The Great Husband Hunt (17 page)

Murray shrugged. He was looking a good deal less tragic than when he arrived.

I said, “Would you care to come out driving?”

It had occurred to me I could take him with me on my first visit to Washington Square. If Bernie was right about a beau needing to be kept in a state of anticipation, I had to find a way of reining in Gil's ardor, and arriving with Murray at my side seemed as good a way as any.

“Where shall we go?” he asked.

I said, “To visit Gilbert Catchings. We'll go tomorrow.”

He said, “Is Gilbert Catchings a reprobate?”

He had heard Ma expressing the opinion that the Belleclaire attracted deviationists, reprobates and showgirls.

I said, “No. As a matter of fact he's my fiancé, but we haven't yet made our announcement, so you must be sure not to breathe a word of this to your step-ma.”

I rather relished the idea of Murray hurrying home to ruin Ma's evening with his loose lips.

I said, “What made you think this is a lemon tree?”

“I know it is,” he said. “I grew it. From a pip.”

That boy had been allowed to get away with way too many untruths.

23

The Keynote dance hall was the greatest lark. You could dance as close as you liked and until midnight. I remarked to Gil that I wouldn't mind applying for a position there myself, like Bernie, but he made it clear he didn't care for the idea of his sweetheart dancing with other men and I found the pleasure of being so fiercely protected outweighed the irritation of being overruled. It was just what I had hoped for from Oscar Jacoby, before he had had to go away to the country for fresh air and basket weaving.

After the Keynote closed we went on to the Hootsy Tootsy Club for drinks with maraschino cherries. Bernie came along, too, with her last fare of the evening, a captain recently discharged from the 339th, one of our Polar Bear Boys who had risked his life in the fight for Russia. He had a fresh, friendly face. His name was George and he was from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and I don't believe he ever had drunk Manhattan cocktails before.

Bernie said, “George here was in a place called Archangel. Did you ever hear such a pretty name for a town?”

“Nothing pretty about it,” he said. “We had thirty degrees below. What are the arrangements for paying for these refreshments?”

Gil said, “Consider them paid for.”

Bernie was wearing her soldier boy like he was an Oak-leaf Cluster, angling the conversation around to battalions and regiments and such, asking Gil which bit of the fray he had gotten into, even though I had told her about his asthma.

“Couldn't persuade them to take me,” he said. “My state of health obliged me to stay behind and take charge of a factory. We supplied uniforms to the military.”

Bernie said, “Your state of health looks pretty fine to me.” She said it in a light, flirtatious manner, but it could have been differently received. I noticed her friend George kept adjusting his cuffs. I dare say he was hoping Gil wasn't going to take offense. I dare say he'd had his fill of fighting.

He needn't have worried. Gil did no more than turn around Bernie's implication and return it as a compliment to George.

“Not as fine as your friend's here,” he said. “And thank God for men like George, or we'd all be living under the Prussian heel.”

“Yes, well,” George said, still fussing with his cuffs, “it made a man of me.”

Bernie had her arm around his shoulder. “George is thinking to stay on in New York,” she said. “He's thinking to set up as a mortician. Isn't that wild?”

Gil said, “Never be out of work there, George! Morticians! Always the last people to let you down!”

He made us all laugh. Over the months we often went out drinking after Bernie finished at the Keynote. Most times she was with some new face, and whoever it was, Gil could get along with him.

It turned out Gil didn't live on Washington Square exactly. He was in Minetta Lane, which was off MacDougal Street, which was off Washington Square. He shared a low red-brick with a number of other poets and pamphleteers. I discovered this when I kept my promise to my stepbrother Murray to take him out driving and spare him from having to go to B'nai Brith and dance with scarves and other boys. I collected him from East 69th Street and was disappointed to find Ma in a good humor with me. Murray had omitted to tell her about my drinking gin and being engaged to be married.

“How considerate of you, Poppy,” she said, and then she whispered, loud enough for Murray to hear, “Boys are
so
difficult.”

I quizzed him as we drove downtown. “Where did you tell Ma we were going?”

“To visit your nice friend,” he fawned, “and not be underfoot at home and an encumbrance.”

Gil's house smelled of sourness and he seemed not to have completed his toilette although it was quite two o'clock in the afternoon. Poets, of course, can become so abstracted that they forget to shave. He already had company when we arrived, sitting in all the mess and confusion. An artist called Casella who had paint under his nails, and an anarchist called Frederick who had brought a gift of bourbon whiskey.

I said, “What a muddle. Didn't the help come?”

They all laughed. They seemed quite as fascinated by me as I was by them.

I said, “Now Gil, you really have no reason not to show me some of your verses.”

I could see a quantity of notebooks and loose leaves of paper covered with scribbling. Mr. Casella was all for a poetry reading, too, and Murray, who was in a most obliging mood. Only Frederick appeared bored by the prospect of being entertained. I have often found this to be the case with anarchists.

Gil began.

“Here's one I wrote yesterday,” he said.

Winter Poppy Blooms

You cut the mustard for me

My Westside Princess

I waited for more but that was all it amounted to. He said it was an ancient Japanese style of poetry called haiku and quite the rage with those in the know. “Seventeen syllables,” he explained. “Five in the first line, seven in the second line, five in the third line. Here's another one.”

Homecoming doughboys

Purple hearts on Fifth Avenue

Soot blackened branches

Mr. Casella nodded solemnly and I did, too, because Gil did recite most affectingly, but as I pointed out, if people paid for verses by the line, a haiku was never going to pay the rent. This caused the anarchist to stop being bored and roar with laughter.

Then Murray piped up.

“That's not seventeen,” he said. “That one has eighteen.”

And so an argument ensued between my stepbrother and my intended, as to the number of syllables in the word “purple.”

I said, “I fail to see that it matters. Let's go out for pastries.”

I was a little concerned for the safety of my new Packard. It had attracted a deal of attention when I parked it in Minetta Lane, and keen as I was to meet artists and revolutionaries, I didn't want my property ruined by envious vagabonds.

Mr. Casella, who had a hungry look about him, was all in favor of pastries and so was Murray, but first he wanted another verse, looking to catch Gil out, I suppose.

“Okey-dokey,” Gil said, and he composed one right there and then.

Thin boy, gloved, hatted

Counting syllables and cakes

Is this haiku too?

It didn't rhyme, of course, which in my opinion is the very least a poem should do, and it led to a discussion on the number of syllables in “syllable” but I was impressed by the way Gil could just conjure things out of his head, and I was gratified to see him getting along so well with Murray. They were destined to become kin, after all.

We drove to Rivington Street, in the neighborhood of Orchard and Delancey and the unfortunates. Even the anarchist was persuaded to ride with us, and I treated everyone to apricot
ruggelach.
I asked Mr. Casella how much he charged for portraits, having in mind that Gil and I might get our likenesses painted before the wedding, but he explained to me he wasn't that kind of artist. He was something called a vanguardist, and vanguardists regarded portrait-painting as outmoded.

Frederick agreed with him. “Portraits!” he scoffed. “Nothing but a bourgeois conceit. What about the
real
people? Where are
their
portraits?”

I couldn't answer him. I said, “I'm sure anyone might like to have their portrait painted.”

But I took note of what was being said, especially the word “bourgeois” which was used frequently. Minetta Lane people seemed to have a fund of unusual ideas. They felt sorry for the unfortunates, but they didn't wish them to get rich, because they regarded wealth as another kind of misfortune. As for the in-betweens, the little people who had jobs of work and were neither tragically rich nor tragically poor, they seemed to despise them above all. I wasn't sure I understood the figuring behind this, but I did feel instinctively that if I couldn't be rich, I'd sooner be poor than a dreary in-between.

Having already promised myself to become a more interesting person, I now saw how this might occur. With the help of Gil and his friends I could easily acquire a set of new opinions.

“Well?” I said to Murray, as I drove him home. “Isn't Gil a handsome and fascinating creature?”

“He's all right,” Murray replied. “His house is rather smelly though. Shall we have to live there, after you're married?”

I said, “Certainly not. We shall live somewhere amusing and have the help put lavender in the linen press. And anyway, you shan't live with us. You'll stay in your own house until you're old enough to find a wife.”

“I'm nearly fourteen,” he said. “I may just run away.”

He fell silent for a while. I felt sorry for him, facing the prospect of another dinner with Ma and the uxorious Mr. Jacoby, but there was little I could do. Gil and I were going to the Blue Ribbon Grill for ribs and dancing.

“Your step-ma is really very fond of you,” I lied. “And if you'll promise to try and get along with her, I'll take you out for a spin again soon.”

“Listen to this,” he said.

Eating chicken soup

Step-Ma Dorabel sounds like

Draining bathwater.

He counted off the syllables on his fingers.

“Seventeen!” he said. “It's a haiku!”

24

At midnight on January 16, 1920, the selling of alcoholic beverages became prohibited, thanks to the efforts of Representative Volstead who wished to prevent the unfortunates from spending all their money on intoxicating liquor and beating their wives and failing to be reliable employees. Gil and I began that last evening at the Waldorf-Astoria but they soon ran out of liquor so we made our way to the Park Avenue. The snow was getting blown about in flurries and people were in a somber mood considering we were meant to be having a party. When midnight came, I even saw men weep.

I said, “Now whatever shall we do?”

I had laid in a quantity of gin and rye whiskey for consumption at home, but that wasn't going to last forever. Gil replied that nothing on earth would keep Manhattan dry.

“Ways and means, Princess,” he said. “You ask Harry if I'm not right.”

My brother-in-law Harry had taken to Gil, after an inauspicious start when he had been sent by Ma and Aunt Fish to investigate the Catchings family and prove Gil's unsuitability as a husband. Here is how it all came about.

Returning home from his second visit with me to Minetta Lane, Murray disturbed the concord of the Jacoby dinner table by calling his father a bourgeois pig.

Questions were asked, I was summoned to give an account of the company we had been keeping, and Ma greeted my announcement about marrying Gil with a fit of palpitations so severe that Aunt Fish had to be sent for, with her bottle of Tilden's Extract.

“Poppy,” Aunt Fish said to me, “why is it that just when a person thinks they may be allowed to enjoy a peaceful old age, you find new ways to trouble them.”

“It's not a question of my age, Zillah,” Ma interrupted, surfacing from her attack of the vapors. “I'm sure I have never felt more vigorous. It was the shock that felled me. I'm almost resigned to Poppy ruining her life, but that she would expose Judah's boy to such low company…”

“You must be resigned to nothing,” Aunt Fish instructed her. “If Poppy has taken up with penniless idlers we must act without delay.”

I said, “Gil isn't an idler. He writes poetry and looks into ways of changing society. Anyway, I have enough money for both of us.”

My aunt turned pale.

“This proposed union,” she said. “Have letters been exchanged?”

“No,” I said. “Only verses.”

She made me feel like a child again with her interrogations. Mr. Jacoby had absented himself from the room as soon as Aunt Fish arrived. Throughout my life I have observed that whenever a strong emotional tide starts running, men discover urgent business in another part of the house.

Murray, though, had stayed for the spectacle. He had not yet learned manly ways. He knew if he sat quietly no one would notice him in his ringside seat, waiting for blood and teeth to fly.

“But did you sign anything?” she asked. “Anything at all?”

“Only my account at the Hootsy Tootsy Club,” I replied. I hadn't intended to play Aunt Fish's game and answer her questions. I had planned to laugh at her bourgeois anxieties and goad her with her powerlessness, but it all went wrong.

“Who are his people?” she wanted to know.

I said, “I believe he's an orphan.”

Gil had always refused to discuss family. I took this to be because he had none, or because he was embarrassed by their penury.

“A likely story,” she said. We must have this investigated, Dora, without delay. And who are his set? Whose teas have you been attending?”

I mentioned Frederick the anarchist, and Casella the painter, and a women's righter called Anne.

“Well, these are certainly not people we know,” she interrupted, “and you surely realize a girl cannot marry into the unknown? You must marry someone like Leopold Adler.”

Leopold was one of the banking Adlers. He had hairy knuckles and his lips were always wet.