The Great Husband Hunt (8 page)

“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 to 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 sickbed 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 around 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!”

11

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.”