The Great Husband Hunt by Laurie Graham Read Free Book Online Page B

invasion might feel like.
    I redrafted my letter to Cousin Addie, hoping to capture her interest with the news that I had been as close as four blocks to the barbarian invaders. I obtained her address and a postage stamp from Ma's writing table, and I dropped it in a mailbox on the way to my weekly visit with Sherman Ulysses. As to how I would explain the arrival of Cousin Addie's reply, I felt that Providence would inspire me when the moment came. All that talk of war made audacity seem the order of the day.

8
    I followed the war as best I could using my old school atlas. Honey and I had enjoyed a brief exposure to education at the Convent of the Blessed Redeemer. We both started late, due to measles, whooping cough and Ma's conviction that paper harbored disease and all books were written by socialists, and I finished early, almost immediately after Honey graduated, due to scarlatina and the nuns' inability to warm to me once my blonde and sainted sister had left.
    “We pray you may find somewhere more suitable,” Sister Diotisalvi wrote to my parents, and Pa said, “Let her go to the Levison School.” But the Levison was on the East Side. I'd have had to cross Central Park every day, a journey Ma and Aunt Fish equated with finding the Northwest Passage. Worse still, the Levison was getting a reputation for turning out bookish and disputatious students. One of the Schwab girls had attended for just one year and had emerged so deformed, so stripped of delicacy, that Mrs. Schwab had had to search as far afield as Winnipeg, Canada, to find her a husband.
    So I was not enrolled there, nor anywhere else. From the age of thirteen I had been tutored at home. By which I mean I received erratic visits from teachers of French, piano and dancing, and Ma taught me the correct way to serve tea. Of the Balkans, or Belgium, or Kaiser Wilhelm, I knew nothing. But I was a fast study, and Ma depended entirely upon me to explain about the Eastern Front.
    “All this rampaging around is most unsettling, I'm sure,” she said. “If only people would be polite and stay in their own countries. Prussians and Russians and Macedonians. It's all too hectic.”
    I was a little confused myself whether the brave Russians who had taken on the Hun were the same ones who had cruelly chased Malka Lelchuck from her home, and I should have liked to ask the Misses Stone about it, but they never called anymore. They were too busy with war work.
    Then the Ballet Russe came to the Century Theater and as a reward for recent good behavior I was invited to join Aunt Fish and Uncle Israel to see the opening performance of
Petrushka.
Preparations began immediately after breakfast when Honey arrived with her burnt-orange Directoire gown and a chocolate-brown velveteen evening coat.
    Burnt orange, it turned out, was not my color, but with a little help from Ma's seed pearl choker and a dab of cream rouge my skin was coaxed out of a tendency to mealiness. The shoe problem was not so easily solved. Honey's tapestry evening slippers were size four. My feet were size seven.
    The Irish was assigned to do the best she could with a can of boot black and my battered day shoes.
    “No one will see,” Ma said, “if you are careful to take small steps.”
    After luncheon I was excused all further duties and sent to my room with instructions to double my dose of Pryce's Soothing Extract of Hemp and lie still with my eyes closed.
    “Attending a ballet is a very draining business,” Ma advised me. “You must conserve yourself, otherwise you will be no use to me tomorrow and then what shall I do?”
    At six I was collected by Uncle Israel's driver. We no longer had one of our own. After Pa's death Ma had given him notice.
    “After all,” she said, “we shall hardly be going anywhere.”
    Ma had plenty of money, but she seemed always to derive pleasure from small economies.
    “Remember, Poppy,” Ma called after me as I bounded downstairs to the front door, “small