Free The Great Husband Hunt by Laurie Graham Page B

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