clothes, but some of their projects, their work amongst ‘the element’, sounded adventurous and exciting. They raised money for the settlement houses where the Russian Hebrews could be washed and fed and trained out of their rude oriental ways. They arranged classes where the unfortunates could learn hygiene and gymnastics. They sent them to summer camp.

I said, ‘Gymnastics and summer camp! I’m sure I shouldn’t mind being an unfortunate.’

The Misses Stone laughed.

‘No, Poppy,’ one of them said, ‘you wouldn’t say so if you saw how people lived. Workers and donations are what we need. Perhaps some day, when you’re not so much needed at home?’

‘I hope,’ Ma sighed, ‘some day I may feel strong enough to spare Poppy for a few hours.’

Her true intention was that I should never set foot anywhere near such dangerous territory, but I wore away her resolve with the daily drip, drip, drip of my requests. It took many months. Then suddenly, one summer morning, she threw down her needlepoint and said, ‘I see you are determined to break my heart, Poppy, so go and be done with it.’

Two days later I was taken by trolley-car to the Bowery, and then, with a Miss Stone on either side of me for safety, I was swept into the tumult of Delancey Street, the very place where Pa had enjoyed his cherry blintzes.

I tried to tell the Misses Stone about this exciting coincidence, and they smiled, but I wasn’t at all sure they could even hear me. I had never in my life encountered so much noise or seen so many people. Then we turned onto Orchard Street and the buildings and the noise of the stinking, shouting unfortunates pressed in on me even closer.

There were dead ducks and chickens hanging from hooks, and women with dirty hands selling eggs from handcarts, and pickle barrels, and shop signs in foreign squiggles, and small boys carrying piles of unfinished garments higher than themselves, and ragged girls playing potsy on the sidewalk.

‘Why is everyone shouting?’ I shouted.

‘Because they’re happy to be here.’ That was the best explanation the Misses Stone could offer.

I said, ‘I’m sure abroad must be a very terrible place if Orchard Street makes them happy.’

We went to The Daughters of Jacob Center where the element could learn to dress like Americans and raise healthy children. And then to the Edgie Library where they could study our language.

‘You see, Poppy,’ they said, ‘how much needs doing?’

I said, ‘I don’t come into my money until I’m twenty-one and I don’t know how much there’ll be because Pa had complicated affairs.’

But the Misses Stone said it wasn’t only money they needed but helpers, and why didn’t I try sitting, just for five minutes, and helping someone with their English reading.

A small girl stood in front of me with a primer in her hands, trying to stare me down. I turned to tell the Stones I probably wouldn’t be very good at it, but they were hurrying away to inspect another class, and the staring girl was still waiting with her book.

I said, ‘The first thing you should learn is not to stare, especially not at your elders and betters.’

She was pale as wax, and skinny.

‘What’s your name?’ she said. She spoke perfect English.

I said, ‘And if you’re going to read to me you had better start immediately because I have to go home very soon.’

I sat on a stool and she stood beside me, a little too close for my liking, and read. She was pretty good.

I said, ‘You can read. You don’t need good works doing for you.’

She grinned.

I said, ‘Have you been to summer camp?’

She shook her head.

I said, ‘How about gymnastics?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I did do that, but now I can’t be spared. I have to help make garters. We get one cent a piece. My name’s Malka but I like Lily better. What do you think?’

I didn’t really know what gymnastics were. As I had never been allowed them I surmised they were something desirable.

‘How old are you?’ she asked. She was one impertinent child.

‘And how were the gymnastics?’ I asked, feeling my way.

‘They were fun,’ she said. ‘Are you married? I like your coat. Want to see how I can turn a somersault?’ And she just flipped over, like a toy monkey. She went over so fast, I couldn’t see how she did it. This attracted the attention of the other little monkeys, who all left off their studying and gathered around me, fingering the fabric of my coat.

I looked around for someone to rescue me, but minutes passed before a Miss Stone appeared.

‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘You’ve made some friends already. They’re quite fascinated by you.’

I said, ‘I think I have to go home now. I think I’m needed there.’

‘But you’ve made such a hit,’ she said. ‘It’s because you’re a younger person, I expect. Do stay a little longer.’

I had to insist most firmly that I be home no later than four.

The girl called Malka shouted after me as we left the room.

‘Hey, Miss No Name,’ she called. ‘You have pretty hair.’

It was a measure of everyone else’s poor opinion of my looks that a compliment from an unwashed unfortunate went straight to my head.

‘That child reads well,’ I said. ‘How does she come to be here?’

‘The Lelchucks?’ she said. ‘They had to run from the Russians. Would you like to meet the rest of the family?’

I was torn. On the one hand I felt uneasily far from home. The loudness and smell of the place exceeded anything I could have imagined. But on the other hand I had a Miss Stone either side of me, greatly experienced in the ways of the ‘element’, and anyway, wasn’t I always longing to escape from the monotony of the parlor? I decided I would rather like to see where Malka Lelchuck lived.

We turned onto Stanton Street, where the buildings seemed still taller and darker, and every fire escape was cluttered with boxes and furniture. The entrance to Malka’s house was unlit and dirty, and as we climbed two flights of stairs people pushed past us.

I said, ‘These unfortunates seem to have a great many callers.’

The thinner Miss Stone laughed. ‘No, Poppy,’ she said, ‘these are their neighbors. The Lelchucks have only two rooms.’

Then I began to understand why they were called unfortunates. They had to share their buildings with strangers.

The door was open. The Misses Stone went in and beckoned me to follow, but I peered in from the threshold. Mrs Lelchuck kept her head bowed, too shy to speak, or perhaps too tired. She and four girls were busy around a table, finishing garters. There was a smell of frying, and vinegar, and other unknown things. My head swam.

There was something in the scene I recognized. Tedium, possibly. Finishing garters looked like very boring work. But there was something else I noticed, though I couldn’t name it. I think I now know it was the simple concord of a family working together. At any rate this, combined with the information that Malka Lelchuck had learned gymnastics, suggested to me that these so-called unfortunates were a good deal better off than I. Furthermore, I could not stop toying with the novelty of a compliment. Someone thought I had pretty hair. The unfortunates had looked at me with wonder and admiration. I passed the trolley ride home aflame with self-glory.

By dinner time the surprise of becoming an intrepid doer of good works and a beauty had so drained me I was unable to give an account of myself.

‘I feared as much,’ Ma said. ‘You have caught a disease and now we shall all pay for your recklessness.’

That night I dreamed of pickles that turned somersaults and ducks with no feathers and when I woke next morning I had a circle of itching red weals around each ankle. I had brought home with me from Stanton Street a deputation of fleas. Ma had the house dismantled. The floors were scrubbed with brown soap. Small dishes of camphor were burned in every room. And every surface was dabbed with kerosene until an inevitable encounter between a naked flame and kerosene fumes deprived Reilly of her eyebrows, and consequently us of our cook.

As the Irish had been dismissed just days before for ferrying quantities of canned goods out of our pantry and home to her mother, carrying them away under her skirts, the final reckoning was that we were reduced to one housemaid, one parlor maid and a person who came in weekly to do mending and alterations. We faced social ruin and starvation, and all because of my headstrong expedition down amongst ‘the element’.

‘I hope,’ Ma said, ‘you are quite satisfied.’

But I wasn’t. On reflection, from the safe haven of West 76th Street, I decided I wanted more expeditions. I wanted to ride on trolley-cars, and maybe even on the elevated railway. I wanted to do good works amongst grateful people who admired my hair. I wanted to taste a cherry blintz.

But further visits to Delancey Street were unthinkable for a while. I was in trouble, and my disgrace was intensified by our having to dine every night with Aunt Fish and Uncle Israel until the first in a series of unsatisfactory replacements for Reilly began her duties. Even then it was many weeks before I sensed any let-up in my aunt’s watchful disapproval. In fact it wasn’t until November and the occasion of my seventeenth birthday that I felt I had finally been forgiven.

‘Getting to be quite the young lady, Pops,’ said Uncle Israel.

He and Aunt Fish gave me a sketch book and a metal box with little blocks of paint.

‘Watercolors. An elegant and suitable occupation for you, Poppy,’ explained Aunt Fish.

‘How kind,’ said Ma, ‘and how timely, now that you will be settling down to your duties at home.’

I heard a door slam shut on my career as a brave and beautiful benefactress.

From Ma I received a new writing case, and from Baby Sherman Ulysses a framed photograph. My best gifts though were from Honey who, in addition to a dreary manicure set, brought me a bag of scraps from her dressmaker, a bag with pieces of pale green crêpe de Chine and red taffeta and blue satin.

I hugged her.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘you are old enough now to stop chewing your nails, so I thought I’d encourage you. It’s time you took more care in your toilette.’

I said, ‘Why? We’re not looking for a husband anymore.’

Honey said that neat nails were an asset to anyone and Ma and Aunt Fish couldn’t have agreed with her more.

In a roundabout way I even received a gift from Reilly, who returned, on November fourteenth, and offered to give us just one more chance, thereby saving me from further nightly inspections at Aunt Fish’s dinner table.

I used my birthday scraps to make dolls’ clothes, as Honey had intended, and when the scraps were all gone, I used my paints to plan what I should like to make next. Shiny, slippery dresses, and pantaloons with beads and tassels, and big, bright coats that trailed behind like folded butterfly wings and flashed a lining of shot orange silk.

Ma said, ‘Wasting paint again, Poppy? How I should love you to make me a painting of trees and clouds. Just a small one. I’m sure there is no necessity to splash the paint about so.’

I was allowed to resume my weekly visits to Honey’s house, too, once we could be certain fleas were the only bad thing I’d brought home from Stanton Street. I’d go for a whole afternoon, and look through Honey’s closets and try on her hats and shawls and bang about until I woke Sherman Ulysses. He always seemed very pleased to see me, and he was quite advanced, for a Glaser.

‘Honey,’ I said one time, ‘you know how I have to stay with Ma now and be her help and comfort? Well, what will I do when Ma is dead?’

‘Gracious, Pops,’ she said, ‘that won’t be for years. Thirty years maybe.’

‘No, but still,’ I said, ‘what will I do then?’

‘You’ll live with me and Harry,’ she said.

That was the day I decided to write to Cousin Addie in Duluth.

‘Dear Cousin Addie,’ I wrote.

I am your Uncle Abe Minkel’s girl. We have never met, but I am an old maid like you. I hope we can be correspondents. What are your dolls’ names? I make very good dolls’ clothes which I could send you some time. I would certainly be willing to visit Duluth some day.

I never mailed it. Before I could work out a secret way to discover her address and to receive her replies without interference from Ma, I was distracted by new thrills and skirmishes. A war had begun in Europe.

SEVEN

President Wilson told us that the United States of America must be seen to be impartial in thought, word and deed, but the Prussians cared nothing for that, so we were preparing for invasion. Quantities of canned goods were brought in and a lock, to which only Ma held a key, was fitted to the pantry door. This reawakened Reilly’s dormant desire to flounce out and leave us in the lurch again, and threats were exchanged. Only the news, flashed to us from Harry’s office, that a German submarine had been sighted in Long Island Sound, pulled Reilly back into line.

‘Well?’ Ma said, with the confidence of a player who is holding a royal flush. ‘The Hun is at the door. Are you staying or leaving?’

Reilly returned below stairs, but as long as Ma kept up the locked pantry regime, Reilly exacted her own small satisfactions.

‘Asparagus tips, if it’s not too much trouble.’ Her voice would erupt from the speaking tube, like an Upper Bay foghorn, and quite destroy the gentility of Ma’s parlor.

It turned out there had been no submarine. But something else was menacing us, as I should have guessed from conversations between Ma and Honey which always ended abruptly as I came into the room. Then a meeting was convened, for Sunday afternoon. Honey and Harry were to attend and the Aunt and Uncle Israel Fishes, and tea and seed cake would be served.

I said, ‘I’ll take Sherman Ulysses for a walk in his bassinet.’

Seed cake was my least favorite.

‘No, Poppy,’ Ma said. ‘This concerns even you.’

We were assembled to discuss the question of German connections.

Harry said, ‘Weiner, Ittelman, Schwab, they’ve all stopped speaking German, even behind closed doors.’

Ma said, ‘I’m sure I wouldn’t know German if I heard it. Abe never used it. Nor his father.’

I said, ‘Are we Germans, then?’

‘Of course not, you foolish girl,’ Ma and Aunt Fish chorused.

‘It’s a question of appearances,’ Harry went on. He stood up and stroked his moustaches and rocked on his heels as he spoke. I suppose this helped him to feel less of a nonentity.

‘We all know we’re not Germans,’ he said. ‘We certainly don’t behave like Germans. But we have to face facts. Every name tells a story and as patriotic Americans we’d be fools not to free ourselves of any taint. A change of name. That’s all it takes. We’re changing to Grace. A good old American name.’

‘Don’t see the need,’ Uncle Israel said. ‘I recall when your father changed from Glassman to Glaser. Seems to me that was change enough.’

‘You’re wrong, Israel,’ Harry said. ‘You’d be surprised what little things folk pick up on. I have to do this, for my boy’s sake.’

Aunt Fish agreed with Harry and had quite set her heart on becoming a Fairbanks, but Uncle Israel would have none of it.

‘Question,’ he challenged her. ‘What is a herring? What is a carp? What is a turbot? I’ll tell you. They are fish. F-I-S-H. A good plain American word. I rest my case.’

Meanwhile Ma was eyeing me nervously. As well she might.

‘We were thinking of Mink,’ she said, ‘but as Harry pointed out, even Mink has a ring to it. So I have settled upon Minton. A very elegant, English name that will serve us well. Poppy Minton! How pretty it sounds. I believe it suits you better than Minkel any day.’

I allowed her to keep talking until I was sure I understood her meaning. Then I upended tea and seed cake all over her and the Turkish rug.

‘Good,’ Harry continued, as though an overturned tea tray was nothing remarkable, ‘so that’s settled. And you’ll be interested to hear I’ve just acquired a little jobbing printers, so your cards and so forth can be changed at advantageous rates.’

‘I’m not changing my name,’ I screamed. ‘I shall always be a Minkel. Always, always. I’d rather be a German than a Minton.’

It fell to Aunt Fish to slap my face and express loud regrets that I had returned from my afternoon amongst the wild Asiatics of Stanton Street rebellious as well as lousy.

‘Now, now! Nothing’s decided yet, Pops,’ Uncle Israel called after me as I ran from the room. But it was. Harry had already made moves to change his name to Grace, and wherever Harry led, Ma would follow.

I hid in Pa’s closet and wept. Down in the parlor another part of him was being taken from me, and it seemed – perhaps it was the crying affecting my sinuses – but it seemed that his clothes hardly smelled of him anymore.

‘If they do it, Pa,’ I whispered into his gray worsted, ‘I shall change it back to Minkel the moment I’m of age.’

I did too. And though Honey may have gone to her grave a Grace instead of a Glaser, to this day I address my correspondence with Sherman Ulysses to Mr S. U. Glaser. He complains and says it causes confusion and inconvenience to the staff of the Pelican Bay Retirement Home, but I tell him, the money he’s paying he’s entitled to discommode a few people. They’re all foreigners anyhow.

Nineteen fourteen turned into nineteen fifteen. The Misses Stone continued their work trying to uplift the unfortunate Hebrews, Uncle Israel Fish joined a relief committee and Harry, correctly anticipating a trend for changing disadvantageous names, bought two more printing firms.

In May the Germans sank the Lusitania with the loss of one hundred and twenty-eight American lives, and Ma and Aunt Fish reviewed their invasion precautions. There was an evacuation plan, involving dollars stuffed inside corsets and a secret address in Cedar Rapids. Iowa was apparently to be given a second chance. Priority of travel was awarded to Honey and to Sherman Ulysses, carrier of the blood of Abe Minkel, if not of his name, and they would be accompanied by Ma. I was to bring up the rear with Aunt Fish. This didn’t bother me. Much as I longed to escape the monotony of West 76th Street, a Hun invasion sounded too exciting a prospect to miss.

In the event, the closest Ma and Honey came to running for port was when the Atlantic Fleet was anchored in the Hudson and German agents were caught planning to blow up the guests at a Grand Naval Ball that was to be held on 72nd Street.

Defeated by the concept of traveling light and traveling fast, Ma was so unable to decide which hats to leave behind that the moment passed. The Germans were deported. The fleet, having danced till dawn, sailed safely away. And I was left, untangling the silks in Ma’s embroidery basket, wondering what an invasion might feel like.

I redrafted my letter to Cousin Addie, hoping to capture her interest with the news that I had been as close as four blocks to the barbarian invaders. I obtained her address and a postage stamp from Ma’s writing table, and I dropped it in a mailbox on the way to my weekly visit with Sherman Ulysses. As to how I would explain the arrival of Cousin Addie’s reply, I felt that Providence would inspire me when the moment came. All that talk of war made audacity seem the order of the day.

EIGHT

I followed the war as best I could using my old school atlas. Honey and I had enjoyed a brief exposure to education at the Convent of the Blessed Redeemer. We both started late, due to measles, whooping cough and Ma’s conviction that paper harbored disease and all books were written by socialists, and I finished early, almost immediately after Honey graduated, due to scarlatina and the nuns’ inability to warm to me once my blonde and sainted sister had left.

‘We pray you may find somewhere more suitable,’ Sister Diotisalvi wrote to my parents, and Pa said, ‘Let her go to the Levison School.’ But the Levison was on the East Side. I’d have had to cross Central Park every day, a journey Ma and Aunt Fish equated with finding the Northwest Passage. Worse still, the Levison was getting a reputation for turning out bookish and disputatious students. One of the Schwab girls had attended for just one year and had emerged so deformed, so stripped of delicacy, that Mrs Schwab had had to search as far afield as Winnipeg, Canada, to find her a husband.

So I was not enrolled there, nor anywhere else. From the age of thirteen I had been tutored at home. By which I mean I received erratic visits from teachers of French, piano and dancing, and Ma taught me the correct way to serve tea. Of the Balkans, or Belgium, or Kaiser Wilhelm, I knew nothing. But I was a fast study, and Ma depended entirely upon me to explain about the Eastern Front.

‘All this rampaging around is most unsettling, I’m sure,’ she said. ‘If only people would be polite and stay in their own countries. Prussians and Russians and Macedonians. It’s all too hectic.’

I was a little confused myself whether the brave Russians who had taken on the Hun were the same ones who had cruelly chased Malka Lelchuck from her home, and I should have liked to ask the Misses Stone about it, but they never called anymore. They were too busy with war work.

Then the Ballet Russe came to the Century Theater and as a reward for recent good behavior I was invited to join Aunt Fish and Uncle Israel to see the opening performance of Petrushka. Preparations began immediately after breakfast when Honey arrived with her burnt-orange Directoire gown and a chocolate-brown velveteen evening coat.

Burnt orange, it turned out, was not my color, but with a little help from Ma’s seed pearl choker and a dab of cream rouge my skin was coaxed out of a tendency to mealiness. The shoe problem was not so easily solved. Honey’s tapestry evening slippers were size 4. My feet were size 7.

The Irish was assigned to do the best she could with a can of boot black and my battered day shoes.

‘No one will see,’ Ma said, ‘if you are careful to take small steps.’

After luncheon I was excused all further duties and sent to my room with instructions to double my dose of Pryce’s Soothing Extract of Hemp and lie still with my eyes closed.

‘Attending a ballet is a very draining business,’ Ma advised me. ‘You must conserve yourself, otherwise you will be no use to me tomorrow and then what shall I do?’

At six I was collected by Uncle Israel’s driver. We no longer had one of our own. After Pa’s death Ma had given him notice.

‘After all,’ she said, ‘we shall hardly be going anywhere.’

Ma had plenty of money, but she seemed always to derive pleasure from small economies.

‘Remember, Poppy,’ Ma called after me as I bounded downstairs to the front door, ‘small steps.’

We ate an early supper of clear soup and epigrams of mutton, and I was supplied with an extra precautionary napkin, to be tied under my chin.

‘It would be a tragedy,’ Aunt Fish said, ‘if Honey’s beautiful gown was ruined, when she has been generous enough to lend it.’

It wasn’t all that beautiful a gown.

Uncle Israel asked, ‘What is it again we’re going to see?’

‘It will come to me momentarily,’ Aunt Fish said, ‘though why you ask I cannot fathom. I see you are quite determined to dislike it, whatever it’s called.’

I suppose musical comedies were more to Uncle Israel’s taste. I suppose he took along the evening paper as a fall-back in case of boredom.

I had never dreamed how wonderful a theater might be. The carpets were thicker and deeper, the chandeliers were vaster and sparklier than anything I had imagined. And there were marble staircases curving either side of a palm garden. I should have liked to practice majestic sweeping on those stairs.

But most exciting of all was the frenzy of the orchestra preparing to play and the roar of the audience. Aunt Fish was examining every face in the grand tier, and occasionally she would flutter her hand.

‘The Elmore Ferbers are here,’ she observed, ‘in spite of the talk. How brave she looks.’

Uncle Israel looked up from his paper and rolled his eyes.

‘And I spy Mrs Root,’ she pressed on, ‘with a person who may be her sister from Buffalo. What a serviceable gown that twilled silk has turned out to be. I declare I must have seen it a hundred times.’

The lights went down.

‘Now, Poppy,’ she whispered, patting my hand, ‘we need only stay for the first act. And do sit up nicely. With good posture and Honey’s lovely gown I believe you look rather pretty this evening.’

The curtain went up. The stage appeared to be covered with snow, and crowds of people were walking about, just like they were in a real town. There were candy stalls and a merry-go-round and a puppet theater, and everyone seemed happy, except for Petrushka who looked sad and the Ballerina who looked plain dumb. Petrushka wore beautiful blue boots and red satin trousers, but the clothes I liked best were the Wicked Moor’s. He wore gold trousers and a bright green jacket and his hat was made of twisted yellow and violet silk.

Uncle Israel didn’t care for the music.

‘Darned racket,’ he said, and he took out his newspaper again, even though it was far too dark for him to read.

Aunt Fish kept wondering aloud why they hadn’t been able to find a dancer who could point his toes.

I said, ‘I think he’s meant to be dancing that way.’

‘Meant to?’ she said. ‘Of course he isn’t meant to. Ballet is danced with pointed toes, as I would have expected you to know. And I’m sure one pays enough to see correct technique.’

I was anxious that the combination of rackety music and incorrect feet might provoke an early exit, so I fairly begged Aunt Fish to be allowed to stay to the end. This made a sickening spectacle, I dare say, but it worked. I believe she was so astonished by my fawning she quite forgot about leaving the theater early. So the Moor killed Petrushka, the curtain came down, and far below us the livelier element of audience divided, two-thirds whistling and stamping, one-third booing.

With the house lights up, and the prospect of a second supper drawing near, Uncle Israel became cheerful again.

‘Nine-thirty and our duty is done,’ he said. ‘Now that’s what I call a decent show.’

I said, ‘I should like to see it all again.’

‘Well, don’t look at me,’ he said. ‘I’ve swallowed my dose. Bring your sister. Bring your mother.’

Aunt Fish gave him a warning tap with her fan.

‘Dora would find the stairs far too taxing,’ she said. ‘And I don’t know that anything so progressive would suit Honey. Besides, it seemed to me a rather silly story. How much more satisfactory it would have been if someone had married the dainty little doll.’

But I was glad Petrushka never got the Ballerina. It was bad enough he always had to go to his poky room and couldn’t wander around and buy gingerbread and just please himself, without having a prissy girlfriend, too. He was better off dead.

Uncle Israel said why didn’t he treat us all to steak tartare at Luchow’s, but Aunt Fish said she thought we’d had quite enough stimulation for one evening. I didn’t care. I was ready to go home and dream about bright blue boots and turbans made of yellow and violet silk. It seemed to me I had discovered an elegant answer to the question of my mutinous hair.

NINE

By the beginning of 1917 President Wilson had taken about as much as he could from the Hun, and even Reilly, who never had a good word to say about the British and believed they intended to take over the world, even she was preparing herself for all-out war. She kept a heavy poker by her bed, in case of a night-time invasion, and was working, in her spare time, on a type of cambric nosebag filled with crushed charcoal biscuits, which she hoped would protect her from phosgene gas. After she had made one for herself and one for the Irish she began work on a miniature one for Sherman Ulysses.

I ran upstairs to report this act of kindness, but it cut no ice with Ma.

‘Little wonder,’ she said, ‘that we are expected to eat our chicken still pink at the bone, when the help amuse themselves all day with handicrafts.’

I said, ‘When the war comes …’ but she would never let me get any further. She was of the firm belief that talking about a thing could bring it on, and that, therefore, the best policy was to look on the bright side. She even planned a season of gay afternoon teas, her first social foray since Pa’s death.

‘Teas,’ she said, ‘are quite suitable for a widow, and not nearly so draining as dinners.’

When war did come, in April, she said, ‘Poppy, you have been humming this past hour and smiling to yourself like a loon. I fail to account for your happiness. I’m sure war is a most inconvenient thing.’

It wasn’t quite happiness I felt, but a little bubble of excitement. Whatever her shortcomings, my mother was deeply patriotic, so it seemed possible that my country’s need of me might outweigh her own claim on my time. I was, after all, nearly twenty years old.

I said, ‘Ma, I should really like to do something for the war effort.’ Nursing was what I had in mind. I liked the crisp femininity of the uniform. I hoped I might be sent to the Western Front and have a handsome blinded officer fall in love with my voice.

‘How proud your father would have been,’ she whispered, and her eyes quite shone.

The very next day Miss Ruby was sent for. She was an unfortunate person who had lost her money through unwise investments and so was forced to do mending and alterations for good families. After a brief discussion with Ma, Miss Ruby provided me with a basket of sludge-brown wool and a lesson in turning heels. I was to be a knitter of socks for the American Expeditionary Force.

I confided in Honey my hopes that I might have been sent to the front line.

‘There are many important ways to serve,’ she said. ‘I shall be very glad of your help at my War Orphans Craft Bazaar, for instance.’

I said, ‘But I wanted to go to France.’

‘And what use would you be to anyone there?’ she asked.

I reminded her that I had studied French for four years, but she laughed.

‘Looking into French books doesn’t signify anything, you goose,’ she said. ‘Minnie Schwab went to Paris and she found they spoke something quite unintelligible. Besides, if you went away who would take care of Ma?’

I said, ‘She has Reilly. Or she could stay with you.’

‘Isn’t that a rather selfish scheme, Poppy,’ she said, ‘to think of uprooting her from her own home?’

Somehow, at the age of nearly twenty, I managed to be both useless and indispensable. My country didn’t need me, my mother couldn’t spare me, and the French would not be able to understand me. I knitted socks in such a fury of frustration, Miss Ruby could barely keep me supplied with yarn.

We suffered almost immediate casualties. Our parlor maid and housemaid had conspired to inconvenience us by leaving together to work in a factory. Then Sherman Ulysses’ day nurse volunteered for the signal corps, and Ma, in the spirit of sharing during a time of national emergency, offered Honey the use of our Irish. Honey wasn’t sure. She and Harry wished their son to be cared for by a person of the highest caliber, someone who would truly understand the ways of an exceptional four year old. My nephew was exceptional in a number of ways. His speech was still immature and when he failed to make himself understood he would lie on the floor and hold his breath until he erupted into a howling rage. ‘Num num,’ he’d sob piteously, ‘num num.’ And all around him would try to guess, with the utmost urgency, what he was trying to convey. Also, though he knew perfectly well how to sit nicely on extra cushions and use his spoon and pusher and drink neatly from a cup, he did not always choose to do so.

‘I don’t know, Ma,’ Honey said. ‘Does your Irish know anything about children?’

‘Of course she does,’ Ma said. ‘The Irish are never fewer than thirteen to a family.’

Still Honey dithered, driving Ma to become unusually testy with her.

‘I must remind you, Honey,’ she said, ‘that war requires sacrifice. And if I am prepared to make my sacrifice you might be gracious enough to accept it.’

All of this turned out to have been futile because when the Irish was sent for, to be given new orders, she had her coat on, ready to go to Westchester County and be a wartime fruit picker and leave us in the lurch.

Ma was beside herself, but the Irish was fearless.

‘’Tis to free up the men, d’you see ma’am?’ she said. I studied her as she said it, and often rehearsed to myself later how she had told this to Ma, as cool as you like, and then simply walked out of the door.

It took a week for Ma and Honey to regroup and decide there was a simple choice. Either Reilly had to be seconded to the part-time care of Sherman Ulysses or Honey must suffer a total collapse. Reilly was called upstairs.

She said it was bad enough managing without a girl to help her downstairs, without having to run to another house and play nursemaid. She said she couldn’t see the justice of being asked to do the work of three for the wages of one, and not very generous wages at that. She said she thought herself quite unsuitable for the care of a small child on account of an ungovernable temper.

‘Then you must learn to master it, Reilly,’ Ma said. ‘Think of it as your war effort.’

Two things occurred to me. The first was that Reilly had a newly defiant look about her. I sensed she would only endure this latest imposition for as long as it took her to make other arrangements. The second was that when she disappeared I might well acquire a new set of shackles. I might have to learn to cook and clean. I might have to endure the flailing feet and slimy top lip of Sherman Ulysses in full spate.

TEN

No one paid afternoon calls anymore. Mrs Lesser and Mrs Schwab were busy meeting troop trains with coffee and cigarettes, one of the Misses Stone was driving for the Motor Corps, and the other was speaking at Liberty Loan rallies when she could spare time from helping the unfortunates. As for Aunt Fish, she had become the very paragon of a committee woman.

Monday was Milk for Polish Babies, Tuesday was the Maimed Soldier Fund, Wednesday was Trench Comfort Packets and Thursdays she alternated French Orphans with Plows for Serbia. The Blue Cross Association were anxious to capture her for their Suffering Horses and Disabled Army Dogs Committee, but Ma counseled against taking on any more.

‘You will prostrate yourself, Zillah,’ she said, ‘and however deserving the cause, you may be sure it’s not worth paying for it with your health. Besides, think of Israel. When a man comes home to an empty hearth every night …’

But Uncle Israel was busy, too, with his War Relief Clearing House and I believe he found, as I did, that my aunt was improved by war. It distracted her with practical problems and filled her address book with new acquaintances.

‘Mrs Elphick,’ she reported, ‘proposed that we add sewing machines to the list, and Mrs Bayliss seconded the proposal.’

Ma played with the fringed edge of the tablecloth and yawned.

‘And then Miss Landau suggested …’ Miss Landau now featured prominently in Aunt Fish’s conversation.

‘Such a genuine person,’ Aunt Fish would prattle. ‘Quite tireless, and so generous with her time. And helping to raise her nephews, too, since her sister was so cruelly taken. They were Philadelphia Landaus, I believe, and her sister was married to Jacoby the furrier. Only thirty-five when …’ Here Aunt Fish would lower her voice. ‘… it was an obstruction of the internal parts, and she might have been saved if only she had given in sooner to the pain.’

‘Yes,’ Ma would reply, ‘I believe you told me a dozen times already. Fatigue must be making you forgetful.’

It was the tireless and genuine Miss Landau who lured Aunt Fish through the door of something called the B’nai Brith Sisterhood, and soon afterwards, onto its war relief committee.

‘Don’t look at me that way, Dora,’ Aunt Fish said.

‘I begin to wonder,’ Ma said, ‘why you troubled arguing with Israel about names, if you’re now willing to associate so freely with racial factions.’

Uncle Israel had refused to become a Fairbanks, but my aunt had had her cards changed anyway. Harry had given her a special price.

I said, ‘Is B’nai Brith German then?’

Aunt Fish laughed. ‘No, Poppy,’ she said. ‘It’s just a silly old name.’

With Reilly dispatched to look after Sherman Ulysses every day between the hours of ten and three, Ma had taken upon herself responsibility for preparing luncheon. This led to a series of mishaps with knives, hot pans, gravy browning and corn starch and to a consequent shortage of anything edible between breakfast and dinner. I was hungry, all the time, and I had sore elbows caused, Ma decided, by immoderate knitting.

I said, ‘Perhaps now I could do something else for the war?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you could. You have really applied yourself most commendably to socks, so I believe you have earned a change.’

I was so buoyed by the prospect of being sent to France at last, to patrol my wards by lamplight, and adjust the pillows for dashing lieutenants, that I stole two slices of cake and allowed myself to be caught with the second piece jammed sideways in my mouth. Ma had in her hand the official Red Cross list of required items.

‘Hot-water bottle covers,’ she said. ‘I dare say they are quite easy to make. Or warming wristlets. And Poppy, you might bear in mind that like charity, the war effort begins at home. Reilly is with us so little now we have given her to Honey, and cake doesn’t grow on trees.’

But Reilly and Sherman Ulysses’ reign of mutual torture was almost at an end. In September Sherman announced, ‘Shernum kicked fat Yiley, ha ha’, and Reilly announced she was going to New Jersey to make hand grenades and not to bother keeping her position open.

Ma replied stiffly that she hadn’t intended to, and then went to lie down with a vinegar compress, while Reilly packed up her few poor things.

I felt something in me change. A page turned, or a cloud passed. I couldn’t quite say. But sitting alone in the parlor, waiting to hear Reilly’s footsteps on the back stairs, everything seemed to be shifting and stirring, and I liked it. I heard her door close and then the thunk of her valise on the stairs.

I stationed myself in the stairhall and smoothed down my skirt. She paused a moment when she saw me blocking her way, but then she came on down and took the hand I offered her.

I said, ‘I wish you well, Reilly. I’m proud to think you’ll be doing such important work.’

‘You get board and lodging,’ she said. ‘And a day off every week. And it’s only a bus ride into Atlantic City.’

I suppose she thought I might ask her to change her mind.

She said, ‘I can’t stay cooking for two and nursemaiding a child that’s never been corrected. There’s a war on.’

We shook hands.

I said, ‘I shall soon be doing war work myself.’

I had no idea where those words sprang from. Perhaps it was the thought of knitting wristlets.

As soon as Reilly was gone, I put on my cloth jacket and took the elevated railway all the way to Exchange Place. Uncle Israel was most surprised to see me, but not a bad kind of surprised.

‘Someone give you a bang on the head, Pops?’

Uncle Israel always deemed himself something of a humorist.

I said, ‘It’s a turban. I designed it myself. Uncle, I want to do some proper war work.’

I explained that our Irish had gone fruit-picking and Reilly was on her way to a munitions town and everyone in the world seemed to have something to do except me.

‘I guess you heard about your cousin Addie?’ he said. ‘I guess that’s what’s brought this on?’

I always loved my Uncle Israel but that day even he seemed condescending. I couldn’t endure any more. I banged my fist on his desk and he jumped a mile in the air.

‘Nothing has brought it on,’ I shouted, ‘except a war. A great big war where everyone else is doing good works and having fun but I’m not allowed. I’m a grown-up but I’m still obliged to stay home with Ma. It’s not fair!’

Simeon the secretary put his head round the door, ready to eject me I dare say or bring in a glass of restorative brandy, or place his skinny body between Uncle Israel and any physical danger. Uncle waved him away.

He was quiet for a moment, weighing up, I suppose, where his loyalties lay. I gave him a little help. I said, ‘Even Aunt Fish is doing a hundred different things so I’m sure it wouldn’t hurt for me to make myself useful.’

‘Pops,’ he said. ‘If you want to do your bit you won’t find me standing in your way. Not at all. Your Pa would have been proud.’

I said, ‘That’s what Ma said about the socks. But I’m through with knitting.’

‘Quite right,’ he said, ‘quite right. Well, I wonder what I can do to help?’

How banging on a person’s desk can make them change their tune.

I said, ‘I need you to ask someone. You know lots of people. Tell them I’m a very good worker and I’m available to start immediately. And I know French. And I’m not afraid of blood.’

I didn’t think I was afraid of blood.

Uncle Fish stood up and put on his top hat.

‘This calls for some thought,’ he said, ‘and thinking calls for lunch.’

So he offered me his arm, and Simeon stood back as I swept by him, in case of continuing fireworks. We went to Child’s restaurant for corned beef hash and fried eggs.

I asked about Cousin Addie. Cousin Addie, he told me, was quite the talk of Duluth. She had tried to join the marines, but when she realized all they were offering was work as a stenographer, she had used strong language to the recruiting sergeant and then gone directly to the bank to organize her own war work.

She had bought four large gasoline-powered vehicles for a mobile hospital and was having them shipped to France at her own expense. Better yet, she was going with them. I was hurt that Cousin Addie hadn’t thought to invite me along. Especially as I’d written her a letter and explained we were made of the same stuff. Her mobile hospital was going to have an operating theater, with its own lighting generator and a laundry and a disinfection unit, and it was all in trucks that could be driven to forward positions. Uncle Israel said she wouldn’t see change out of twelve thousand dollars.

I asked him if I had twelve thousand dollars.

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Have some peach pie. Girls like pie.’

But I was eager to be off to the Red Cross. It seemed to me that once they realized I was kin to Addie Minkel of Duluth I’d be on the next boat to France.

I said, ‘Uncle, how long would you say it might take a person to learn to drive a truck?’

‘Pops,’ he said, ‘I’m going to introduce you to Max Brickner’s wife at Surgical Dressings. I can’t be party to anything that might lead to getting shelled or sunk, so don’t ask me. As it is, I have the feeling I’m never going to hear the end of this from your Ma. And anything that incommodes Dora has a habit of turning right round and incommoding me.’

Red Cross headquarters was all comings and goings. Telephones rang, vehicles arrived and left, and Isabel Brickner’s hair had worked loose from its pins.

‘Of course I can use you,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you answer that telephone?’

I took a message about surgical scrubs while Mrs Brickner searched for shipment manifests and sent an avalanche of papers onto the floor. Uncle Israel looked on, smiling.

‘Looks like you could do with a filing clerk, Isabel,’ he said, ‘and Poppy’s a good little tidier-up.’

Mrs Brickner straightened up and looked at me.

I didn’t even allow her time to open her mouth.

‘No I’m not,’ I said. ‘I’m a hopeless tidier. But I’m strong and healthy and I want to do something for the boys at the front.’

‘Do you, Poppy?’ she said. ‘Then take off your coat, roll up your sleeves, and report to Room 19.’

And so I began the next stage of my war effort. I sat at a long table with a dozen other girls, rolling cotton bandages and singing songs.

Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching

I spy the Kaiser at the door

But we’ll get a lemon pie and squash it in his eye

Then there won’t be a Kaiser anymore

It was after five o’clock by the time I finished my turn at the Red Cross and boarded a trolley-car to go home and face Ma. The sun was still shining and I felt full of energy. Some of the girls said it was boring work but I thought it was the greatest fun. You were allowed to make coffee and talk, about anything at all, even beaux. And, anyway, I felt certain this was only the beginning.

As I had explained to the other girls, as a mustard heiress I would soon be coming into my fortune, and then I’d be able to buy a surgical flotilla like Cousin Addie and go to the Western Front and save lives. After I told them that they were much more welcoming. As soon as I walked into the room I’d see them smile. Hot Stuff, they called me, because of Minkel’s Mighty Fine Mustard.

I walked the last ten blocks, composing myself for Ma, and when I looked down 70th Street I could see camouflaged transports moving slowly down the Hudson toward the open sea. I was, I had decided, now effectively head of our household. Pa was gone, Honey had her own establishment, our help had all left us and Ma was advanced in years and enjoyed very poor health. I bounded up the front steps, ready to take on the world.

Ma didn’t answer when I called out, but I found her in the library, sitting in Pa’s old chair with a duster in her hand. It was the first time I had ever known her enter that room.

‘So many trinkets,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I don’t know why he was so particular about them.’

I said, ‘Ma, I have found a position with the Red Cross and I have to go there as often as I possibly can to do essential work, but I promise that I’ll take care of the dusting, and I’ll leave you a luncheon tray, and be home in time to make dinner for us. And if some day you are very indisposed, I might be spared from my work, just until Honey can come to sit with you, for we all have to make sacrifices you know.’

‘There will be no need for a luncheon tray,’ was her first response.

I said, ‘It came to me, after Reilly said she was needed for the munitions, that I had to volunteer, too. Uncle Israel took me along and they were so grateful to have me they begged me to start right away.’

‘How industrious you’ve been,’ Ma said. ‘And Israel, too. And how convenient, for it so happens I’ve decided to answer my country’s call, too. We shall both be modern working women, and in the evening we shall eat sandwiches.’

I said, ‘Ma, what ever kind of work can you do?’

It seemed most capricious of her to rise from her sick bed and become modern on the very day of my own triumph.

‘I shall make jam,’ she said. ‘I have joined,’ she announced, ‘the National Campaign for the Elimination of Waste. Let me see no more crusts left on the side of your plate, Poppy. Let me see no more cake toyed with, on account of dryness.’

I am sure I had never toyed with cake in my life.

Still, suddenly Ma and I had full and important lives. We talked all evening about household economies we might make as part of our war effort. I even steered our conversation round to the expedience of riding in public trolley-cars.

‘Only be sure to wear your gloves,’ Ma said, ‘and to wash your hands at the very first opportunity. Minnie Schwab rode on the elevated railway, you may remember, and immediately became ill with a hacking cough.’

‘What a pity,’ I crowed, ‘that Honey can manage nothing more demanding than her Widows and Orphans Bazaar.’

‘Now, Poppy,’ Ma said. ‘Honey doesn’t have your sturdiness. As long as she remembers to take her elixir, though, she manages very well. And she can hardly be reproached for finding wars difficult. She’s a married woman. She has a husband to fear for.’

But Harry was having an awfully good war. A patchy lung kept him away from any military engagements. His steel investments were doing well. Also his holdings in oil and rubber. He had bought a house in Palm Beach, Florida, and parcels of land bordering on three of Long Island’s most up-and-coming golf courses. He had even been elected to the Wall Street Racquet Club.

‘If he has any sense,’ Uncle Israel had said when he heard that news, ‘he’ll be polite enough not to insist on playing.’

We dined on sardines on toast and after dinner I tried to show Ma how to turn a heel. We had, after all, baskets full of yarn, and we were in a fever of thrift and industry. But I made an awkward teacher. Within an hour Ma had abandoned knitting and was thinking of embroidering handkerchiefs.

I said, ‘I think our boys may do well enough with plain ones. How can you be sure of embroidering the right initials?’

‘Why, I shall do a selection, of course,’ Ma said. ‘As long as my eyesight holds up.’

Emptied of staff our house seemed suddenly vast and vulnerable. With Reilly gone it now fell to me to protect the Minkel fortress and I was doing the rounds, securing all the doors and windows for the night, when I heard the telephone ring. It was the hour for Aunt Fish’s daily report on her committees.

I raced upstairs to take the call but arrived in the parlor to discover that Ma had picked up the hated gadget and answered it herself.

‘I am quite well, thank you Zillah,’ she said. ‘Answering the telephone is now part of my war work. To spare poor Poppy. She’s practically running the Red Cross bandage effort, you know? They had her there till half past four this afternoon and us without so much as an Irish. But we are determined to manage. One must do what one can for the duration. And I shall fill the solitary hours with needlework. I am embroidering for victory!’

ELEVEN

My new friends at the Red Cross took me for younger than twenty, especially as I didn’t have a beau as yet. As I explained to them, I hadn’t even had my debut, what with Pa’s passing and my being needed as a companion and helpmeet to Ma. I didn’t feel deprived. I remembered Honey’s debut. Her head had filled up with names of dance partners and designs of gowns, and ever after that she hadn’t been much company anymore. It had all cost a mountain of money and the result of it was she married Harry Glaser, so it seemed to me we hadn’t had such a good return on our investment.

Sometimes at the depot boy drivers passed our way, picking up consignments of dressings and hospital garments, and certain girls, like Junie Mack and Ethel Yeo, always called them in and made them laugh and blush. Of course, they were all boys who weren’t fit to fight so I wouldn’t have considered actually walking out with any of them, but they interested me nonetheless. Boys were an entirely new variety of person and I enjoyed learning about them.

Ethel and Junie liked boys who’d take them hootchy-kootchy dancing and buy them cocktail drinks. They liked to be squeezed, too, and kissed.

‘Hey, handsome,’ they’d call. ‘Are there any more at home like you?’

If Mrs Max Brickner was around or any of the older ladies, they kept their voices down. Otherwise we were a very jolly room, and I joined in with the laughter even if I didn’t always quite understand the joke. There was a blond boy with an eyepatch who was around for a while.

‘Hey, good-looking,’ Junie used to shout to him. ‘Have you met Hot Stuff, here? Her folks are big in mustard, but she sure could use a little sausage.’ And we all laughed when the boy turned pink.

‘Keep your eye out for her, anyway,’ she’d shout after him, and Ethel would scream.

Ethel and Junie taught me a lot of things. How to smoke a cigarette without choking and how to dance the tango. I didn’t accompany them to dance halls, of course, because after I finished my turn on bandages I had to hurry home to Ma, but just knowing about that side of life gave me more confidence.

I was even able to pass along to Honey advice Ethel had given me about avoiding the getting of a baby. Sherman Ulysses was now large and boisterous for his age and I felt sure she wouldn’t care to double her troubles.

‘After Harry squeezes you,’ I told her, ‘be sure to stand up directly and jump up and down and if possible douche thoroughly.’

‘Poppy!’ she said. ‘What kind of company are you keeping? You mustn’t talk about such things. Please don’t oblige me to speak to Ma about this.’

But Ma and I were now great allies. The only time we spent together was in the evening, by which time we were too tired for warfare of a personal nature. Ma would report from the vegetable canning front and I would give her selected anecdotes from surgical dressings. Of my tea-break tango lessons I said nothing.

‘Ethel Yeo?’ she’d ponder. ‘Yeo. Where did you say her people are from?’

‘All that is a thing of the past,’ I’d explain to her. ‘No one cares what your name is or where you came from, just as long as you’re doing your share. Everything’s changing, Ma.’

‘Oh dear,’ she’d say. ‘I do hope it doesn’t change too much.’

But she herself was continuing to change. One of the Misses Stone had explained to her about war bonds, and she had made a decision to invest without consulting either Harry or Uncle Israel.

‘I’ll only be lending the money, Poppy,’ she said. ‘It’s to feed a soldier and help beat back the Hun. And it will repay me at three and a half percent guaranteed, tax free.’

Aunt Fish was shocked until she learned that no less a person than the prudent Miss Yetta Landau had herself invested fifty thousand dollars in Liberty Bonds.

‘One’s money is quite safe,’ Aunt Fish allowed, ‘and as Yetta rightly says, better we fill the war chest this way or we shall be taxed and taxed until we are wrung dry. Dora, I should very much like you to know Yetta. Perhaps the B’nai Brith Charity Bazaar would be the time for you to meet.’

Ma pleaded pressure of Comfort Packet handkerchiefs to embroider, but Aunt Fish would have none of it.

‘It will take you out of yourself,’ she insisted. ‘A person can be too much in their own company. Solitary needlework can leave one prey to thoughts.’

‘Very well,’ Ma said, amazing us with her decisiveness. ‘I’ll be happy to attend your bazaar. But have no fears, Zillah. I have never been prey to thoughts. What about Poppy? Is she invited?’

‘Poppy may come, too,’ Aunt Fish said, looking at me menacingly over Ma’s head, ‘though I’m sure she must have a hundred other things she would sooner do.’

It was all the same to me. Whatever my aunt’s reasons for not wanting me along, they were nothing to the benefits of staying home alone. I could try out, in a looking-glass, the effect of shortening my skirts. I could dance a silent tango and imagine what it might be to be squeezed by a man. I could so load a slice of bread with jam that it would take two hands to lift it to my mouth.

‘How soon is the bazaar?’ I asked. ‘How charming for Ma to have an event to look forward to.’

Aunt Fish continued to eye me. ‘Whatever you are up to,’ her look said, ‘you don’t fool me.’

‘Likewise, I’m sure,’ I shot back to her, without a word being spoken.

‘Yetta Landau has raised single-handed the money for two ice machines to be sent to the front,’ Ma hurried to tell me upon her return. ‘Few people realize how essential ice is for the field hospitals, or would think it worth their attention, but she cares nothing about the popularity of her causes. Indeed the less they are known, the harder she works at them. And then there are her family responsibilities. It is no exaggeration to say she has raised her sister’s family as if it were her own. How many aunts would do as much as Dear Yetta has done?’

Miss Landau had become Dear Yetta on the strength of two hours’ acquaintance. Not only had Ma freshened up her gray lawn and attended the B’nai Brith Sisterhood Combined War Charities Craft Bazaar, but she had also circulated. Cards had been exchanged, some from as far afield as East 92nd Street, and visits were presaged. Visits appropriate to a period of national austerity, of course.

I heard the door creaking open on Ma’s narrow life and I was glad. The pace of her days quickened and filled with Thrift Drive rallies and fund-raising teas. Weeks passed without our boys receiving monogrammed handkerchiefs or any vegetables getting canned. And when I came home from bandage rolling she was no longer inclined to listen to my news. She wanted me to listen to hers.

Yetta Landau was sister-in-law to Judah Jacoby, and Mr Jacoby had been ten years a widower, left with two sons to raise.

‘It was Oscar’s bar mitzvah,’ Ma started on the first of many tellings of the story. Oscar was the elder Jacoby son. I had no idea what a bar mitzvah was.

‘It’s a special kind of birthday,’ Ma said, hurrying on.

‘How special?’ I asked. Since Pa’s death my own birthdays had become the occasion of muted, utilitarian giving.

‘Special for boys,’ she said. ‘Now, please don’t interrupt. Mrs Jacoby had not been feeling well but no one suspected she was mortally ill. It was only when she was missed during dinner and found collapsed in her boudoir that the gravity of the situation was realized. By the time she was seen at St Luke’s Hospital it was too late. She had suffered a fatal torsion of the insides.’

Ma refused to tell me how they knew what had killed her if it was inside, or to explain why boys had special birthdays. Only that Oscar Jacoby was now twenty-three years old and had just completed basic training at Camp Funston.

I asked Honey if she knew about bar mitzvahs.

‘It’s a Jewish thing,’ she said. ‘They have to go to the temple and read an old scroll and then they get gifts and money and a dinner.’

I asked her how she knew.

‘Because Harry did it,’ she said. ‘But Sherman Ulysses won’t. We’ve progressed beyond that.’

Giving up dinners and gifts didn’t sound like progress to me.

I said, ‘Is Harry Jewish then?’

‘Poppy!’ she said. ‘What kind of a question is that?’

I had no idea whether it was a stupid question or merely an embarrassing one, so I took it to a person who already knew the extent of my stupidity and lack of savoir faire. I left home an hour earlier than usual and stayed on the trolley-car as far as Uncle Israel’s office.

‘Don’t tell me the Red Cross have run out of work for you,’ he said when he saw me. Simeon had left Uncle’s door open when he showed me in and was hovering just outside, remembering my earlier show of spirit, no doubt.

‘No,’ I said, ‘but I have something to ask you and if you don’t mind I prefer not to do it with that person eavesdropping.’

‘Pops!’ he said. ‘Simeon is my right-hand man.’

Still, he sent him away and closed the door.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘what is it? Are you sure I’m the person to ask? Mightn’t Honey be more suitable? Or your aunt?’

‘Uncle Israel,’ I began, ‘I want to know if Harry Glaser Grace is Jewish.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I see. Well, I suppose it all depends what you mean by …’

‘I don’t know what I mean by it,’ I said. There was a little tremor of frustration in my voice. ‘I’m not even sure what Jewish is.’

He lit a cigarette.

‘Let me see,’ he said. ‘Shall we begin with Moses? No. Let’s begin with Abraham.’

So my uncle told me a story about people who lived in tents and sacrificed sheep and listened to the Word of God. It was a rather long story. By the time he mentioned the Free Synagogue on West 68th Street the urgency had gone out of my question. Harry had many faults but I was certain he’d be too scared to sacrifice a sheep.

I said, ‘Honey says Oscar Jacoby had a bar mitzvah party because he’s Jewish?’

‘Yes,’ Uncle Israel replied.

‘And Honey says Harry had one too. Does that mean he used to be Jewish?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘So you can stop being Jewish? Like biting your nails?’

‘Yes and no,’ he said, and got up and walked around behind his desk. I suppose he knew what was coming next.

‘Are we Jewish?’ I whispered. ‘Am I?’

I suppose I had actually worked out the answer already.

Uncle Israel weighed something invisible, first in one hand, then in the other, then sighed deeply.

‘In a manner of speaking,’ he said. ‘But it’s really not a thing to get bothered about. These days …’

I said, ‘Oh I’m not bothered about it. Do you know, I always thought it would be nice to be something, apart from just an heiress. Like Junie Mack is Scotch and Mrs Lesser’s kitchen maid was albino. And now it turns out I am something. What fun.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘my advice is not to make too much of this. No need to make, what shall we say … a feature of it. One needs to rub along in society. And in business. There are degrees of Jewishness. Yes. It’s really a question of degree. How are the bandages going?’

‘Very well,’ I told him. ‘It does me very nicely until I come into my money and can buy a hospital to take to Flanders.’

Something occurred to me.

I said, ‘Is Cousin Addie Jewish too? I suppose she must be.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose she must.’

I gave Uncle Israel a most affectionate kiss.

‘Thank you so much,’ I said. ‘I knew you were the person to ask.’

‘Pops,’ he said, as I was leaving. ‘Another word of advice. I wouldn’t trouble your Ma with this Jewish business.’

‘Why?’ I said. ‘Doesn’t she know?’

TWELVE

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?’

THIRTEEN

In March 1918 the Bolsheviks surrendered to the Hun and Uncle Israel Fish took me to the theater to see Harry Lauder. Mr Lauder was a Scotchman. He wore a skirt and sang songs I couldn’t understand, but Uncle Israel seemed to enjoy them very much indeed. After the show we went to the Waldorf for champagne wine and oyster soup, and he said it would be a good time to have a little talk about my impending inheritance.

‘You’ll get a monthly allowance,’ he said, but he wouldn’t say how much. ‘Don’t want you running wild with it, Pops,’ he said. ‘And you’ll have a nice spread of stockholdings, keeping your money working for you.’

I said, ‘Will I be richer than Honey?’

‘What kind of a question is that?’ he said. ‘Harry’s made some smart investments for Honey. I’m not party to the details, of course, but Harry has a head on his shoulders. He has a nose for the coming thing.’

I remarked that I didn’t want Harry’s nose anywhere near my investments.

‘Never fear,’ Uncle said, ‘I’ll be managing your fund, and you’ll find me a more conservative investor than these young bloods. Stay liquid, that’s what I always advise. You won’t catch me buying big houses in Oyster Bay.’

That was Harry’s latest thing. He foresaw a need for convalescent homes on Long Island once we had won the war.

I said, ‘But when shall I be old enough to manage my own fund?’

I believe Uncle Israel looked a little hurt.

‘Well, of course,’ he said, ‘I shan’t be around forever. And when you marry …’

I said, ‘But I’m not allowed to marry. I have to stay home and take care of Ma.’

‘Who told you such a thing?’ he said. ‘Of course you’ll marry. And then your husband will advise you on your investments. But no hurry. I’m good for a few years yet.’

He ordered a rack of lamb with pommes de terre boulanger. It was news indeed to me that I was no longer expected to remain an old maid. I thought this over as we ate, Uncle making short work of the ribs while I concentrated on the potatoes. They were the best I had ever tasted.

The champagne wine had made me feel a little fizzy, but I was suddenly awake enough to see a connection between my secretly restored eligibility and the abrupt silences that fell whenever I walked in on Ma and Aunt Fish. They were matchmaking.

‘Uncle Israel,’ I said, ‘did you ever meet Mr Jacoby?’

He choked a little on a piece of meat and turned quite purple before he was able to catch his breath and order a glass of brandy. He dabbed at his eyes with his napkin.

‘Judah Jacoby?’ he said, eventually. ‘Yes, I know him. I remember his father, too. Of course, they were just importers when they started, but they’re in everything now. Everything from the pelt to the finished garment. Fine quality and square dealings. That’s Jacoby.’

I said, ‘His wife died, you know, and her sister helped him raise his sons?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I hear all about it, never fear.’

I said, ‘And Oscar Jacoby is gone for a soldier. Do you happen to know which lot he’s with?’

‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Though I’m sure I’ve been told. I leave my superiors to keep up with that side of things.’

And he gave me a funny greasy smile. My heart was racing.

I said, ‘Uncle Israel, Ma and Aunt Fish are always laughing and whispering when they come home from the Jacobys’ but they don’t tell me anything. Do you suppose … ?’

‘Pops,’ he said. He leaned across the table and patted my hand. ‘I have learned not to suppose anything. Who can possibly fathom what Dora and Zillah find amusing? Perhaps they’re matchmaking. Perhaps they’re just enjoying their war. Now, who’s for charlotte russe?’

I went home with a warm, fluffy feeling inside my tummy. Ma was already in bed, but her light was still burning so I went into her and gave her a kind of hug that was not customary in our family.

‘Oh Ma,’ I said, ‘I’m so happy.’

‘Poppy,’ she said, ‘I do believe you’re tight. Did Israel explain everything? About your money?’

‘He did,’ I said. ‘He explained everything.’

Alone in my room I tried on Grandma Plotz’s tourmaline ring, then I lay down and counted my blessings.

1. By November I would be a mustard heiress and Uncle Israel would keep me liquid. Whatever that meant.

2. Destiny was conspiring with my mother and my aunt to unite me with none other than the very beau of my choice, Oscar Jacoby.

3. I was Jewish, to just the right degree.

FOURTEEN

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.’

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