Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? by Marion Meade Page A

disease and secondarily from chronic worry about Dorothy’s oldest brother. Harry, unlike Bert, was not much interested in “getting ahead” and didn’t give two cents about keeping jobs. Whenever Henry got him one, he would manage to get fired. Irresponsible about spending money, lacking self-control, he was the object of Henry’s scorn, the target of his cajoling and bullying, an errant boy-man whom he felt compelled to rescue time after time. No sooner had Bert and Tiny married than Harry told his father to go jump in the lake and finally left home—he was twenty-five—and went to live with them. Subsequently he vanished altogether and was remembered in family legend as “the black sheep” who most likely had gone to the bad.
    The spring of 1911 began a wrenching year. Dorothy’s Uncle Sam, long subject to problems with his nerves, became insane and had to be committed to a sanatorium, where he soon died. Six months later, Hannah Rothschild Theobald died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of fifty. Then, in the winter of 1912, Martin and Lizzie Rothschild went abroad for a holiday and stayed on until April. The couple, who had remained childless, liked to live in lavish high style. As befitted persons of consequence, they had booked for their return trip first-class passages on the maiden voyage of the world’s most luxurious steamship. On the fifth night after leaving Southampton, the Titanic struck an iceberg.
    On the first lists to be posted, Lizzie Rothschild was noted as saved, but Lord [ sic ] Martin Rothschild’s name appeared on neither the safe nor the known-dead lists. Henry clung to hope. The following evening, in drenching rain, he stood at pier 54 as the Carpathia was being moored; the gangplank lowered and the first of the seven hundred survivors (out of two thousand passengers) began to straggle down. There at last was a dazed Lizzie in her fur coat, but no Martin. Her husband, she told them, had escorted her to a lifeboat and then stayed behind on the boat deck. For two hours she had bobbed about under the stars, watching while the Titanic slipped lower in the water, then upended and glided beneath the surface. When the Carpathia had appeared in the gray light of dawn, she had climbed up its swinging ladder and collapsed on the deck. For several hours the Carpathia had searched for small boats among the icebergs, but Lizzie had known it would be useless. Martin, she said, was at the bottom of the ocean.
    Henry was only sixty when the Titanic sank, but Martin’s death triggered a state of decline in him, leaving him full of dismal thoughts about how swiftly his family had flickered out. Now he acted feeble beyond his actual years and expected everyone to fetch and carry for him, unaware that he was being burdensome. The most important person in his life became Dorothy, who had patiently to bear the brunt of his petulance day after day. She was unable to make Helen and Bert understand that she was nearly twenty and expected more from life. Henry continued to make sentimental pilgrimages to the Lower East Side, never failing to show up at Christmas to distribute holiday tips, and he liked to take along Helen’s small son, Bill. By the end of 1913, he was keeping to the apartment and at Christmas lacked the energy to visit the old neighborhood—too bitter cold to be gadding about just to hand out a few dollars. On Christmas Eve he felt so poorly that the doctor had to be sent for. Three nights later, he died of a heart attack.
    The New York Times obituary that credited J. Henry Rothschild as a pioneer of the wholesale cloak and suit industry would have pleased this son of a fancy-goods peddler. To his funeral came former colleagues, his club friends, and board members from Mount Sinai Hospital. He was laid alongside Eliza in Woodlawn Cemetery, where his unornamented stone seems carelessly chosen next to his wife’s.
     
     
    New York in 1914 was gripped by dance fever. In restaurants