she had quite taken to me.
‘If only I could hold onto you,’ she said. And I permitted her to do so for the remainder of the day, helping to finish up packing twelve hundred pairs of leatherette bedroom slippers and making a start on pajamas and convalescence suits.
It was gratifying to know that I’d helped ensure that the more capacious sizes of hospital wear went to our fine American boys instead of being wasted on small Frenchmen. And it was good to make new acquaintances and hear new stories, especially from one sweet girl who read us her husband’s latest letter. He was with the 212th Field Artillery but she didn’t know exactly where. A soldier was not allowed to say.
On the trolley-car home I began composing Oscar’s letter. ‘My own little girl,’ it began. I was hoping that Ma might have had another fatiguing day preserving root vegetables. I hoped she would favor an early night so I would be left in peace to practice styles of handwriting.
The house was silent. The more I called for Ma the more she didn’t reply, and all I found were jack cheese sandwiches, cut on the diagonal and left under a dainty chain-stitched cloth. I had been abandoned.
I called Honey, but Harry answered and before I could tell him Ma was missing he said, ‘Ah, Poppy. Just the person I need. Could you possibly run over and give us a hand? Our help’s doing war work, you know, and it’s all getting rather too much for Honey.’
I said, ‘Why can’t you help? I’ve just put in a day’s war work myself.’
‘Oh be a sport, Poppy,’ he begged me. ‘Just an hour. Honey’s been caring for Sherman Ulysses all day but she’s just had to go and lie down. You have no idea how taxing it all is, and there’s no sign of dinner.’
But I had a very good idea. I could hear my nephew playing his drum, right up close to the telephone. Still, Honey never did have much vigor.
I said, ‘I can’t help you. I have to send out a search party for Ma. Why don’t you get dinner at your club?’
‘I intend to,’ he said, ‘just as soon as Honey rallies enough to put the boy to bed. Seeing as his aunt isn’t willing to put herself out a little.’
I replaced the handset on its cradle. That was the beauty of telephone conversations. One click and you could disconnect Harry.
I tried Aunt Fish next, but there was no reply. Neither were the Misses Stone at home, and Mrs Schwab had not yet succumbed to the vulgar intrusion of a telephone in her house. I resorted to calling Mrs Lesser, who adored the telephone and stayed by it every moment she wasn’t at Penn Station pouring coffee for doughboys in transit.
‘How right you are to worry,’ she said. ‘One hears such horrors. Have you checked the kitchen stairs? She might so easily have missed her footing.’
We discussed other possibilities. Murder. Kidnap. I believe she was quite disappointed when I mentioned the sandwiches.
‘Then her absence seems to have been anticipated,’ she said, ‘and I must ask you not to occupy the line any further. I expect a call from my sister in Nyack momentarily.’
Ma appeared at the unwontedly late hour of half past seven and interrupted me just as I had decided to stop pacing the floor and exploit such rare solitude. When Ma was at home she never found it convenient for me to sing or lie stretched on the hearthrug.
‘Where have you been?’ I yelled. ‘I was all but ready to look for you in the morgue.’
She had the dull flush of a person who had been drinking sherry wine.
‘Poppy,’ she said, ‘I told you last night and again this morning, I was invited to Dear Yetta’s crush for starving Polish babies. How inattentive you have become.’
I’m sure I would not have forgotten such a thing. Had I been told, I’m sure I might have hurried home sooner from Depot No. 5 and accompanied Ma myself, to the house Yetta Landau shared with her brother-in-law, to the very home and hearth of my secret sweetheart, Oscar Jacoby.
Ma and Aunt Fish had been driven home in Mr Jacoby’s Studebaker automobile, but I was unable to find out much more than that. For a woman who had crossed Central Park twice in one day and partaken of intoxicating drink, Ma had surprisingly little to say for herself. She could give me no account of the people she had met, or the style of the Jacoby house, and when I asked whether she might arrange a little affair of her own, whether Miss Landau and her family might pay us a return visit, she only gave a contented sigh.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘I may take a powder and retire.’
She climbed the stairs, listing gently to starboard.
‘Please be sure to dock all the laws,’ she called, and disappeared into her boudoir.
My appetite restored by the knowledge that I wasn’t an orphan after all, I wolfed down the sandwiches and set to work on creating a love letter from my soldier on the Western Front.
‘My own little girl,’ I began.
Well here I am in Flanders’ field, killing the Boche and having a dandy time. I get off about six every night and I sure wish you were here with me so we could go out dancing. The eats here are pretty good. Still, I can’t wait till we have whipped the Hun and I can return to your loving arms. I know a girl like you won’t lack for gentlemen admirers, but I hope you can find it in your heart to wait for your devoted sweetheart, Oscar.
I wrote it first in a selection of styles until I hit upon a hand that looked manly. Then I made a fair copy on onionskin paper and jumped on it a while. By the time I was finished it had the appearance of having come to me through fire and flood, and for good measure, I slept with it under my pillow that night.
Oscar Jacoby was beginning to take on flesh.
He was good fun, I decided, with just the right amount of seriousness. He was a first-rate dancer, and he had cool hands, not clammy and pink like Harry’s. And he’d take a girl to supper and allow her to choose anything she liked, even two kinds of dessert. He wouldn’t give her a baby and leave her at home with it banging its drum.
Ethel Yeo gave me a sly smile when I showed them my letter next day. I turned away and when I looked again, she was still smirking at me.
‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘my Ma dined with his people only last night.’
‘Yeah?’ she said. ‘And what division did you say he’s with?’
Hellfire and damnation if I just couldn’t remember whether I’d said he was with the 26th or the 28th. I pretended I hadn’t heard her. I excused myself and went to pay a call.
‘Never mind, Hot Stuff,’ she whispered, next time she came near me. ‘I’ll be able to ask him myself, won’t I? When he comes home from the war?’
In March 1918 the Bolsheviks surrendered to the Hun and Uncle Israel Fish took me to the theater to see Harry Lauder. Mr Lauder was a Scotchman. He wore a skirt and sang songs I couldn’t understand, but Uncle Israel seemed to enjoy them very much indeed. After the show we went to the Waldorf for champagne wine and oyster soup, and he said it would be a good time to have a little talk about my impending inheritance.
‘You’ll get a monthly allowance,’ he said, but he wouldn’t say how much. ‘Don’t want you running wild with it, Pops,’ he said. ‘And you’ll have a nice spread of stockholdings, keeping your money working for you.’
I said, ‘Will I be richer than Honey?’
‘What kind of a question is that?’ he said. ‘Harry’s made some smart investments for Honey. I’m not party to the details, of course, but Harry has a head on his shoulders. He has a nose for the coming thing.’
I remarked that I didn’t