The Unfortunates. Laurie Graham
spent together was in the evening, by which time we were too tired for warfare of a personal nature. Ma would report from the vegetable canning front and I would give her selected anecdotes from surgical dressings. Of my tea-break tango lessons I said nothing.
‘Ethel Yeo?’ she’d ponder. ‘Yeo. Where did you say her people are from?’
‘All that is a thing of the past,’ I’d explain to her. ‘No one cares what your name is or where you came from, just as long as you’re doing your share. Everything’s changing, Ma.’
‘Oh dear,’ she’d say. ‘I do hope it doesn’t change too much.’
But she herself was continuing to change. One of the Misses Stone had explained to her about war bonds, and she had made a decision to invest without consulting either Harry or Uncle Israel.
‘I’ll only be lending the money, Poppy,’ she said. ‘It’s to feed a soldier and help beat back the Hun. And it will repay me at three and a half percent guaranteed, tax free.’
Aunt Fish was shocked until she learned that no less a person than the prudent Miss Yetta Landau had herself invested fifty thousand dollars in Liberty Bonds.
‘One’s money is quite safe,’ Aunt Fish allowed, ‘and as Yetta rightly says, better we fill the war chest this way or we shall be taxed and taxed until we are wrung dry. Dora, I should very much like you to know Yetta. Perhaps the B’nai Brith Charity Bazaar would be the time for you to meet.’
Ma pleaded pressure of Comfort Packet handkerchiefs to embroider, but Aunt Fish would have none of it.
‘It will take you out of yourself,’ she insisted. ‘A person can be too much in their own company. Solitary needlework can leave one prey to thoughts.’
‘Very well,’ Ma said, amazing us with her decisiveness. ‘I’ll be happy to attend your bazaar. But have no fears, Zillah. I have never been prey to thoughts. What about Poppy? Is she invited?’
‘Poppy may come, too,’ Aunt Fish said, looking at me menacingly over Ma’s head, ‘though I’m sure she must have a hundred other things she would sooner do.’
It was all the same to me. Whatever my aunt’s reasons for not wanting me along, they were nothing to the benefits of staying home alone. I could try out, in a looking-glass, the effect of shortening my skirts. I could dance a silent tango and imagine what it might be to be squeezed by a man. I could so load a slice of bread with jam that it would take two hands to lift it to my mouth.
‘How soon is the bazaar?’ I asked. ‘How charming for Ma to have an event to look forward to.’
Aunt Fish continued to eye me. ‘Whatever you are up to,’ her look said, ‘you don’t fool me.’
‘Likewise, I’m sure,’ I shot back to her, without a word being spoken.
‘Yetta Landau has raised single-handed the money for two ice machines to be sent to the front,’ Ma hurried to tell me upon her return. ‘Few people realize how essential ice is for the field hospitals, or would think it worth their attention, but she cares nothing about the popularity of her causes. Indeed the less they are known, the harder she works at them. And then there are her family responsibilities. It is no exaggeration to say she has raised her sister’s family as if it were her own. How many aunts would do as much as Dear Yetta has done?’
Miss Landau had become Dear Yetta on the strength of two hours’ acquaintance. Not only had Ma freshened up her gray lawn and attended the B’nai Brith Sisterhood Combined War Charities Craft Bazaar, but she had also circulated. Cards had been exchanged, some from as far afield as East 92nd Street, and visits were presaged. Visits appropriate to a period of national austerity, of course.
I heard the door creaking open on Ma’s narrow life and I was glad. The pace of her days quickened and filled with Thrift Drive rallies and fund-raising teas. Weeks passed without our boys receiving monogrammed handkerchiefs or any vegetables getting canned. And when I came home from bandage rolling she was no longer inclined to listen to my news. She wanted me to listen to hers.
Yetta Landau was sister-in-law to Judah Jacoby, and Mr Jacoby had been ten years a widower, left with two sons to raise.
‘It was Oscar’s bar mitzvah,’ Ma started on the first of many tellings of the story. Oscar was the elder Jacoby son. I had no idea what a bar mitzvah was.
‘It’s a special kind of birthday,’ Ma said, hurrying on.
‘How special?’ I asked. Since Pa’s death my own birthdays had become the occasion of muted, utilitarian giving.
‘Special for boys,’ she said. ‘Now, please don’t interrupt. Mrs Jacoby had not been feeling well but no one suspected she was mortally ill. It was only when she was missed during dinner and found collapsed in her boudoir that the gravity of the situation was realized. By the time she was seen at St Luke’s Hospital it was too late. She had suffered a fatal torsion of the insides.’
Ma refused to tell me how they knew what had killed her if it was inside, or to explain why boys had special birthdays. Only that Oscar Jacoby was now twenty-three years old and had just completed basic training at Camp Funston.
I asked Honey if she knew about bar mitzvahs.
‘It’s a Jewish thing,’ she said. ‘They have to go to the temple and read an old scroll and then they get gifts and money and a dinner.’
I asked her how she knew.
‘Because Harry did it,’ she said. ‘But Sherman Ulysses won’t. We’ve progressed beyond that.’
Giving up dinners and gifts didn’t sound like progress to me.
I said, ‘Is Harry Jewish then?’
‘Poppy!’ she said. ‘What kind of a question is that?’
I had no idea whether it was a stupid question or merely an embarrassing one, so I took it to a person who already knew the extent of my stupidity and lack of savoir faire. I left home an hour earlier than usual and stayed on the trolley-car as far as Uncle Israel’s office.
‘Don’t tell me the Red Cross have run out of work for you,’ he said when he saw me. Simeon had left Uncle’s door open when he showed me in and was hovering just outside, remembering my earlier show of spirit, no doubt.
‘No,’ I said, ‘but I have something to ask you and if you don’t mind I prefer not to do it with that person eavesdropping.’
‘Pops!’ he said. ‘Simeon is my right-hand man.’
Still, he sent him away and closed the door.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘what is it? Are you sure I’m the person to ask? Mightn’t Honey be more suitable? Or your aunt?’
‘Uncle Israel,’ I began, ‘I want to know if Harry Glaser Grace is Jewish.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I see. Well, I suppose it all depends what you mean by …’
‘I don’t know what I mean by it,’ I said. There was a little tremor of frustration in my voice. ‘I’m not even sure what Jewish is.’
He lit a cigarette.
‘Let me see,’ he said. ‘Shall we begin with Moses? No. Let’s begin with Abraham.’
So my uncle told me a story about people who lived in tents and sacrificed sheep and listened to the Word of God. It was a rather long story. By the time he mentioned the Free Synagogue on West 68th Street the urgency had gone out of my question. Harry had many faults but I was certain he’d be too scared to sacrifice a sheep.
I said, ‘Honey says Oscar Jacoby had a bar mitzvah party because he’s Jewish?’
‘Yes,’ Uncle Israel replied.
‘And Honey says Harry had one too. Does that mean he used to be Jewish?’
‘Yes,’