The Unfortunates. Laurie Graham

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      ‘Are we Jewish?’ I whispered. ‘Am I?’

      I suppose I had actually worked out the answer already.

      Uncle Israel weighed something invisible, first in one hand, then in the other, then sighed deeply.

      ‘In a manner of speaking,’ he said. ‘But it’s really not a thing to get bothered about. These days …’

      I said, ‘Oh I’m not bothered about it. Do you know, I always thought it would be nice to be something, apart from just an heiress. Like Junie Mack is Scotch and Mrs Lesser’s kitchen maid was albino. And now it turns out I am something. What fun.’

      ‘Well,’ he said, ‘my advice is not to make too much of this. No need to make, what shall we say … a feature of it. One needs to rub along in society. And in business. There are degrees of Jewishness. Yes. It’s really a question of degree. How are the bandages going?’

      ‘Very well,’ I told him. ‘It does me very nicely until I come into my money and can buy a hospital to take to Flanders.’

      Something occurred to me.

      I said, ‘Is Cousin Addie Jewish too? I suppose she must be.’

      ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose she must.’

      I gave Uncle Israel a most affectionate kiss.

      ‘Thank you so much,’ I said. ‘I knew you were the person to ask.’

      ‘Pops,’ he said, as I was leaving. ‘Another word of advice. I wouldn’t trouble your Ma with this Jewish business.’

      ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Doesn’t she know?’

       TWELVE

      Uncle Israel need not have worried about Ma. She knew all about our Jewishness but had simply never gotten around to discussing it.

      ‘It wasn’t the fashion,’ she said. ‘And one was always so busy. Running a house. Raising one’s children to be good Americans. Your Pa and I were agreed that those were the important things.’

      I said, ‘So you’re not vexed at my mentioning it?’

      ‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘Indeed I was only saying to Dear Yetta, when this war is over and we are not all so occupied I should very much like to attend Temple Emanu-El. They say the chandeliers are quite exquisite.’

      Yetta Landau and her adopted family now featured as much in Ma’s conversation as they did in Aunt Fish’s. As far as I was aware neither my mother nor my aunt had ever met Mr Jacoby and his sons, but they were discussed with proprietorial familiarity.

      ‘How Murray must miss his brother now he is gone for a soldier,’ Ma would observe.

      ‘Oscar will break hearts,’ Aunt Fish would predict, ‘with his father’s looks and his aunt’s sweet manner.’

      I cannot say for sure which occurred first; the idea that the sweet and handsome Oscar Jacoby might be the one destined to give me my first squeeze, or the suspicion that Ma and Aunt Fish were hatching a scheme. I only know it began to happen that whenever I walked into the parlor their excited voices would fall silent. Also, that I revealed Oscar’s name to my friends in bandaging.

      ‘We’re Jewish, you see,’ I told them.

      ‘You don’t say!’ Ethel laughed.

      They wondered why he hadn’t given me a ring before he left with the American Expeditionary Force.

      ‘We want to test our love first,’ I explained.

      ‘Uh-oh,’ Junie said. ‘First you get the ring. Then you test the love.’

      I could have kicked myself. I had a pink tourmaline at home that would have served. It had been Grandma Plotz’s. Honey got the brilliant-cut sapphire because she was the eldest, and I got the tourmaline.

      Next the Red Cross girls wanted to see Oscar’s picture. I played for time, day after day pretending I had forgotten to slip it into my pocketbook.

      ‘I should have thought,’ said a person called Mrs Considine, ‘you would carry him next to your heart.’

      ‘Yes,’ said Ethel, throwing down the gauntlet. ‘Seems pretty odd to me. No ring. No picture.’

      That night I set to work. I carved up an old photograph from Honey’s debut year, took from it the head and shoulders of John Willard Strunck, and fitted it to my gold locket. John Willard Strunck once danced a cotillion with my sister but he had subsequently died of thin blood and dead men tell no tales.

      At the Red Cross next day everyone huddled around admiring my beau.

      ‘He’s cute,’ Junie said. ‘Real blond and wholesome looking, for a Hebrew.’

      ‘Does he write often?’ Mrs Considine wanted to know. She said she got letters from her son all the time. That woman was trouble.

      I pleaded Oscar’s slow passage across the Atlantic Ocean while I considered what to do next. I had no idea how often a soldier might write to his sweetheart. Nor did I know what kind of things he’d tell me. How often he would fight the Hun, or whether I should allow him to be wounded. I thought perhaps a minor wound, about three months into his tour of duty. Something large enough to excite admiration, but too small to warrant repatriation.

      I had a slight unease, which I pushed repeatedly to the back of my mind, that I might be playing with Oscar Jacoby’s real fate. What if I said he was wounded and then fact followed fiction? What if he became a famous war hero? How would I explain not being at his side when he returned in triumph? And what if he was killed? What if he sensed that somewhere his courage was being talked up, and he ran blindly into battle, anxious to live up to his reputation?

      I began to have a nightmare in which Aunt Fish and Mrs Considine were playing trumpets and a bandaged man forced me to dance the tango. His bandages kept unwinding and getting under my feet. Sometimes underneath the bandages I seemed to see John Willard Strunck and sometimes there was no one under there at all.

      I was relieved when someone from the Women’s Bureau telephoned Mrs Brickner and asked for the loan of a bright and willing person who understood French.

      ‘Looks like I’m on my way to join Cousin Addie,’ I said, as I waved Ethel and Junie goodbye.

      ‘Heck,’ Junie said, ‘wouldn’t it be the wildest thing if they sent you the same place they sent your beau? I sure hope he’s behaving himself.’

      ‘You take care now, Hot Stuff,’ Ethel called. ‘Don’t you go getting shot or anything.’

      ‘So far as I am aware,’ Mrs Considine said, ‘enemy fire has not reached No. 5 Depot.’

      And so it turned out. It wasn’t the front I was bound for at all, but Front Street, where a fissure had appeared in American – French relations, caused by badly judged shipments of nightwear.

      A large perspiring woman handed me two pages of close-written mystery. ‘Please translate,’ she said. ‘I have boxes here waiting to be filled and shipped.’

      I’m sure I might have made shorter work of it had she not stood over me, wheezing and dabbing her brow.

      ‘It seems to be about pajamas?’ I ventured.

      ‘Well I know that,’ she snapped back.

      I threw her morsels of information as best I could.

      ‘They require larger sizes. No. They require no large sizes. They want small sizes, and medium. And they prefer blue cotton. Not stripes.’

      Gradually she stopped perspiring and treated me with the respect due to an interpreter.

      ‘What