The Unfortunates

by Laurie Graham

  I said to Emerald, ‘What about you? It’s only cartilage, you know? It’s easily done. Or how about a permanent wave?’

  ‘A permanent wave?’ she said. ‘Didn’t you just spend money getting rid of your permanent wave?’

  There was a procedure I had tried out, supposed to remove the kink out of darkie hair.

  Emerald said, ‘Either this family’s crazy or I am and I know which way the evidence points.’

  Em ran in a groove. She attended to her studies, rode horseback in Central Park on Sundays, whistled in the bathroom. Nothing ever seemed to get her down. Fridays she’d even volunteer to eat dinner with Ma and help her do the business with the candles.

  ‘Why don’t you come?’ she’d say. But Fridays weren’t good for me. I had the gallery.

  ‘And why don’t you come?’ she’d ask Sapphy. ‘Whatever happened to being Jewish?’

  Sapphire said, ‘I can be Jewish without lighting candles.’

  ‘Oh no you can’t,’ Em said. But Sapphy had already left the room.

  Emerald finished at the Levison in the summer of 1943 and carried off just about every prize going. I was in Pittsburgh at the time, tracking down an interesting Lithuanian we had heard about. He painted large oils of factories and we knew the Jebb Corporation were becoming interested in industrial collectibles.

  So Honey went to Em’s commencement in my stead, but the very next date I had free, I gave her lunch at the Astor and a check for her first mink.

  I said, ‘Go to Jacoby’s. You’ll get it at cost.’

  ‘Mom,’ she said, ‘it’s high summer. I don’t want a mink.’

  That’s the younger generation for you. They never think ahead.

  I said, ‘And what are you planning to do with your life? I could use a vendeuse at the gallery.’

  ‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’d know how to sell that stuff you have there.’

  I said, ‘I’ll teach you. We have explanations for every piece. All you have to do is tell people what the artist is saying. As soon as you do that they buy. People worry about the silliest things. Whether it’s worth the money. How they can be sure they’ve hung it the right way up. They just need reassurance.’

  ‘Well, still no thanks,’ she said. ‘I’d like to work in a flower store.’

  I said, ‘I’ll buy you a flower store.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’d just like to work in a store and go to the lunch counter with nice friendly people.’

  I said, ‘You realize your life won’t be your own? I tried it myself many years ago. You realize you’ll never have time to get your hair styled or meet a beau for cocktails.’

  ‘A beau!’ she said. ‘You sound like Grandma. Well, the kind of … beau I’d be looking for probably won’t get off early either. I’ll be fine Mom. I don’t need my own store.’

  In her own way Emerald could be as uncooperative as Sapphire.

  She said, ‘Were you really a shop girl?’

  I said, ‘I worked in neckties in Macy’s. But then I met Gil and I found the hours didn’t suit.’

  I had said it before I thought.

  ‘Gil?’ she said. ‘Do you mean Gilbert? Was he really Sapphy’s pa?’

  I said, ‘I have to get back to the gallery.’

  She clamped her hand over mine.

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ she said. ‘You missed me winning General Excellence so you can darned well order me Peaches Flambé and tell me about Gilbert.’

  I said, ‘He was a mistake, that’s all.’

  She wanted to know what kind of mistake.

  I said, ‘I don’t know. He was a kind of revolutionary intellectual …’

  She whistled.

  I said, ‘I suppose it was my fortune came between us.’

  Em said, ‘Why? Wouldn’t Grandma let him have any of it?’

  I said, ‘No, I gave him as much of it as he needed, but he just didn’t seem to enjoy it. He preferred sitting in cafés, drinking with paupers.’

  She said, ‘Do you have a picture?’

  I said, ‘No. There was a wedding portrait but as I recall your Grandma cut it in half.’

  ‘No wonder Sapphire’s such a misery,’ she said. ‘She hardly knows who she is. I’m sure glad Gilbert wasn’t my daddy.’

  I realized she was gazing at me through my cigarette smoke.

  ‘Gilbert definitely wasn’t my daddy, was he?’ she said.

  So I told her the whole thing, about flying down to Cap Ferrat with Humpy and meeting Reggie. Well, practically the whole thing. Between a mother and daughter there are certain details best kept veiled.

  ‘Scandalous,’ she said. But she was laughing. ‘And did you know about sexual intercourse and everything?’

  This was what happened when you allowed a girl a modern education.

  I said, ‘I knew enough not to use words like that in the Astor dining room.’

  ‘Well, la-di-dah,’ she said. ‘And where is Gilbert now?’

  ‘Buenos Aires,’ I said, quick as a flash. ‘I believe that’s what I heard. Of course, he could be anywhere by now.’

  ‘Mmm,’ she said, scraping the pattern off her dessert dish. ‘Like Uncle Murray. I hate it that the world is so big. Don’t you?’

  FORTY-NINE

  So Emerald went as a junior at Fleischmann’s Fresh Flowers. You could set your watch by her, swinging out of the apartment every morning in one of her adorable little suits. Of course, I made sure Artie Fleischmann knew who she was. I made sure he understood he couldn’t make her life a misery, like she was any ordinary shop girl.

  Not long after we won the war in Europe a letter arrived for me at the Jacoby house. It was from England, so Ma had felt justified in having the help steam open the envelope. But it wasn’t from Murray.

  ‘Thank goodness this beastly war is over,’ Angelica wrote.

  I’ve had a rather fabulous time myself, driving top brass, but many have had a perfectly horrid time. The Burtons lost two sons, we lost a distant Bagehot, and the Belvoir is looking generally depleted. Bobbity hoped Kneilthorpe would revert because Merrick’s far from well, but it’s being retained for convalescents so the poor things are going to be cooped up in the leaky wing for the foreseeable.

  Now I must get to the point. Edgar Boodle-Neary has asked me to marry him and I rather think I might. I still think fondly of Murray but it seems unlikely he’s going to return to me now. I hope you’ve all had a decent war.

  Ma waited until I’d finished reading before she presented her case against mixed marriages.

  ‘A cat may as well marry a horse,’ she declared.

  I said, ‘Reggie and I were mixed and we had a blissful marriage. I believe Murray’s problem may have been that he didn’t realize he was a fairy.’

  Aunt Fish said, ‘This is what comes of art galleries, Dora. As I always warned it would.’

  ‘Well,’ Ma said, ‘God is good. He spared Judah having to hear such a thing.’

  I placed a transatlantic phone call immediately.

  I said, ‘Are you having him declared dead?’

  ‘How extraordinary,’ Angelica kept saying. ‘How absolutely extraordinary to hear your voice.’

  I said, ‘I wish you well, Gelica, I really do. But I don’t want Murray to be dead.’

  ‘I’m applying for an annulment,’ she said. ‘It’s quite easily done. Is this costing you a mint, chatting on the blower like this?’

  I said, ‘I’m going to have him looked for, you see? I’m going to hire a sleuth and track him to the ends of the earth.’

  ‘How are Em and Sapphy?’ she asked.

  I said, ‘He was very fond of you, you know? Whatever happened …’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, our conversation finally getting into step. ‘I know. But, of course, you were the one he adored.’

  That night I dreamt I was in my little orange Oriole, but Nancy Lord was at the controls. I was squashed so tightly between Gil and Reggie I couldn’t prevent Nancy from doin
g crazy maneuvers and Murray was out on the nose of the plane, wearing a top hat.

  Next day I visited the offices of a private detective called Pink and placed before him the few facts I had.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘When a person chooses to disappear he can ask for no better cover than a war. The chances are not good.’

  Nevertheless he pocketed my check.

  I wrote to Angelica suggesting she try romping with this Edgar before any gowns were created or cakes frosted. They say lightning never strikes the same place twice but they say a lot of things I have found not to be the case.

  I enclosed a picture of Emerald, and I promised one of Sapphire just as soon as she returned from her rest-cure at Cedarhurst. I had driven her out there and it had been the saddest journey. We saw so many little houses with gold stars posted in their windows for their lost loved ones.

  July of 1945 was an unsettling month. It may all have been over for the likes of Angelica but the war dragged on for us. Gasoline was sometimes short and we couldn’t get ice cream, and then, when the stories started, about what Mr Hitler had done to the Hebrews, I couldn’t do a thing with Humpy.

  ‘Now do you see?’ he kept saying. ‘I could have stayed. I should have.’

  He seemed to be heaping everything upon himself, even things Mr Roosevelt and Mr Truman hadn’t been able to prevent, and I hated to see a man cry, even if he was a pansy.

  Emerald said, ‘That would have been us too.’

  In Paris they had driven all the juifs to the velodrome and after that something terrible had befallen them.

  I said, ‘It wouldn’t have been us. I’d have made sure those people knew who we were. I’d have given them money.’

  Still, I was glad we’d come home.

  Just before VJ day I ran into two figures from the past. Mrs Wendell Tite née Bernie Kearney who blanked me on Madison Avenue, and Ethel Yeo who was seated behind the reception desk of the new nail parlor I’d begun patronizing. It was she who claimed me. She was wearing her eyebrows in a different style so I would never have known her.

  ‘You ever roll bandages at the Red Cross?’ she asked.

  I didn’t make too much of remembering her.

  ‘Well, I sure remember you,’ she said. ‘Weren’t your folk in pickles?’

  I said, ‘Were you the one that caught for a baby?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I never caught for a baby. That was Junie. Are you rolling bandages this time around?’

  I told her about escaping from Paris, France, by a squeak.

  I said, ‘I suppose you just started here? I didn’t see you before.’

  ‘I own the place,’ she said. ‘This one and three more. Soon as peace comes I intend expanding into facials. You should look out for me. I’ll give you the works, for old times’ sake. You look like you’ve been doing a lot of living.’

  I tore up her card into the tiniest pieces the moment I was outside. I couldn’t forget her remark, though, and immediately after Labor Day weekend I took myself off to the Mayo Clinic and had my face neatened.

  Honey attributed my rejuvenated appearance to the uplifting effect of Pastor Norman Peale’s addresses which she had been passing along to me in pamphlet form.

  ‘Unless, of course,’ she said, ‘you have a secret beau.’

  But it was Emerald who had the secret beau. His name was Mortie Boon and he bought flowers in Fleischmann’s every Friday for weeks before he got up the courage to pick out a dozen long-stemmed roses and hand them right back to her.

  His people had started out in corsetry.

  ‘Well, Emerald,’ Ma said, ‘people will always need corsets. Corsets and mustard. You will never go hungry.’

  Fortunately Mortie’s father was a forward-looking person. He had begun diversifying into swimming costumes.

  Mortie was no oil painting but Em had eyes for no one else and in the early days he was always civil to me. Ma and Aunt Fish he had eating out of his hand. So much so, he was able to override Ma’s wish to have the wedding at East 69th Street. The Boons lived in Lenox Road, which was as good an address as you could hope for in Brooklyn, and they always did their marrying at Union Temple.

  ‘It’s a family tradition, Mom,’ Emerald explained to me. ‘And seeing as how we don’t seem to have any of our own I think I’d like to go along with Mortie’s.’

  Then Sherman Ulysses arrived home from the war with a piece of Japanese shrapnel and a fiancée. Ma placed the shrapnel in the vitrine alongside Pa’s old treasures. It was harder to know what to do with the fiancée.

  Her name was Vera Farber and she had served in the WAVES at Guantanamo Bay. This had given her a high and mighty opinion of herself over those of us who had kept the home fires burning, an opinion quite out of proportion for a person who had been a mere yeoman in the Fleet Post Office. Her people were in gloves.

  Ma immediately suggested a double wedding but Vera was an agnostic atheist so that idea was strangled at birth.

  Nineteen forty-six was a two-wedding year for us, three if you counted Angelica who became Lady Boodle-Neary far away in Melton Mowbray, England. She wrote me how she had placed her flowers on my darling Reggie’s grave and I was touched beyond words. From Mr Pink the detective I received nothing but accounts due.

  We still had wartime yardage restrictions but I have always regarded restrictions as something to be circumvented. I created for Emerald a full-skirted gown in ice-white duchesse satin, and I would have done my best for Vera, too. Perhaps something with a butterfly peplum or some other back interest, to draw the eye away from her solid shoulders and her heavy jaw. But I was not asked. She and Sherman Ulysses tied the knot at City Hall in wool suits and felt hats with never a feather nor a diamond pin in sight. Then, five days later, we all crossed the East River to see Emerald and Mortie joined as one.

  As Ma observed, that was a real wedding.

  We had had only one moment of discord, when Em realized she was expected to have a Hebrew name and demanded to know why I hadn’t given her one.

  She said, ‘I have to have one for the marrying contract.’

  I had never heard of such a thing.

  I said, ‘Does Mortie have one?’

  ‘Of course he does,’ she said. ‘It’s Mordecai, but don’t you dare tell him I told you. It’s not a name you use. It’s just a name you have. So now what am I going to do?’

  I took the problem to Ma.

  I said, ‘Do you know anything about this?’

  ‘It’s probably something they do in Brooklyn,’ she said. ‘But don’t fuss so. Let her take “Dora”. Dora is a good name and it saddens me that neither of my granddaughters were given it.’

  Aunt Fish said, ‘Dora isn’t a Hebrew name. Zillah is, though. Let her take that.’

  But Em wasn’t satisfied. She rummaged through our family history, prodding us with questions until Ma remembered that Sarah had been the name of my grandma Plotz and my grandma Minkel. No one had ever troubled to tell me.

  So, Sarah it was. Sarah Emerald Minkel Merrick married Mordecai Mortie Boon and then we all adjourned to the ballroom for roast sirloin of beef and dancing.

  Mortie’s father waltzed with me in an alarmingly warm clinch, but given Mrs Boon’s lack of physical charms I could understand how exciting he found me. I allowed him his moment of pleasure. The whole affair went off in a very good humored way until Sapphire collapsed into the fresh fruit platter.

  ‘She is far far too fatigued,’ Ma explained, to anyone who would listen.

  ‘She’s had too much rye,’ said some judgmental Boon.

  I said, ‘I’m sorry if Sapphy spoiled your day.’ I was buttoning Em into her going-away dress.

  ‘Nothing spoiled my day,’ she said. ‘I just wish she didn’t have to be so contrary and miserable. If only she could find a Mortie.’

  But since the war ended Sapphire had done nothing but date a series of Displaced Persons. Thin, broken people who had no money and didn’t speak. She even omitted to catch t
he bouquet of perfect Fleischmann gardenias Em tossed in her direction. Some people will never be helped.

  FIFTY

  In 1951, one of our artists, Orfie Sokoloff, became discovered. Many of our unfortunates had chosen to remain unfortunate, refusing to attend parties and talk pleasantly to people from National Benzene or DeWitt. But Orfie understood what he had to do. His murals were large anyway, and he was always amenable to making them larger. Between six and nine he was willing to put on one of the fabulous silk vests I’d designed for him and engage buyers with his beautiful tawny eyes. Best of all, he turned those eyes on a most influential commentator, Jerome Sacks. Sacks fell quite in love with him and wrote him up in Art Now and Trends and every important magazine.

  I hadn’t cared very much for Sokoloff’s work myself. I found it too brown and messy. But after I had studied on it a while I began to see there was something energetic and fearless about it, so I commissioned him to paint me a mural of my own and I had him come over to Turtle Bay to see the color of my dining-room drapes.

  By 1952 everyone had heard of Orfie Sokoloff, and anyone who took the trouble to be au courant had heard of Poppy Minkel Merrick. I had saved the future of art from the smoking ruins of Europe and I was photographed for People magazine. ‘Grandmother in the Vanguard’ the caption said. I had Humpy to thank for divulging that piece of information. My mother might have looked like a grandmother, but I certainly didn’t.

  Emerald and Mortie’s firstborn had arrived in August 1951. They named him Alan Mordecai and he was subjected to the full Hebrew procedure in a private room at Mount Sinai Hospital. Mortie’s brother was chosen to be kvatter and his sister-in-law for kvatterin, owing to Sapphire’s being too indisposed to accept the position. As far as I was concerned a hospital was no place for a party. Still, I did provide a very good champagne, and I might well have stayed longer and admired the child more if Mortie’s mother hadn’t so monopolized the scene. I looked at it this way: Mrs Boon wasn’t leading the full and exciting life I was so who was I to begrudge her her silly triumphs.

  Sherman Ulysses and Vera had also expected what my sister referred to as ‘a happy addition’ but in the event it came to nothing. Vera had a complication and was fated always to be brought to childbed prematurely. I must say this for Vera, though I found her dull and homely, she at least wasn’t the kind of woman who grew bitter about her childlessness. She took herself off to Barnard College and read books and became even more homely.