Lucky Us, page 12
In the dream, we’re tap-dancing to “We’re in the Money” and we are too, too marvelous. “We’re in the money, come on my honey, look up, the skies are sunny …” We are shimmering, from our gold caps and gold capelets to the gold lamé halter tops down to the giant paillettes of our short shorts and our gold tap shoes. We are Ginger Rogers vulgar and cheerful. We are like white-girl Nicholas Brothers—sharp and sexy, fearless and exuberant. We are not trying to please, we are the Gods of Pleasure, and lucky them who get to see us. We leap from tabletops onto piano tops and then back downstage, light bouncing off our gold coins, gold sweat flying. We come down two long gold staircases, on opposite sides, and dance downstage once more. I give you a twirl, you give me one, and we hold it—I hear myself whispering to you, One, Two, Three, Four, and the camera—I now see we’re in a movie and this is the final shot, a long shot of our bodies, behind a fountain of gold coins, filling the screen.
It would be great if the dream ended here.
In the dream, I’m in a restaurant, just like real life that night when I met Mr. Fox and Mr. Fletcher at Sardi’s after the show. They said I had star potential and they wanted to offer me something big. That’s what hooked me. Directors may be complicated and intellectual (you couldn’t prove it by me) but actors are so simple. Give us the good stuff and we’ll follow you anywhere. Genuine praise (not the “Darling, how do you do it?”), sincere gushing from someone important and not on our payroll and not in our bed and we do whatever you want us to, sucking in that reefer, fucking that donkey. Sorry.
In the dream, Fox and Fletcher are in green suits and I am sitting between them. The table is covered with food, which is not how it was. I didn’t want to seem, one, impressed, two, unladylike, three, presumptuous, so I ordered a small steak, a green salad, and a glass of red wine. They kept saying, Have the shrimp, how about lobster thermidor, and I thought, Not yet, I won’t. In the dream, just like in real life, I am thrilled and suspicious. I had this kind of dinner in Hollywood, and look how that turned out. In the dream, it’s like Rome before the fall: small birds stuffed with glazed, glimmering things. Everything surrounded by frosted grapes and vegetables carved into flowers, a jeroboam of Champagne in a giant bucket (finally saw one this past year, at New Year’s—huge), and two rings of enormous shrimp hanging off a crystal bowl and all facing right, like the Esther Williams swimmers.
In the dream, I drive home with the crystal bowl of shrimp on the passenger seat. This is what I really did want to do. There was a big bowl of shrimp on the table, and I wanted to bring some home to Reenie. She would have made scampi for us, or we would have just sat up and devoured them at the kitchen table. In real life, I didn’t say much to Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Fox that evening, Thanks for the swell meal and the compliments and the expression of serious interest. In the dream, I say thank you and I keep looking at the truly enormous shrimp, thinking about how pleased Reenie will be with them, and me.
In the dream, just like it was in real life, Reenie is waiting up for me, in her pink kimono, with her hair piled up on her head. In the dream, she’s happy to see me, her eyes are sparkling. In real life, she was steaming. It was the way it always was when I came back late. She yelled that she didn’t leave Gus (which is not how I would describe it but …) so she could be my mistress. She didn’t turn her back on her church and her family so she could be my dirty little secret. Once she threw a plate at the wall and once she broke my tortoiseshell sunglasses. I go toward her, to say I’m sorry—and I am sorry but I did think that a little discretion wouldn’t kill us and I was not prepared to have Messers. Fletcher and Fox over for a home-cooked meal in the carriage house with Danny yelling for Mama, and you and Edgar playing dominoes in the front room.
The dream is no different from real life, at this point. Reenie did have a pot of sauce on the stove. She did say, I wasn’t gonna start cooking till you walked in the door. I’m not sitting down to cold food anymore. I did say, Honey, I ate. She lit a cigarette off the stove, and I won’t ever know what she was about to say. A rope of flame leaped from the burner to the end of her hand and wrapped around her chest and shoulders like a blue-and-orange curtain, like a bit of stagecraft pulling her up to the fly loft. Fire ran down the back of her robe. I started screaming and pulled Reenie out of the kitchen, rolling her around and around on the damp grass, until my hands were too burned to be of any use and Reenie had stopped screaming.
In the dream, just like in real life, the yard is dark, no light except for the porch lamp. I can hear Reenie breathing. Her whole body was black and red and ash, a deep shadow on the dark grass in the black night. I’m glad that I can’t see her clearly, although I feel her hair on my arm. I can’t feel my hands. They hang like red, blackened meat from my wrists. My fingers flutter like thick ribbons.
In the dream, the light from the porch fades until I can’t see a thing. Edgar sleeps through everything. You come running downstairs in my fancy green silk nightgown, crying, reaching for me. There’s no Danny. He’s not missing. It’s like he never was.
In real life, the last thing I saw was you beside me in your pink pajamas, fumbling with your glasses. You told me later that Edgar and Danny slept through the whole thing.
I don’t think I was at Reenie’s funeral. I hope it was lovely. I hope someone sang “Night and Day,” because that was our song. I imagine the funeral was while I was in the hospital. Lucky us, that there were Torellis who specialized in things other than perfect fruits and vegetables. Dr. Andrew Torelli, taller and presumably smarter than Joe Torelli, was on his way to being a big man in burns and trauma at Columbia Presbyterian. Did you meet him? In my recollection, I was alone in the hospital most of the time. Dr. Torelli checked my hands where the burns were worst and he said the best person for this kind of damage was Dr. Arthur Litton, who practiced in England, where they saw a lot of this during the war. Dr. Torelli had studied under Litton at Columbia. The Torellis had a driver take me to the airport and to the gate. My hands were essentially useless and everyone did everything for me on the plane, although I could turn pages with the outside edge of my left palm and I could hold a cup between my forearms. I drank cups of gin for eight hours and someone took me to Queen Victoria Hospital, and there, in short, I recovered use of my hands. In not so short, eight months of exfoliating and grafts that didn’t take and physical therapy the likes of which you have only seen in reenactments of Mary, Queen of Scots’s imprisonment. The nurses were thoroughly bovine or as tough as the pilots they cared for (and I knew, and they told me, that they were there to take care of the airmen. I told everyone that I’d been burned while trying to save my sister, who died, and that did get me some sympathy). At night, I wept over Reenie and my hands. A nurse gave me hot milk with a little codeine for the first two months and then she saw I liked it and cut me off, saying, Enough, meaning enough codeine, enough grieving, and probably, that she’d had enough of me.
Dr. Litton was young and smart and second in command. Dr. McIndoe was the great man, and the savior of the RAF and other burned pilots. I met Dr. McIndoe once, and when he saw I was not a pilot, had my whole face, use of my legs and at least eight distinct fingers (as opposed to the slabs of pink patty so many of the men had), he lost interest. “ ‘Not my cup of tea,’ as the chorus girl said to the vicar.” He let me stay at the hospital, anyway.
The airmen gave me hope. I doubt that most of them had started out as exceptional. They started out young and patriotic and full of that masculine excitement over testing themselves and, generally, full of themselves. They had a Guinea Pig Club (named for Dr. McIndoe’s endless, often successful, experimenting on their limbs and faces) and they got used to me. Boys with half-faces, skin like red fungus from neck to hip or legless and rolling their wheelchairs to bring me a beer because the Guinea Pig Club was celebrating something. We celebrated Fridays. We celebrated that no one had died this week. That William Best had been offered a job in the office of British Airways. That Tom Marshall’s glass eye fit like a charm, after three bad ones. I loved being their girl, and I sang my heart out for the Guinea Pig Club on every occasion. I gave them Noël Coward like they’d never had before, and I gave them the last of the red-hot mamas, complete with patter, and I cannot tell you how much I wish that everything I learned there stayed with me. You know, the crisis passes, the crucible cools, and there we are, slightly improved, not much altered. I expressed gratitude every day and I tried to be charming, as we’d had enough money only to cover the first month of my treatments.
How are you? How is Danny?
Peace in our time.
Iris, the Singing Guinea Pig of Queen Victoria Hospital
16
After You’ve Gone
IN THE DAYS AFTER REENIE DIED, I MOVED AS FAST AS I COULD. My plan was to help everyone, but sorrow made me deaf and blind and awkward. I poked Danny in the ear with a comb when I tried to fix his hair. I dropped scrambled eggs on my father’s bare chest, because Clara wasn’t around to feed him. I tripped getting the mail and skinned both my knees. Danny ducked when he saw me coming. I didn’t understand why I kept falling over. It was much worse, and more awkward, than my worrying. Worrying was my nature. My father had been a beaker of etiquette and big ideas, Iris was a vase of glamour, and I was the little brown jug of worry. I worried about my father, almost immobile except for the tiny tremors and startling, meaningless gestures. I worried about Iris, because the last time I saw her she was being shoved screaming into an ambulance, smelling like charred meat. I worried about Danny, because I had no choice. Clara, who could have shared the worrying and helped with Danny, was on tour for another three weeks. By the time she came back, I planned to have nothing to say to her. She would beg me to tell her about this difficult time; she’d put both of her hands over mine and I’d turn my back on her. Oh, it’s over now, I’d say.
Telling Danny that Reenie was dead, that Iris was in for a long recovery in a hospital somewhere, and that the person taking care of him for now and the indefinite future, was me, was the worst day of my life. I would rather have been left on that porch, sick to my stomach, watching my mother motor down an endless road, for every day of my life than ever relive, or even recall, telling Danny his mother was dead.
His mouth opened and closed a couple of times and he looked up at the ceiling. He smiled, as if this were one of our odd, grown-up jokes, the kind he didn’t get but always wanted to. His face stretched and reddened around his wide, painful smile and then he turned his face away from me and cried, pressing himself into the back of the couch. Oh, how could we, I thought.
I am so sorry, I said. I am so sorry. I am so sorry we let this happen. I know I’m not at all the person you want taking care of you. I don’t blame you. I know I am no kind of mother at all but I will try. Danny, I swear to God, I will not leave you and I will try.
Try, he said and we lay down on the floor, crying over what we didn’t have.
REENIE’S FUNERAL WAS JUST four days later and short and small. I let Father Dom preside because who was there to object but me, and I didn’t have the energy. Mrs. Torelli made the arrangements. Francisco came, to represent, and the five of us sat in the smaller chapel of the Torellis’ church on Middle Neck Road and Father Dom spoke kindly, and even warmly, about Reenie and her loveliness and her devotion to the Torellis (leaving out Iris and glossing over Gus, the German spy). He focused on Danny, which I appreciated, and on God’s will, which was appalling, as my father would have said. He wrapped it all up in a half hour. I thanked the Torellis and Francisco and I took Danny out for ice cream.
The next day, the Torellis had brought over a basket of fruit for me to deliver to Iris, for when she got out of her coma at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. All the Diegos came to take me there. If I’d been left alone, making sure Danny caught the bus and that my father didn’t fall out of bed, I might have been so busy, I wouldn’t have gone to see Iris at all. Carnie banged on the door at 7 A.M. I told her I couldn’t really drop everything to drive over to the hospital. She picked up the Torelli basket and handed me my loafers. Danny stood in the doorway of his room, pulling on his lip, which drove me crazy.
Let’s put on our shoes, I said. I found his Raggedy Andy doll and most of his bagel and we all went to the hospital, Danny on my arm like a barnacle.
Bea kept Danny in the hospital cafeteria. (“What can you do?” she said. “Reenie’s dead. Iris is a mess. Who needs to see that? You have to, he doesn’t.”) Carnie and Francisco stepped back to let me go into Iris’s room first, to find a way to hug my sister gently, but with great feeling. My great feeling was that this was all a bad dream, that it was impossible that Reenie, adored by Danny and Iris, was dead and gone. I hadn’t loved her but I had liked her and she had taken care of Danny and made my sister happy and that was, pretty much, good enough for me.
Iris opened her left eye (the right side of her face and neck was layered with gauze and tape), and even that did not look like my sister’s eye. That bright, sometimes acid, leaf-green light had gone out of it. Francisco kissed Iris’s forehead, and I did the same. Carnie sat at the foot of the bed. She told Iris a few stories about hijinks at La Bella Donna. I sorted everything in the basket and made a tower of the chocolates. I peeled a tangerine. Francisco said that I was taking care of everything at home, not that it was all on my shoulders, but I was doing a great job and Iris didn’t have to worry about a thing. Iris closed her eye. Carnie went to relieve Bea and Francisco said, You need to rest. I’ll leave you girls alone. He took the tangerine and went into the hall. He didn’t come back.
I walked around the room. You know, I said, I thought it was better Danny didn’t come in and see you like this. Iris nodded and the tubes taped to her chest and the cocoons on her arms and shoulders moved slightly. I said, We probably have a month at the Torellis. They need a butler and a cook and a governess. And I don’t think Danny and I can cover those bases. Iris closed her eye.
We sat for a few moments and she opened her eye again.
She mouthed the word Reenie.
“Can I touch you here?” I said, and I rested my hand on her left leg. She nodded. “I thought someone would have told you.”
Iris held my eye, furiously.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “They did everything they could for her. She was … she wasn’t … she was not alive by the time she got to the hospital.”
She mouthed the words I know.
“You know? You mean you already knew?”
Iris nodded.
“Does it help to have me tell you?” I said.
“No,” she said.
ON THE WAY HOME, Francisco let Bea drive and he sat in the back with me, with Danny sprawled across us, half asleep. Francisco told me that when Iris’s hands were healed, he had some tricks to help her, to make her hands look pretty. In the backseat shadow, he traced designs and contouring on my hand. (You shade the tips of the fingers in pearl, he said, so they catch the light. The burned areas, if there are any, you layer with a sheer foundation and then a peach one and then you use just a little brown to slim the fingers. Plus, she has to wear nail polish, always, to make her hands look finished.)
Iris was in the special burn unit for another two weeks. The Torellis sent more fruit baskets, to her, and to me. Danny and I ate fancy pears and ginger cookies and Golden Delicious apples, and I have to say that he never asked for a decent meal. I figured that when he lay in bed, praying in his mysterious way, he asked God: What kind of people steal you from your life, however miserable, and give you a better life, however peculiar, and then take it away, just when you’ve just gotten a tiny bit comfortable?
Every morning, I fed my father poached eggs and jam from the little jars tucked into the fruit baskets and then I took Danny to school. I quit going to La Bella Donna, even though I knew that wasn’t the smart thing to do, and looked after my father, who didn’t really need anything except a milk shake and a bedpan. I didn’t have it in me to tell women what might happen to them.
I’d walk to Danny’s school and sit outside his classroom until the bell rang. We’d take the bus into town and go shopping for things we liked. I stole nail polish for me and Captain Marvel comics for him. We bought ice cream cones at Kriegel’s and walked over to Grace Avenue Park to do my nails and read. We watched the kids play. When it got a little cooler and darker the kids went home and Danny and I put our goods in my bag and we played on every piece of equipment, and perfected a standing double on the slide and then we took the bus home, for our fruit and cheese and cookie dinner.
I don’t know who visited Iris. Even though I think that I am, really, in the red cul-de-sac at the bottom of my heart, a better person than Iris, I know that if it’d been me in that hospital, she would have slept in the chair beside my bed.
17
Hitler Has Only Got One Ball
Letter from Gus
Pforzheim
January 2, 1945
Heil Hitler! Just kidding. People here salute all different ways.
Fick dich and the horse you rode in on. Or, Mein Gott, when will this war be over? Or, You can have my sister if we can have your chicken. Or, What are you looking at, Hurensohn? (SOB, to you.) Or, I’m doing my best here—don’t shoot me or steal from me or turn me in. (I’m working on that last one. I hope it will keep us alive.)
