Lucky Us, page 8
I JUST WANTED TO begin my own life, one that didn’t include my relatives. I showed up at Bea and Carnie’s in time for lunch, most days. They were interested in Clara too. Was she really Negro, what did she use on her skin, what kind of singer was she, would she ever let a white person do her hair? I loved that Bea and Carnie thought that Clara and I sat around, chewing the fat at our kitchen table. Francisco didn’t have time for me. He had a skinny boy with Frank Sinatra hair sweeping up and shampooing at his shop and he had two barbers working for him. He didn’t need me, he said. He said that as much as he loved me, I’d be better off working for his sisters. He trimmed my bangs and the skinny boy watched us and swept up the tiny snips of hair with a big flourish. I went back to La Bella Donna.
Bea and Carnie said I’d done so well at the shop, I should come with them on house calls and pick up some more pin money. You’re not a baby, Bea said. Start planning ahead. House calls meant more and more careful sweeping up than at the shop. I did notice that the ladies were very happy for me to use the lint brush on their furniture, make tea, and empty the trash, and would you mind, there’s a good girl, just take the dog for walkies while I’m drying. I took small things that I thought would not be missed. The house-call ladies were rich but not Torelli rich. Cigarette lighters would be missed. Brooches would be missed. I took a can of peanuts, a pair of navy kneesocks. I found five dollars in a man’s raincoat pocket and took it. I thought, I’m planning ahead.
Bea and Carnie spent weeks talking about whether or not to take me to Mrs. Vandor’s. Mrs. Vandor was their prize. Her first husband had been a Hungarian nobleman (Bea said) and he died in World War I (or in France, in a car accident, Carnie said). Mrs. Vandor had escaped Hungary and come to this country (with just the clothes on her back, Bea said, or with gold coins sewn into her underwear, Carnie said) and married a White Russian who died of TB. Now she had a beautiful apartment in the nicest building in East Brooklyn and she was their favorite client, ever.
I’d become a good assistant. I thought this was not surprising but Carnie said just the opposite was true. You don’t see yourself in ten years, still sweeping up piles of hair and drying the sink with a rag and scrubbing the hair color off someone’s face so they don’t look spotty, do you? You don’t think you’ll be doing this forever, do you? I said that I didn’t. (My vision of the future was like the paintings I’d seen of the Old West, mysterious, serious, with great beauty at every vista and terrible things happening whenever any people appeared.) There you go, Carnie said. I’m saying, the best kind of assistant is Dora’s girl, Kimmy, who wants to be an assistant. Wants to. You see how happy she is when she gets every hair off the floor? I did. I swept for praise, for Francisco’s hooded look of approval when he dropped by, for lunch and a dollar and a place at the table. I did not sweep for the pleasure of a job well done.
Kimmy was our mascot. She had a lazy eye and she was a little slow. I never saw anyone be unkind to her. When Kimmy was in the shop, Carnie made a point of saying good things about the nuns, about convents, and how much fun the sisters had. Bea said that a nunnery sounded like a great place to live. In the end, even with the lazy eye, Kimmy married well, a much older man, with his own business and no children, and they moved to Astoria. When her mother got heart trouble, she moved in with Kimmy and her husband and Carnie said to me, See? No one knows anything.
They were not bringing the likes of Kimmy to Mrs. Vandor’s. Neither of them wanted to do the cleanup. They liked spending the afternoon with Mrs. Vandor. I think she was the only woman they considered more worldly, more truly cosmopolitan than they were. They looked at the newspaper pictures of socialites and their Greek playboys, of women in tiaras in front of summer houses in Italy and estates in Rhode Island, of men with three last names resting their hands on their horses and sports cars and I never heard a bitter, envious word from them. They mused about famous people’s errors in judgment, the same way they did about their neighbors, about my family and theirs. They frequently said, as I do now, Too bad money and taste don’t live together. They said, as I could say every day of my adult life, God doesn’t give with both hands, honey.
Mrs. Vandor’s apartment was to all the homes I’d seen, as Jackie Kennedy would be to all the previous first ladies. It was fresh and chic but soft and so assured that as soon as you walked in, you understood that not only did you live with the wrong furnishings, in whatever unfortunate place you came from, you also had chosen the exact wrong outfit just that morning. You would have had a very hard time persuading me that Mrs. Vandor was not an exceptionally lovely human being, even if she’d walked in dragging a bleeding body and proceeded to kick the living Jesus out of it. Which she didn’t. She was tall, fair, and regal, rather than thin (if I hadn’t been star struck, I would have said that she looked like a very pale camel), wearing long gray silk pajamas, the top unbuttoned over a long white satin shirt. (Which I couldn’t get over—I thought about it for days. Was it underwear, even though it was satin, where else did she wear it, was it something that she wore only at home, the way my mother had, on some Sunday mornings, worn a cotton housedress while she got ready for my father?)
Bea and Carnie introduced me as their niece and Mrs. Vandor said, Don’t be ridiculous—she’s not a relative of yours. Some Scotch-Irish and Russian mix. Bea and Carnie looked at me and I shrugged. Mrs. Vandor made us all tea poured into cups I was afraid to hold and afraid to sip from. I tried to keep my lips over my teeth, so that I wouldn’t bite the china by accident. Carnie looked at me hard. I put down my cup, rattling it in the saucer, and I held on to a ginger cookie (with lemon cream filling) like it was a life preserver.
Carnie colored Mrs. Vandor’s gray hair ash-blond and then Bea did her hands and feet. Mrs. Vandor closed her eyes until they were finished. I offered to wash the cups and empty the wastebasket and Mrs. Vandor said, with her eyes closed, I wouldn’t make that kind of thing a habit. One wishes to be useful, but not indispensably so. She gave me two dollars and a Bonwit’s bag with books in it.
“Books make a room,” she said. She gave Bea and Carnie each a heavy silk French scarf, red for Bea, emerald green for Carnie, and then she said, at the door, “I’m taking a little trip, my dears. We’ll see each other before Christmas.” (We would not.)
Bea and Carnie talked about where she was going and why and with whom, all the way home. I took BUtterfield 8 out of the bag and read it on the train to Great Neck, and on the bus to Pond Road.
THAT NIGHT, I WALKED into the Torelli kitchen for a snack, and almost tripped over my father, drinking a cup of coffee. My father and I were hardly ever alone together. Reenie and Iris were a couple. My father and Clara were a couple. I was, to everyone, including me, odd man out.
“Hello, stranger,” he said.
He asked me what I thought about Iris and her friend Reenie and I said, Not much.
They seem very fond of each other, he said.
I said they certainly did and I might have rolled my eyes a little, disloyally, just to show my father that I wasn’t such a fool as Iris to be losing my marbles over other people, other girls, all the time. My father smiled. He said, You know what Oscar Wilde said—women are meant to be loved, not understood. Applies to both of them, darling. And I nodded, although it seemed to me that I was going to be a woman too and I would like it if someone thought they should understand me.
What’s in the bag? he asked. I showed him the books. He whistled when he saw BUtterfield 8 and he asked me if I found it racy. I said I found it sad, and I could see that he liked my answer, and I hoped he’d ask me about the other books and that I’d come up with deep, interesting answers.
“You know what I like to read,” he said. “Those Little Blue Books we read on the great trek east. There are thousands of them. As Phineas T. Barnum said, something for everyone.”
My father washed and dried his cup and we walked back to the carriage house in the dark. He put his hand out to keep the forsythia branches from smacking me in the face.
When I need to call up my father, when I want to feel loved by him, I remember him dancing with me in my bedroom back in Abingdon, before my mother left me on his porch. I think of him guiding me through the forsythia bushes, his fingers brushing the moths away from my face at the carriage-house front door.
There was nothing wrong with our carriage house. It was not as nice as my father’s house in Windsor but it was nice enough in its practical, un-showy way. Everything in it was useful, a little worn, mostly brown. Nothing matched. Nothing was lacy or embroidered. My father and I sat in our living room while he hung up his jacket and put on his slippers. He took all of the books out of Mrs. Vandor’s bag: Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perelman, more John O’Hara, and O Pioneers! by Willa Cather. At the bottom of the bag was an old deck of cards, with green plaid on the back and all kinds of pictures.
“Tarot,” my father said, biting off both t’s. “The secrets of the universe. God help us.” I was not averse to knowing the secrets of the universe. My father threw the top two cards on the table: the Queen of Cups, a grim blonde in a long white dress, on a granite throne. The Lovers, Adam and Eve holding hands under a winged god with flaming hair. He threw down another three, a man weeping in his bed under a stack of nine swords, a dwarf standing on big, star-stamped coins, a rainbow of ten gold cups. My father snorted. “Not the woman her library would have led me to believe,” he said. “Appalling.”
IN THE MORNING, I found a box of thirty Little Blue Books outside my door. His note said, “Educate yourself.”
History of Evolution; Poems of John Keats; Auto-Suggestion—How It Works; French Self-Taught (heavily penciled); What Every Married Man Should Know; What Every Married Woman Should Know; How to Make All Kinds of Candy; Psycho-Analysis—The Key to Human Behavior; Proverbs of Japan; Proverbs of China; Proverbs of Italy; Proverbs of Russia; Proverbs of Arabia; Chekhov’s Short Stories. And underneath a dozen more: An Introduction to the Reading of Tarot.
THE SEVENTY-EIGHT CARDS CAME with a small, stained instruction booklet. Every picture told a story and the stories suited me. Occasionally, the pictures were cheerful: a juggler skipped along holding big coins, the naked lady dipped her pitcher into a starry pond (the Star) but more often, Death rode in on a big white horse, dogs bayed at a frowning moon, lightning struck a forbidding tower and it burst into flames.
I came to love the Tower. Unlike the other seventy-seven cards, whose meanings can be reversed, or at least muted when the card is turned upside down, the Tower is always the Tower. Right side up, catastrophe. Upside down, damn near catastrophe. It scared the bejesus out of my clients, when I got them, and led to extra readings, until I’d choose to tuck it away. Major and minor arcana. Instead of clubs, spades, hearts, and diamonds, the suits were wands, cups, pentacles (the big coins), and swords. You could use them to represent the four seasons, the four elements, the soul, the body, the mind, and the heart. You could use them to represent just about any four things that anyone might want to hear about.
I brought the cards and the booklet to the beauty parlor and I asked Bea and Carnie if I could set up in their shop. Bea and Carnie were great respecters of enterprise, and since—as Bea said—I didn’t seem like the kind of girl who was going to land a successful husband or a rich beau anytime soon, they gave me a card table in the waiting area. Neither of them knew anything about tarot but they both flipped through the cards (Bea crossed herself, quickly) and by the time they’d finished checking the cards for anything that would not be in keeping with the high tone of La Bella Donna, they’d already made rules for me. Ten-minute readings, because we had to keep traffic flowing, unless there was a slowdown in the shop, in which case I could expand. (This was fine with me. I didn’t think I had more than ten minutes of hocus-pocus in me.) One dollar a reading. (Bea thought maybe fifty cents but Carnie said, What, now she’s gotta make change?) And they agreed that sometimes people didn’t tip for this kind of thing.
Are you going to tell them bad news? Carnie said. I said that I thought a little bad news was probably part of it. Carnie said it’d be better for business if I didn’t give out with imminent death or something really bad happening to a client’s child, right there in the salon. (None of us thought for a minute that I had psychic powers.) I wore a skirt and blouse and Carnie did my hair and makeup. (You don’t have to be a beauty queen,” she said. You just have to look normal attractive because you’re in our shop. You represent us. But you need to look like you know something special, Bea said. She dotted a beauty mark near my mouth.)
They steered me to Mrs. Russo. Mrs. Russo’s husband had left her six years ago and she’d never gotten over it. She thought she saw him everywhere. She called the police once a month and on their last two anniversaries she had tried to kill herself. Bea thought that if anyone would give me a dollar, it’d be Mrs. Russo.
Mrs. Russo and I faced each other over the little table. I’d wrapped the cards in one of Iris’s silk scarves. I made a big show of unwrapping them and I asked Mrs. Russo to hold the cards. She squeezed them like they were Mr. Russo. I flipped over nine cards, for past, present, and future. I said I saw Mr. Russo, lured away by evil companions. I said that he had been in a car accident and lost his memory. I described the present as filled with strength (the woman with a chain of flowers, holding a lion) and said that the future held peace for Mrs. Russo and no pain for Mr. Russo. Mrs. Russo thought this was the best thing she’d heard. She told her sister, who gave me another twenty-five cents, just to say thank you. Mrs. Russo’s cousin Sylvia by marriage, with the reputation, watched while I laid down the cards for her cousin. Nice, she said. After my henna, you can do me. I gave Sylvia Russo a man madly in love with her, who wanted to marry her. She looked very pleased. I said that she should not marry this man because he wasn’t good enough for her. He was not telling her the whole truth, I said. Mrs. Russo and her sister stood over their cousin’s chair. I told Sylvia that within a year, after she turned down the current no-good liar, another man would come along. A good man. That man she should marry. The Russos dabbed at their eyes. I was launched.
The ladies liked that I was an innocent vessel. I described whatever salacious goings-on seemed called for, as if I barely understood what the cards were showing me. The ladies liked that the cards and I seemed to be on their side. After a week of the Russos, and more Russo cousins, I had clients every day. I advised that a miserable, no-good bitch of a daughter (about whom I’d been hearing for six months, from her aunt) should not be given a loan, according to the Justice card, and might come to no good end, according to the Six of Swords, which had a sad woman and child in a canoe, floating away from a dock. Mrs. Sorita should not go to Atlantic City with an old beau from high school, not even just for fun (Three of Pentacles, faintly disapproving). Mrs. Benjamin should let her daughter take night classes and Jeannie could start out local, before she applied to Brooklyn College (Ace of Wands, heigh-ho for education). No one who sat at my table was encouraged to have a fling, to leave the country, to go in or go out of this world like gangbusters.
Suddenly, I had money. I opened a bank account across the street from the shop. I hadn’t had a dime of my own that I hadn’t stolen, since we’d left Ohio. My father paid for his own immaculate self and for evenings out with Clara. Iris paid for herself and helped Reenie, who’d never been paid much, now that Reenie was single. I’d been wearing Iris’s hand-me-downs for four years, badly, and had hardly noticed. Now I bought college-girl clothes and did my hair the way college girls did and I stuffed my bra. I had two pairs of new shoes. The pain in my chest, which I had had since the day I was left on the front porch, eased up. It wasn’t grief. It was being broke and badly dressed, and now I wasn’t.
10
Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen
Letter from Iris
Upper Richmond Road
Putney, London
April 1947
Dear Eva,
Pride of Israel orphanage. You knew your way around that place like you lived there. You were my tour guide. You must have timed our visit for the baseball game and the boy you had a crush on. (You kept your glasses off and your chest out until the baseball players were called inside.) Then the little ones came out. We stood there like people at a museum, admiring, assessing the different children. There weren’t that many different kinds, were there? Skinny, dark-haired, dark-eyed, beaky boys, the occasional little blimp with fat wrists and knees and a wary look, a few blondes. I had said that I would like a baby, but there were clearly no babies to be had, or if the orphanage did have babies, they kept them properly stored inside.
I know you understood that I needed a child for Reenie. I must have told you a million times how much she wanted a baby, how sad it was for her that now that Gus was gone, she’d probably never have one. She told me, and I told you. She looked into adoption and discovered that the adoption agencies would give a pair of married monsters triplets before they’d give one baby to a single woman. You ventured once that Reenie might meet someone else, a man that she could have a baby with, but I squelched that. I’m sorry. I had no business making you snatch that little boy (I can see it now, that awful pile of bricks and Stars of David discreetly carved into the cornices—proudly Jewish but not too Jewish, just in case).
I don’t have much confidence in what people remember. It seems to me, I remember some things at a gallop, some moments from Ohio bearing down upon me in huge detail, and other things are no more than small leaves floating on a stream. Memory seems as faulty, as misunderstood and misguided, as every other thought or spasm that passes through us. I know I wasn’t so much younger then that I can use youth as an excuse; let’s just say that I still thought I was made to triumph. That I was, in fact, owed a triumph. I planned to give Reenie a little boy, the way a rich man buys his wife a Cadillac. I thought she would love me even more for my unexpected, staggering generosity. And because Danny was a child, and not a car, we’d be like the Nelson family, except we would be Harriet and Harriet and Danny, and Danny would be exceptionally well behaved.
