The Unfortunates

by Laurie Graham

  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.
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  ‘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 s
ake.’

  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?’