Lucky Us, page 13
The little girls Sieg Heil! like you wouldn’t believe. If this country weren’t being strafed, shit on, and starved, we’d have to take them downtown and buy them little Bund Deutscher Mädel outfits. BDM is like the Girl Scouts—if the Girl Scouts gave badges for Jew-killing and world domination. The girls goose-step around the little square of dirt in front of the house all morning. I don’t discourage them. I’m hoping their enthusiasm makes us look good. Greta just flaps her hand up at the wrist and looks away.
Her aunt and uncle are decent people, what we think people in the old country should be. Salt of the earth. We’ve got no butter, no chickens, and no gas. The old man tinkers with this and that, sharpens knives, and does a little black market in cigarettes when he can. The aunt cleans the kitchen twice a day and makes potatoes sixteen ways. Occasionally, there’s a mashed turnip that we could use to patch tires, if we had tires. These people wish we’d never come. The old lady hisses when I come into the kitchen. We make the girls play outside until their lips are blue. But the aunt and uncle share their dinner with us every night and twice, the old man and I have hitched out to a farm so I could fix some prehistoric tractor. Most mornings, we just keep walking until someone with a few eggs needs a knife sharpened.
They lost two sons on the Russian front. They don’t know where their third boy is. I haven’t seen another man in Pforzheim with all his limbs, and under forty. There’s a young guy up the road and he gets around with a cart on four wheels, like a kid’s wagon but big enough to accommodate a grown man. He must have been six-two when he had legs. We’re friendly, and sometimes, after a few shots, Hans asks me to tell him the story of our coming to Germany. He laughs until he cries and sometimes I do too.
There’s no work for me in town. There were watchmakers and jewelers on every corner and now there’s nothing.
January 28, 1945
We got bombed for the first time last night. Greta was throwing dishwater in the yard because the drain was backed up and I was pulling the curtains. The girls stood on the porch, calling the cat. The bombs started falling and the girls looked up. I don’t think they knew what they were seeing or hearing. The alarm screamed out and we hustled down to the cellar. I carried Carolyn, Greta took Anna and the old people, and the cat hurried down behind us. The lights went out. We slept in the cellar, in the smoke. In the morning, Uncle Horst and I pulled down the back door and what was left of the kitchen. We are all fine.
Your pal, Gus
GUS AND HANS LISTENED to the radio address of Marshal Harris, from London. The marshal said, “It should be emphasized the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale … are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories.”
The man was as good as his word, Gus thought.
DRESDEN HAPPENED TEN DAYS before Pforzheim. Herr Altmann’s brother drove his old truck three hundred miles from the outskirts of Dresden, where there were still some roads, to Pforzheim. Gus helped him out of the truck and he made the girls play in the yard while Greta changed the dirty bandages around the old man’s neck and ear. He talked for an hour, and Greta translated for Gus. The center of Dresden was destroyed. He’d driven past piles of rubble taller than the people who came out from the cellars. He said the rubble was brick, stone, bicycle frames, burning tires, wood framing, people’s coats and hats and shoes, and underneath and in between that, people. He said he passed dead people without a mark on them; they’d died from asphyxiation. Gus asked Greta if she was sure that’s what the man was saying. Greta said, I’m sure. His name is Klaus, Greta said, and Gus shook his hand.
GUS HERDED THE THREE elderly Altmanns and Greta and Carolyn and Anna in and out of the cellars six times in two days, with small bombs falling and small planes flying low overhead. Gus asked Greta to ask Klaus if this was how Dresden had started. Klaus said no—Dresden had started with a bang, and Gus and Klaus laughed in the cellar.
After the first round of bombs, Gus and Klaus and Herr Altmann drove the old truck around parts of Pforzheim to view the damage and see if there was anything they could do. They saw half-buildings, walls with window spaces, transoms without doors beneath them. A church spire lay in the street, leaning up against the library, closing off the road. A nurse ran under it. At one house, flames were still running up and down the house like imps, having blown out the windows and opened the roof.
They drove home, and the bombs fell as they got out of the truck. Girls, into the cellar, Gus yelled. Greta, mach hinne! He felt the fire roll down the steps, old wood or dirt steps, into the cellar, right behind him and the girls. Jars of cherry preserves exploded. The cellar lights blinked and flared up and then snapped into darkness. The bombs stopped and Anna stood up and stamped her feet, to get out. Klaus said, Sometimes when people run to get out of the cellar, they burn their hands and arms on the metal hasps. Gus wrapped his hand in his coat and pushed the door open, just two inches. He found the world on fire. Light rained down. It lit up the sky like the town had done on New Year’s and the light pooled, still bright and burning, on the cold ground. Blood-orange flames spread through their yard and through their iron fence.
For three days, ashes fell like snow. Gus kept the girls in and they watched the flakes coming down and drifting up. All the German women Gus knew collected something; his mother and his grandmother collected snowbabies, Schneebabies. His mother had loved the ones with a prickly white bisque all over them, only their pink, smooth china cheeks and dark eyes visible. Schneeflocken. Snow-covered. Everything around what was left of the house was schneeflocken. There was one last series of bombs, for most of a day. His family lay in the cellar for hours, on the dirt, their coats on top of the broken glass, as the sky thundered and the rest of the house blew apart and the floor above them rolled up, like an old rug. When Gus came to, all three of the Altmanns lay dead, side by side, near the cellar steps. Anna and Carolyn had died next to Gus, arms and legs out wide, like starfish. He couldn’t find Greta’s body.
Afterward, people said more died in Dresden than in Pforzheim. More died in Tokyo than in Dresden, Gus said, and who cares. Before he left Pforzheim, Gus walked to his friend Hans’s house. Hans’s body was still in his yard, his arms around his mother. The four wagon wheels lay on them like wreaths.
18
Going Home, Going Home
I HAD BEEN GONE FROM THE SALON FOR WEEKS. I WAS BROKE again and couldn’t borrow from anyone. As my father would have said, if he could talk, One should only take advantage of those who can afford it. I told Danny he had to start taking the bus home, and I went back to work. When I finished reading the cards for Mrs. Russo and her never-returning husband and made contact with Mrs. Rubio’s son, lost at sea, Bea said, Stay for a drink. Francisco came into the salon with a box of cookies. Bea said, Looky here. We love you. That Danny is a nice little boy. He’s funny, Carnie said. Guess what, she said. Bea, here, got married last week. She and that Artie eloped, like a couple of kids.
I said that was a wonderful surprise, and then Carnie said, You could say that—she’s got a miracle bun in the oven. Oh, I’ll look like a beached whale by Thanksgiving, Bea said. And did Carnie tell you? She’s being chased all over East Brooklyn by a dentist with a little girl. Dead wife, not divorced. He’s nice, Carnie said. Rabinowitz.
I said I was glad for both of them. I said they’d done plenty for us and no one could have done more. That card table, I said. You set me up in business. You and Mrs. Vandor. We still don’t know what had happened to Mrs. Vandor, Carnie said. Life’s a mystery. I think she ran off with her piano teacher, Mr. Shmottlach. Bea nodded. That’s what we think. Good-looking guy. Foreign.
Can I keep reading cards here? I said. They looked embarrassed. Of course, Carnie said. No one’s throwing you out. We’re just saying things have changed, so we can’t take the two of you in and we wish we could.
Francisco would—he loves you like a daughter (You know what she means, Carnie said) and he really likes Danny—but he has his hands full. I understand, I said. Bea and Carnie made big eyes and they looked over at Francisco and shook their heads. He has his hands full, they both said, with setting up a new barbershop in Penn Station, with a manicurist and a shoeshine stand. (Inside the shop, Bea said. You know he’s smart.)
I said that was great and Francisco said his sisters had been generous in backing him and they both thanked him for thanking them and then everyone looked around and we all had some cookies.
This is where you want someone, a Mrs. Vandor or a Charlotte Acton, to grab the plate of cookies and say, Aren’t these marvelous?
Also, Bea said, Francisco’s got his hands full at home too. Carnie looked like she wanted to cry. I have a boy staying with me, Francisco said. He’s straight from Mexico, he’s a hard worker, and he’s staying with me until he gets on his feet. Your little taco de ojo, Carnie said, and they were off and running in Mexican but quietly, until Francisco slammed his hand on the table and the sisters shut up. It’s just for a while, Francisco said. Believe me, I know what you know, he said to his sisters. I’m teaching him English. Carnie said, You’re cooking for him. I am, Francisco said. I cook for him and I play conquian with him. Yes, Encarnación, we do play cards. It’s shocking, I know. He sleeps on the couch. Jorge is a beautiful boy, Francisco said. He’s beautiful and I’m not a fool. He starts night school in two weeks.
Carnie rolled her eyes and said, We’ll see. And we did see. Jorge went to night school and he met an Anglo girl named Gracie Shreve from Long Island City and he brought her to Francisco for his blessing. They married and Francisco went to the wedding and hung pictures of Gracie and Jorge slicing the cake, of Francisco and the Shreves lifting their glasses, of Francisco waltzing with the bride. Gracie sent a card every Christmas, with a picture of her and Jorge and their two little boys, all looking very well, and Francisco put them up on the mirrors of the barbershop, near the framed photographs of Francisco and Mayors La Guardia and O’Dwyer.
Francisco sighed and put his hand on my shoulder. I’ve got something for you in my car, he said. Before you go. In the car, he rummaged around and found a brush-and-comb set with fire trucks on it for Danny and some rhinestone combs for his sisters. We went back into the salon, and Bea and Carnie were sitting still, arms flung on my tarot table like they’d been shot in the back.
“It’s the president,” Carnie said. “He’s dead.”
“In Warm Springs,” Bea said. “Ah, he’s dead. Who killed him? Our president.”
Francisco pulled me onto the dirty velvet couch. I cried in his arms and Bea and Carnie cried in each other’s arms and we all sat around the table and wept and listened to the radio, which reported every detail of the president’s aneurism and his collapse and the moment he said, “I’m afraid I have a terrific headache.” We could all imagine him saying it, that plummy, patrician voice that managed to be the voice of people who never spoke that way, never dressed that way, never went to a single place Franklin Delano Roosevelt had ever been, and he spoke for the three of us.
“I have to get Danny,” I said. “Do you think the school told the kids?”
Francisco said, “You tell Danny the president was a great man. You make sure, no matter what some lying, Republican schoolteacher pendejo tells him, that your little boy knows we won’t see another like that man. You tell him.”
“We all have to go home,” Bea said, and she turned out the lights.
People were driving all over the road, and on the shoulders. I passed men driving toward the city with tears streaming down their faces. I could see the people on the buses above me, white handkerchiefs pressed against dark faces. I picked Danny up and he was shaking. I told him what Francisco told me to say and when we got home, the two of us got into my bed and listened to the radio all night. I missed my sister, then.
OUR OWN FUTURE, BY which I mean mine and Danny’s, was not so clear and, where clear, not so rosy. We’d moved. The Torellis were as good to us as anyone could ask. I certainly hope that if I found myself with a lot of money, four children, and a big house on the water and my butler fell ill and my cook died and my kids’ governess hightailed it to England, that I would be as generous and patient with the survivors as the Torellis were. But I doubt it. Mrs. Torelli said we could take the living room couch and the hutch and the pots and pans and she handed me an envelope with two months’ rent for a small house on Old Tree Lane. She’d found it through the new maid’s sister and put a deposit down before I ever saw it, which was reasonable. I was eighteen and taking care of a sick old man and an eight- or nine-year-old boy I hardly knew, making my living as a fortune-teller in East Brooklyn, and I wasn’t likely to say, No, thank you, not quite, let’s keep looking. Mrs. Torelli said good-bye to us pretty much the way she’d said hello—kind and a little surprised to find herself in our company. Mr. Torelli had had plenty of experience with damaged goods and the wishes and hopes of all his scheming cousins, and my guess is that he knew us by the end. He stood in the fork of the driveway and watched Ozzie Patterson carry my father like a pile of firewood and plant him head up and feet down in the back of his car. I carried down carton after carton, like an ox on a muddy hill, and when I was about to go upstairs for a final sweep, Mr. Torelli gave me a fifty-dollar bill.
“My mother died when I was eight,” he said. “Good luck to you.”
I packed Danny into the car with his Tinkertoys and Raggedy Andy and the pilot’s jacket Reenie had given him for his last birthday. I stood in the big, curving driveway and wished what I always wished, that I could turn left and go to the Torellis’, instead of taking a quick right to the carriage house. Clara waited for us at the new house, sipping a cold drink at the kitchen table and supervising Ozzie’s idiot cousin (her words, not mine) in unloading our beds from the Sears truck, a gift from Ozzie Patterson. The Sears driver was Negro. Our next-door neighbors on both sides were Negro too. The old man across the street was white and sat on his porch, smoking and watching. Little Ruthie Post, Danny’s dearest friend, who lived only a couple of blocks away, sauntered past (always as if she’d been touring her estate and just happened to pass our cottage) and invited Danny to walk her to the park, so he missed the tearful shifting and unloading of my father, of our few furnishings, of Reenie’s clothes, which were too big for me, and of Iris’s clothes, which I refused to send her.
OZZIE CARRIED EDGAR TO the attic and tucked him in, and when he came down, he washed up and offered Clara his arm. They left. I cleaned hard for the rest of the day and then gave up for a good, long time. I made pancakes for me and Danny and soft scrambled eggs for my father. I sat with Danny while he prayed to Saint Joseph of Cupertino and he let me kiss him goodnight, in his new bedroom, with the new bed and airplane-shaped rug, courtesy of Ozzie Patterson and his devotion to Clara.
I went back to the attic to sit by my father. His brain tumor was killing him. He wouldn’t get better and he wouldn’t die. People say that even if the dying seem not to hear you, they do. After a few nights at the new house, while changing a bedpan, I told him, “It’s all right—you can let go.” My father must have heard this as a call to arms. He rallied. He started opening his eyes for a few hours every day and muttering in Yiddish. Clara said we (meaning I) should get someone who spoke Yiddish to encourage Edgar, and I did. I found Bernie Smedresman of Bernard’s Fine Dry Cleaning. Mr. Smedresman was short, round, unstoppably kind. He was a bowling ball of good will. He brought the bagels and accoutrements, and sometimes Clara and Ozzie stopped by for bagels and lox. Mr. Smedresman brought herring in cream sauce, but only Ozzie tried that.
Falling in love with Ozzie Patterson didn’t stop Clara from directing my father’s care. She supervised what I cooked for him and when I fed him and she made it clear that I would now be giving him his sponge baths, not her. And I thanked her every day, just for showing up. Twenty minutes after my father died, she’d be gone, in a puff of smoke and a shimmer of silk, and I didn’t blame her. She came most mornings to make herself a cup of coffee, kiss my father on the forehead, sing a few songs to him, and come downstairs to smoke a couple of cigarettes and laugh at me. What a mess, she’d say. A baby with a baby. She’d poke Danny in the back, telling him to stand up straight and be polite, telling him no girl wanted a mealy-mouthed, hunchbacked boyfriend. She’d hand him a comic book and me her red lipstick. Fix yourself up and eat a decent meal, she said. God knows, the way you look now, you got to get up twice to cast a shadow.
THE WAR ENDED. THE blackout drills were over and the streetlights came on. We hadn’t ever kept the garden hose, metal buckets, and long-handled shovel we were supposed to have at our house. I didn’t have anything more than a broom, a sponge, and a box of borax. We didn’t even have a ladder, and when Danny threw a ball on the roof, I had to climb past my father, out the attic window, and get it while Danny told me to be careful. The Victory parade went up Middle Neck Road, from All Saints’ Church to the green, on January 12, just like the big one in the city. We had two drum majors leading the band from the Merchant Marine Academy, and high school girls handing out flowers and flags, and a jeep covered in red roses, carrying three soldiers, waving stoically. The ministers and a priest and a rabbi stood in the gazebo on the lawn behind the library and read the names of our dead. Danny and I cheered for the living and cried for the dead, like everyone else. I hoped that Gus was in the first category, but I doubted it.
If you’d asked me what I understood about fortune-telling, I would have told you that no one came to see someone like me because they were happy. I would have said, People come because they are so frightened, they wake up in a sweat. They look into the well of their true selves, and the consequences of being who they are, and they’re horrified. They run to my little table to have me say that what they see is not what will happen.
