The Unfortunates

by Laurie Graham

  If 1951 was the year of arrivals, 1952 turned out to be a year of departures.

  Aunt Fish was the first to go, slipping on a patch of ice on her way to a canasta afternoon and striking her head against a curbstone. Ma reacted to this tragedy with a mixture of perplexity and annoyance. There had hardly been a day of her life when her sister hadn’t been at her side with a ready opinion and I believe she felt that absence more keenly than any other she had had to bear.

  ‘I never cared for Mrs Weiss’ canastas,’ she said. And then later, ‘gallivanting in February always was a perilous thing’.

  I felt my aunt’s death profoundly. My breathing was easier. I had a sensation of well-being, of floating, almost. This was marred only by a momentary pang of guilt as we stood in horizontal sleet and saw her lowered down on top of Uncle Israel. He must have endured at least as much as I had, and yet I had never heard him say a truly disloyal word. But by the time we drove away from Pinelawns, I was floating again.

  Then Bobbity, out with the Belvoir, misjudged a ditch and took a fatal tumble.

  ‘Merrick is pretty cut up,’ Angelica wrote.

  The padre at Buckby wouldn’t allow us to bury Fearless alongside her, which is what she would have wished. Ordinarily we would simply have taken her home to Bagehots, but the new people there don’t hunt and so wouldn’t have understood, and Kneilthorpe is almost certain to be sold to a frightful little builder, so one daren’t have left Bobbity there. She might end up entombed under something called ‘affordable housing’. As Edgar says, ‘one dreads to think’.

  Anyway, I regret to say we had to cave into the Buckby man. If we could have fitted Fearless into a casket we would have done so and had the last laugh on the little upstart.

  We knew Oscar and Yetta were living in rustic simplicity in Bethel, near the Pennsylvania state line. We knew Oscar played with wood and Yetta had become odd. I suppose we also knew the day would come when something had to be done about her, but it had never seemed pressing enough to identify what that ‘something’ might be. A letter addressed to ‘The family of Miss Yetta and Mr Oscar’ changed that. A Lutheran pastor, who described himself as a friend and neighbor, informed Ma that Miss Landau was in a state of ‘high derangement’ and had been living for an unknown period of time with the decomposing remains of her nephew.

  ‘Little Abe will see to things,’ said Ma. ‘And Poppy will go with him.’

  But I had an opening. I couldn’t just drop everything.

  Sherman said, ‘That’s OK, Grandma. Mother has offered. We don’t need Aunt Poppy.’

  ‘It’s the least I can do,’ Honey said. ‘They’re family, near enough. What must people think?’

  I said, ‘Don’t concern yourself with what people think. For a friend and neighbor this pastor can’t have been visiting them too often.’

  Ma said, ‘All Yetta had to do was telephone. If she had telephoned I would have had someone go up there right away.’

  But Yetta and Oscar had never bothered with a telephone.

  ‘Nor with help,’ Honey reported back. ‘You can’t imagine the squalor. I don’t believe they ever threw away a newspaper. And the stench, Poppy!’

  Yetta Landau had been taken to a rest home in Monticello and what remained of Oscar was returned to New York. The only thing Sherman managed to salvage was a little side table with inlays of holly wood dyed pink and purple.

  ‘I thought Grandma’d like to have something,’ he said.

  ‘Or Murray,’ I said. ‘If he should return.’

  ‘Aunt Poppy,’ Sherman said, ‘I hope you’re not still throwing away money on detective agencies?’

  That was my business, I’m sure. I knew Ma had never cared for either of her stepsons and if anyone should have had the inlaid table it was me. But, of course, I couldn’t say so. My reasons for remembering Oscar were secret ones. I was glad anyway that our marrying had never come off.

  And the year still hadn’t taken its full toll. One November afternoon, as Humpy and I were hanging some new Molinard abstracts, Emerald telephoned in a flap.

  ‘Mom!’ she said. ‘You’d better get up to Grandma’s fast. She says she has police on her stoop peering through the glass and the help’s out buying nova.’

  I said, ‘Have you tried your Aunt Honey? I can’t go running errands right now. We have Jerome Sacks coming for a preview.’

  ‘To hell with your preview,’ she yelled. ‘Just get up there. I’m on my way as soon as Alan’s had his bottle, but there’s traffic.’

  Emerald took way too much upon herself with regard to giving orders.

  ‘But, of course, you must go,’ Humpy said.

  I sometimes felt he was too eager to have me off the scene as well.

  There was an empty patrol car parked just down from the Jacoby house. In the time it had taken me to find a cab, Officers O’Halloran and Fitzpatrick had talked their way into Ma’s upstairs parlor.

  Ma said, ‘Poppy, I don’t know what I’ve done. They’re looking for someone called Mary, but I haven’t seen her.’

  ‘Marie Nooge Catchings,’ the red-haired one said, and he brought out a baby picture of Sapphire.

  ‘See?’ he said, turning it over. ‘It has this address on the back.’

  I believe I asked if she was hurt. Then I had to be helped to a chair and brought a glass of water. The next thing I recall, Mortie had arrived, sent uptown by Emerald, and Ma was asking over and over, ‘What did I do? What did I do?’

  Officer Fitzpatrick said as far as they knew no harm had befallen Marie Nooge Catchings. He apologized for any misunderstanding. The casualty was a white male, aged approximately sixty, who had partially cremated himself smoking in bed in a rooming house.

  ‘They just knew him as The Writer,’ Officer O’Halloran said. ‘And we did find a few scribblings. A few scribblings, a number of empty bottles and the baby picture.’

  I said, ‘I guess it’s Gilbert Catchings you’re talking about. He was once my husband and Marie Nuage Sapphire is our daughter, but I never knew he kept a picture of her. That is the darndest thing.’

  Officer Fitzpatrick said the body was in the Elizabeth Street morgue.

  Mortie said, ‘Do we have any obligations here? Shall I arrange for a mortician or do you think Sapphire’ll want to do that herself?’

  I said, ‘Well, it’s too late in the drinking day to ask her now, and I don’t expect her to have any strong opinions about it. She really never knew him.’

  Mortie was trying to explain to Ma why a mortician was required when Emerald arrived.

  She said, ‘Whoa there, Mortie! Are we expected to bury a person just because he was found with a picture of Sapphy in his room? Mom, shouldn’t you ride downtown with the officers? Make sure it is Gilbert Catchings? Wasn’t he meant to be in Buenos Aires?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Ma said, becoming lucid at the most inconvenient moment. ‘Honey saw him on Fifth Avenue on several occasions. And we decided not to notice it, didn’t we Poppy? We decided to pretend Mr Catchings had never happened.’

  Emerald was in a testy mood anyway. She hated anything that disturbed her domestic routine and driving in from Brooklyn when she would normally be preparing Mortie’s dinner counted as a major upheaval.

  ‘Mortie,’ she said, nice as pie, ‘why don’t you turn on Amateur Hour for Grandma while I show the officers to the door?’

  Those two boys picked up their caps and rolled out of the parlor like a pair of nice friendly bears. They left me to her mercies. I guess they had no idea how she was planning to turn on me the instant they were gone.

  ‘Why?’ she kept yelling at me. ‘Why couldn’t you just tell her where her daddy was? What was it to you anymore? She could have met him, or not. How old did she have to be before you quit interfering? Well, it’s too late now. But you’re for it. She’s going to pitch into you when she finds out about this, and for once I’m going to be right behind her. Don’t you think it’s eaten her heart out ever since she realized I had my d
addy right there where I could see him and she didn’t even have a picture?’

  I said, ‘Gil Catchings was no Reggie.’

  ‘That’s nothing to do with anything,’ she said. ‘A person needs to know where they came from. Doesn’t matter if it’s a bad address.’

  Em had become interested in the workings of the human mind since the arrival of baby Alan, reasoning everything out with him, talking to him all the day long as though he understood. She wouldn’t even have a night nurse for him. She was full of theories.

  ‘Did it ever occur to you,’ she said, ‘he might have been good for Sapphire even if he wasn’t good for you? Even if he was lousy … he’d have been somebody.’

  I said, ‘It was that experience in Paris that turned her to drink.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ she said. ‘But she certainly made a fool of herself and all because she didn’t know who she was. And if Uncle Murray hadn’t told me a few things, I wouldn’t have known either. We were like little blobs of jello, only no particular flavor. Heck Mom, first I thought I was Aunt Honey’s little girl, then I thought I was some kind of English princess. I was all of nine years old before I started working things out. And Sapphy just never did. She’s kind of limited, you know? I do love her, but she’s kind of limited.’

  I said, ‘I did the best I could.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  I said, ‘I had a pretty raw deal myself, you know? I lost my Pa. I had Grandma and Aunt Fish flattening me out and strapping me down and disapproving of every move I made. Then we had a war …’

  ‘You loved the war,’ she said. ‘Well, OK, someday we can talk about that. We can see how far back cruelty to children runs in this family. That’d be fun. But right now you have things to explain to Sapphire. Such as how her daddy was living just a cab ride away, with her picture on his night table. And by the way, do you realize how much benzedrine she’s taking these days?’

  I said, ‘Lots of people take benzedrine. Anyway, I’ll tell her in the morning. There’s nothing more to be done now. I may as well get back down to the gallery.’

  ‘Yes Mom,’ she said, ‘why don’t you just do that.’

  Her voice was unpleasantly tight.

  ‘Em,’ Mortie said quietly. ‘Don’t upset yourself.’

  No one seemed to consider how I might be feeling. Questioned by police. Dragged back into Gil Catchings’ sordid affairs. Obliged to stand up Jerome Sacks.

  FIFTY-ONE

  So the very Minkel money Gil had turned against paid for his admission to a cemetery in Flushing, and as soon as that was done Sapphire commenced to make a life’s project of building him into a giant and a hero. She gathered up a few paltry things from his room on the Bowery and took a low-rent apartment on Second Avenue, to be nearer Ukrainians and bohemians and others she described as ‘my daddy’s kind of people’. After that she only ventured north of Gramercy Park to see her mind doctor, and her regular coolness with me turned into an arctic freeze.

  Baby Alan learned to walk and talk, Vera graduated cum laude and immediately began another course of study, and Ma gave up all pretense of a social life. She adored the television, once Mortie had convinced her that the people on the screen could not see her the way she could see them, and the acquisition of a new help named Coretta completed her happiness. Coretta loved television, too, and was most willing to serve Ma’s evening slop on a tray and then sit with her through Hopalong Cassidy and the Colgate Comedy Hour. I believe Coretta became a kind of friend to her. She was certainly the person who introduced Ma to Shirley Temple cocktails.

  Then the time came around for the setting of Oscar’s headstone, and the marking of his anniversary. His name was to be added to his mother’s on a bronze plaque in Temple Emanu-El.

  I said, ‘How come Judah’s name isn’t up there yet?’

  Ma said, ‘Because he’ll share a plaque with me. And if my aching bones are anything to go by, he won’t have long to wait.’

  Emerald said, ‘I don’t suppose you’ll be gracing us with your presence on Saturday morning?’ But I did go. Once in a while I liked to hear those squiggly back-to-front words.

  The Landau cousin came up from St Louis, wearing old-fashioned eyeglasses, probably the same ones he’d worn to the Seder, and Judah Jacoby’s friends from the Men’s Club and the Temple Youth Committee. You can’t just say Kaddish. You have to have a certain number present, otherwise I guess God can’t hear you, and for a person who had chosen to live like a hermit Oscar managed to pull in quite a crowd.

  Ma came with Emerald and Mortie, leaning unnecessarily on Mortie’s arm I thought, and Coretta came, too, although she was a Baptist Total Abstainer, and I stood slightly apart, needing to get away punctually for lunch with Humpy and an important collector from London, England.

  I was wearing a divine boxy jacket and long-line pencil skirt in cranberry silk with a witty velour toreador hat.

  Someone came in late, when the ordinary praying was almost finished, and stood behind me, quite close. I could smell the breath of a person whose mouth is too dry.

  Mortie was to be chief mourner. He had never met Oscar in his life, but it had to be a man, and Sherman Ulysses didn’t go to temples and think irrational thoughts. If there was one thing we were short of in our family it was Jewish men.

  ‘Yisgadal va yiskadash,’ Mortie began, and when it came to the ‘y’hay shm’ay’, where everyone joins in, I heard a voice I thought I knew.

  ‘Y’hay shm’ay raboh m’vorah …’ May His great name be blessed.

  I turned around. It was my stepbrother Murray. But changed into an old man, with sunken cheeks and no teeth and thin, colorless hair.

  He didn’t look at me, though, until after he’d said, ‘Omayn’. That’s how you know the praying is finished. ‘Omayn.’

  Then he just took one look at my hat and said, ‘Olé.’

  We went right out, before anyone else made a move, and stood under the temple awning till an empty cab came along. My head felt like one of those little shake-and-view snowstorms.

  I said, ‘I have a lunch.’

  ‘OK,’ he said.

  I said, ‘Ride with me, while I think.’

  ‘OK,’ he said.

  I pushed him into the cab.

  I said, ‘I thought you were dead, of course.’ And he grabbed my arm with his bony old hand.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ That was all he’d say. ‘I’m sorry.’

  I didn’t know what the hell to do. I couldn’t take a refugee to lunch with James Foliat. Murray wasn’t even wearing a collar and tie. Besides which, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to master my emotions if I had him sitting there before me. He was a sorry sight indeed.

  He said, ‘You can drop me at 44th Street.’

  I said, ‘Are you staying at the Algonquin?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘But I could see you there, later.’

  The cab pulled over.

  I said, ‘Swear to me you’ll be there.’

  ‘I swear,’ he said.

  I said, ‘Swear properly. Put your hand on your heart.’

  ‘Lady,’ the driver said. ‘This is a cab not a court of law. You want Dominique’s Grill or don’t you?’

  Humpy and James Foliat were late. Bella Yaff had been told to expect them but Bella Yaff had failed to remember and they had had to wait for her to roll out of her bed and throw on her stinking coveralls. I had once given her a tablet of Roger et Gallet Muguet soap but the hint had passed her by, and I instructed Humpy to retrieve it next time he was in her neighborhood, which he did. She made slovenliness her trademark, and it worked very well. Better to be famous for one’s unwashed hair than to be an unknown.

  Foliat, though, turned out to be a fastidious little man. Yaff’s domestic arrangements were making him think twice about buying, so Humpy was in a bad humor.

  ‘Take over, would you?’ he whispered. ‘I’d rather like to skip lunch.’

  ‘Me too,’ I whispered back. ‘My stepbrot
her just rose from the dead and I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.’

  ‘Murray?’ he said. ‘How extraordinary! Well then. Let’s order a little something and press on, shall we? I think I might have an egg salad? I never eat much at this time of day.’

  But James Foliat had a very serious attitude to lunch. Shrimp Appetizers were required, followed by Broiled Squab, Nesselrode Pudding, and after a bottle of Beaujolais wine the damage done by Bella Yaff was repaired. It was three-thirty before I raced into the Algonquin, searching for Murray’s face.

  He was in the back lobby, sipping a glass of milk and pretending to read a book. I sat opposite him, the better to look at him.

  ‘I suppose I’ve been very, very bad,’ he observed.

  I said, ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Is Auntsie dead?’ he asked. And that was how it was. Every question was answered with another question.

  ‘Did you know Angelica’s not your wife anymore?’

  ‘Have you been back from England long?’

  ‘I searched for you in Paris.’

  ‘How are Sapphy and Em?’

  ‘You look terrible. What happened to your teeth?’

  ‘Would you care for a cocktail? Or we could go to Hegeman’s for old times’ sake.’

  We stayed put.

  I said, ‘You saw Emerald this morning. In the Prince of Wales check? She has a baby now, and Sabbath candles and a husband. The whole thing. She’s old before her time. Sherman Ulysses the same. He’s gone gray. Your pa’s gone. But if you know about Oscar, I guess you know that. Do you know all this already? Have you been hiding out down here spying on us all these years? Do you intend showing your face at 69th Street?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think I’ll visit Auntsie first.’