The Great Husband Hunt (14 page)

“Well, I shan't go,” the boy Murray piped up.

Ma ventured back into the conversation. She said, “But I understood it was the war to end all wars. How very unsettling to think we may have another one.”

“How so?” Oscar said. His cuff link had begun to rattle again. “Didn't you describe it as an adventure? And Cousin Landau here thinks it makes men nobler. He'd like to find out if he has what it takes.”

He pushed back his chair and rose to his feet.

“Well, I'm sure he does. Blood, brains…anything that's easily spilled…”

The dumplings in my soup suddenly lost their appeal.

“Guts. Lights. Skin and bone. That's what soldier boys are made of.”

I watched him leave the room, pale but sweating.

Murray had finished his soup.

“Shall I go after him, Auntsie?” he said. “Is he allowed a tray in his room?”

“Oscar is…” Mr. Jacoby seemed at a loss.

“What has happened?” Mr. Roth shouted.

“Eat your soup,” Mrs. Roth shouted back.

“Oscar is suffering from exhaustion of the nerves,” Miss Landau explained, “and it might have been better after all, Murray, if we had not insisted on his being here tonight. Now he's been rude to our guests, a thing he never would have done before.”

She said it kindly enough. Murray considered for a moment.

“Oh, yes, he would,” he murmured. “Sometimes he would have been even ruder.”

It had been a shocking performance from Oscar. He had been sarcastic and surly. He had mocked his cousin, affected not to notice my dress, and he had said disgusting unrepeatable words. He seemed not to give a damn about anything. I fell deeply and crazily in love.

A boned lamb roast followed, and a strawberry sherbet, and gradually the mood lightened. There was talk of going to Saratoga to see the trotting races. And even the boy Murray deigned to be interested in my own plan to drive across America.

“But where will you stop for luncheon?” he asked, scraping the very last traces of sherbet from his sundae dish.

When dinner was finished, the Seder dish was brought back in, and the broken pieces of matzo cracker, and more wine was poured.

“Is it time yet?” Murray asked his father. But there were more prayers and blessings to sit through before he finally got the signal to leave the table and open the door for Elijah. We all stood, and drank, but Elijah didn't appear and neither did Oscar. He was in his room, I decided, pacing the floor, wondering whether he had ruined his chances with me.

Then Miss Landau and Murray and Mr. Jacoby finished off with a song, and we withdrew, ladies and gentlemen all together, to take coffee in the drawing room.

As I drove Aunt Fish home I strained to hear what she and Ma were whispering, but neither of them ever seemed to finish a sentence.

“I have every confidence…” Ma began.

“Of course, the important point to be decided…” Aunt Fish interrupted.

I did manage to catch “June might be very suitable…” and then a motorized bus passed by and drowned the rest of Ma's words.

I gave up trying to hear, and in my mind's eye began designing my trousseau. Oscar and I would be a very modern couple. We'd probably live in a new apartment building until we inherited the Jacoby house, and might even dispense with servants. Since the war it was becoming quite the trend to manage with help who just came in as required. It was a very satisfactory arrangement. Backstairs girls had always seemed to create more problems than they solved, and cooks were positively hazardous, always so hot and cross and liable to boil over.

Oscar and I would dine at the Plaza, and for breakfast I'd make French toast. The silk pajamas I planned to hand-paint would be both chic and practical in the kitchen. Then I would need car coats for our honeymoon drive to California, a roomy batwing in lined wool, a lightweight one in natural linen. For the wedding ceremony I envisioned a slender collarless tube of dove gray crêpe de chine with a single gardenia pinned to the shoulder. Or, if we had to delay until the fall, the same dress but worn with a short cape trimmed with silver mink. I decided we wouldn't have children but when we went to Paris, France, for our first anniversary we might adopt two pretty French dogs, a boy one and a girl one.

When we arrived at West 73rd Street I suggested we might go in and say goodnight to Uncle Israel.

“I expect he'd like to hear all about our evening,” I said.

“No, Poppy,” Aunt Fish replied, looking over my shoulder and smiling at Ma in a rather flagrant way. “I believe you should go home directly and share a soothing tisane with your mother.”

I wanted no tisane. I wanted to go to bed and be alone with my racing thoughts. But Ma insisted. The help was required to put down her novelette and prepare a tray and I was required to accompany Ma to her room and await the arrival of the tasteless brew.

Ma sighed contentedly. “Now wasn't that a most congenial evening?” she said. “And so interesting. You know, the Jewish parts weren't at all difficult to follow. And they were over soon enough.”

She tossed her hat onto a chair. Tossed it. And then she did something else I had never seen before. She twirled.

“Well?” she said. “Don't just stand there. Unhook me at the back and tell me what you think.”

I grinned. She grinned back.

“You've guessed?” she said.

“Yes, Ma,” I said. “Of course I've guessed. And I'm very happy.”

“Oh Poppy, are you?” she said. Shorter than me by a head, she took me in her arms and looked up at me, full of tenderness. “Dearest Poppy,” she said, “you can't imagine what it means to hear you say that. I've quite dreaded the moment of telling you.”

“But you must know it's what I want too,” I said.

A person may stand so close to the obvious that it becomes invisible to her. Ma's smile wobbled and a few happy tears spilled down her cheeks.

“What a darling daughter you are,” she cried, “so generous and gracious. Judah predicted you wouldn't stand in my way, and I should have known. It was just…well…you were always such a girl for your pa.”

The help made a clumsy entrance with a tea tray and banged about a great deal. This interruption allowed me enough time to grasp that my conversation with Ma had veered away from its expected route, and to understand, with horrible clarity, why. If good help had been easier to come by, if we had managed to employ someone who could efficiently and pleasantly deliver a tea tray, say goodnight and leave, it all might have happened too quickly for me to master my tongue and save myself from making the most humiliating mistake.

Finally we were alone again.

“You were such a girl for your pa,” she resumed, “but it has been seven years. And Judah is a good man. I hope some day, after we are married, you may even grow to think of him as a kind of father.”

Ma made herself comfortable on her daybed, sipped her tea and between sips smiled to herself in a gratingly smug manner. She had robbed me of my dreams but didn't even know it. My mother was to be married and it didn't seem to have occurred to her that it was my turn.

I immediately began chipping away at her happiness.

“Oscar was very rude to you at dinner,” I said, succeeding in sounding casual.

“Oh, but Oscar has neurasthenia,” she said proudly, “brought on by the war. The doctors say he needs a great deal of rest. And I'm sure dinners don't improve anyone's nerves. I quite disagreed with Yetta when she forced him to attend this evening, and I shall tell her so.”

I said, “How strange, though, that Miss Landau and Mr. Jacoby never married. They seem so suited. I dare say she is quite like her sister. I dare say she reminds Mr. Jacoby of his first wife.”

“How little you know,” Ma said. “Yetta is not at all the marrying kind. She is far too full of opinions to make a man happy. Of course, she has been a tower of strength to them. But she lacks…well…A husband, you know, likes a certain softness in a wife, a certain fragility. This is something you should bear in mind, too, Poppy. I have noticed a rather defiant tendency in you and if I have noticed it you may be sure it will discourage any suitors.”

I said, “But you told me I wasn't to have any suitors. After Pa was drowned you said I was to stay with you and be an old maid.”

Ma brushed away this objection as though it were a small fly.

I said, “So now I'm not needed anymore as a companion, I suppose I may please myself? Take a husband or not take a husband.”

“But this is precisely my point,” Ma said, surfacing a little from her golden haze. “It's not for you to
take
a husband. It is for a husband to…choose you. And you are only twenty-one. There is hope for you yet.”

“Where shall you live?” I asked.

“Why, in Judah's house,” she said. “Where else?”

“And will Miss Landau stay on?”

“Naturally,” she said. “I shall take on the general running of the house, but Yetta will still be needed. As I told her, I only know about the raising of girls. Boys are a mystery to me. Although, of course, as a real mother one notices errors that a maiden aunt might not. I'm sure she will welcome the benefit of my advice. The boy Murray, for instance. Your aunt and I detect a certain impudence about him. It was probably considered comical in the younger child and not corrected. Well anyway, time enough for that.”

In an instant I warmed to Murray Jacoby. Like me, he had lost a parent. Like me, he was charged with impudence. And like me, he was considered a candidate for one of Ma and Aunt Fish's programs of improvement. I vowed to stand by him in any way I could.

I said, “I shall stay on here, of course.”

“Oh no!” Ma said. “That would be quite unsuitable. And besides, I shall want your help redesigning my rooms. They are a little too plain for my taste, and you have such a good eye for color. What fun we shall have.”

The wedding was to take place in June or July. Ahead of me stretched weeks and weeks of disappointment and hurt and crushing, unendurable shame.

“Ma,” I said, “I'm so tired I can hardly keep my eyes open. May I be excused?”

“Why, how selfish I am,” she said. “Off to bed now. We both need our beauty sleep! And in the morning we'll call Honey. This calls for an urgent tea party. Goodnight darling. Come and give your ma a kiss…”

She offered me her silly self-satisfied face.

“You may kiss the bride,” she simpered.

I forced myself to brush my lips across her soft old-lady skin and she was waiting for me, ready with one final sharpened knife to plunge into my heart.

“Poppy,” she whispered, “I should very much like you to design my gown. Goodnight dearest. And sweet dreams.”

19

On Sunday, July 6, 1919, Ma was married to Judah Jacoby. A minister came to the Jacoby house on East 69th Street and the marrying was done in the ivory parlor, where Ma had already begun to make her mark. Little by little our home had been emptied of porcelain garniture and Venetian doilies. They had been ferried across Central Park in discreet packages and reappeared, looking every bit the overdressed guests, to clutter Miss Landau's tables.

A parasol lamp had sprung up, purchased from W. & J. Sloane's and delivered one afternoon when Ma had been sure of having the Jacoby place to herself. And the mantel was now festooned. The mantel and the mirror above the mantel and the piano, too, all draped in Spanish shawls. Mr. Jacoby, I remember thinking, had better not fall asleep in his armchair when Ma was in a fit of home-making. He might wake up swagged in fringed silk.

I found myself unable to call Mr. Jacoby anything but Mr. Jacoby. When the nuptials were announced he had taken me to one side.

“I do hope, Poppy,” he'd said, taking my hand tentatively in his, “that you will find a place for me in your heart, if not as a father, perhaps as an uncle? Or at least as a friend.”

But I had the only uncle I wanted, and I failed to see how an old man could be my friend. A friend was someone you met at Horn and Hardart for pie and coffee. A friend was someone you could talk to about lingerie and beaux. And besides, I was uncomfortable with the way he had taken to calling Ma “Dorabel.”

I designed for Ma a slender sheath dress in hortensia blue silk, with a vermilion side-slashed kimono coat lined in the same blue. I prepared detailed colored drawings and made up a toile so she could try the shape and see how trim it made her appear, but she wavered, and the next I knew she had been to A. T. Stewart's with Aunt Fish and picked out a serviceable two-piece in fawn.

“I'm sorry to disappoint you,” she said, “but I decided your design was altogether too progressive, didn't we Zillah?”

Aunt Fish had very strong opinions on all aspects of a marrying. The room should be decorated with calla lilies. The groom should be at least three years older than the bride, and taller. Brisket should be served.

“I believe Honey might wear your design,” Ma said, trying to mollify me. But Honey had lost interest in fashion. Honey had lost interest in pretty much everything. Even with a full complement of servants and Sherman enrolled at the Jauncey Day School for Boys, she still found it taxing to do much more than leaf through
Town Topics.

We were a small wedding party. Harry was away, buying property on Bay Shore, Long Island, Uncle Israel excused himself because of the difficulties of climbing to an East Side front stoop. Also because the tendency to dribble had persisted. And Oscar was in a veterans' convalescent home in the Catskill Mountains, suffering from black moods.

But four men were needed to hold the corners of the chuppah. It had to be men. So the deaf Mr. Roth had been prevailed upon, and two valued employees from the firm of Jacoby, a Mr. Klot who was the senior pelt grader, and a Greek called Basil.

“A genius,” Mr. Jacoby said. “This man can make a garment out of nothing but mink tails.”

I saw Aunt Fish later, examining the jacket that was Ma's wedding gift, looking for the joins.

With Murray they had four to hold the poles of the canopy and the marrying was done with Sherman Ulysses stretched out on the rug, gently drumming his feet. He wasn't throwing a tantrum exactly. It was simply that Honey had asked him to stand up nicely, so he felt obliged, I suppose, to do the opposite. It was a listless kind of disobedience.