Ishkabibble

The girl in the silver dress refused, on principle, to worry about anything. It was her one principle. She had inherited it from her father, who had refused to worry about his marriage, his liver, or the Florida land deal, all three of which had subsequently killed him, in that order, between 1921 and 1923.

Her name was Posy, which was not the name on her birth certificate but had been the name in every newspaper that had ever printed her, and she lived, in the spring of 1929, in a suite at the Carlyle that her father had not quite finished paying for at the time of his death and that nobody, in the four years since, had had the heart or the paperwork to take from her.

She drank the bitter one. Mezcal, sweet vermouth, Campari, calamansi cut into the orange so the orange tasted a little like a fight. A white foam on top, which she ate first with a spoon, the way a child eats the icing. The drink underneath was the colour of a sunset over a city one was leaving. She did not notice. She did not, on principle, notice sunsets.

The bill at the Carlyle she waved off with the gesture and the word.

“Ishkabibble,” she said.

The husband in Connecticut — she had a husband in Connecticut, technically, a man named Harold who bred spaniels and had not seen her since November — she waved off with the same gesture and the same word.

The news from Spain, which was bad and getting worse, and which her friend Margot kept trying to read aloud to her from the Tribune at breakfast, she waved off with the gesture and the word.

The cough she had developed in February she waved off with the gesture and the word.

The letter from her father’s lawyer in March, the one in the long cream envelope, she did not open. She put it on the mantel, next to the photograph of her father at Saratoga in 1919, and she waved at the mantel, twice a day, with the gesture and the word, as one might wave at a relative one was fond of but did not intend to visit.

She said it through April. She said it through May. She said it through the long bright summer at Sands Point, where she swam every morning at six and drank every evening from five, and where the boy from the next house over, who was nineteen and an idiot and in love with her, asked her in August what she was so afraid of. She kissed him on the forehead, the way one kisses a horse, and said, “Ishkabibble, darling. Honestly.” He never quite recovered. He told his second wife about her in 1958.

She said it through September, when the market began to do the thing the market began to do, and her broker, whose name was Felix and who had been her father’s broker before her, telephoned the Carlyle three times in a single week. She did not take the calls. The switchboard girl, who adored her, told Felix each time that Madam was indisposed. Madam was not indisposed. Madam was at the Stork, or at the Plaza, or in the bathtub at the Carlyle eating a peach.

She said it through October, until the morning of the twenty-ninth, when Felix called at six, and the switchboard girl, who was crying, put him through.

Felix said three sentences. She did not remember the second one afterwards. The first was her name. The third was the word “gone.”

She put the receiver down. She sat on the edge of the bed in the suite at the Carlyle that her father had not finished paying for. She looked at the mantel, at the long cream envelope from March, still unopened. She looked at the photograph of her father at Saratoga, and at the small silver dress folded over the back of the chair, where she had left it the night before.

She raised her hand. She waved.

“Ishkabibble,” she said, to the empty room.

The waving did not stop. She kept waving, in one form or another, through November and December and into the following spring. The world did not stop either; the world, it turned out, was a thing that could be waved at indefinitely without effect.

By Christmas, somebody else had her dress. By Easter, somebody else had her suite. By the summer of 1930 she was in a small flat in Murray Hill that smelled of gas, and Margot brought her oranges on Sundays, and she had stopped, finally, saying the word, because there was no longer anything left to wave at.

The gesture, though — the gesture she kept. She did it sometimes at the window, at nothing in particular, the way a person whose hands have learned a trick will keep performing it long after the trick has stopped working.