The Great Husband Hunt (36 page)

Aunt Fish said, “Dora isn't a Hebrew name. Zillah is, though. Let her take that.”

But Em wasn't satisfied. She rummaged through our family history, prodding us with questions until Ma remembered that Sarah had been the name of my grandma Plotz and my grandma Minkel. No one had ever troubled to tell me.

So, Sarah it was. Sarah Emerald Minkel Merrick married Mordecai Mortie Boon and then we all adjourned to the ballroom for roast sirloin of beef and dancing.

Mortie's father waltzed with me in an alarmingly warm clinch, but given Mrs. Boon's lack of physical charms I could understand how exciting he found me. I allowed him his moment of pleasure. The whole affair went off in a very good humored way until Sapphire collapsed into the fresh fruit platter.

“She is far far too fatigued,” Ma explained to anyone who would listen.

“She's had too much rye,” said some judgmental Boon.

I said, “I'm sorry if Sapphy spoiled your day.” I was buttoning Em into her going-away dress.

“Nothing spoiled my day,” she said. “I just wish she didn't have to be so contrary and miserable. If only she could find a Mortie.”

But since the war ended Sapphire had done nothing but date a series of Displaced Persons. Thin, broken people who had no money and didn't speak. She even omitted to catch the bouquet of perfect Fleischmann gardenias Em tossed in her direction. Some people will never be helped.

50

In 1951, one of our artists, Orfie Sokoloff, became discovered. Many of our unfortunates had chosen to remain unfortunate, refusing to attend parties and talk pleasantly to people from National Benzene or DeWitt. But Orfie understood what he had to do. His murals were large anyway, and he was always amenable to making them larger. Between six and nine he was willing to put on one of the fabulous silk vests I'd designed for him and engage buyers with his beautiful tawny eyes. Best of all, he turned those eyes on a most influential commentator, Jerome Sacks. Sacks fell quite in love with him and wrote him up in
Art Now
and
Trends
and every important magazine.

I hadn't cared very much for Sokoloff's work myself. I found it too brown and messy. But after I had studied on it awhile I began to see there was something energetic and fearless about it, so I commissioned him to paint me a mural of my own and I had him come over to Turtle Bay to see the color of my dining-room drapes.

By 1952 everyone had heard of Orfie Sokoloff, and anyone who took the trouble to be au courant had heard of Poppy Minkel Merrick. I had saved the future of art from the smoking ruins of Europe and I was photographed for
Life
magazine. “Grandmother in the Vanguard” the caption said. I had Humpy to thank for divulging that piece of information. My mother might have looked like a grandmother, but I certainly didn't.

Emerald and Mortie's firstborn had arrived in August 1951. They named him Alan Mordecai and he was subjected to the full Hebrew procedure in a private room at Mount Sinai Hospital. Mortie's brother was chosen to be
kvatter
and his sister-in-law for
kvatterin,
owing to Sapphire's being too indisposed to accept the position. As far as I was concerned a hospital was no place for a party. Still, I did provide a very good champagne, and I might well have stayed longer and admired the child more if Mortie's mother hadn't so monopolized the scene. I looked at it this way: Mrs. Boon wasn't leading the full and exciting life I was so who was I to begrudge her her silly triumphs.

Sherman Ulysses and Vera had also expected what my sister referred to as a “happy addition” but in the event it came to nothing. Vera had a complication and was fated always to be brought to childbed prematurely. I must say this for Vera, though I found her dull and homely, she at least wasn't the kind of woman who grew bitter about her childlessness. She took herself off to Barnard College and read books and became even more homely.

If 1951 was the year of arrivals, 1952 turned out to be a year of departures.

Aunt Fish was the first to go, slipping on a patch of ice on her way to a canasta afternoon and striking her head against a curbstone. Ma reacted to this tragedy with a mixture of perplexity and annoyance. There had hardly been a day of her life when her sister hadn't been at her side with a ready opinion and I believe she felt that absence more keenly than any other she had had to bear.

“I never cared for Mrs. Weiss's canastas,” she said. And then later, “gallivanting in February always was a perilous thing.”

I felt my aunt's death profoundly. My breathing was easier. I had a sensation of well-being, of floating, almost. This was marred only by a momentary pang of guilt as we stood in horizontal sleet and saw her lowered down on top of Uncle Israel. He must have endured at least as much as I had, and yet I had never heard him say a truly disloyal word. But by the time we drove away from Pinelawn, I was floating again.

Then Bobbity, out with the Belvoir, misjudged a ditch and took a fatal tumble.

“Merrick is pretty cut up,” Angelica wrote.

The padre at Buckby wouldn't allow us to bury Fearless alongside her, which is what she would have wished. Ordinarily we would simply have taken her home to Bagehots, but the new people there don't hunt and so wouldn't have understood, and Kneilthorpe is almost certain to be sold to a frightful little builder, so one daren't have left Bobbity there. She might end up entombed under something called “affordable housing.” As Edgar says, “one dreads to think.”

Anyway, I regret to say we had to cave into the Buckby man. If we could have fitted Fearless into a casket we would have done so and had the last laugh on the little upstart.

We knew Oscar and Yetta were living in rustic simplicity in Bethel, near the Pennsylvania state line. We knew Oscar played with wood and Yetta had become odd. I suppose we also knew the day would come when something had to be done about her, but it had never seemed pressing enough to identify what that “something” might be. A letter addressed to “The family of Miss Yetta and Mr. Oscar” changed that. A Lutheran pastor, who described himself as a friend and neighbor, informed Ma that Miss Landau was in a state of “high derangement” and had been living for an unknown period of time with the decomposing remains of her nephew.

“Little Abe will see to things,” said Ma. “And Poppy will go with him.”

But I had an opening. I couldn't just drop everything.

Sherman said, “That's OK, Grandma. Mother has offered. We don't need Aunt Poppy.”

“It's the least I can do,” Honey said. “They're family, near enough. What must people think?”

I said, “Don't concern yourself with what people think. For a friend and neighbor this pastor can't have been visiting them too often.”

Ma said, “All Yetta had to do was telephone. If she had telephoned I would have had someone go up there right away.”

But Yetta and Oscar had never bothered with a telephone.

“Nor with help,” Honey reported back. “You can't imagine the squalor. I don't believe they ever threw away a newspaper. And the stench, Poppy!”

Yetta Landau had been taken to a rest home in Monticello and what remained of Oscar was returned to New York. The only thing Sherman managed to salvage was a little side table with inlays of holly wood dyed pink and purple.

“I thought Grandma'd like to have something,” he said.

“Or Murray,” I said. “If he should return.”

“Aunt Poppy,” Sherman said, “I hope you're not still throwing away money on detective agencies?”

That was my business, I'm sure. I knew Ma had never cared for either of her stepsons and if anyone should have had the inlaid table it was me. But, of course, I couldn't say so. My reasons for remembering Oscar were secret ones. I was glad anyway that our marrying had never come off.

And the year still hadn't taken its full toll. One November afternoon, as Humpy and I were hanging some new Molinard abstracts, Emerald telephoned in a flap.

“Mom!” she said. “You'd better get up to Grandma's fast. She says she has police on her stoop peering through the glass and the help's out buying nova.”

I said, “Have you tried your aunt Honey? I can't go running errands right now. We have Jerome Sacks coming for a preview.”

“To hell with your preview,” she yelled. “Just get up there. I'm on my way as soon as Alan's had his bottle, but there's traffic.”

Emerald took way too much upon herself with regard to giving orders.

“But, of course, you must go,” Humpy said.

I sometimes felt he was too eager to have me off the scene as well.

There was an empty patrol car parked just down from the Jacoby house. In the time it had taken me to find a cab, Officers O'Halloran and Fitzpatrick had talked their way into Ma's upstairs parlor.

Ma said, “Poppy, I don't know what I've done. They're looking for someone called Mary, but I haven't seen her.”

“Marie Nooge Catchings,” the red-haired one said, and he brought out a baby picture of Sapphire.

“See?” he said, turning it over. “It has this address on the back.”

I believe I asked if she was hurt. Then I had to be helped to a chair and brought a glass of water. The next thing I recall, Mortie had arrived, sent uptown by Emerald, and Ma was asking over and over, “What did I do? What did I do?”

Officer Fitzpatrick said as far as they knew no harm had befallen Marie Nooge Catchings. He apologized for any misunderstanding. The casualty was a white male, aged approximately sixty, who had partially cremated himself smoking in bed in a rooming house.

“They just knew him as The Writer,” Officer O'Halloran said. “And we did find a few scribblings. A few scribblings, a number of empty bottles and the baby picture.”

I said, “I guess it's Gilbert Catchings you're talking about. He was once my husband and Marie Nuage Sapphire is our daughter, but I never knew he kept a picture of her. That is the darndest thing.”

Officer Fitzpatrick said the body was in the Elizabeth Street morgue.

Mortie said, “Do we have any obligations here? Shall I arrange for a mortician or do you think Sapphire'll want to do that herself?”

I said, “Well, it's too late in the drinking day to ask her now, and I don't expect her to have any strong opinions about it. She really never knew him.”

Mortie was trying to explain to Ma why a mortician was required when Emerald arrived.

She said, “Whoa there, Mortie! Are we expected to bury a person just because he was found with a picture of Sapphy in his room? Mom, shouldn't you ride downtown with the officers? Make sure it is Gilbert Catchings? Wasn't he meant to be in Buenos Aires?”

“Oh no,” Ma said, becoming lucid at the most inconvenient moment. “Honey saw him on Fifth Avenue on several occasions. And we decided not to notice it, didn't we Poppy? We decided to pretend Mr. Catchings had never happened.”

Emerald was in a testy mood anyway. She hated anything that disturbed her domestic routine and driving in from Brooklyn when she would normally be preparing Mortie's dinner counted as a major upheaval.

“Mortie,” she said, nice as pie, “why don't you turn on
Amateur Hour
for Grandma while I show the officers to the door?”

Those two boys picked up their caps and rolled out of the parlor like a pair of nice friendly bears. They left me to her mercies. I guess they had no idea how she was planning to turn on me the instant they were gone.

“Why?” she kept yelling at me. “Why couldn't you just tell her where her daddy was? What was it to you anymore? She could have met him, or not. How old did she have to be before you quit interfering? Well, it's too late now. But you're for it. She's going to pitch into you when she finds out about this, and for once I'm going to be right behind her. Don't you think it's eaten her heart out ever since she realized I had my daddy right there where I could see him and she didn't even have a picture?”

I said, “Gil Catchings was no Reggie.”

“That's nothing to do with anything,” she said. “A person needs to know where they came from. Doesn't matter if it's a bad address.”

Em had become interested in the workings of the human mind since the arrival of baby Alan, reasoning everything out with him, talking to him all the day long as though he understood. She wouldn't even have a night nurse for him. She was full of theories.

“Did it ever occur to you,” she said, “he might have been good for Sapphire even if he wasn't good for you? Even if he was lousy…he'd have been
somebody.”

I said, “It was that experience in Paris that turned her to drink.”

“I don't know about that,” she said. “But she certainly made a fool of herself and all because she didn't know who she was. And if Uncle Murray hadn't told me a few things, I wouldn't have known either. We were like little blobs of Jell-O, only no particular flavor. Heck Mom, first I thought I was Aunt Honey's little girl, then I thought I was some kind of English princess. I was all of nine years old before I started working things out. And Sapphy just never did. She's kind of limited, you know? I do love her, but she's kind of limited.”

I said, “I did the best I could.”

“Yes,” she said.

I said, “I had a pretty raw deal myself, you know? I lost my pa. I had Grandma and Aunt Fish flattening me out and strapping me down and disapproving of every move I made. Then we had a war…”

“You loved the war,” she said. “Well, OK, someday we can talk about that. We can see how far back cruelty to children runs in this family. That'd be fun. But right now you have things to explain to Sapphire. Such as how her daddy was living just a cab ride away, with her picture on his night table. And by the way, do you realize how much benzedrine she's taking these days?”

I said, “Lots of people take benzedrine. Anyway, I'll tell her in the morning. There's nothing more to be done now. I may as well get back down to the gallery.”

“Yes Mom,” she said, “why don't you just do that.”

Her voice was unpleasantly tight.

“Em,” Mortie said quietly. “Don't upset yourself.”

No one seemed to consider how I might be feeling. Questioned by police. Dragged back into Gil Catchings's sordid affairs. Obliged to stand up Jerome Sacks.