The Unfortunates. Laurie Graham

said it was boring work but I thought it was the greatest fun. You were allowed to make coffee and talk, about anything at all, even beaux. And, anyway, I felt certain this was only the beginning.

      As I had explained to the other girls, as a mustard heiress I would soon be coming into my fortune, and then I’d be able to buy a surgical flotilla like Cousin Addie and go to the Western Front and save lives. After I told them that they were much more welcoming. As soon as I walked into the room I’d see them smile. Hot Stuff, they called me, because of Minkel’s Mighty Fine Mustard.

      I walked the last ten blocks, composing myself for Ma, and when I looked down 70th Street I could see camouflaged transports moving slowly down the Hudson toward the open sea. I was, I had decided, now effectively head of our household. Pa was gone, Honey had her own establishment, our help had all left us and Ma was advanced in years and enjoyed very poor health. I bounded up the front steps, ready to take on the world.

      Ma didn’t answer when I called out, but I found her in the library, sitting in Pa’s old chair with a duster in her hand. It was the first time I had ever known her enter that room.

      ‘So many trinkets,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I don’t know why he was so particular about them.’

      I said, ‘Ma, I have found a position with the Red Cross and I have to go there as often as I possibly can to do essential work, but I promise that I’ll take care of the dusting, and I’ll leave you a luncheon tray, and be home in time to make dinner for us. And if some day you are very indisposed, I might be spared from my work, just until Honey can come to sit with you, for we all have to make sacrifices you know.’

      ‘There will be no need for a luncheon tray,’ was her first response.

      I said, ‘It came to me, after Reilly said she was needed for the munitions, that I had to volunteer, too. Uncle Israel took me along and they were so grateful to have me they begged me to start right away.’

      ‘How industrious you’ve been,’ Ma said. ‘And Israel, too. And how convenient, for it so happens I’ve decided to answer my country’s call, too. We shall both be modern working women, and in the evening we shall eat sandwiches.’

      I said, ‘Ma, what ever kind of work can you do?’

      It seemed most capricious of her to rise from her sick bed and become modern on the very day of my own triumph.

      ‘I shall make jam,’ she said. ‘I have joined,’ she announced, ‘the National Campaign for the Elimination of Waste. Let me see no more crusts left on the side of your plate, Poppy. Let me see no more cake toyed with, on account of dryness.’

      I am sure I had never toyed with cake in my life.

      Still, suddenly Ma and I had full and important lives. We talked all evening about household economies we might make as part of our war effort. I even steered our conversation round to the expedience of riding in public trolley-cars.

      ‘Only be sure to wear your gloves,’ Ma said, ‘and to wash your hands at the very first opportunity. Minnie Schwab rode on the elevated railway, you may remember, and immediately became ill with a hacking cough.’

      ‘What a pity,’ I crowed, ‘that Honey can manage nothing more demanding than her Widows and Orphans Bazaar.’

      ‘Now, Poppy,’ Ma said. ‘Honey doesn’t have your sturdiness. As long as she remembers to take her elixir, though, she manages very well. And she can hardly be reproached for finding wars difficult. 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!’

       ELEVEN

      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.’