Lucky Us, page 7
You’re Not the Only Oyster in the Stew
CLARA WILLIAMS HATED THE TIME BETWEEN SETS AT THE NITE Cap. The whole half hour was sweating and setting and refinishing her skin. Her vitiligo never took a night off. Clara drank one big glass of water and one hot tea with honey in the nasty dressing room and she sat at the bar for only two minutes before she went back onstage. She did notice that when she made herself up as white, she was more conservative all over. Light-pink lipstick, pearl earrings, a-tisket, a tasket. She hadn’t gotten as many chances lately. Since the war started, people looked at one another more carefully. Negro and white people looked twice at dark-skinned white people, at Chinese and Japanese people, at people with accents. Before, if you said you were white, by God, people took you for white, and if you said you were Negro, people certainly took you for Negro. Clara thought that it might be pushing her luck to impersonate a white woman too often, although she had an itch, every now and then, to bust out her Doris Day and she had the tight pink sheath and white gloves to do it. In Reno, she’d done Doris Day for about a week, with a white quartet behind her.
That Reno trumpeter wasn’t really a man. He was a tubby, sweet-faced little guy and no one mentioned to his wife or three sons—and Clara had wondered about those three strapping boys—that he was really a tubby, sweet-faced gal who could swing all night on the trumpet and had decided that her chances were better if she wasn’t a woman. Sometimes, in spite or annoyance, when the band stayed half a beat behind her all night, Clara’d imagine swiping a lipstick across the trumpeter’s round face or pulling his pompadour forward into a pixie cut. It would take only one gesture and she would never be he again.
Sometimes, when Clara filled in her face, connecting all the blank seas and inlets of the vitiligo to the smaller and smaller brown islands of her real color, it was hard not to feel that she was impersonating a Negro. The dark, arched eyebrows. Ruby-red lipstick shaping her pale, streaky mouth. Her nose, which was sometimes a contouring challenge when she was white, was a comfort. It was a Negro nose. When she was Negro, she sometimes put a little beige cream down the bridge to broaden it, in case someone failed to notice. Clara understood that race was more than a matter of appearance, but it was also a matter of appearance. Like Rudolph Valentino’s nose. How did people not notice that schnoz everywhere? Clara saw that nose on fancy white men from Philly to Boston. She saw it on half the Italians in New York, every other Tony and Guido. She saw it on almost every handsome colored flying ace, in newsreel after newsreel. That bony arch and hawklike tip. How did people not see that it was the same nose? It was probably the same dick too. Clara knew a girl who had met Errol Flynn in Hollywood and she said it was no longer than your forefinger but as wide around as a biscuit, and Clara had heard the same was true of many Italian men and of the Tuskegee Airmen too.
Pond Road
Great Neck, New York
18 June 1943
Dear Miss Williams,
I am writing to you after an evening at the Nite Cap. I am the chap who bought you a stinger between sets, but you have so many admirers that that description may not help my cause. Your performance tonight was splendid. I think that Lena Horne herself would have applauded your “Stormy Weather,” and your version of “There Are Such Things” was truly beautiful. I will be at the Nite Cap next Sunday. If I may, I will again buy you a drink between sets.
Yours, in admiration,
Edgar V. Acton
Edgar wrote the note ten times. He didn’t write, I am the white man who bought you a drink, because it was possible that there’d been other white men at other shows, although he hadn’t seen any. Edgar felt that the letter had more Jeeves-and-the-country-house than he’d intended. He’d never used the word “chap” in his life, but he was an English butler in a Negro nightclub and he thought that foolishness might be his trump card.
HE HADN’T THOUGHT ABOUT how it would be inside the Nite Cap. He had a free Saturday night, which he rarely did. (Saturday night, the Torellis usually had twenty or thirty relatives over for dinner and Edgar tended bar, served the priests, supervised the buffet, and drove the resentful cousins he had not been able to keep out of Joe Torelli’s Scotch back to the Bronx. “From whence they come,” Joe Torelli said.) The Irish bars of Great Neck were rough and charmless, and Manhattan was a big pond, after Ohio. He wanted a place he could listen to jazz, where no one knew him and no one wanted to. Inside the Nite Cap, Edgar was not invisible. He shone, and not in a good way. The bouncer was Negro, the tall, creamy coat-check girl was Negro, the broad-shouldered, bald-headed bartender and all of the men and women around him were Negro. At Windsor College, he was often the only man in a room full of women and it never bothered him. To be the sole man was not unpleasant; sometimes it was charming. Nice women rarely turn on a man they know, and even if they do, they’re women; their weapons are words. The Nite Cap was filled with tired cleaning ladies and baby nurses who worked hard for their living, and a few working girls and men with nicked, thick hands and cut faces; laborers, cooks, truck drivers, fighters. After Edgar had sat ten minutes at a rickety table, a waiter brought him a gin. He let go of Edgar’s glass reluctantly, not opening his hand until Edgar gave him five dollars and told him to keep it. The waiter moved a little more briskly, as if service could now be expected. Edgar’s first impulse was appeasement. If he knew what would make these men smile, and these women forgive him, he would offer it. He would soft-shoe across the small stage, make fun of his own accent and pallor, demonstrating his essential harmlessness, so he could stay in the Nite Cap, and not get hurt.
Pond Road
Great Neck, New York
1 July 1943
Dear Miss Williams,
It was a pleasure to see you again. I fear that I may have interrupted your conversation with your colleague the drummer, and I apologize. I’m delighted that you remembered encountering me outside the Silver Star Diner. I certainly remembered you. Would you consider joining me for a late supper at Gino’s this coming Wednesday evening? I understand that Mr. Circiello is quite a jazz fan and I’m sure he would be honored to have you at his restaurant.
Yours,
Edgar V. Acton
There would be difficulties in courting Clara. He was almost twenty years older. He was white. He wasn’t rich. He wasn’t certain that even by the standards of a Negro jazz singer on Long Island, he qualified as good enough. He gave a lot of thought to which places would be welcoming to them as a couple and he felt that Greenwich Village was his first choice. From what he’d heard from Earl, the bartender at the Nite Cap, there were a few nightclubs in Harlem that would be a distant second.
Clara, having been born and raised in America, didn’t give it another thought.
“Do you have your own home?” she said.
THEY WALKED DOWN HUDSON Street. It was a cool night and Clara pulled her shawl around her. Dinner at Gino’s was what Edgar had hoped for. The food covered the plate, the tomato sauce was mildly spicy and thick, and one could imagine a warm-hearted, chubby woman, who was not like Edgar’s mother and probably not like Clara’s, stirring a pot in the kitchen, humming some Neapolitan tune. Mr. Circiello didn’t welcome them with any special attention but he didn’t raise an eyebrow and he gave them a good table and he did say, Good night, signorina, good night, signore. It was a tremendous success. They had been seen and served and thanked. Edgar drove them back to the house Clara shared, to the room she rented from a cousin of the drummer. They sat in the car. Edgar put the radio on.
“Like a couple of kids,” Clara said.
“You, of course, are a spring flower,” Edgar said. “I should be bringing you to The Ritz.”
Clara sat still.
“You think if The Ritz was handy, I’d let you take me there?” she said.
Edgar’s sympathies were all with Clara.
“Clara, I’m too old for you and I’m not rich. I want to take you out every evening that we are both free and I want us to go to the best clubs and eat dinner at places like Gino’s, which I can hardly afford on a butler’s salary. If I follow my impulses in this matter, I will have to steal the Torelli silver, pawn it at that place we passed tonight, and, unless I am very clever, spend the rest of my quiet life in the state penitentiary. Breaking rocks.”
“I see that,” Clara said. “I see you on the chain gang. I see you singing ‘In the Jailhouse Now’ from can to can’t.”
“I do know ‘In the Jailhouse Now,’ ” Edgar said.
“You do not.”
“I may struggle with the tune,” he said, and he sang, not badly and in no accent but his own.
He’s in the jailhouse now. He’s in the jailhouse now.
I told him once or twice quit playin’ cards and shootin’ dice.
He’s in the jailhouse now.
Clara smiled and shook her head.
Edgar said, “Oh, I know. I cannot impress you.”
He leaned forward and kissed Clara on her neck and her cheek. He wanted to lick off her makeup, to kiss the perfect, bare Clara underneath.
CLARA THOUGHT THAT IT would be good if he did; it would be cool water on her blistered heart if he did.
9
Pennies from Heaven
THE TORELLIS WERE MY FAIRY-TALE FAMILY. I BELIEVED THAT their house was so much nicer and their family so much sturdier because they were better people than we were. My mother and I had been the worst people, so we’d had the worst home. We had had the worn-out first floor of a worn-out two-family and I saw, the day I was left on my father’s porch, that everything we owned had been shabby and just cheap to begin with, including my clothes and my person. At my father’s house, which was really Iris’s mother’s house, things were lovely. My father didn’t really qualify as a lovely person but he did rescue us from Hollywood, is how I saw it.
Everyone told me Iris’s mother, Charlotte, had been wonderful, and I thought that her perfection had probably made up for my father’s shortcomings. I believed that the Torellis, unlike my family, had souls, and their souls, if you’d hung them on the clothesline behind the carriage house, would have billowed bright white and sheer, smelling like sunshine. Mrs. Torelli, as I saw her, took motherhood seriously. She talked to Reenie about what her children liked to eat, she talked to Iris about their feelings (their “crazy ideas” is what she said, but still, she was interested), she told everyone about Mr. Torelli’s digestive problems, which little Joey had inherited, and when Baby Paulie had a bumpy, purple rash on his fat little neck, Mrs. Torelli made Dr. Fishkind come to the house to treat it. She could not have left a child on the front porch of any house, anywhere, ever.
Mr. Torelli talked to me once in a while when I was snitching something from the kitchen early in the morning or when he passed me at the end of the day on the walk from the garage to their house. Sometimes he patted my head and said, How’s the genius? Sometimes he just started talking the way you do to a dog, and I’d follow him up to the kitchen door until he went inside.
The Torellis liked daily naps for their children and big meals of good food. They liked large, clean cars, a clean kitchen, and nice clothes, with no stains or tears. As long as we made this possible, the Torellis didn’t bother us. (Reenie dropped the “Heitmann” when Gus was taken away and went back to “Lombardo.” She moved into the carriage house with us, and my father only said, Well, aren’t we Opéra-Bouffe-by-the-Sea.) Mrs. Torelli did say to me, over her morning cantaloupe and Baby Paulie’s rice cereal, which covered half her silk housecoat, that it was good that we had taken Reenie in. That poor girl didn’t know which way was up, Mrs. Torelli said.
Reenie and Iris shared a room now and Iris went into the city to audition twice a week. (I meant to tell you, she said. I took my mother’s maiden name. Reardon. We’re still sisters. People do it all the time.) When Iris was catching the morning train, she asked me to take her place with the little girls, and we’d play Geography and I Spy, which seemed like very educational games to me. Sometimes we would act out our version of Little Women, in which Beth didn’t die and Joey played the March family dog. Mrs. Torelli didn’t mind. She managed her household with one chubby white hand and the help that really mattered was my father and Reenie. Iris called my time with the kids “enrichment.” Now that the girls were in school, Mrs. Torelli focused on the boys during the day, and she let them run around the garden until they were wet and dirty and hungry. When I was home, I brought out sandwiches and apple juice. Iris’s absences bothered only Reenie, I think. Iris invited us both to see her onstage. Reenie said, “I don’t have time to do that. I’m working.” “Me too,” I said, and it gave me some mean satisfaction to let Iris know that this time I had better things to do than sew the sequins and wait in the wings.
When Iris was gone two days in a row, which happened more and more, I’d rehearse the Torellis’ children one evening and have them perform the next. We did Cinderella, with Catherine as Cinderella, then with Mary as Cinderella, and always with Joey as a madcap pumpkin. We did an abbreviated Tempest, mostly storm and rescue, with Mary as Miranda (“You’re the princess”), Catherine as Ariel (“You’re a magic fairy,” I told her), Joey as Caliban (“You scare the crap out of the girls”), and Baby Paulie as Prospero (carried by me, his lines uttered by me—that long drive to East Brooklyn had not been for nothing), and I made my father, Mrs. Torelli, and Reenie watch.
They clapped and Mrs. Torelli took the kids upstairs. My father said, Interesting experiment, and walked back to the carriage house. Reenie sat weeping at the kitchen table.
“I’ll never see Gus again,” she said.
I said that we didn’t know that.
“I’ll never have children,” she said, and I thought that was about the shortest mourning period on record.
“Do you think he was a German spy?” Reenie said.
“Do you?” I said.
Reenie wiped her face with a dish towel. “Of course not. He was a good man.”
I said I thought so too, and Reenie got up and took off her apron.
“You could write to the government to find out what’s happened to him,” I said. “Or I could.”
“I did that,” she said. “It’s not as easy as you think. None of it.”
Reenie put on her coat and picked up a dish of fruit compote she’d made for us at the house, bits and pieces of fruit that were starting to go bad, all stewed together with cinnamon and white wine. Iris and I ate bowls of it.
“Iris worries about him,” Reenie said.
Like fun, I thought. Reenie wanted a baby and Iris wanted Reenie and it seemed to me that the only person who heard Gus’s big laugh, who missed his sharp look and those thick, quick fingers shuffling cards like a croupier, was me.
CLARA WILLIAMS WAS THE next morning’s surprise. My father introduced her to me, pretty much the way he had introduced me to my sister, back in Ohio. When it came to immediate family, Edgar was all for plain talk. Oh, Evie, glad you’re up. Iris has been in and out. This is my very good friend Miss Clara Williams. We hope she’ll be visiting us quite a bit.
Miss Clara Williams, pale and dark, put out her pretty light-blue suede glove (my mother would have killed for those gloves, with the tiny, flat pleats at the wrist and two blue pearl buttons) and I took her hand and mumbled. She smiled and the dimple in her left cheek was deep as a dime. I wanted to make her smile again. She sat down and pulled off her gloves. I saw her hands, speckled with white patches and dots of white skin. She said that maybe I’d stick around and have a cup of coffee with her, if I wasn’t too busy. I poured two cups. My father put on his butler’s coat, patted my shoulder, and went to the door.
“For God, for country, for Joseph Torelli,” he said, and left.
Clara stirred her coffee and sat with her spoon hovering an inch above the table.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I put down the two scorched linen napkins my father had taken (rescued, he said) from the Torellis’ laundry pile.
“Isn’t this just fine,” she said. “Fine.” In East Brooklyn, there was an Italian café my sister and I liked, and for a treat, we would order affogato, hot espresso poured over vanilla ice cream, the dark streaming into melting ivory pools. Like that.
“Are you in school?” she said.
I went through my song-and-dance, which began with my implying that I had already graduated and ended with me saying I really was giving a lot of thought to City College.
“Your father says you’re the smart one.”
“Not the pretty one,” I said. I was mortified.
“Oh, you can fake pretty,” she said.
CLARA CAME TO OUR house most nights after that, and she stayed in my father’s room. In the morning, I’d wake up early to watch the light-blue cab come for her and see her run down the stairs with a dress over her arm and her enormous crocodile makeup case. The three of us never ate together and I chose to think that was my father’s possessiveness and not Clara’s lack of interest. Iris said that for Clara, we were just duckpins to be bowled over. I said I didn’t think Clara was after his fortune.
I was sixteen and I was used to Iris and Reenie, and used to the happy Torellis and now used to my father pretending to be a butler, although watching him bow his head, just an inch, when Mr. Torelli told him to pull the car around, bothered me. Clara Williams was extraordinary to me. I was embarrassed to be so fascinated by her odd, smooth skin and her cool manners and to be so enamored of her voice. My lucky father.
WE WERE ALL BROKE, but I was more so. I took money, very carefully, from everyone’s open purse or wallet. Reenie kept a couple of quarters in her old black coin purse and Iris always had loose change now, now that she was back in business. She was Irish Maid, Second Debutante, Silly Shopgirl, appearing nightly near or on Broadway. Iris was working hard, and not just onstage. She told me about the agents she had to woo, and the stage managers. She told me it was important to pay for your own drink when the cast went out after the show and she told me that putting an extra dollar in the pot made people like you more. She did her exercises every day, she said, and she was taking dance and she’d gotten into an acting class. She said her voice was an instrument and her body was an instrument. And my ass is a Stradivarius, she said.
CLARA WILLIAMS HATED THE TIME BETWEEN SETS AT THE NITE Cap. The whole half hour was sweating and setting and refinishing her skin. Her vitiligo never took a night off. Clara drank one big glass of water and one hot tea with honey in the nasty dressing room and she sat at the bar for only two minutes before she went back onstage. She did notice that when she made herself up as white, she was more conservative all over. Light-pink lipstick, pearl earrings, a-tisket, a tasket. She hadn’t gotten as many chances lately. Since the war started, people looked at one another more carefully. Negro and white people looked twice at dark-skinned white people, at Chinese and Japanese people, at people with accents. Before, if you said you were white, by God, people took you for white, and if you said you were Negro, people certainly took you for Negro. Clara thought that it might be pushing her luck to impersonate a white woman too often, although she had an itch, every now and then, to bust out her Doris Day and she had the tight pink sheath and white gloves to do it. In Reno, she’d done Doris Day for about a week, with a white quartet behind her.
That Reno trumpeter wasn’t really a man. He was a tubby, sweet-faced little guy and no one mentioned to his wife or three sons—and Clara had wondered about those three strapping boys—that he was really a tubby, sweet-faced gal who could swing all night on the trumpet and had decided that her chances were better if she wasn’t a woman. Sometimes, in spite or annoyance, when the band stayed half a beat behind her all night, Clara’d imagine swiping a lipstick across the trumpeter’s round face or pulling his pompadour forward into a pixie cut. It would take only one gesture and she would never be he again.
Sometimes, when Clara filled in her face, connecting all the blank seas and inlets of the vitiligo to the smaller and smaller brown islands of her real color, it was hard not to feel that she was impersonating a Negro. The dark, arched eyebrows. Ruby-red lipstick shaping her pale, streaky mouth. Her nose, which was sometimes a contouring challenge when she was white, was a comfort. It was a Negro nose. When she was Negro, she sometimes put a little beige cream down the bridge to broaden it, in case someone failed to notice. Clara understood that race was more than a matter of appearance, but it was also a matter of appearance. Like Rudolph Valentino’s nose. How did people not notice that schnoz everywhere? Clara saw that nose on fancy white men from Philly to Boston. She saw it on half the Italians in New York, every other Tony and Guido. She saw it on almost every handsome colored flying ace, in newsreel after newsreel. That bony arch and hawklike tip. How did people not see that it was the same nose? It was probably the same dick too. Clara knew a girl who had met Errol Flynn in Hollywood and she said it was no longer than your forefinger but as wide around as a biscuit, and Clara had heard the same was true of many Italian men and of the Tuskegee Airmen too.
Pond Road
Great Neck, New York
18 June 1943
Dear Miss Williams,
I am writing to you after an evening at the Nite Cap. I am the chap who bought you a stinger between sets, but you have so many admirers that that description may not help my cause. Your performance tonight was splendid. I think that Lena Horne herself would have applauded your “Stormy Weather,” and your version of “There Are Such Things” was truly beautiful. I will be at the Nite Cap next Sunday. If I may, I will again buy you a drink between sets.
Yours, in admiration,
Edgar V. Acton
Edgar wrote the note ten times. He didn’t write, I am the white man who bought you a drink, because it was possible that there’d been other white men at other shows, although he hadn’t seen any. Edgar felt that the letter had more Jeeves-and-the-country-house than he’d intended. He’d never used the word “chap” in his life, but he was an English butler in a Negro nightclub and he thought that foolishness might be his trump card.
HE HADN’T THOUGHT ABOUT how it would be inside the Nite Cap. He had a free Saturday night, which he rarely did. (Saturday night, the Torellis usually had twenty or thirty relatives over for dinner and Edgar tended bar, served the priests, supervised the buffet, and drove the resentful cousins he had not been able to keep out of Joe Torelli’s Scotch back to the Bronx. “From whence they come,” Joe Torelli said.) The Irish bars of Great Neck were rough and charmless, and Manhattan was a big pond, after Ohio. He wanted a place he could listen to jazz, where no one knew him and no one wanted to. Inside the Nite Cap, Edgar was not invisible. He shone, and not in a good way. The bouncer was Negro, the tall, creamy coat-check girl was Negro, the broad-shouldered, bald-headed bartender and all of the men and women around him were Negro. At Windsor College, he was often the only man in a room full of women and it never bothered him. To be the sole man was not unpleasant; sometimes it was charming. Nice women rarely turn on a man they know, and even if they do, they’re women; their weapons are words. The Nite Cap was filled with tired cleaning ladies and baby nurses who worked hard for their living, and a few working girls and men with nicked, thick hands and cut faces; laborers, cooks, truck drivers, fighters. After Edgar had sat ten minutes at a rickety table, a waiter brought him a gin. He let go of Edgar’s glass reluctantly, not opening his hand until Edgar gave him five dollars and told him to keep it. The waiter moved a little more briskly, as if service could now be expected. Edgar’s first impulse was appeasement. If he knew what would make these men smile, and these women forgive him, he would offer it. He would soft-shoe across the small stage, make fun of his own accent and pallor, demonstrating his essential harmlessness, so he could stay in the Nite Cap, and not get hurt.
Pond Road
Great Neck, New York
1 July 1943
Dear Miss Williams,
It was a pleasure to see you again. I fear that I may have interrupted your conversation with your colleague the drummer, and I apologize. I’m delighted that you remembered encountering me outside the Silver Star Diner. I certainly remembered you. Would you consider joining me for a late supper at Gino’s this coming Wednesday evening? I understand that Mr. Circiello is quite a jazz fan and I’m sure he would be honored to have you at his restaurant.
Yours,
Edgar V. Acton
There would be difficulties in courting Clara. He was almost twenty years older. He was white. He wasn’t rich. He wasn’t certain that even by the standards of a Negro jazz singer on Long Island, he qualified as good enough. He gave a lot of thought to which places would be welcoming to them as a couple and he felt that Greenwich Village was his first choice. From what he’d heard from Earl, the bartender at the Nite Cap, there were a few nightclubs in Harlem that would be a distant second.
Clara, having been born and raised in America, didn’t give it another thought.
“Do you have your own home?” she said.
THEY WALKED DOWN HUDSON Street. It was a cool night and Clara pulled her shawl around her. Dinner at Gino’s was what Edgar had hoped for. The food covered the plate, the tomato sauce was mildly spicy and thick, and one could imagine a warm-hearted, chubby woman, who was not like Edgar’s mother and probably not like Clara’s, stirring a pot in the kitchen, humming some Neapolitan tune. Mr. Circiello didn’t welcome them with any special attention but he didn’t raise an eyebrow and he gave them a good table and he did say, Good night, signorina, good night, signore. It was a tremendous success. They had been seen and served and thanked. Edgar drove them back to the house Clara shared, to the room she rented from a cousin of the drummer. They sat in the car. Edgar put the radio on.
“Like a couple of kids,” Clara said.
“You, of course, are a spring flower,” Edgar said. “I should be bringing you to The Ritz.”
Clara sat still.
“You think if The Ritz was handy, I’d let you take me there?” she said.
Edgar’s sympathies were all with Clara.
“Clara, I’m too old for you and I’m not rich. I want to take you out every evening that we are both free and I want us to go to the best clubs and eat dinner at places like Gino’s, which I can hardly afford on a butler’s salary. If I follow my impulses in this matter, I will have to steal the Torelli silver, pawn it at that place we passed tonight, and, unless I am very clever, spend the rest of my quiet life in the state penitentiary. Breaking rocks.”
“I see that,” Clara said. “I see you on the chain gang. I see you singing ‘In the Jailhouse Now’ from can to can’t.”
“I do know ‘In the Jailhouse Now,’ ” Edgar said.
“You do not.”
“I may struggle with the tune,” he said, and he sang, not badly and in no accent but his own.
He’s in the jailhouse now. He’s in the jailhouse now.
I told him once or twice quit playin’ cards and shootin’ dice.
He’s in the jailhouse now.
Clara smiled and shook her head.
Edgar said, “Oh, I know. I cannot impress you.”
He leaned forward and kissed Clara on her neck and her cheek. He wanted to lick off her makeup, to kiss the perfect, bare Clara underneath.
CLARA THOUGHT THAT IT would be good if he did; it would be cool water on her blistered heart if he did.
9
Pennies from Heaven
THE TORELLIS WERE MY FAIRY-TALE FAMILY. I BELIEVED THAT their house was so much nicer and their family so much sturdier because they were better people than we were. My mother and I had been the worst people, so we’d had the worst home. We had had the worn-out first floor of a worn-out two-family and I saw, the day I was left on my father’s porch, that everything we owned had been shabby and just cheap to begin with, including my clothes and my person. At my father’s house, which was really Iris’s mother’s house, things were lovely. My father didn’t really qualify as a lovely person but he did rescue us from Hollywood, is how I saw it.
Everyone told me Iris’s mother, Charlotte, had been wonderful, and I thought that her perfection had probably made up for my father’s shortcomings. I believed that the Torellis, unlike my family, had souls, and their souls, if you’d hung them on the clothesline behind the carriage house, would have billowed bright white and sheer, smelling like sunshine. Mrs. Torelli, as I saw her, took motherhood seriously. She talked to Reenie about what her children liked to eat, she talked to Iris about their feelings (their “crazy ideas” is what she said, but still, she was interested), she told everyone about Mr. Torelli’s digestive problems, which little Joey had inherited, and when Baby Paulie had a bumpy, purple rash on his fat little neck, Mrs. Torelli made Dr. Fishkind come to the house to treat it. She could not have left a child on the front porch of any house, anywhere, ever.
Mr. Torelli talked to me once in a while when I was snitching something from the kitchen early in the morning or when he passed me at the end of the day on the walk from the garage to their house. Sometimes he patted my head and said, How’s the genius? Sometimes he just started talking the way you do to a dog, and I’d follow him up to the kitchen door until he went inside.
The Torellis liked daily naps for their children and big meals of good food. They liked large, clean cars, a clean kitchen, and nice clothes, with no stains or tears. As long as we made this possible, the Torellis didn’t bother us. (Reenie dropped the “Heitmann” when Gus was taken away and went back to “Lombardo.” She moved into the carriage house with us, and my father only said, Well, aren’t we Opéra-Bouffe-by-the-Sea.) Mrs. Torelli did say to me, over her morning cantaloupe and Baby Paulie’s rice cereal, which covered half her silk housecoat, that it was good that we had taken Reenie in. That poor girl didn’t know which way was up, Mrs. Torelli said.
Reenie and Iris shared a room now and Iris went into the city to audition twice a week. (I meant to tell you, she said. I took my mother’s maiden name. Reardon. We’re still sisters. People do it all the time.) When Iris was catching the morning train, she asked me to take her place with the little girls, and we’d play Geography and I Spy, which seemed like very educational games to me. Sometimes we would act out our version of Little Women, in which Beth didn’t die and Joey played the March family dog. Mrs. Torelli didn’t mind. She managed her household with one chubby white hand and the help that really mattered was my father and Reenie. Iris called my time with the kids “enrichment.” Now that the girls were in school, Mrs. Torelli focused on the boys during the day, and she let them run around the garden until they were wet and dirty and hungry. When I was home, I brought out sandwiches and apple juice. Iris’s absences bothered only Reenie, I think. Iris invited us both to see her onstage. Reenie said, “I don’t have time to do that. I’m working.” “Me too,” I said, and it gave me some mean satisfaction to let Iris know that this time I had better things to do than sew the sequins and wait in the wings.
When Iris was gone two days in a row, which happened more and more, I’d rehearse the Torellis’ children one evening and have them perform the next. We did Cinderella, with Catherine as Cinderella, then with Mary as Cinderella, and always with Joey as a madcap pumpkin. We did an abbreviated Tempest, mostly storm and rescue, with Mary as Miranda (“You’re the princess”), Catherine as Ariel (“You’re a magic fairy,” I told her), Joey as Caliban (“You scare the crap out of the girls”), and Baby Paulie as Prospero (carried by me, his lines uttered by me—that long drive to East Brooklyn had not been for nothing), and I made my father, Mrs. Torelli, and Reenie watch.
They clapped and Mrs. Torelli took the kids upstairs. My father said, Interesting experiment, and walked back to the carriage house. Reenie sat weeping at the kitchen table.
“I’ll never see Gus again,” she said.
I said that we didn’t know that.
“I’ll never have children,” she said, and I thought that was about the shortest mourning period on record.
“Do you think he was a German spy?” Reenie said.
“Do you?” I said.
Reenie wiped her face with a dish towel. “Of course not. He was a good man.”
I said I thought so too, and Reenie got up and took off her apron.
“You could write to the government to find out what’s happened to him,” I said. “Or I could.”
“I did that,” she said. “It’s not as easy as you think. None of it.”
Reenie put on her coat and picked up a dish of fruit compote she’d made for us at the house, bits and pieces of fruit that were starting to go bad, all stewed together with cinnamon and white wine. Iris and I ate bowls of it.
“Iris worries about him,” Reenie said.
Like fun, I thought. Reenie wanted a baby and Iris wanted Reenie and it seemed to me that the only person who heard Gus’s big laugh, who missed his sharp look and those thick, quick fingers shuffling cards like a croupier, was me.
CLARA WILLIAMS WAS THE next morning’s surprise. My father introduced her to me, pretty much the way he had introduced me to my sister, back in Ohio. When it came to immediate family, Edgar was all for plain talk. Oh, Evie, glad you’re up. Iris has been in and out. This is my very good friend Miss Clara Williams. We hope she’ll be visiting us quite a bit.
Miss Clara Williams, pale and dark, put out her pretty light-blue suede glove (my mother would have killed for those gloves, with the tiny, flat pleats at the wrist and two blue pearl buttons) and I took her hand and mumbled. She smiled and the dimple in her left cheek was deep as a dime. I wanted to make her smile again. She sat down and pulled off her gloves. I saw her hands, speckled with white patches and dots of white skin. She said that maybe I’d stick around and have a cup of coffee with her, if I wasn’t too busy. I poured two cups. My father put on his butler’s coat, patted my shoulder, and went to the door.
“For God, for country, for Joseph Torelli,” he said, and left.
Clara stirred her coffee and sat with her spoon hovering an inch above the table.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I put down the two scorched linen napkins my father had taken (rescued, he said) from the Torellis’ laundry pile.
“Isn’t this just fine,” she said. “Fine.” In East Brooklyn, there was an Italian café my sister and I liked, and for a treat, we would order affogato, hot espresso poured over vanilla ice cream, the dark streaming into melting ivory pools. Like that.
“Are you in school?” she said.
I went through my song-and-dance, which began with my implying that I had already graduated and ended with me saying I really was giving a lot of thought to City College.
“Your father says you’re the smart one.”
“Not the pretty one,” I said. I was mortified.
“Oh, you can fake pretty,” she said.
CLARA CAME TO OUR house most nights after that, and she stayed in my father’s room. In the morning, I’d wake up early to watch the light-blue cab come for her and see her run down the stairs with a dress over her arm and her enormous crocodile makeup case. The three of us never ate together and I chose to think that was my father’s possessiveness and not Clara’s lack of interest. Iris said that for Clara, we were just duckpins to be bowled over. I said I didn’t think Clara was after his fortune.
I was sixteen and I was used to Iris and Reenie, and used to the happy Torellis and now used to my father pretending to be a butler, although watching him bow his head, just an inch, when Mr. Torelli told him to pull the car around, bothered me. Clara Williams was extraordinary to me. I was embarrassed to be so fascinated by her odd, smooth skin and her cool manners and to be so enamored of her voice. My lucky father.
WE WERE ALL BROKE, but I was more so. I took money, very carefully, from everyone’s open purse or wallet. Reenie kept a couple of quarters in her old black coin purse and Iris always had loose change now, now that she was back in business. She was Irish Maid, Second Debutante, Silly Shopgirl, appearing nightly near or on Broadway. Iris was working hard, and not just onstage. She told me about the agents she had to woo, and the stage managers. She told me it was important to pay for your own drink when the cast went out after the show and she told me that putting an extra dollar in the pot made people like you more. She did her exercises every day, she said, and she was taking dance and she’d gotten into an acting class. She said her voice was an instrument and her body was an instrument. And my ass is a Stradivarius, she said.
