Lucky Us, page 11
They swapped the German POWs for American POWs today. The Americans cheered and hugged one another. Then they handed us over to the Germans, like putting out the cat after a long day. The Germans weren’t glad to see us, the Americans didn’t give a damn if we dropped dead, and those South Americans were whisked away so fast I have no idea what became of them.
We walked a couple of miles over torn-up track, with four suitcases, the gold dollars sewn into my shorts, and two cold and weepy girls. We got to a boardinghouse. Greta made herself understood and she got on the phone to her aunt and uncle.
Here’s what her uncle said: Why are you here?
How long are you staying?
What will you eat?
I wasn’t even offended. Who in the name of Christ would leave America to come to Germany?
Karl Hauser, formerly your Gus
14
Let’s Fly Away
MY FATHER’S ILLNESS BECAME A LONG, BUMPY, TERRIBLE ROAD TO a place we didn’t want to go, except that the road itself was so awful, we couldn’t wait to get there. Clara told me that she’d missed her mother’s death and had only heard about her brother’s, and that these long days must be Someone’s way of making up for that.
Sometimes my father thought Clara was his third daughter. The three of us were having dinner around his bed one night, balancing our plates on our knees, and he said, I don’t know what I would do without my girls. I am the happy version of King Lear, a lucky man with three lovely daughters. Iris and I looked at each other and Clara waited until my father fell back asleep and said, You think it’s nice for me? Being the third daughter, and the dusky one, the one who gets to brush his teeth and wash his wienie? I don’t remember that scene from King Lear.
Iris had other fish to fry. She got bigger parts on Broadway, and came home at two in the morning, running up the stairs to Reenie. Iris and Reenie both felt there was no reason for Danny to spend time in a sickroom with a man he’d hardly known before, who didn’t know him now. In the daytime, Reenie cooked, and in the evenings, she watched Danny, leaving a lot of days to me and Clara, talking our way through the washing and the drying and the slow misery of feeding my father.
Clara said, “The first time I saw your father, I was walking out of the Silver Star Diner.”
I said I loved their French toast.
“He raised his hat to me, like I was white,” she said. “I liked that. I haven’t always been in the company of gentlemen.”
I nodded.
“Your father doesn’t mind appearing foolish. That’s a good thing.”
I never saw my father as foolish. When I was a little girl, I saw him as a god, generous with the Hershey bars, and now I saw him as clever and shallow. Thin silver plate over nickel, is what I thought, and the thought must have showed on my face.
“You think this was nothing for him? You think your father lived in his own nice house, with an Irish maid and his own pretty family and taught English poetry three days a week and now he is a symbol of Joe Torelli’s success, Joe Torelli’s Rochester? You think this is what your father was hoping for? To open the front door for Joe Torelli and leave around the back?”
She put her hands in front of her, like she was praying for the strength not to hit me in the face.
My father opened his good eye and looked at Clara. He pressed his left hand over his heart, which was what he did now when he had strong feelings he couldn’t express.
“Here now,” Clara said. “It’s okay. It’s just me. It’s just Clara. And Eva.”
He put his left hand on hers. “I’ve forgotten some things.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Clara said and she lay down next to him. She put her head on his chest and pulled his hand down to her shoulder. I picked up the leftovers from breakfast.
“My dear,” he said to her. “My love.”
Then he said, “Mamele.” And Clara lifted her head.
“Oh, boy,” she said to me.
“Darling girl,” he said. “I know you.”
“I know you too,” she said, still looking at me.
“No. I know you. Your brother took you everywhere. I never saw a guy so crazy about his little sister. Smoke Williams. I know you.”
My father turned his head and fell into one of his quick, restless sleeps.
He didn’t make much sense anymore. He talked about the green river Wye and the stately homes of England and sometimes about me and Iris, when we were very little girls together, which never was. Sometimes he would get very sentimental about my mother, which I found unbearable, but I didn’t know how to tell my dying father to please shut up.
Clara said, “I did have a brother called Smoke. His name was Henry. I loved him. I’d go on his rounds with him, delivering liquor to different clubs. Everywhere we went, he made sure someone gave me a glass of milk, or a cookie or a little sandwich. I don’t remember your being there.”
“We played pool,” my father said, with his eyes closed. “The Green Mill. Smoke ran the table. Who could forget?”
Clara said to me, “Honey, I have to get ready for tonight. Can I leave him with you?”
My father persisted. “No? Nu? Izzy Vogel, the Jewish boy at Chez Paree? You don’t remember me? See the ears, see the big blue eyes? What happened to your brother?”
“He died in the riots,” Clara said. “I’ll take that stuff down,” she said, and left the room.
“Yisgadal yis …” my father said, raising his hands to the sky.
ALMOST EVERYTHING HE SAID after that was in another language. Clara said it was Yiddish. He sang to us in Yiddish. He sat up in the bed, frowning, and said, “Ich voyn bei Grand Avenue, Chicago.”
One afternoon, my father put his hands on Clara’s shoulder and stood up. He gestured for his slippers, and I couldn’t get his swollen feet into them. He shrugged. He took Clara’s hand for a few steps and, barefoot, led her onto a dance floor, somewhere.
“Oh, the turkey trot,” Clara said, over his shoulder. “Years ago. My aunt and uncle used to do all these crazy dances. Turkey trot. The camel. The grizzly bear.”
My father danced another few steps and stood still, in the middle of the room.
“Oh, I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate,” he said and fell, bone by bone, to the floor.
THE DOCTOR CAME TO the house in April, when the tulips and forsythia were everywhere. Where there weren’t enough flowers, the Torellis nestled small pink and white plastic chicks. They placed a pair of three-foot-tall porcelain bunnies and bouquets of giant pink and yellow ribbons at both ends of the driveway, and the doctor drove over the ribbons. Every time someone rang the bell at the carriage house, Clara would sit down in whatever room she was in and say, Doorbell.
“I’m not the maid,” she said.
Clara and I had both read the article in the Great Neck magazine, written by an anonymous maid, complaining about no privacy, shitty leftovers, and notable stinginess in vacation and salary. Clara told me that one evening at the Nite Cap, a regular customer, a big woman from Alabama, read the entire article aloud from the stage.
“She says, ‘And I say to you, ladies and gentlemen, next white woman ask me do I mind watching the kids for them on Thursday night is gonna get “I sho’nuff do and here’s my foot on your fat white ass.” ’ And you know who bought her a drink?” Clara said. “That nice Ozzie Patterson. Patterson’s Cleaning Company. Patterson’s Livery. And you know what else he did? He bought me a Manhattan. He bought me two and he drove me home. In his Oldsmobile.”
“That was nice,” I said, as if Ozzie Patterson, with his two businesses and his famously kind disposition and his obvious good health, were of no concern to me.
THE TORELLIS SENT A priest to sit with my father. It was a very Torelli thing to do: kind, well intentioned, a little tone-deaf. Not a single person in our extended family was religious, except Danny, who did actually pray on his knees every night, asking for miracles (bicycle, train set, hang glider). Danny was devoted to Saint Joseph of Cupertino, the patron saint of aviators, which he must have picked up from Reenie. When the Torellis told Reenie that Father Dom was coming over, Reenie walked out of the kitchen and into the garden to cool off. She came back in and told Danny to go play outside. She walked over to the carriage house and started setting the table, in the middle of the day.
“You want to give me a hand, here, missy?” she said.
Reenie threw down the plates. She said she’d given up on the Church. She said she wasn’t one of those cafeteria Catholics, picking and choosing. She knew women who used diaphragms and took communion and men who committed adultery every week and never even bothered with acts of contrition. They opened their filthy, sinful mouths wide for the body and the blood of Christ and Reenie did not believe in that. She said she understood that the Church wasn’t open to her, any more than her mother would have been. Most Italian men were like her father, she said, may he rest in peace. Their attitude toward the priest is You mind your business, I’ll mind mine. Reenie said she didn’t care for Pope Pius XII, who never said a word about the murder of the Polish Catholics, never mind the Jews. She said that she thought there were two possibilities, that Jesus was as the Bible described him, and her soul was in good and blessed hands, or Jesus was a cardboard figure pasted together by a bunch of smug priests and cowed nuns, and her soul, if she had one, was on its own. And so is yours, she said.
If Reenie didn’t send Father Dom home, I thought Clara would. Clara leaned in the doorway, watching Reenie assault the table. Clara said she didn’t like to talk to priests. She didn’t like to talk to Baptist ministers either, but she certainly knew how. She told Reenie she didn’t understand a thing about Catholics. It’s all praise Mary, she said, women doing all the hard work and letting men run the church and calling the shots for everyone. When she was growing up, she said, her minister was a good-looking man, shiny black hair curling down to his snowy white collar. The ladies quoted him when it suited them, fussed over him, and carried on but didn’t they manage to spin the churchly world on their strong brown fingers. The doorbell rang and Reenie poured us each a glass of wine. After five minutes, Father Dom, who clearly knew when a confession was coming and when that ship had sailed, came back downstairs and left. Reenie went back to the house, looking like a woman who’d wrestled and won.
If our paths had crossed earlier, Clara said, if someone had brought you when you were a baby to the Pilgrim’s Hope Baptist Church in Chicago, you would have heard me sing when I was fourteen. I had a vibrato like a hummingbird. You could hear me almost every Wednesday at midnight, she said, and people I didn’t even know talked about me and my sweet voice. Do you believe in Jesus? she said.
I said that I didn’t. I said that I hadn’t been raised that way.
Good, Clara said. She said it was bad enough when white people believed in Jesus but it was insane for black people to believe in Jesus, although she didn’t go around saying that. She didn’t believe, ever, that Jesus was going to deliver her to anything, anywhere. She said she absolutely did not believe that after two thousand years a white man was going to come back from his own lynching to help out Clara Williams or take her hand or be her friend.
When I had started having trouble with my skin, she said, I went out and got the names of doctors and I lay under special lights and bought jars of gray powder and a bottle of blue paste that burned so bad, I cried just opening the jar. You know what I didn’t do? she said. Pray. I know your momma left you, she said. I left my mother. I had a pretty voice and ugly skin and I thought my best bet was a world of pink lights and heavy makeup. You know what my mother did when I told her I was going? She gave me five dollars and a ham sandwich and she went to church. What’d your mother give you, she said.
My mother left me a suitcase, I said. That was all I’d ever said, and “a suitcase” was always enough to get me a kind look from whoever I was telling. Francisco had practically burst into tears when I told him.
What was in the suitcase, Clara said.
I described my two white blouses, my cardigan, the two sets of underwear, and two pairs of socks. There was my brush-and-comb set and my nicest hair ribbons. I said that she hadn’t left me a photograph of herself or of the two of us.
That’s right, Clara said. She was saying to you, Look ahead, not behind.
THE DOORBELL RANG AGAIN.
“Oligodendroglioma” is what the doctor said. Iris sat with us for that and listened while we told the doctor everything: the new language and his all-day headaches and now the vomiting and his bowels and his right side entirely paralyzed and sleeping most of the day. The doctor said, Yes, that’s what this tumor is like. And he said, He didn’t learn a new language, you know. Whatever that is, it’s the tongue of his childhood.
Mamaloshen is the word he was looking for.
15
Harbor Lights
I SMELLED SMOKE. I RAN INTO MY SISTER’S EMPTY ROOM AND heard Iris screaming outside, on the patch of lawn near the kitchen door. I should have gone to Danny, or to my helpless father, but I ran downstairs. There were no flames anywhere. Smoky threads rose from Reenie and Iris, rolling on the grass as one person. Iris rose up on one knee and Reenie lay on the grass, crying out weakly. I ran into the house and called the ambulance. Then I carried Danny to my father’s room and lay him in bed next to Edgar.
“Vos?” he said. “Vu?”
I wrapped Edgar’s arms around Danny.
“Just keep him here,” I said. “We’re fine.”
“Of course,” he said. He shifted over. “Looks like a nice kid.”
I heard the sirens and ran back downstairs. In the red and blue flashing lights, three big men in white jackets put Reenie on a stretcher. I wanted to say, Save my sister, but Iris wasn’t dying. She was calling Reenie’s name.
I’m here, I kept saying. Iris was weeping and panting as they put Reenie into the ambulance. Two of the big men came beside us.
“Now, you, miss,” the biggest man said to Iris. “Easy does it.”
I touched her warm hair.
“Let me die,” Iris said.
The big man nodded gently and the other two put her on the stretcher and shut the ambulance door behind her.
“You can follow,” the man said to me. “Lenox Hill Hospital.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t drive.”
MR. AND MRS. TORELLI came down the gravel drive, in their thick bathrobes and velvet slippers. Mrs. Torelli put her arm around me and asked me what had happened. I said there was a fire but it didn’t spread and she said, Thank God. Mr. Torelli asked me where they were taking them and he said that Lenox Hill Hospital was a good hospital, with good doctors. My cousin’s a doctor, he said. I’ll give him a call tomorrow. Mrs. Torelli pushed back my hair. You’re gonna want a shower, she said. I could see the soot on her hands.
I looked in on my father and Danny, heads together on my father’s big pillow. The kitchen had black streaks above the stove and toward the door and a pot of sauce splashed over the floor. I cleaned the floor and washed the pot. I shut the door to the kitchen. Mrs. Torelli would pay someone to fix it. I threw my smoky pajamas in the garbage. I took a shower and watched the gray water pool around my dirty feet. I used Iris’s special chestnut shampoo and her rosewater face cream and I wrapped myself in her pretty blue robe. This is the Tower, I thought.
Letter from Iris
7 Queensberry Place
South Ken, London
April 1947
Dear Eva,
One of Carnie’s ladies has caught up with me in London. She knows that you and I are sisters and that I am on the stage, which she finds thrilling. She is no longer a smart young lady from East Brooklyn (talk about your jumbo shrimp!) but is now a VIL—Very Important Lesbian—around town. She called on me to give a little hometown news and to get some Hollywood stories from me. I sang for my supper with stories of Mr. Thalberg getting frisky with his cigar and Garbo not wearing underpants and being a complete cow—all true. So, Diana Lapidus, as was, tells me that you’re well and happy and still reading palms. She said, with much wink, wink, nudge, nudge that she hears you have a son, and I assume this is Danny. It must be Danny; you wouldn’t have gotten rid of him—although you might have wanted to. He was not going to be the handsomest or easiest child. I could be mistaken, of course.
Let me start again. I was thinking about the two big trips we took, Ohio to Hollywood, Hollywood to Brooklyn. On my way up, on my way down.
I know I am leaving out the big middle.
I have this dream about once a week. I take Nembutal sometimes and then I have just the remains of the dream, the watery marks it leaves on me and the bed.
In the dream, you and I are dancing to “We’re in the Money.” Do you remember this? When you first came to live with us (and wasn’t that a pip? I don’t think there was another man in the world who would have said to his sixteen-year-old, recently bereaved daughter, “Yes, dammit, stop bothering me. Obviously, she’s your sister. Now you have someone to play duets with.” Didn’t he just take the cake?), from time to time, you’d do a whole routine from Gold Diggers of 1933. I don’t know what possessed you, but you were much better than the eyeglasses and cut-in-the kitchen hair had led me to expect. You had done the routine with your mother, I think. Or for her. I never got the feeling that your mother was an artiste.
First you did the parade from “Remember My Forgotten Man,” which was hilarious. You marched across the living room, changing hats, helmet to newsie to baseball cap, and then you froze for a second, eyes down, hands in pockets, to demonstrate the plight of homelessness. Suddenly, you lifted your chin like a mad chorine and did the tap dance that the girls in the gold-coin hats had done. We did that number together, once, right before we left Ohio. The Rotarians’ annual talent show, first prize, one-hundred-dollar bond. I made us gold hats, and Mrs. Drysdale (that fat widow next door, who always had her eye on Edgar?) gave me yards of gold braid and we sewed it onto the lapels and cuffs of our blazers. I put pancake on your legs and mine and I wouldn’t let you wear socks with the tap shoes because it wasn’t sophisticated. You had blisters like grapes after, and I’m sorry. I couldn’t figure out how to make those gold-coin bottoms, so we wore short skirts with gold-ball fringe, also courtesy of Mrs. Drysdale, who would have done anything for Edgar’s approval. Poor old thing, I never said a word to Edgar. Of course, we didn’t tell him about the show, and two days later we were on the bus with every bond and dollar bill I’d hidden away.
