The Great Husband Hunt (12 page)

“…even you probably. Do you?”

“I do not,” he said.

“Don't you want one?” I asked. “Nellie said any gentleman can get one, as long as he has life in his body, and it quite suits the wives because then husbands don't come home every night expecting conversation.”

He pushed his dish away from him.

“Nellie said Harry probably has a string of them,” I continued. “Do you think so? Honey does find conversation awfully tiring.”

“Poppy,” he said, “this person is precisely the kind I was warning you against, and may I say, this is not polite talk for a young lady. What else did this person say? Did she ask for money? Did she name names?”

Uncle Israel appeared to have lost his appetite, though I couldn't see I was to blame. If he chose not to have a sweetie that was his affair. As to Harry, I had already decided I was going to question him myself.

On the way home I went to Macy's in Herald Square. I ordered a Singer sewing machine and spent thirty dollars on Vinolia vanishing cream, fruit cake, flesh-tone stockings and a garter belt, scent, a Kolinsky fur collar for my winter coat, and a selection of hatpins which I gave to Ma.

“But I already have hatpins,” she said. “What possessed you to buy me more? Such extravagance. A small tablet of cucumber toilet soap would have been most acceptable.”

I was a little hurt by her criticism. I had had fifty dollars to dispose of and I'm sure I had done the very best I could. I'm sure, had they been given by anyone else she'd have said, “One can never have too many hatpins.”

At the beginning of December Honey sent word that she felt strong enough to return to New York.

“She will stay with us,” Ma said, “until I'm satisfied as to her recovery. A month at least, I think. How cozy we shall be!”

We had just engaged, at great expense to Ma's nerves, a new maid-of-all-work, a foreign girl with rudimentary English. She was put to work scrubbing and airing the room that had once been mine before Honey's marriage, but it was soon decided that it was incurably damp and cheerless and quite unsuitable for a convalescent.

“She must have your room,” Ma decided. “It was once hers anyway, so she'll feel quite at home there, and you always did well enough in the damp room. You are lucky, Poppy, to have been blessed with a strong constitution.”

Harry was to bring Honey and Sherman Ulysses home in his Packard. As soon as I heard this, I went to 74th Street and made my demands.

“I have to learn to drive an automobile,” I told him, “so it may as well be you that shows me how. Then I shall be able to drive us all from Oyster Bay.”

He sniggered.

“Drive from Oyster Bay!” he said. “You fool! You can't just jump behind the wheel.”

He soon came around to my way of thinking.

“Do you know what I heard about you, Harry?” I said. “I heard you have popsies. I wonder whether Honey knows? I believe I may discuss it with her. I have a feeling she has no idea what a considerate husband she has.”

“Just get into the car,” he whined, “and pay close attention to what I do. It's a great deal harder than it looks, as you're about to find.”

But it wasn't, of course. It was amazing what an ill-founded reputation Harry had for knowing about things.

I studied what he did for a while and then, after we were over the Queensborough Bridge, I resumed my questions about popsies until he caved in and allowed me to take the wheel myself. There was nothing to it.

The nurse and the tutor were dispatched to bring Sherman home by railroad, which still left three of us to squeeze in beside Honey's luggage.

“Driving!” Honey cried. “How modern you've become. And as thin as a pencil, too, with all that rushing around I suppose, fighting wars. Or have you been slenderizing? I shall have to learn your secret, Poppy. I eat next to nothing but I never seem to reduce.”

When they heard about my driving, Ma and Aunt Fish were amazed and anxious in equal measure. On the one hand Yetta Landau drove, so driving was, by association, a Good Thing. On the other hand, she brought to it a carefulness I could never hope to emulate. I was famously untidy and erratic. What if I had untidily steered the Packard over a precipice and killed us all?

“Ma,” Honey said, “I don't believe Poppy took us anywhere near a precipice. She doesn't even waver when she's having her cigarette lit. As a matter of fact, I found her to be a more soothing driver than Harry. Now tell me about the Jacobys. I want to hear all the news.”

But she was hushed, with significant looks from Ma and Aunt Fish, and then Sherman Ulysses arrived, in the care of his nurse, and caused a change of topic. I didn't care. I was feeling proud and excited about my ability to drive a car all the way to Oyster Bay and back, and, anyway, I was accustomed to the whispers and secret smiles connected with the name of Jacoby. I knew what was going on.

My nephew had certainly grown some, and that good sea air had given him a fund of energy. He shot through the door, bumped against the credenza and tumbled up stairs to the parlor with his bootlaces flying.

“Now, Shermy,” Honey said, “shake hands nicely with Grandma and Aunt Poppy. He's learned to shake hands, you know?”

But Sherman Ulysses's hands were busy investigating the face on one of Ma's china shepherdesses, picking at it with a fat little finger.

“Hey, Sherman!” Harry bent low, holding out his own hand. “Come and show us how it's done.”

But Sherman blew a raspberry in his daddy's face and fell back, very pleased with himself, against Ma's chair. Harry laughed.

“That's my boy!” he said. “Want to fight? Eh? Eh?” He put up two silly fists.

“Harry!” Honey warned. “Please don't get him overwrought.”

It was too late, of course. Sherman was already beside himself with fatigue and excitement and uncurbed bumptiousness. I observed him. I knew that the sight of a small child, close kin, should arouse tenderness in me but I felt nothing, and he himself sensed there was someone in the room he had failed to enrapture. His eyes kept returning to meet mine.

“I think,” said Ma, “he might like a nice glass of buttermilk. Poppy? And a cookie?” But Sherman was smart enough to know I was not his friend. He clung to Ma's skirts and I fumed within, refusing to coax him. A grandchild, no matter how unlovely, was apparently to be fussed and petted and fed on buttermilk and cookies, but
I
had never enjoyed any of these privileges. My grandparents had lingered in Iowa, stubbornly declining ever to come to New York City and adore me. They had given me nothing, except a tourmaline ring and a pile of money.

Ma took Sherman down to the kitchen herself and I remained in the parlor with Harry and Honey, until I grew tired of the way Harry prowled around, picking up vases and bowls, examining them as though he were in a shop. I went in search of a little soothing buttermilk for myself and found Sherman and Ma in the top stairhall, standing in front of the twin oil paintings of Pa and Ma.

“And this is your grandpa Abraham,” Ma was whispering. “Shouldn't you like to be named Abraham, same as your grandpa? Isn't it a very fine name?” And Sherman Ulysses was nodding solemnly, chipping away with his pointed little teeth at one of my favorite brown sugar cookies.

So Honey began her convalescence, in my bedroom, and we dropped into a new regime. She slept till eleven and then a breakfast tray was taken in to her. Every afternoon, Sherman was brought by his nurse for an hour of caresses. And twice a week Harry came to dine. A perfunctory affair, this. As soon as the savory was cleared he always had to rush away to a card game.

“Just as well,” Ma would say. “I believe Honey may have overreached herself today.”

I was hardly at home. There was still work to be done at the Red Cross.

“The guns are silent, but the battle goes on,” Mrs Brickner had said. “So many devastated lives. So many orphans and widows and poor crippled heroes.”

There were victory parades, too, with bands playing and our soldier boys marching up Fifth Avenue. At Madison Square there was a victory arch, made of plaster, and further uptown a curtain of sparkling glass beads suspended from two white pillars. I always looked out for Irish Nellie, having in mind to quiz her on certain things, such as her travels in Europe, and the habits of married men. But I never saw her.

Honey was still with us in January, although beginning to dress a little earlier in the day. I petitioned Uncle Israel for enough money to buy an automobile, and while he hesitated I made short work of my monthly allowance, buying quantities of fabric which I turned into experimental gowns.

I had let slide Aunt Fish's offer of a set of bespoke support garments, and created for myself a system of layered tubes that fell loosely from the shoulder seams and made me feel tall and strong and rather beautiful. Ma referred to them as my
robes,
and hoped aloud that the craze would soon pass. Honey judged the line interesting but the colors too shrill. I enjoyed this compliment and repaid it by making her a three-layer muslin in matronly shades of gray, blue and indigo. She loved it. She declared all her set would want one, though I wasn't aware she had a set anymore, and I began to feel that at least my sister no longer saw me as a child.

Then I came home one day to find her pink and agitated and ready for a quarrel. Whiling away the long hours, she had been rooting around in my drawers and unearthed John Willard Strunck. She was waiting for me, swinging the locket on its chain, trying to look more injured than triumphant.

“What can you have been thinking of?” she began.

Having no explanation I cared to share with her, I remained silent. She reeled at the damage I had done to a treasured photograph, shed crocodile tears over a departed one-time cotillion partner, and scorned my need of someone else's beau. All the while I stared her out. It was only her threat to bring the matter to Ma that roused me to defend myself.

“He was never your beau,” I said. “He danced with you because Pa knew Dr. Strunck and you quite despised him. I remember it, Honey. You found his chin weak. And since he is dead don't you think he deserves to have his picture in someone's locket, instead of moldering in albums you had quite forgotten? I did it first because I've been so pursued by boys this last year and needed to fend them off…”

Honey snorted.

“…but now I'm rather proud to have it. I'm sure even a person with a weak chin would like to be remembered and carried in a locket.”

“You were so proud of it,” she said, “you dropped it amongst your hairpins and tangled ribbons. How slovenly you are, Poppy. Sly and slovenly.”

“You should go home,” I said, evenly. “You should go and attend to your own affairs. Before Harry spends any more of your fortune taking showgirls to supper.”

“How dare you,” she said. “Harry does no such thing!”

But she telephoned for the car to fetch her, packed away her sleeping powders, her Tilden's Extract and her tonic wine, and was gone within the hour.

Ma was quite put out when she returned from a bazaar and found her gone.

“I fail to account for her urgency,” she said. “Can you account for it, Poppy?”

I reclaimed my room that night and flushed John Willard Strunck down the water closet, may he rest in peace.

17

It took a crisis to reconcile me with my sister. One afternoon early in the New Year Uncle Israel returned to his office and suffered a seizure.

It occurred to me that he might die, and then that any of us might die. In a funk over the fragility of life, I went to 74th Street and begged Honey that we be friends again.

“Of course we're friends, you noodle,” she said. “How could we not be?”

I apologized for what I had hinted about Harry.

“Well,” Honey said, “let's say no more about it. What matters now is Uncle Israel.”

He blamed the episode on a rogue clam in his lunchtime chowder, his doctor blamed it on his having eaten too many good, sweet clams and the attack left him with a strangely lopsided face. It also temporarily loosened his grip on my money. Weakened by bed rest and health lectures from Aunt Fish he agreed to transfer to my personal account enough funds for the purchase of a Pierce-Arrow cloth-top roadster. This brought me more pleasure than I had believed possible. Driving Harry's Packard had been all very well and good, but behind the steering wheel of my own car anything seemed possible.

I had in mind to visit Duyluth, Minnesota, and see whether Cousin Addie was home from the war, also Blue Grass, Iowa, to inspect my mustard roots. I had in mind to drive sheer across the United States of America till I came to the end of the road, but I figured to do it with a companion of some kind. A dog perhaps, or a beau. And until that was settled I contented myself with driving around the city.

“How restless you are,” Ma observed. A fine remark from a person who was out playing canasta at least four times a week. And I came home one day to find her in a fever of excitement.

“The most wonderful thing,” she said. “Oscar Jacoby's regiment will be home in time for Passover. There's to be a Seder, Poppy. Dear Yetta is making a Seder, and we are invited.”

Oscar's name was the only thing in this announcement that signified anything to me. Though I had decided I wouldn't marry him, I was theoretically willing to be pursued and courted, and I was certainly curious to see him. Of Passovers and Seders, I knew nothing.

Ma brushed aside my queries.

“Passover!” she insisted. “You know!
Passover!
The Bible. Egypt. Dinner. Good gracious, Poppy, you exhaust me with your questions. Well, ask your uncle. He will explain it to you, and be sure to pay close attention. A Seder is a most particular dinner.”

This became more and more evident as Ma and Aunt Fish went for fittings for their new gowns, and I was put under pressure to order something for myself.

I already had one of my own new designs under construction, a loose calf-length skirt in black and crimson surah and a matching Slav shirt fastened across one shoulder with a line of frogging and Chinese balls.

“We have seen such a suitable pink voile, haven't we Dora?” Aunt Fish began.