She’s a married woman. She has a husband to fear for.’
But Harry was having an awfully good war. A patchy lung kept him away from any military engagements. His steel investments were doing well. Also his holdings in oil and rubber. He had bought a house in Palm Beach, Florida, and parcels of land bordering on three of Long Island’s most up-and-coming golf courses. He had even been elected to the Wall Street Racquet Club.
‘If he has any sense,’ Uncle Israel had said when he heard that news, ‘he’ll be polite enough not to insist on playing.’
We dined on sardines on toast and after dinner I tried to show Ma how to turn a heel. We had, after all, baskets full of yarn, and we were in a fever of thrift and industry. But I made an awkward teacher. Within an hour Ma had abandoned knitting and was thinking of embroidering handkerchiefs.
I said, ‘I think our boys may do well enough with plain ones. How can you be sure of embroidering the right initials?’
‘Why, I shall do a selection, of course,’ Ma said. ‘As long as my eyesight holds up.’
Emptied of staff our house seemed suddenly vast and vulnerable. With Reilly gone it now fell to me to protect the Minkel fortress and I was doing the rounds, securing all the doors and windows for the night, when I heard the telephone ring. It was the hour for Aunt Fish’s daily report on her committees.
I raced upstairs to take the call but arrived in the parlor to discover that Ma had picked up the hated gadget and answered it herself.
‘I am quite well, thank you Zillah,’ she said. ‘Answering the telephone is now part of my war work. To spare poor Poppy. She’s practically running the Red Cross bandage effort, you know? They had her there till half past four this afternoon and us without so much as an Irish. But we are determined to manage. One must do what one can for the duration. And I shall fill the solitary hours with needlework. I am embroidering for victory!’
My new friends at the Red Cross took me for younger than twenty, especially as I didn’t have a beau as yet. As I explained to them, I hadn’t even had my debut, what with Pa’s passing and my being needed as a companion and helpmeet to Ma. I didn’t feel deprived. I remembered Honey’s debut. Her head had filled up with names of dance partners and designs of gowns, and ever after that she hadn’t been much company anymore. It had all cost a mountain of money and the result of it was she married Harry Glaser, so it seemed to me we hadn’t had such a good return on our investment.
Sometimes at the depot boy drivers passed our way, picking up consignments of dressings and hospital garments, and certain girls, like Junie Mack and Ethel Yeo, always called them in and made them laugh and blush. Of course, they were all boys who weren’t fit to fight so I wouldn’t have considered actually walking out with any of them, but they interested me nonetheless. Boys were an entirely new variety of person and I enjoyed learning about them.
Ethel and Junie liked boys who’d take them hootchy-kootchy dancing and buy them cocktail drinks. They liked to be squeezed, too, and kissed.
‘Hey, handsome,’ they’d call. ‘Are there any more at home like you?’
If Mrs Max Brickner was around or any of the older ladies, they kept their voices down. Otherwise we were a very jolly room, and I joined in with the laughter even if I didn’t always quite understand the joke. There was a blond boy with an eyepatch who was around for a while.
‘Hey, good-looking,’ Junie used to shout to him. ‘Have you met Hot Stuff, here? Her folks are big in mustard, but she sure could use a little sausage.’ And we all laughed when the boy turned pink.
‘Keep your eye out for her, anyway,’ she’d shout after him, and Ethel would scream.
Ethel and Junie taught me a lot of things. How to smoke a cigarette without choking and how to dance the tango. I didn’t accompany them to dance halls, of course, because after I finished my turn on bandages I had to hurry home to Ma, but just knowing about that side of life gave me more confidence.
I was even able to pass along to Honey advice Ethel had given me about avoiding the getting of a baby. Sherman Ulysses was now large and boisterous for his age and I felt sure she wouldn’t care to double her troubles.
‘After Harry squeezes you,’ I told her, ‘be sure to stand up directly and jump up and down and if possible douche thoroughly.’
‘Poppy!’ she said. ‘What kind of company are you keeping? You mustn’t talk about such things. Please don’t oblige me to speak to Ma about this.’
But Ma and I were now great allies. The only time we 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
