Lucky Us, page 9
How was I to know? I was raised by a completely normal, lovely mother, with hot breakfasts and sudsy baths and walks to the library, and she died just as I was turning awful, shrieking about my spots and my hair and getting my monthlies—I remember you getting yours. You were fourteen. It was just before everything went bad in Hollywood. You, being you, had read up on menstruation in my Margaret Sanger book. You just sat on the toilet until I got home and then you gave me your list of sundries, on the back of an envelope. You must have been sitting there for hours. When I got back with the goods, both your legs had fallen asleep and I had to hold you up. I strapped in that enormous pink slab of a sanitary napkin, I assured you that you could get pregnant but that did not mean you had to have anything to do with boys if you didn’t want to, and I threw your soiled pants into the trash can behind the apartments.
What I want you to remember is that I cared for you. I want you to see that between my nice mother, who had a maid and two sets of china and a life history of ease and no consequence, and our blithe, inscrutable, crooked father—I had no way of knowing what was required.
You saw Danny before I did. I don’t know what caught your eye. I should have had stronger feelings, I suppose. My heart should have filled with love, knowing that this was the exact little boy (you said he was four or five, I had no idea) we were meant to have, but it didn’t. I felt the way one might if one were asked to choose among pearl bracelets of rather poor quality, when one has no interest in pearls and never has. We visited three more times and every time, we looked for Danny and smiled and waved and we pulled a bit more at the hole in the wire fence, until a child could crawl through it. You found some scrap lumber that we laid up against the hole, so no one would see. I don’t know why we thought anyone would stop him, or us—those children were all at the orphanage because no one wanted them.
Do you remember what Danny said when he started talking to us? He told us that his mother had fallen off a roof and his father was so sad, he had to bring Danny and his brother to the home. We did look at the other boys, but you had your heart set on Danny. You said he seemed nice and smart. You were right, but I certainly saw no evidence of that at the time. What he seemed to me was undersize, possibly nearsighted, and pitiful. When we got his attention and I finally put out my hand to him at the hole in the fence, he just stared at his shoes. I have to tell you, I worried that he was slow and that we should have found a smarter child, but you put the candies right in my hand to encourage him and he toddled over, like a badger coming for his snack. There’s a hotel in the north I’ve been to a couple of times (married lady, Scots, and very keen … for about two months) and at teatime, they put out a huge dish of milk and chunks of bread around it and the badgers come around and dip, like matrons at the Connaught. I watched them every day.
Had we gotten a car? Did we bring him home on the subway? That seems impossible but I know we didn’t have a car (our father was so strict about not borrowing the Torellis’ car for our personal business; that must have been the only ethical fence he wouldn’t jump). I think I carried Danny in, wrapped in a red-and-white blanket. (No one can say we didn’t plan ahead. Why, we had a sack of candy and a blanket.) Danny hadn’t cried at all when we pulled him through the opening. He just looked behind him, wiped his dirty little nose, and took my hand. He did look a little the worse for wear in our bathroom, eyes rolling around and his heart beating so fast in his chest that I could see it. Reenie washed his face and hands with a warm cloth (she was afraid that he’d never had a bath and all that water would scare him) and made him a cup of milky tea and we put him in our bed. The sight of Reenie, with the little boy’s head on her breast, her hand smoothing his hair, holding the cup for him and singing some Italian lullaby, was all that I wanted. That, and her beautiful smile when he fell asleep. She did ask me where we had found him and I told her the thinnest lie, that a neighbor of the Diegos had abandoned their child to return to Mexico and no one knew what to do with him. Reenie seemed a little surprised that he was Mexican; he didn’t look Mexican, she said, but in the end, she saw only his sweet face and big eyes and his stubby hand gripping her skirt, and if I had told her he was Robert of Scotland, she’d have believed that too. I must have thought that Reenie’s Catholic heart would seize up at the thought of his being stolen and she’d make us take him back. I had told her once that she could have a baby with Francisco and we’d raise it, but she wouldn’t hear of it.
Edgar came in and took off his shoes and watched Reenie rocking this little person he’d never seen. I told him our story about the Diegos and he lit a cigarette. “How extraordinary,” he said. “Mexican? Is there any coffee left?” I got him coffee and put a few shortbread cookies around the cup, which I hoped he understood to mean, Don’t say a word, please. He drank his coffee and he patted Reenie’s shoulder. “I’m sure someone will tell me all about it in the morning,” he said. “What’s our little fellow’s name?” Reenie picked “Dante” and we Americanized it to “Danny” and I suggested “Lombardo” was less troublesome than something Mexican, and Reenie agreed.
In the morning, you and I shopped for clothes at Woolworth’s and Reenie practiced the story of Danny Lombardo to the Torellis, making the nonexistent Diegos into Reenie’s nonexistent Italian cousins, just to be on the safe side. Mrs. Torelli asked to meet Danny. Reenie steam-cleaned him. At five, we presented him, and whatever Mrs. Torelli was looking for, Danny passed muster. He looked straight into her eyes and smiled shyly. Mrs. Torelli was devastated that any Italian mother could be so cruel. She apologized that she had nothing but dresses for hand-me-downs, because Joey was only three. Danny didn’t show his awful orphan teeth and she didn’t have to hear his pure and appalling Brooklyn accent. I worked harder on that child’s accent than I did on my own. Do you remember? In first grade, he got top marks for diction, elocution, and public speaking, thank you very much.
I assume I never hear from you because of Danny. If you were me (well, there we are, aren’t we?), I know you would have pulled up your cotton socks, bound your burned hands, and gotten on with the business of taking care of poor Danny. As I’m sure you have.
I’m enclosing a couple of favorable notices. I have been on the BBC pretty much nonstop since leaving the hospital. The wisecracking American gold digger, the hand-wringing, fragile American secretary, the deluded Southern belle. I play older (the camera doesn’t love me the way it would you, and I have the permanent air—quelle surprise—of the older sister). I have saved the BBC a fortune in airfare. And now I’m on a soap, as the conniving American sister-in-law who our genteel and plucky heroine can’t get rid of. (Our entire country is, apparently, grasping but resolute, too coarse to be insulted and too stupid to go home when we’re not wanted. I don’t know who these people think saved their skinny spotty asses just the other day, but I guess it wasn’t us.) Nothing makes you love America like winter in England.
Your sister,
Iris
I DID HAVE MY HEART SET ON DANNY. HE SEEMED TO HAVE NO one, and maybe worse than no one, and I could tell from the way he tilted forward that he needed glasses. I would give him to Reenie and Iris and stand by, wings fluttering, in the background. For the first two days, Danny didn’t say a word. He didn’t say, Who are you, where are you taking me, who are all these people, when can I go home? He stared at each of us when we spoke to him and Iris was afraid that he was deaf and dumb. She snapped her fingers next to his ear and he flinched but he didn’t speak. He woke up when Reenie did and dressed himself and followed her to the Torellis’ kitchen. While she cooked and washed up, he pressed up against her. While she served, he sat at the kitchen table and laid his head on it. Reenie carried him back to the carriage house when she was done for the day and put him into bed. She kissed him goodnight and Iris kissed him goodnight and my father and I called out, Good night, from the living room and then Danny spoke.
“I got a brother,” he whispered to Reenie. “Bobby.”
Reenie got the truth out of Iris and insisted she go back to the orphanage. I wouldn’t go. I’d done what Iris wanted me to do and offered up my rescue of Danny to the universe. I wanted to get on with my tarot cards (I had seven clients now) and my makeup and my daily reading about the war, and, above all, my limitless fascination with my body, which was changing every minute. I balanced on the edge of the tub to study myself in the steamy bathroom mirror: pinup girl, mystery woman, farmer’s daughter. I could spend an hour examining my underarms and elbows and another hour on my eyebrows.
Iris said nothing had changed at the orphanage. Older boys tossed a tattered baseball. Little boys jumped over piles of trash, throwing rocks at tin cans. Iris went up to the wire fence and scanned the boys. She saw Bobby right away. He was Danny, four years older, and still beautiful. He stood on a stack of bricks, posing confidently, and a much older boy sketched him. Iris said he was a little junkyard Salomé and she didn’t want him anywhere near us.
The other boys saw Bobby being sketched by the artist and they muttered, but they didn’t speak. The artist was a tall, well-built boy with a heavy brow, and Iris said if she’d been a little kid, she wouldn’t have wanted to cross him either. He noticed Iris.
“Hey, miss,” the artist said. Bobby hitched up his trousers and twisted slightly toward Iris. The turn in his ivory torso, the neat little fold above his hipbone, was as beautiful as the rest of him.
“Are you Bobby?” she asked.
Bobby stared back. Iris said she could see it all unfolding. She’d chat with Bobby. She’d tell him that Danny was with us. Bobby’d walk out of the orphanage in nothing more than his filthy T-shirt and his loose khakis and he’d come back to Pond Road, with expectations. He’d share a bedroom with Danny and break his toys. Bobby’d become the arbiter of what was right and normal and male, and what Reenie and Iris thought wouldn’t count. Bobby had a blackmailer’s cool look. He reminded Iris of Rose Sawyer.
“I heard the boys calling him Bobby,” Iris said to the artist. “I was just in the neighborhood, visiting friends.” She used her Gracious Guest voice. Bobby’s eyes lingered on the big vermeil pin on Iris’s collar and she knew she was right.
“I must be going,” Iris said. “Good luck with your art.”
“ ‘Good luck with your art’? You said that?” I asked.
“I did.”
“Did Bobby look sad? Did he look disappointed?”
“He looked like a cheap little monkey,” Iris said. “I’m telling Reenie I never saw him.”
11
You Made Me Love You
BEING FAIRY GODMOTHER DIDN’T WORK OUT FOR ME. REENIE loved Danny the way I never saw anyone love anyone, and it made me sick. She teared up when she washed his pasty little face. She grabbed his hand in the middle of breakfast and pressed it to her lips, right over the scrambled eggs. It was a festival of maternal love, all day, every day. And if Danny didn’t flourish, he certainly recovered. He got less pasty. He talked. He followed Reenie like a cheerful little tugboat and he didn’t flinch when people spoke to him. I avoided them both.
Before Iris’s downfall, I’d had crushes on whichever movie star the magazines were pushing. (Why hold back? Grant, Gable, Flynn, and Randolph Scott.) Now I refused to have a crush on anyone. Women were fools. Men were lucky fools. In my rewrite, Mrs. Torelli would be my mother, Francisco my father, and Mrs. Gruber the beloved, eccentric aunt. Danny, that watered-down, crybaby, weak-kneed version of me, would not even be an extra.
Iris used to say I was a born stagehand. I had attached myself to the Torelli show, like a limpet. I basted the chicken when Reenie let me. I shelled peas. I tied the girls’ hair bows and cleaned Joey’s face. I removed the morning newspaper (and Mr. Torelli’s racing forms, and Mrs. Torelli’s hairpins) from the breakfast table, to get the house ready for company. I watched out the window for Mrs. Torelli’s hairdresser (her French hairdresser came out from the city on Fridays and Mondays, just for Mrs. Torelli). I watched for handsome Father Dom, who came once a week, to take a walk with Mrs. Torelli and praise the children. On the first Sunday in October, the most beautifully windblown day that month, we had about thirty Torellis in the living room, waiting for Father Dom. Mrs. Torelli told me, in the kitchen, that Father Dom had been crushed by his rejection from the army, turned down as a soldier, and as a medic, and even as a chaplain. In wartime, before a dangerous maneuver, army priests can absolve the Catholic soldiers of all past and future sins, including whatever ones they might commit in combat. Father Dom decided that, because there was a war going on, he could offer field absolution to the Torellis. He accepted all confessions in the solarium, with a bow of his glossy head, and all future transgressions were forgiven, as the Torellis, of all ages, from all boroughs, took a knee in the living room, ate a huge dinner, and marched onto the field of life. I watched from the kitchen and contemplated conversion (Mrs. Torelli would be so pleased, I thought, and all my lies and future lies forgiven), and I helped serve eggplant parm after. Reenie’s head was killing her, so I said I’d take over.
BY EIGHT O’CLOCK, EVERYONE was absolved and fed. The big kids were asleep. Mr. Torelli went out to a special meeting with the greengrocers. Reenie was lying down. Danny was in bed and Iris was at the theater, playing someone’s saucy Irish maid. Baby Paulie was so fussy, he was twisting out of Mrs. Torelli’s arms, arching like a pink fish. Paulie was miserable, coughing and sniffing, in and out of his million-dollar crib. Mrs. Torelli gave him baby aspirin crushed into applesauce, which he threw up three times. The fourth time, I helped her ladle it into him and he slept. I got the girls quieted down and I told Joey the story of Cowboy Joe, which was basically Puss in Boots comes to Wyoming. Mrs. Torelli said I was a godsend and I went to make us both tea. I looked for mothers the way drunks look for bars. Big ones, little ones, Italian ones, Negro ones. All I wanted was some soft, firm shoulder to lean against, a capable hand setting me right and making me breakfast.
I fell asleep on the divan in the Torellis’ bedroom and I woke up to Paulie barking like a seal. I ran to Paulie’s bedroom. He wasn’t hot. He wasn’t crying. He was shiny along all his creases and sweating, a little, with the effort of breathing. If every cough sounded like a circus seal, every inhale was a thin train whistle. Mrs. Torelli took us into her bathroom. She hung up her cashmere robe with the silk piping.
“Turn on the shower,” she said. “Very warm. Not hot.”
She handed Paulie to me and shut the bathroom door. She took off her nightgown and his diaper and stepped naked into the shower with Paulie. “Take off your socks and your shoes,” Mrs. Torelli called to me. “You might as well take off your skirt.” I did. I counted to one hundred, Mrs. Torelli sang “A-tisket, A-tasket.” She sang opera, and then Paulie stopped coughing. There was a soft wheeze and then the sound of his baby laugh. Mrs. Torelli stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around warm, pink Paulie and put him in my arms. He laid his head on my shoulder and I pushed his wet brown curls off his face. I saw Mrs. Torelli before she pulled the bath towel around her, a series of ivory ovals, dashes of pink, and splashes of black. I wanted to never leave that room.
PAULIE WAS ASLEEP AND Mrs. Torelli and I were dry and wide awake. I asked her to sing opera again. She looked away, like a shy girl, and sang what she sang to Paulie, “Come per me sereno.” She told me that her mother had wanted to be an opera singer. Who lives by hope, dies by hunger, Mrs. Torelli said, and I said that I hoped that wasn’t true. She said, See, hope.
I offered to read her cards. I laid out a Celtic Cross. I gave Mrs. Torelli the reading of all time. I gave her healthy children (And one more, she asked, and I said, Absolutely, if you really, really want one, because I thought that probably, in the end, she wouldn’t) and success for all of them. I gave her more Torelli Markets (because that seemed likely). I gave her good health for her and Mr. T., and better luck for her sister, who had multiple sclerosis (and I didn’t say what better luck would entail). I gave her the Lovers and the Sun and the High Priestess, in a neat pile. I gave Mrs. Torelli deathless love, which she deserved.
Letter from Gus
Fort Lincoln, North Dakota
January 1944
Dear Evie,
I fixed the roof in the dining hall, so dirt and shit and snow don’t fly in all day. We made a baseball diamond, so people can play. Mostly the real Americans play. I don’t know what Germans play in Germany and the Japs don’t play with us. After dinner, a German guy will get up, sharpen his mustache, and sing a little Wagner. The older men pound the tables like it’s a Munich beer hall. The Japs do not sing Japanese songs after dinner. We are all potential or actual traitors here at Fort Lincoln, but some of us are white.
The guy I fixed the roof with showed me the letter he sent to the INS. He wanted me to tell him that the INS would read it and say, This is a huge mistake, Mr. Hauser. No way that you—fat, dumb, and happy as you were—could be a German spy. Even though you worked for New Jersey Nickel, and were a member of the German American Social Club of Elizabeth, even though you do tend to talk people to death about Germany’s past glories—no way you are a spy.
Here’s what Karl Hauser wrote to the INS: “I have been in this great country for fifteen years. I have been a hardworking businessman and I have paid taxes. I went to night high school in Bayonne to further myself. My wife, Greta Mazur Hauser, was born in Garden City, New York, and she is an American citizen. My two children, Anna and Carolyn, are American citizens. They were both born at Elizabeth General Hospital. I am not a member of the Nazi party. I do not sympathize with the goals of the Nazi party. To my knowledge, I have no relatives who are members of the Nazi party. We have been in this camp at Fort Lincoln, North Dakota, for one year. Please review my case. Sincerely and patriotically, Karl M. Hauser.”
