The Great Husband Hunt (28 page)

“Yes, but never satisfactorily,” he said. “When a man is in business he can't just follow his wife, like a lapdog. Is your husband in business, Poppy?”

I wished I had come better prepared. Sitting in New York it was difficult to explain Kneilthorpe.

I said, “Well, there's the estate. Sir Neville had a bad war, so Reggie has to assist him…”

“And correspondence.” Ma was eager to help. “I expect he has a great amount of correspondence.”

“He does,” I said. “Then there's tennis. And hunting. And shooting.”

“Poppy!” my aunt squealed. “Never use that word again.”

“It sounds to me,” Judah said, “as though Mr. Merrick could easily be spared. Let him come here. If he's any kind of a man he can make a success of himself in New York. Then those children won't have to be uprooted and Dorabel will be happy. She won't have to sail that great ocean, fretting over her grandchildren.”

“There!” Ma said. “I knew Judah would puzzle it out for us.”

“I wonder,” Murray said, carefully peeling an apple, “whether Poppy's husband is going to fall in with your plans so easily? What do you say, Poppy? Didn't you tell me Reggie was counting the days till your return? Didn't you tell me ponies were being purchased?”

“Why does that boy have to spoil everything?” Ma cried.

“Of course…” Murray wasn't finished. “Of course, if Poppy doesn't want to raise her own children she can always make them over to Honey, with a legally binding instrument, and then we'll never need to discuss the matter again. Reggie can stay where he is, doing whatever it is he does, and there'll be no more confusion, on any score. Because I do feel,” he said, looking directly at his father, “that a child is entitled to know where it stands. Don't you?”

He stabbed a quarter of apple and ate it from his knife. Then the door swung open and Sapphire appeared, urged from behind by Emerald. They seemed to be carrying empty jam pots.

“Uncle Murray,” Emerald said, “we forgot to measure our beans.”

Judah chuckled, and encouraged by this my two girls stepped right up to the table. Each jam pot contained a roll of blotting paper, and sandwiched between the paper and the glass, what looked like a squashed beetle, with blotchy broken wings and pale fleshy legs.

“So we did!” Murray cried, and he brought out a folding wooden rule from his inside pocket.

“See, Mommy Poppy?” he said. “I'll bet you didn't know these girls are gardeners.”

I looked closer and he explained it all to me. How there's more to a bean than meets the eye. It can just sit in a canister for years, being a bean, until the help turn it into soup. But if you give it water and sunlight it'll grow roots and shoots and God knows what else.

“And today's winner is,” Murray announced, “the bean belonging to Sapphire Catchings. Take a bow Miss Catchings!”

And everybody applauded. Even Aunt Fish.

“Don't be sad, Em,” I heard Sapphire say as they processed back to the nursery with their bean pots. “Yours'll probably catch up to mine by tomorrow.”

Murray winked at me. I believe he was trying to effect a reconciliation.

37

Reggie was impatient to have me back by his side. “The nursery is freshly distempered,” he wrote.

Bobbity dragged our old rocking horse out of the attic and has polished him up beautifully. I believe she's rather excited about being an aunt. It transpires that Nanny Faulds moved to Cleethorpes to live with a niece, so we're getting a person from the village. By the by, Angelica has had napkin rings engraved with S and E. So do hurry home old thing. Kneilthorpe seems terribly dull without you.

But getting away from New York wasn't so simple. Emerald had a quinsy of the throat, Sapphire developed sticky eyes, and Honey made my task of establishing myself as their rightful mother all the harder by appearing at unexpected moments with candy. I bought them candy, too, but they always preferred hers. I bought them adorable poke hats, too, and sateen bloomers and took them to Stouffer's for chocolate egg creams, but sometimes looking at their wary little faces you'd have thought I had grown horns. Sometimes I thought it still might be easier to leave them behind and let them be a project for my widowed sister, but I kept the thought to myself. Murray's approval of my efforts as a mother meant more to me than I can explain. He and I were friends again.

I lunched with Bernie Kearney one day. She was now Mrs. Wendell Tite, looking pretty soignée in plover gray jersey trimmed with lapin. Her mother had passed away. Her sister Ursula had left Macy's and gone for a nun in Guatemala. And she and Wendell had lost two little babies, never even saw the light of day.

It seemed that no one had anything light or amusing to report.

“I have my womb in back to front,” she said. “So you count your blessings.”

I only made the offer I did out of sympathy for her situation. Some people long for babies and never get them, some people seem just to catch them off tram seats and then wonder what to do with them. Bernie had lost two infants, I had two and I wasn't at all sure I was cut out for raising them. I was only trying to help.

She leapt up, grabbing her pocketbook.

“You are disgusting!” she yelled. “How did you turn out so unnatural? I've a mind to report you. There's a law against selling people.”

Bernie could be so excitable. I wasn't suggesting
selling
her my girls. I was offering to loan them to her. I hated to quarrel with an old friend, but I'm sure it wasn't me who flew off the handle. It wasn't me who ran out of the restaurant and left a Waldorf salad untouched.

I remained where I was and finished my meal and smoked two cigarettes, to demonstrate to all those rubbernecks at the neighboring tables that I was perfectly calm. Then I went looking for Murray, in the little cupboard he occupied at Jacoby Furriers.

I said, “Am I unnatural? Tell me the truth.”

“Yes,” he said. “But I have every hope for you.”

The pressure was mounting. Reggie was waiting. Bobbity had polished the rocking horse. And Murray was looking to me to do the right thing. Then Ma informed me that both girls had started powdering their noses in their beds and the help were complaining about the extra laundry.

I said, “What are help for if not for extra laundry?” and she replied that times had changed.

I booked three berths on the next sailing of the
Berengaria.

“So,” Honey said, crestfallen, “it's decided.”

“Now, Mother,” Sherman said. “I'll come home every weekend. We'll go for walks and I'll cook.”

Walks. Sausages. Sherman was nothing like his father.

I was standing gazing at our waiting, empty steamer trunks when Murray came looking for me.

“I've been wondering,” he said, scratching his chin, “whether you couldn't use some help?”

I said, “Don't worry. Ma's Irish is going to do it.”

“No,” he said. “Not the packing. I mean the journey, and England and…everything.”

I looked at him.

“How would it be,” he said, “if I came with you?”

“Please do,” I begged. “Oh please, please do.”

But I had no expectation that Judah would agree to it. As long as Oscar stayed resolutely in the country, mending broken chairs and suffering from nerves, all business hopes were pinned on Murray. He had learned how to add up and carry forward, and he did it from Monday to Friday without fail, even when there were much nicer things he might have done, like skating or taking a sweetie to lunch.

“Give me an hour,” he said, running out with his coat collar tucked in.

He was gone for three.

“It's done!” he said. “I've been to Thomas Cook. I'm coming with you, Pops.”

“Well,” said Ma. “Yet again Judah has been too soft-hearted for his own good. I hope you'll reflect on that, Murray, while you are gallivanting. That your father isn't getting any younger.”

“And neither are you, Dora,” added Aunt Fish. “For if Judah is overworked and falls sick, whose shoulders will it fall upon? Yours.”

“Ma,” I said, “I promise to send him back to you just as soon I've done with him.”

“Like a library book,” he whispered.

We drank a nightcap together after we'd measured the beans and settled the girls and the ancients had gone to their canasta.

“At Kneilthorpe,” he said.

“Niltrup,” I reminded him.

“At Niltrup, I suppose I might do a little gardening?”

I said, “Murray, it's an awfully big garden.”

“Yippee!” he cried. And he stood on his head, crisscrossing his feet like an inverted ballerina, until he got a taste of secondhand scotch and thought better of it.

I said, “We'll probably put you in the Pomegranate Rum, unless the P of W is expected, in which case you'll get bumped to the Willow Rum. And Bobbity will be determined to find you a congenial horse, but you must stand up to her, because no such animal exists. Tell her you have an allergy. I'll tell her. Also, she makes unspeakable soup so be prepared to fill up on bread. And when we have people staying to hunt, be sure to take your bath early. If you don't there'll be nothing left but a miserable trickle of lukewarm water.”

“Phew!” he said. “I think I'd better take notes.”

All at once I was looking forward to taking Sapphy and Em home to England.

38

The day of our sailing Aunt Fish escorted Honey to the matinée of a light musical comedy, to keep her from melancholy thoughts. Judah didn't come to our farewell either.

“Times are hard, Poppy,” he said. “Your pa was a businessman, so I know you'll understand. I know you'll excuse me.”

We had never advanced to kissing terms. Neither of us would have wanted that. He just shook my hand, and then Murray's.

“Remember,” he said. “Use your time profitably. And don't remain there longer than you have to.”

It was the last time either of us saw him. I have often wished his last words to Murray hadn't amounted to a lecture.

I had had the girls' hair cut in Dutch boy bangs and created smock dresses for them in satin charmeuse, shamrock green for Em and Stars and Stripes blue for Sapphy. They raced up and down the promenade deck and Ma wept a little, but not too much, wondering whether she would ever see them again. They rang “All ashore” and I watched my mother retreat down the gangway, a stout little body on the arm of Judah's driver. She was going home to her husband, and I was going home to mine.

Murray turned out to be no sailor. He lay in his cabin with his head beneath his pillow and even Emerald's singing, of little songs she made up as she went along, failed to cure him of his wish to die. By the time we berthed at Liverpool he had slenderized by several pounds, Emerald had ceased asking for Mommy Honey, and Sapphire had drawn and colored a great quantity of boat pictures.

“These are for Aunt Bobbity,” she told me, dumping one pile into the trunk. “And the others are for the daddies.”

Accustomed to the idea of two mommies, she had decided that Reggie and Sir Neville came as the same kind of package.

Murray hung back while Reggie and I embraced.

“I hope it's all going to be all right,” I said.

“Of course it will, old sausage,” he said. “Welcome home!”

He had brought photographs of two Shetland ponies that hardly stood higher than Bullyboy Beluga.

“They don't have names yet,” he said, “so you'd better put your thinking caps on.”

He was most fascinated by the girls, studying their ways, asking them about the
Berengaria.

“Uncle Murray missed dinner,” Emerald told him,
“every
night.”

It was neat seeing them together, father and child.

Murray was sitting up front beside Reggie. They had slipped right into an easy, friendly manner.

“Did you really?” Reggie said. “You must be famished! We could stop at a hostelry? We might be able to find you some cheese and pickles. Or we can just press on for home? I believe Bobbity has one of her soups on the go.”

The smile on Murray's face as he turned to look at me suggested he was on the mend.

Weary after days of motherhood, I fell asleep, with a daughter either side of me and Beluga curled on my lap, and when I opened my eyes we were just turning onto the gravel sweep.

“See what I mean about the size of the yard?” I said to Murray.

He gazed around him.

I said, “Reggie honey, I do believe my stepbrother is lorst for words!”

Emerald took immediately to her pony, which she elected to name Brown, after its color. She sat aboard it without hesitating and would have led it into the house and upstairs to the nursery given half a chance. Sapphire named hers Coffee Milk, but she preferred the wooden type of horse, a sign to me that she had inherited some of my good sense, even if later in life she didn't always show it.

They were awestruck by Bobbity, possibly because they thought she spoke a foreign language, and they kept a respectful distance from Sir Neville.

He never troubled them by speaking to them, but there was the horrid magnetism of his empty sleeve. The girl who had been drafted in place of Nanny Faulds told me they often discussed it before they fell asleep. Whether there was a tiny hand up inside his shirt, or a nice smooth shoulder. And whether an arm could just disappear.

They very much liked their girl. They allowed her to brush their hair, they swallowed down their cod liver oil, and they never tinkled in their beds again.

Above all though, they loved Angelica Bagehot, and the highlight of their week was the day she came to play. Sometimes they played in the kitchen, making peppermint candy. Sometimes they played Hide-and-Seek. Once, after I had told her about my war work and Cousin Addie and all, they played at hospitals. Even Brown and Coffee Milk had their tails bandaged that day.

Murray spent a great deal of time pacing about outside, writing in a notebook.

I said, “Are you writing haiku verses by any chance?”

“No,” he said. “I'm designing a paradise garden.”

There was an outdoors man who kept tidy what could be seen from the house, and the rest was coppices and pasture.

I said, “Does Bobbity know?”

“Sort of,” he said. “Why?”