Lucky Us

1 I’d Know You Anywhere

MY FATHER’S WIFE DIED. MY MOTHER SAID WE SHOULD DRIVE down to his place and see what might be in it for us.

She tapped my nose with her grapefruit spoon. “It’s like this,” she said. “Your father loves us more, but he’s got another family, a wife, and a girl a little older than you. Her family had all the money. Wipe your face.”

There was no one like my mother, for straight talk. She washed my neck and ears until they shone. We helped each other dress: her lilac dress, with the underarm zipper, my pink one with the tricky buttons. My mother did my braids so tight, my eyes pulled up. She took her violet cloche and her best gloves and she ran across the road to borrow Mr. Portman’s car. I was glad to be going and I thought I could get to be glad about having a sister. I wasn’t sorry my father’s other wife was dead.

WE’D WAITED FOR HIM for weeks. My mother sat by the window in the morning and smoked through supper every night. When she came home from work at Hobson’s, she was in a bad mood, even after I rubbed her feet. I hung around the house all July, playing with Mr. Portman’s poodle, waiting for my father to drive up. When he came, he usually came by two o’clock, in case there was a Fireside Chat that day. We listened to all the Fireside Chats together. We loved President Roosevelt. On Sundays, when my father came, he brought a pack of Lucky Strikes for my mother and a Hershey bar for me. After supper, my mother sat in my father’s lap and I sat right on his slippers and if there was a Fireside Chat, my father did his FDR imitation. Good evening, friends, he said, and he stuck a straw in his mouth like a cigarette holder. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. He bowed to my mother and said, Eleanor, my dear, how ’bout a waltz? They danced to the radio for a while and then it was my bedtime. My mother put a few bobby pins in my hair for curls and my father carried me to bed, singing, “I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate.” Then he tucked me in and shimmied out the door. Monday mornings, he was gone and I waited until Thursday, and sometimes, until next Sunday.

MY MOTHER PARKED THE car and redid her lipstick. My father’s house was two stories of red stone and tall windows, with fringed lace curtains behind and wide brown steps stacked like boxes in front of the shining wood door. Your father does like to have things nice, while he’s away, she said. It sure is nice, I said. We ought to live here.

My mother smiled at me and ran her tongue over her teeth. Could be, she said — you never know. She’d already told me she was tired of Abingdon, where we’d been since I was born. It was no kind of real town and she was fed up to here hostessing at Hobson’s. We talked a lot about finding ourselves a better life in Chicago. Chicago, Chicago, that toddlin’ town … I saw a man, he danced with his wife. I sang as we got out of the car and I did a few dance steps like in the movies. My mother said, You are the bee’s knees, kiddo, and she grabbed the back of my dress. She licked her palm and pressed it to my bangs, so they wouldn’t fly up. She straightened her skirt and told me to check her seams. Straight as arrows, I said, and we went up the stairs hand in hand.

My mother knocked and my father answered the door in the blue vest he wore at our house during the president’s speeches. My father hugged me and my parents whispered to each other while I stood there, trying to see more of the parlor, which was as big as our whole apartment and filled with flowers. (Maybe my father said, What the hell are you doing here? Maybe my mother cursed him for staying away, but I doubt it. My father had played the gentleman his whole life and my mother must have said to me a hundred times that men needed to be handled right and a woman who couldn’t handle her man had only herself to blame. “When I say men are dogs,” she’d say, “I’m not being insulting. I like dogs.”) Behind my father, I saw a tall girl.

“My daughter Iris,” my father said. I could hear my mother breathe in.

“Iris,” he said, “this is my friend Mrs. Logan and her daughter, her lovely daughter, Eva.”

I knew, standing in their foyer, that this girl had a ton of things I didn’t have. Flowers in crystal vases the size of buckets. Pretty, light-brown curls. My father’s hand on her shoulder. She wore a baby-blue sweater and a white blouse with a bluebird pin on the collar. I think she wore stockings. Iris was sixteen and she looked like a grown woman to me. She looked like a movie star. My father pushed us to the stairs and told Iris to entertain me in her room while he and my mother had a chat.

“PICTURE THIS,” IRIS SAID. She lay on her bed and I sat on the braided rug next to it. She gave me a couple of gumdrops and I was happy to sit there. She was a great talker and a perfect mimic. “The whole college came to my mother’s funeral. My grandfather used to be president of the college, but he had a stroke last year, so he’s different now. There was this one girl, red hair, really awful. Redheads. Like they didn’t cook long enough or something.”

“I think Paulette Goddard’s a redhead,” I said. I’d read this in Photoplay last week.

“How old are you, ten? Who the hell wants to be Paulette Goddard? Anyway, this redheaded girl comes back to our house. She’s just bawling to beat the band. So this lady, our neighbor, Mrs. Drysdale, says to her, ‘Were you very close to dear Mrs. Acton?’ ”

The way Iris said this, I could just see Mrs. Drysdale, sticking her nose in, keeping her spotted veil out of her mouth while she ate, her wet hankie stuffed into her big bosom, which my mother told me was a disgusting thing to do.

“I’m twelve,” I said.

Iris said, “My mother was like a saint — everybody says so. She was nice to everyone, but I don’t want people thinking my mother wasted her time on this stupid girl, so I turn around and say that none of us even know who she is and she runs into the powder room downstairs — this is the funny part — the door gets stuck, and she can’t get out. She’s banging on the door and two professors have to jimmy it open. It was funny.”

Iris told me that the whole college (I didn’t know my father taught at a college; if you had asked me, I would have said that he read books for a living) came to the chapel to grieve for her mother, to offer sympathy to her and her father. She said that all of their family friends were there, which was her way of telling me that my mother could not really be a friend of her father’s.

WE HEARD THE VOICES downstairs and then a door shutting and then the piano, playing “My Angel Put the Devil in Me.” I didn’t know my father played the piano. Iris and I stood at her bedroom door, leaning into the hall. We heard the toilet flush, which was embarrassing but reassuring and then my father started playing the “Moonlight Sonata” and then we heard a car’s engine. Iris and I ran downstairs. My mother’d left the front door open and just slipped into Mr. Portman’s car. She’d set a brown tweed suitcase on the front porch. I stood on the porch holding the suitcase, looking at the road. My father sat down in the rocker and pulled me onto his lap, which he’d stopped doing last year. He asked me if I thought my mother was coming back and I asked him, Do you think my mother is coming back? My father asked me if I had any other family on my mother’s side, and I lay my head on his shoulder. I’d seen my father most Sundays and some Thursdays since I was a baby, and the whole rest of my family was my mother. I was friendly with Mr. Portman and his poodle and all of my teachers had taken an interest in me, and that was the sum of what you could call my family.

Iris opened the screen door and looked at me the way a cat looks at a dog.

We sat down to meat loaf and mashed potatoes and the third time Iris told me to get my elbows off the table, this isn’t a boardinghouse, my father said, Behave yourself, Iris. She’s your sister. Iris left the room and my father told me to improve my manners. You’re not living in that dreadful town anymore and you’re not Eva Logan anymore, he said. You’re Eva Acton. We’ll say you’re my niece.

I was thirteen before I understood that my mother wasn’t coming back to get me.

IRIS DIDN’T IGNORE ME for very long. She bossed me. She talked to me like Claudette Colbert talked to Louise Beavers in Imitation of Life, when she said, “We’re in the same boat, Delilah,” which showed that the white lady had no idea what the hell she was talking about, and of course Louise Beavers just sighed and made more pancakes.

Iris helped me navigate junior high. (A big, red-faced girl cornered me after two weeks and said, Who are you, anyway? Iris dropped a manicured hand on the girl’s shoulder and said, Gussie, this is my cousin Eva Acton. Her mother has also passed away. And the girl said — and who can blame her — Jeez, what are you two, vampires? Don’t walk past my house, is all I’m saying.)

I helped Iris prepare for her contests: elocution, rhetoric, dramatic readings, poetry readings, patriotic essays, and dance. Iris was a star. She had a lot of admirers at school, and some girls who didn’t like her, and she didn’t care. I pretended I didn’t care either. I hung around the library and got A’s and my real job, as I saw it, was to help Iris with her contests.

Things were not as nice at the house as they were the day my mother dropped me off. We didn’t have fresh flowers anymore and everything was a little dusty. Iris and I cleaned our rooms and we were supposed to clean the parlor and the kitchen too, but we didn’t. No one did. My father opened cans of salmon or tuna fish and dumped them on our plates, on top of a lettuce leaf. Sometimes he boiled six hot dogs with a can of beans and put a jar of mustard on the table.

I found Charlotte Acton’s very clean copy of Joy of Cooking and I asked my father if I could use it. My father said that he wanted me to know that he and Iris would eat anything I deigned to make. Irma Rombauer said on the first page to begin by facing the stove. I put a bunch of parsley and a lemon in a chicken and put it in the oven for a couple of hours. We finished the chicken and my father thanked me.

On my thirteenth birthday, I made crepes, my father read “The Highwayman” aloud, and we had pineapple upside-down cake for dessert. Iris put the candles in and they both sang.

On New Year’s Eve, our father went out and Iris and I drank gin and orange juice out of her mother’s best cherry-blossom teacups.

“May the hinges of our friendship never grow rusty,” Iris said. “I got that from Brigid, the maid. Before your time.”

“Hear, hear,” I said, and we hooked elbows and choked down the gin.

ONE NIGHT IN FEBRUARY, I woke up to Iris slapping me. It’s true that Iris was not the sister I might have dreamed of. (Not that I’d ever dreamed of a sister at all. I dreamed of having a poodle, like Mr. Portman’s, and for years I dreamed that my mother hired a private eye to find me and came crying to the doorstep of wherever I was living. I never let her in.) But Iris had never hit me before. I’d been in her house for more than a year and she’d never even set foot in my room. When Iris wanted to talk to me, she’d stand in the hallway and point and I’d go sit on her braided rug, next to her bed.

“You sneaky, thieving, filthy bitch.” Her opal ring, the one from her mother, snagged in my hair, and we were stuck together, both of us crying. She yanked me out of bed and across the floor, until she got her hand loose. She threw everything I had, which wasn’t much and most of it clothes she didn’t want anymore, onto the floor. Oh, Christ, she said. I know it wasn’t you. She lay down on the floor next to me, panting.

Iris said my father had stolen a hundred dollars she’d hidden under her mattress. He’d taken it all. It had happened one time before I’d come and then she moved her hiding place, but now he’d found it again. She had five bucks in her hand from tonight at the Pulaski Club, for one of her best speeches, “What Makes America Great?” and she was damned if Edgar was going to get it. She banged around my room, pulling all the books off my little bookshelf. She went into her room and came back with the big scissors we used to make some of her mother’s clothes into things she could wear for her recitations. She cut the middle out of my copy of Little Women, page by page, from “Genius burns!” until almost the end, when Amy marries Laurie, which I hated anyway.

This is my Hollywood and Vine money, she said. That’s my next stop. She put all of my books back nicely and she put my shoes and my clothes back in my closet. She brushed my hair. She folded up the cardigans that used to be hers, and my room and I looked better than usual.

It was amazing to me that Iris had made so much money from her contests. It was amazing to me that she thought it’d be smarter to keep her money in my room. I thought she was mistaken about my father stealing her money in the first place, but she wasn’t. Iris was just being Iris. I don’t think she was more observant or more intuitive than I was. I saw plenty, but I never knew what to make of it. Iris saw only what mattered to Iris, but she really paid attention, like a pilot watching for the flashing lights of the landing strip below. Her attention was the only thing standing between her and a terrible crash. Iris said I was more like someone with a crazy radio inside of me, and half the time the radio said things worth knowing and half the time it said things like, “Crops fail in Mississippi.” Every time Iris won, from Valentine’s Day to Memorial Day, she folded the money into her bra. My father waited up for her and every time, he’d ask her if she’d like him to hold on to her winnings. She always said, No, thanks, and went straight to her room, to throw him off. She was very polite about it.

THE DAY AFTER GRADUATION (me from eleventh grade, with the prizes in English literature and social studies, Iris from high school with a standing ovation and our father reciting “Gunga Din” at both places) Iris gave her speech about “The Fallen” for the Veterans of Foreign Wars. It brought down the house. Really, Iris said, I was great. And I was improvising. I said that she was better than great, that she was as good as Judy Garland, but prettier. Iris said that Judy Garland could cry at the drop of a hot dog and that she knew she had to work on that herself.

Iris did the Rotary and the Exchange Clubs and the American Association of University Women get-togethers from Windsor to Cincinnati, all summer long. She entered every contest within fifty miles, even if she had to hitch a ride and carry her dress clothes and shoes in a sack. She won them all. Sometimes, when Iris walked into the auditorium, you could hear the other girls sigh. She won a fifty-dollar bond from the Midwestern Carpenters Union for best speech by a boy or girl and she trounced the Italian girls with “Musetta’s Waltz” at Casa Italia in Galesburg, where she also won in a walk for “Why I Am Proud to Be an American” at Temple Beth Israel, reciting as Iris Katz. The two of us did pretty well in the corn-shucking contests at the fairground. The corn wagons each held about twenty-five bushels and Iris and I did about sixty pounds together. We came in first in the Youth Group, Girls and we came in second for Youth Group, Seniors, right behind two boys who looked like they’d done nothing but shuck corn their whole lives. We pulled the silk off each other and had root-beer floats. The ten dollars went right into Little Women. Sometimes I opened the book just to look at Iris’s money. At night, I sewed the sequins back on the outfit that was resting, or I basted the pleats on the sailor skirt or I put ribbon on her worn-out cuffs and waited for her to come home. The sequins came loose after every performance and my bed was always covered in them.

IT WAS THE DAY before Labor Day and hot and there were no contests anywhere and no party to get ready for. Iris and I walked down to Paradise Lake, the big pond at the edge of Windsor College. I dragged my feet to make dust devils. Iris took off her shoes and socks and put her feet in the water. She lit a cigarette and I lay down next to her. Iris took two beers out of her bag and I took out last week’s Screen magazine.

“There’s your heartthrob, Paulette Goddard,” she said. “I can do what she does.”

I thought Iris probably could. I kept watch for my father while Iris smoked, her eyes closed.

“Let’s get wet,” Iris said, and I ran back to my room to look for my bathing suit. My father was on his knees in my closet, one hand on my black party shoe.

“I thought you girls were down at the pond.”

“I have to change,” I said. “Iris’s already down there. She brought her suit with her.”

“Your sister plans ahead,” he said. “You are more hey-nonny-nonny.”

He tucked my shoe back into the closet and stood up, smiling a little absently, the way he did at breakfast, when I was talking while he was reading.

When I told Iris she said, “That sonofabitch. You have to do what I tell you.”

I said I would, whatever it was.

IRIS AND I PRACTICED going up and down the honeysuckle trellis in the dark. My job was lookout. Iris packed her best outfits and makeup and the necessaries for me. She said we’d buy new clothes when we got to Hollywood. She said, What looks great in Windsor won’t cut the mustard in Hollywood. Neither of us had really thought about new clothes for me, or where I’d go to school. I was going into twelfth grade, I looked eleven, and I’d skipped two grades already. If you asked either of us, we would have said that I needed more education like a cat needs more fur. Iris made sure we could carry our bags and purses without help; she said she could just picture the kind of wiseguys who would offer to give us a hand and that if she ever went to the ladies’ room by herself for five minutes, I’d probably just hand over all our worldly possessions to some boob. I told Iris that no matter what my shortcomings, it’d still be better for her to have me along. I said I’d wear my glasses all the time and I’d wear the white anklets that I hated, and people would admire her like crazy for taking care of her sad-sack little sister. Men won’t be asking you out all the time because they don’t want to be saddled with me, I said. Old people will buy us meals.

It was exactly like I said. Iris threw her jacket over me when we got on the bus, and I slept for hours at a time, curled up with my head in Iris’s lap, trying to look lovable and needy and keep my skirt tucked down over my knees, even when no one could see me. I hoped Iris was glad she hadn’t left me in Ohio. It was sixty hours from Ohio to the Hollywood Plaza Hotel, which Iris found for us in the Windsor library’s Guide to California, 1941.

WE WALKED FROM THE bus station to the Hollywood Plaza Hotel and Iris told me about hotels. She’d stayed at one in Chicago, with her mother. They’d gone for a weekend with her mother’s sorority sisters and their daughters and they all had a big luncheon in the hotel, in a private dining room, with pink silk walls. They’d had shrimp cocktail and lobster Newburg and Shirley Temples. A doorman in a uniform had taken their suitcases. Iris and her mother called up for room service the first night. A man in a suit wheeled in a little table, full of china plates with silver domes. As Iris and her mother sat in pink armchairs, the man whisked away the domes and laid their napkins in their laps. The butter was shaped like rosebuds. After a chicken dinner and baked Alaska, Iris and her mother put on their nightgowns and robes, pulled back the curtains that the maid had closed, and watched the city lights.

The Hollywood Plaza was nothing like that hotel. It was a two-story concrete u shape, with chipped red roof tiles and the saddest little brown bush in the middle of the courtyard, where the weedy concrete paths split off to two short wings. An older lady stuck her head out of the window. Gruber, she said. First floor.

Iris finished eating her candy bar and wiped her hands on my plaid skirt. She spit into her handkerchief and wiped my face, which I absolutely hated. “Let’s shake a leg,” she said.

Letter from Iris

7 Queensberry Place

South Kensington, London

September 1946

Dear Eva,

I’ve been thinking about you. My show closed last night. I was good, if not great, and a bunch of us working girls and a few sweet old queens went out for Champagne and oysters. The war may be over, but you can by no means get everything you want here (a decent steak still requires more than I can manage). Happily, oysters from the north are no problem. As I am tipping one down my throat, who do I see but Mrs. Gruber, not in her housedress and broken loafers but in a blue taffeta dress and matching pumps, holding a pink gin. I almost choke. As it turns out, of course it’s not Mrs. Gruber — who might be dead by now and whom I can’t imagine ever leaving the Hollywood Plaza, let alone Hollywood. It was just Arlene Harrington, a producer’s wife, with a diamond brooch the size of the Chrysler Building, and I did not say to her, My goodness, you look like my long-suffering, extremely plain, possibly dead Jewish landlady.

Do you ever think about Mrs. Gruber? As soon as she stuck her head out the window you skittered up to her, breathless and shy, the way you never actually were, and offered up the bus story about our late papa and brave mama and our languishing mid-western fortune. I can’t imagine she believed you but she liked you and she didn’t mind me. She took our money before she handed me the key. One tiny room with two beds, a half-fridge and a two-burner stovetop and the bathroom down the hall. I’ve seen worse — so have you, I imagine — but back then, it was the worst place I’d ever been. I knew we would have to struggle when we got to Hollywood but I’d thought it would be a struggle like in the movies: five girls in a couple of rooms, everyone putting their hair up in curlers and cleaning their faces with Pond’s and giggling when the hall phone rang and it was someone’s sweetheart. There was no hall phone and the whole time we were there, I never saw another person besides Mrs. Gruber. I found a dead mouse in the corner when we moved in and when you walked past, I gave it a little kick under the stove and I hope you never saw it.

Those three months were hard, but you were a trouper. You kept the apartment nice and you made dinner on a dime. Do you remember, I’d spill out my tips and we’d make piles, pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and weren’t we tickled when there was a half-dollar. I still remember that night at The Derby. I did “You Are My Sunshine” and I knew I’d nailed it. I could tell. You thought so too, although you were such a little Doubting Thomas, you didn’t want to go for dinner until I was signed with MGM. And then Mr. Freed called and you wore my old blue dress and I got a new one and a real pair of heels and we went to Tubby’s for steak. Six months, five movies, three speaking parts: Passing Through, Something Special, Evening Romance. (Do you remember the Nile-green silk nightie Harpo sent me? Still have it.)

Someone once said: God gave us memory, so we could have roses in December. Someone did not add, So we could have blizzards in June and food poisoning when there was nothing to eat.

Please write to me.

Iris

2 I May Be Wrong but I Think You’re Wonderful

North Vine Street

Hollywood

January 4, 1942

Dear Dad,

Things are really changing around here.

THIS WAS AS FAR AS I GOT. I’D STARTED A DOZEN LETTERS TO HIM and ripped them up and walked them to the corner trash can, while our landlady watched. I don’t know why I wrote at all. I didn’t expect my father to rescue me. I didn’t think I needed rescuing. It seemed to me that if you had to have a mother who’d dropped you off like a bag of dirty laundry and a father who was not above stealing from you (or your sister), you were pretty lucky to have that same sister take you to Hollywood and wash your underpants with hers and share her sandwiches with you. Mrs. Gruber, our landlady and handyman, was excellent company for me when Iris was working. Mrs. Gruber condemned the fraudulence and the trickery of Hollywood but she knew, from personal experience, that some of that stuff was necessary for survival. She would say to me, Your sister will not be crushed by life, and we must admire that. Mrs. Gruber’s own apartment was filled with duct tape and wrenches and half-pipes and wire coils. She wasn’t much of a housekeeper. I thought she was a good cook, of the fried-egg-and-cheese-sandwich variety, which was what the two of us ate together every day. Mrs. Gruber had asked me about school and I told her the truth, that I loved the books and hated the kids, and she said she understood. She said she spoke four languages and had left school in the sixth grade. Where I come from, she said, six years is plenty. If you can read Turgenev, you’re educated.

Mrs. Gruber loved President Roosevelt as much as my father and I did. She worried all the time that someone would assassinate him, until the warm day in December when the Japs bombed us at Pearl Harbor and President Roosevelt declared war on this date which will live in infamy. Mrs. Gruber and I sat still, and when it was over, we cried and read up on Japan in her encyclopedia. When we finished the article, Mrs. Gruber said, We must be glad. Mrs. Gruber said no one would hurt the president now because we needed him. She said she remembered when Republicans compared President Roosevelt to Hitler and to Stalin and to Mussolini. She said she used to see people wearing I HATE ELEANOR buttons walk past her on the sidewalk and she wanted to spit, she wanted to kill them. When she was a young person just arrived in this country, Mrs. Gruber said she would cry from rage and frustration, because she couldn’t kill the people she wanted to kill. Sometimes, she said, men, who were often the people she wanted to kill, would misunderstand and try to comfort her.

So, we got no more of those hateful buttons, she said, but it’s too bad — what’s going to happen to Japanese people, here and in their own country? She said President Roosevelt was nobody’s fool. Mrs. Gruber took her nap at two o’clock. I loosened her corset and shut her bedroom door. I read First Love or turned down the radio a little and listened to Fibber McGee and Molly or looked through Mrs. Gruber’s old letters and photographs, which were mostly in another language. In one photograph, she’s standing next to a short, wide man who has the Gruber nose and they’re both wearing cowboy hats and chaps. Ah, she said when she woke up, we were getting ready for America.

IRIS GOT A CONTRACT. She had sung and shown her profile and her legs at every talent show in Hollywood and her screen test was a wow, she said, and now she was an MGM artist. She said that she’d be speaking lines before the month was out and she said we could move. I’d made Iris walk downstairs to Mrs. Gruber’s to announce her contract and our improved circumstances and to celebrate with Mrs. Gruber’s crème de menthe, which I knew we would have to do. Mrs. Gruber handed us each one of her three gold-stemmed liqueur glasses and sighed.

“You don’t look happy for us,” I said.

Iris finished her drink and examined her nails. She never had any trouble keeping her mouth shut. Plus, I could see she was done with the Hollywood Plaza. Mrs. Gruber had been tops, in her own frowzy, grumpy, foreign way but we were moving on to a nice one-bedroom at the Firenze Gardens on Sunset, and Greer Garson had said, Hello, dear, to Iris the second day on the set. The director had put Iris at the front of the crowd of girls walking down the sidewalk. Iris had pushed her hat forward a little and popped her collar, and after, the dresser said, Nice touch. For Iris, Mrs. Gruber was pretty much yesterday’s egg sandwich.

Mrs. Gruber said that happiness was not something she aspired to, that when we had seen as much of the world as she had, we would know that what lies right behind the horseshit is not a prize pony, my dears, it’s more horseshit. Iris smiled and stood up. She straightened her stockings and hugged Mrs. Gruber. Thanks for being so good to Eva, she said.

ONCE WE LEFT MRS. GRUBER’S, I had no one to talk to. I made up sequels to the books I’d read: David Copperfield and his wife and three kids, living at the seaside; Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester and their progressive boarding school for the blind.

It was still winter, but in Los Angeles the days seemed longer than at home. Iris was gone twelve hours a day. There were no old people and no children at the Firenze Gardens. I waited until three o’clock every day and went to the library, and after, I walked through the park with books on my hip, like a regular kid. I read through the lives of Joan of Arc (three versions, including George Bernard Shaw’s, in which Joan seemed to me to be exactly the kind of bold, goofy girl you’d want for a best friend, voices or no voices) and Marie Curie, who seemed kind of crazy and noble in the same way. I read the biographies of Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale, and even in the books written for little girls, you could tell these women were so tough they’d take a bullet out of you with a fork and not blink.

The Firenze Gardens was much nicer than the old place, every apartment with its own toilet and a big and a little courtyard in the back, where people lay out on beach chairs. Once I lay in a beach chair too, in my shorts and blouse. I tied up my hair with a big bandanna and tried to look like a child actress, while I read about the great nurses. A real actress came over and said, firmly, that that was her chair and would I mind, and I avoided the big courtyard after that. Most of the people were up-and-coming actors, like Iris, working at Fox or MGM all day, with no interest in a flat-chested girl with glasses who wasn’t in the business. I ate dinner whenever Iris got home, and sometimes she brought back sandwiches and cookies from the commissary, which sounded like heaven on earth to me. I would make Iris tell me everything that happened, on and off the set. For about a month, she went to makeup and costume in the morning and then she played a girl reading the newspaper in the bus station, then a girl in the bakery, handing out loaves of bread and making change, then a girl pushing a baby carriage down Main Street. After a few weeks, it was just as she said. The director from the bakery scene noticed how she did her hair (“Hair up, blouse down,” Iris said) and he gave her a couple of lines, way ahead of the girls who’d started when she did. In the morning, I helped Iris pick out her outfit and talked about who she might see, and who might talk to her (“I don’t just say, ‘What’s up, kiddo,’ ” Iris said. “I wait. And I’m helpful.”), and she would practice saying her one line a bunch of different ways. Iris saw Miss Garson kiss Clark Gable. Harpo Marx patted Iris on the fanny and she ate cheeseburgers with pickles and relish (“Never any onions,” she said, “because of the close-ups.”) with women dressed like mermaids, who had to eat standing up, with their feet sticking out behind their tails, in sparkling green ballet slippers. Iris told me all the gossip that the hair stylists told her. The hairdressers told everybody everybody’s business. Iris told me about Francisco Diego, who was the head of makeup and never gossiped about anyone. Francisco told Iris that she had not gone unnoticed and one time, after he did Lana Turner, he put Iris in his chair and did her face the same way. She had to wipe it off before she went back on set but everyone stood around her chair and Francisco gave her a brush and a jar of Ben Nye’s special-blend face powder, for herself, for when she was shiny. When she had a day off, Iris put the Ben Nye powder on my face and a little red lipstick and the two of us went out for waffles. There was a high school about six blocks from Firenze Gardens and Iris and I steered clear.

I did miss Mrs. Gruber. I missed my father too. I refused to think about my mother, except when she showed up in my dreams, lost in the desert or dying by the side of a highway, every couple of nights. I kept writing to my father and tearing up the letters, even though I knew what he was and I knew he wasn’t worrying about me. I knew he didn’t give a tinker’s dam — which is what he said all the time, and he’d explained that it wasn’t a curse, it wasn’t “damn,” it was “dam,” which was a very small piece of something you use before the soldering of tin takes place, and so I used the expression all the time and felt that I was cursing like crazy — but secretly. I wrote him once a month, and saved the pieces until my feelings passed, and then I threw the pieces away.

3 Dirty Butter

IRIS WASN’T SURE WHAT KIND OF PARTY IT WAS. TWO WOMEN IN matching pink silk jackets and long black dresses stepped in front of her, up the stairs to a big house. The doorman or butler was a very large Negro man, in a white satin suit from the eighteenth century and a white powdered wig tied with a black ribbon. He had two gold teeth and he acted like he was not just pleased, but completely delighted to see every woman who walked through the door. He held the door open for Iris and winked.

The women in front of Iris handed their jackets to another man in a white powdered wig and white satin suit and Iris followed them into the larger room. She kept her face still. This was a living room the way Cleveland Stadium was a baseball field. Three girls wearing white satin tap pants and white satin court shoes, and no tops, with pink ribbons around their necks and pink bows in their towering white wigs, walked past Iris, offering pigs in blankets and scallops wrapped in bacon. The girls had little mouche marks near their eyes and rouge on the tips of their nipples. Iris followed the two women in the long black dresses past big satin poufs on the floor and the pale-pink satin divans. (“My goodness, those things’ll stain like crazy,” a girl standing behind Iris said.)

Two tall men in white breeches held giant horns of fruit. Iris guessed they were blond under their white wigs, because their chests were smooth and their eyes were blue. They were barefoot. A woman in front of Iris took a grape and pinched one of the fruit holders’ nipples until he winced a little. Iris gasped. “What a nice party,” the woman said, and she reached under her dress and unsnapped her garters. The woman looked around and put her black pumps and her stockings and panties under one of the divans.

Four dwarves in white turbans and bright-pink vests and matching sultans’ pants came through with jeweled hookahs. They sat down on the big poufs, and women crowded around them on the floor, smoking and laughing. Iris was pretty sure she heard Tallulah Bankhead laughing. A pale woman, beautiful like a silent movie star, with black-lined eyes, black spit curls, and a long, backless silver dress, pulled on Iris’s hand. She asked Iris if she was new and who she’d come with. Iris told her that yesterday, when she was having her makeup done by Francisco Diego, Patsy Kelly’s assistant came by handing out invitations, and she’d given Iris a thick white envelope. Patsy Kelly’s assistant kissed Francisco and said, No invite for you, and he’d laughed. Patsy must have spotted you, the pale woman said now. Iris smiled. I’m Sylvia, the woman said. Iris, Iris said. Sylvia waved her hand and a dwarf wearing a white fez and no vest came by, carrying a tray of pink ladies. Sylvia handed one to Iris. Welcome to Paradise, sweetie pie, she said. Iris and Sylvia sat down on a divan.

A woman came up to them and leaned down to kiss Sylvia. Sylvia introduced Iris and the woman kissed Iris too. She trailed a feather along Iris’s shoulders. Iris sat very still until the woman walked away. Another woman came by and took a sip of Iris’s pink lady, watching Iris over the rim. She finished the drink in a swallow, and she and Sylvia walked away. Iris felt a hand pulling on her hem. A woman was sitting on the floor beside the divan, putting her hand under Iris’s dress and sliding it up her thigh. She brushed her fingers over the inside of Iris’s thighs and over her panties. Iris sat as still as she could. This was not the kind of party, like the ones in Dellie Bryson’s finished basement back home, where you could have a little fun and slap someone and go back to having fun, on your own terms. Iris heard a woman scream in another room but it didn’t sound like a person offended or injured, and the hand was still there, flicking in and out of Iris’s panties. It was possible that in this big house, with all these beautiful women (and the ones who were not beautiful were built like goddesses, and the ones who were neither looked clever and powerful), there was someone whose hand Iris would actually welcome. Iris said, “Thank you,” to the woman sitting on the floor, although that seemed ridiculous, and she walked into the next room, where the buffet was.

Food was lined up, from dinner to dessert — which was a pretty girl with whipped cream and strawberries, laid in thick waves, from her chest to her feet. Women in their slips and high heels, in their cocktail dresses with the backs partially unzipped, were filling their plates. A quartet played all the popular songs, and on the far side of the buffet the two women in long black dresses were doing a slow fox-trot. A brunette in a scarlet kimono and black silk pants was eating steadily from a plate piled with lobster tails. I love lobster tails, she said. I mean it — I think they are the greatest thing ever. Her voice was throaty and warm and she sounded like an American girl, but a little softer and sweeter at the edges. Rose Sawyer, she said, and instead of shaking hands, she gave Iris a lobster tail. Let’s find a spot, Rose said, and they walked to where more women were dancing. She sat Iris down on an empty couch. What a crowd, Rose said. You stay here, beautiful girl. She came back with more lobster tails and an unsteady tower of oysters on the half shell, blinis with caviar piled like flapjacks, and two Champagne flutes tucked into her bodice.

Iris put her hand to her hair to fix it, and the dwarf with the white fez came by. Champagne? he said. Oh, please, Iris said. Rose looked at her. Well, here I am thinking, Look at this little bumpkin, and here you are, having your way with Armand and who knows what else. Shame on me, she said. Oyster? Iris opened her mouth.

This was not the kind of party where you said, Oh, I’ve never eaten oysters, or, Oh, gosh, they look wet and disgusting, which they really did. If oysters were the path to parties like these and beautiful, dazzling, dark Rose Sawyer, Iris thought she could toss back oysters like cold beer on a summer day. She managed two and chased them with Champagne.

“Aren’t you a pro,” Rose said.

“Not really,” Iris said. “I’m from Ohio.” There was no reason to lie to Rose.

“Of course you are,” Rose said. “You are my beautiful American baby. Dance?”

Iris had never danced with another girl, except bumping around the room with Eva, to practice for a party or a show. Iris always made Eva lead so she could work on her steps, but then she had to put up with being led by Eva, who was fierce and wrong-footed on the dance floor and only came up to Iris’s collarbone. Rose Sawyer was about an inch taller than Iris.

“Who should lead?” Rose said.

“I could,” Iris said quietly.

“But you don’t want to,” Rose said, and she put a strong arm around Iris’s waist. All Iris’s dancing, her show routines, waltzing with her father, the senior-year parties with Harry Bledsoe and Jim Cummings, who were the best dancers in Windsor, faded away. She was dancing for the first time, right now, her face against Rose’s smooth, powdered cheek. Breast to red silk breast, thigh to black silk thigh. They did two promenades and a slow twist, as if they’d been practicing, and Rose pulled Iris back to the divan. More Champagne appeared.

Look, Rose said. Shmundies on parade. Iris didn’t know the word but she got the idea. There were naked women everywhere, drinking and eating and smoking and dancing, all naked and nearly naked. A chubby girl lay over the back of one of the divans, her head almost touching the floor. A woman sat underneath her, kissing her face and neck and cradling her head while another woman pulled the girl’s legs over her shoulders and buried her face between them. All Iris could see was the girl’s pearly, round stomach heaving, and the back of the other woman’s head, her smooth platinum hair pulled up with combs shaped like tulips. A woman in a pale-pink chiffon toga walked by and waved to Rose. Her toga came only to her thighs and it was held together by one big ruby starburst at her shoulder. Her small breasts and her large, bushy and bright-orange triangle were not at all covered by the chiffon, just softened, as if by candlelight. A Negro girl, in silver lamé pumps, danced by herself, near the piano. She wore her hair up, rhinestones twinkling in her chignon and more rhinestones sparkling like dewdrops in her dark, curly pubic hair. Iris saw an unfortunate olive-skinned girl near the oysters, with dark hairs around her nipples and a thick cloud of darker hair growing up from the middle of her thighs, like moss climbing a tree and spreading up and across her stomach, almost to her navel. Iris thought the girl was going to feel terrible when no one picked her. Iris wondered if the girl would just eat a few oysters and head home to cry. A tiny blonde, with a big white bow in her hair and a pair of white Mary Janes on her little feet, skipped over and put her face between the dark girl’s breasts.

“A lid for every pot,” Rose said. She spilled a little of her Champagne on Iris’s breast and licked it off, like a cat. The Champagne soaked Iris’s bodice, down to her lap. To her shmundie.

Iris thought the top of her head would come off, shooting through the room like a cannonball of dense, rocketing pleasure. The room did not spin, the way it did when there was too much beer at a party back home. It opened like a flower, the walls falling back to contain the smoke and scent and shmundies—and another one appeared, an inch from Iris’s Champagne flute, blond, dyed blue, and shaped like a heart. The walls yielded and began to melt from every kind of body heat. Even when Iris was much older, even after years of Champagne and cigarettes and silk underthings and a wonderfully varied and pleasing parade of shmundies in her own life, she could recall every single minute of the Hollywood orgy with Rose Sawyer.

WHEN SHE GOT HOME, damp but fully dressed, from garters to gloves, Iris lay on her bed, a few feet away from Eva’s bed. Eva gave a little sniff, about the smokiness in Iris’s clothes, and she turned toward Iris, ready to listen.

“I met a girl,” Iris said. “I’m in love.”

Iris thought it was to Evie’s everlasting credit that all her little sister said was, That’s nice.

Letter from Eva (Unsent)

Firenze Gardens

Hollywood

February 1, 1942

Dear Dad,

Things sure are changing fast around here. We moved into a really nice apartment, now that Iris is under contract at MGM. Mr. Arthur Freed signed her — after just one audition on Sunday night at The Derby (and another at the studio, later). We’re pretty sure Iris is going to be a star. She has a new friend, Rose Sawyer, who you might have seen in the magazines. America’s Sweetheart Rose is what they call her. Rose is showing Iris the ropes, as much as she can, and Iris has already gotten two speaking parts, one in Evening Romance (she gives Robert Taylor a cup of coffee) and one in Something Special. They didn’t make her change anything for that movie, which says a lot. (The girls here change their noses and their names and their eyebrows and everything. One girl has to pad everywhere, front and back and even on the sides. A girl Iris works with had to pluck every hair out of her hairline because they said she had to make her forehead bigger.) Iris doesn’t have to do much. They put some more red in her hair and Francisco Diego, the makeup man, who is really becoming a friend, told her to wear pink-orange lipsticks, not blue-red, because that’s for real brunettes (like me, he said).

4 My Blue Heaven

ROSE RUBBED SUNTAN LOTION ALL OVER IRIS. SHE SQUINTED IN the sun and gave each toe a dab, and each ankle two whirls around and then up and down the shins. Inner thighs right to edge of the white bathing suit. It was a great choice for Iris, Rose thought. Iris stood out in that suit, like a diamond, and the suntan lotion made her fair skin and tiny blond hairs gleam pale gold all over. Rose always saw the best and prettiest parts of every woman she met and she’d point them out and tell how they could look even better. At the studio, she sometimes dressed girls she hardly knew, hat to shoes, just because it pleased her. She didn’t have dolls, or friends, growing up.

Rose smeared cream on Iris’s face (“Don’t wind up with a red nose,” she said. “Mr. Freed’ll kill me.”) and her chest, to the wired edge of the suit, slipping her fingers under the shoulder straps. She told Iris to turn over so she could do her back.

“Oh, this is nice,” Rose said.

“Yes.”

Rose could hear Iris breathing loudly in her ear. Rose massaged her shoulders, stroking her arms. She pulled gently on Iris’s fingers. Rose had never had a massage but she’d heard two women talking about massages at the commissary. They said Hedy Lamarr had one every morning for her lymph nodes and that was why she looked so amazing. Everything drains out of you, said one of the women. Rose wanted to drain everything out of Iris. She splashed oil on the backs of Iris’s legs and pulled Iris’s legs apart. Everything that was draining now swelled up and came back in little waves, up one leg, then the other, rushing up Iris’s spine and down her calves. Iris’s feet flexed under Rose’s hands. Iris buried her face in the beach blanket. Rose had brought everything she could think of: sandwiches, oranges, hard-boiled eggs, soda pop, a beach blanket, and the slick gold oil for Iris’s skin. The sun had started to drop, just a little, still bright orange above the horizon, and the beach was still warm. A little girl with pigtails, wearing just her underpants, did a couple of cartwheels through the waves, and her parents gathered her up in a big towel. Rose and Iris watched the three little figures trudge to the parking lot, and then the beach was empty.

Rose lay back and untied the straps of her suit. Iris said nothing. Rose unrolled her suit top to below her breasts. No one’s here, she said. Look.

Iris looked carefully in every direction. After the orgy, Iris told Rose that she’d hardly seen breasts until that night, and that they’d never mattered to her. She said that she’d seen her mother’s a few times and she saw Eva’s little nothings, a pair of fried eggs, all the time — how could she avoid it. Walking to the beach, Iris said to Rose, Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, and that’s how I look at you.

Rose kissed Iris’s nipple. She pulled Iris’s hair and kissed Iris on the forehead, on the cheek, on the lips, on her neck, behind the ear. Iris kissed her back. Rose pushed Iris off and stood up. Rose pulled down her bathing suit and stretched, the sun glowing behind her and through her legs.

“You too,” she said.

Iris kicked off her suit and they clasped hands and ran into the water.

“Geronimo!” Iris yelled.

They swam like seals, and before it got too dark, they ran out of the water and dried each other off. Rose packed everything up and carried the basket on her head like an island woman.

PUDGE NEVER DROVE OVER the speed limit. It took him less than an hour to drive from Hollywood to Malibu and only ten minutes to park his car and trail the two girls walking from Tim’s delicatessen to the beach. He walked north, close to the road, where no one on the beach would notice him. After twenty minutes, he had all the photos he needed. And he knew the pictures were perfect. You can’t really go wrong with a C3 range finder and two beautiful naked girls cavorting on the beach, is what Pudge thought. He didn’t have to do a thing to the pictures. The redhead’s pretty mouth on the brunette’s tit. The brunette and the redhead (not a real redhead, he noticed) taking off their suits and running into the water, their asses bouncing like happy peaches. Pudge did the negatives and the contact sheet and he didn’t wait for the six prints to dry. He laid them on a couple of dish towels on his backseat and drove them over to Hedda Hopper’s office. She made him spread the photos out on her secretary’s desk and she put on her glasses. Hedda Hopper told her secretary to give him fifty dollars.

“Thank you, Mr. Rustin,” the secretary said.

“They’re good pictures,” Pudge said. “You can see everything.”

ROSE KNEW WHO HEDDA Hopper was. Hedda Hopper was not, in Rose’s opinion, the worst person in the world or in America, or even just in Hollywood in 1942. Hedda Hopper hated FDR and she wrote some bad things about Jews that never came to much and she was famous for saying that the civil rights movement was bad for Negroes. Thirty-two million people read Hedda Hopper.

On Tuesday, Hedda Hopper called Rose at her bungalow and invited her to lunch the next day. Rose took off her red nail polish and put on pink. She wore an ivory gabardine suit and a hat and gloves. Hedda Hopper had iced tea and a Cobb salad. Rose wanted a club sandwich but she ordered the same thing. Hedda Hopper passed Rose the Los Angeles Times, folded in half. Inside the fold, there were three photographs of Rose and Iris at Malibu.

Rose said, “If that photographer had stayed another minute, he would have seen me slapping her face. I was never so upset in my life.”

Hedda and Rose looked down at the photographs together. Hedda put the picture of Rose kissing Iris’s breast on top of the pile. She sipped her iced tea and Rose sipped hers.

Rose said, “Honestly, Miss Hopper, I didn’t even know girls like that existed. She asked me if I wanted to go the beach. I thought we were friends. I didn’t know what to do.”

Hedda Hopper didn’t say a thing. She moved her hand so her rings caught the light. She ate a few bites of her salad.

Rose said, “I think girls like her are just ruining Hollywood. They’re just not … not the right kind of people.”

Hedda asked for a little more dressing.

Rose clasped her modest, pink hands in front of her.

“I admire all you’ve done to clean up Hollywood, Miss Hopper. I do. Just the other day — before this, this awful, mixed-up thing, I was saying to Buck, Buck Collins — my fiancé; did you know we’re engaged? We’ve been keeping it a secret, not that we think someone like you would be interested in our little romance — I always say that everyone in the business has an obligation to support the right kind of movies, and the right kind of people.”

Rose called her agent to say that she hoped that something would come of her romantic feelings for Buck and then she took her phone off the hook and was sick for two days. On Thursday, Rose’s picture was in the paper. It was a studio picture of her and Buck Collins, smiling at each other and holding the reins of his beautiful horse, Star. On Saturday, the studio drove her and Buck and a photographer to a bungalow not too far from the Malibu beach and on Sunday, there was a full-page spread of them in front of the bungalow and in front of St. Thomas the Apostle Episcopal Church. Rose held on to Buck’s hand. On the drive back, Buck said, We really should have dinner. We will, Rose said. She put her head against his thick shoulder.

In the article, Hedda Hopper quoted Rose as saying, “When you’re in love, why wait?” Miss Hopper wrote, in the next line, “Why indeed? These lovebirds are ready to bill and coo in their new nest and we wish them all the best!” In the middle of Monday’s column, Miss Hopper wrote: “There is always going to be an unsavory element in Hollywood, women — we certainly can’t call them ladies — of a certain stripe, who may lead young girls into the shady, dangerous parts of our little town. Do the right thing, Mr. Mayer.”

Rose read every word. The head of public relations at MGM would call a man, who’d call a man, and by the time Iris got to the set on Tuesday, she’d be turned away at the gate. The guard would hand her a paper bag with some bobby pins, her slippers, and her silk robe inside it. Iris was about to turn nineteen, and her career was over. Rose had seen it happen to other girls.

She knew better than to call Iris. Iris would apply for all the waitress jobs at the places near the studio, where everyone knew her and liked her, and the manager would give her a free cup of coffee and a slice of pie and Iris would know what that meant. Iris would apply at Ohrbach’s and Bullock’s and the salesladies would take the application and put it on the pile, without a word.

FRANCISCO DIEGO THOUGHT OF HIMSELF AS AN ARTIST. HE’D been putting makeup on beautiful women and pretty girls and some very attractive men for thirty years. He’d done the deep-red Cupid’s bow lips, the delicate pink flush, the Betty Boop eyes, and narrow, penciled-on eyebrows one hair thick, and then the full, slick brows and Maybelline lashes and the big, raspberry eat-me-now mouth. He’d worked with beet juice and talc when he’d had to and he’d drawn stockings on his own sisters’ legs when they couldn’t get nylons. He’d met Max Factor. The late Max Factor had showed him a very good time in a couple of Malibu bars, and, in return, Francisco showed the man a better way to sponge on foundation. He could still do the Charleston with the starlets and arm wrestle with the boys. He loved the girls who, when he cupped their little chins, pointy or round or square as a sugar cube but still charming, their eyes welled up with gratitude. He had made them beautiful when they had just been pretty. He made the rare beauties unforgettable. He had made a sweet stick of a farmgirl into an Egyptian princess and watched her glide onto the set, knowing she now knew who she was.

He loved the boys who would let him love them, who let him fill in the little ginger mustache or the lopsided brows or slip a pad onto the left shoulder and knew he had given them their careers. He even liked the ones whose vanity was legion. A tailor once called him after a big star came in to have the waist on his pants taken in. The star told everyone about his tailoring needs and the tailor told everyone that the problem was not the small waist, but some smallness a little farther south. To be that vain was to be as vulnerable as a woman, is what Francisco thought. He had solved the problem by looking like everyone’s Mexican grandfather. He didn’t color his hair, he didn’t watch his weight. He smoked one cigar a day and he got his cigars from the same place Mr. Thalberg used to. He had seven gray smocks and seven pairs of black linen pants and seven pairs of black espadrilles and dressed up for no one. For some of the actors, coming into the makeup room after six months of unemployment or suspension or being lent out for some piece of crap at First National Pictures, finding Francisco in his trailer, cleaning his brushes, was like catching sight of the lighthouse after months at sea. He took some of the sailors home with him, gave them refuge in his quiet bungalow, in his big lap, in the home-cooked meal, and in his affection, which he made sure had not a single dot or thread of envy or competition in it.

HE’D NOTICED IRIS ACTON on her first day. There were always a dozen of her kind, even prettier, on the MGM lot on any day of the week, but she was quick and clever, and it was possible she could act. Someone had taught her good manners. She watched what everyone did and didn’t do. She didn’t throw fits. She didn’t make eyes at the movie stars. She was never late. He suggested she take in the back of her dress about an inch right over the roundest part of her rear, and the next day, the girl had put a dart in every dress she had.

After Hedda Hopper kicked Iris’s ass, and no one on the set would even say the girl’s name, he drove over to the Firenze Gardens. He went because he was, as his younger sister liked to say, a big fat pile of pity for every stray dog and mangy cat that crossed his path. Iris was a starlet on the way up for about six months and now she was a stray dog, and she probably didn’t even know it. He had a soft spot for young people. They had no idea what was coming and how much of it was just dumb luck. They thought every asset they had would last forever and that their flaws could be concealed under fabric or false names or foundation until the lights were turned off. If you can feel sorry for a starving mutt, Francisco thought, you should certainly feel sorry for the young and beautiful.

Iris opened the door, her eyes as red as cherries. She didn’t invite him in.

“It’s so nice of you to come by, Mr. Diego,” the little sister said. She brought him a glass of water and put him in the only armchair.

“I came to invite you girls to dinner,” Francisco said.

Iris flinched.

“That’s very nice of you,” the little girl said and she wiped her glasses on her skirt and settled them back on her square face. Iris looked out the window.

“Everyone likes my cooking,” he said.

He made them dinner three Tuesdays in a row, waiting for Iris to tell him what he already knew, so he could help her make a fresh start somewhere. The little sister ate two plates of everything and told him the history of the X-ray and the iron lung. He told the girls about his childhood in the San Fernando Valley on Rancho El Escorpión and how it became the Platt dairy ranch, and how that was pretty much the history of Southern California. He told them about the one-room schoolhouse and riding home on his palomino and his discovery of his feelings for handsome ranch hands and his understanding, at nine, that when he finished high school, he would need to run, not walk, to a big city. He told them about his mother, who was every flashing-eyed, hot-tempered Mexican heroine in history, and her three quiet husbands, all of whom died after fathering Francisco and his two half-sisters — now in New York and prospering, he said, and about as Mexican as salami on rye. He gave Iris a hundred chances to tell the truth, and Iris lied through every meal. He admired the way she talked about leads and interviews. She lied when he handed around the empanadas and she lied right through to the butter-pecan ice cream. She lied while he played cards with the little sister. She lied patting him on the cheek, to say goodnight, and Francisco caught her hand. Next time, he said, it’s your turn to have me over for dinner, just to be nice and, and afterward, we’re playing To Tell the Truth.

5 If You Ain’t Got the Do-Re-Mi

NO ONE RETURNED MY SISTER’S CALLS. I MADE KRAFT MACARONI and cheese most nights, with variations. Iris kept looking for work. I know your face, dear, one of the women at Ralphs Grocery told her. Everyone who read the newspapers and the movie magazines knew Iris’s face now.

“It’s like I’ve got the plague,” Iris said. “It’s like being Typhoid Mary.”

I said, “You’re not actually killing people.”

The next morning, I went by Mrs. Gruber’s to see if our old place was available and Mrs. Gruber asked why and I gave her the short version, as I understood it. Mrs. Gruber said, What a bitch, that Rose Sawyer. She said, Azoy gait es, that’s how it goes. Which I’d heard her say so many times, I’d started to say it myself. Mrs. Gruber poured crème de menthe into the gold-stemmed glasses for the two of us, and she said, Of course, you girls can have the room, at your old rate. She said she’d throw people out if she had to, and we clinked glasses. Mrs. Gruber said, Fame and beauty. Believe me, Alle ziben glicken. It means it’s not such a gift, ketzele. You stick with the big books and the little glasses.

BECAUSE OF THE SITUATION, I didn’t want to go out. I didn’t go to the park. I didn’t go down to the Firenze Gardens courtyard. Iris didn’t ask me to stay in with her. She didn’t ask me for anything. She did her exercises and touched up her hair and washed our clothes in the sink. She began packing our things and she told me that we’d move in a week. You don’t need to mention this to anyone, she said. Who would I tell, I said.

Iris did her vocal exercises every morning. She ironed all of our blouses and skirts in silence and generally acted like a person who lived alone, which I understood. I understood it and I tried to act like I didn’t even notice and I hoped that Iris wasn’t thinking about leaving, which I would have been. I wouldn’t have hung around for everyone to crap on and I wouldn’t have wanted a fourteen-year-old girl, who looked twelve and did absolutely nothing but cook food from a box and worry and read, for my sidekick. I sat in the armchair near the window and read The Picture of Dorian Gray, which I’d stolen from the library, and the old Photoplays that were in the apartment when we got here. When I finished the magazines, I found a Bible. I skipped over the slow stuff, the begats and some of the more disgusting parts, but I liked the New Testament, which was full of green hills and blue skies and forgiveness and similes and metaphors. In the Old Testament, there were no metaphors — bushes actually burned, walls fell down, seas parted, and any rational person would dive for cover when that happened. In the Old Testament, God delivered people. He rescued them from their enemies, from the wicked, from famine, from the grave. He waltzed them out of Egypt with a mighty hand and a bag of crackers, and that’s what I had in mind.

GOD’S BURNING SERAPH, OR someone, was leaning on the doorbell while Iris packed and Francisco and I were washing up, after I made us a hot-dog supper. After I dried the last plate, we’d play cards, and after that, I was pretty sure Francisco would stick ten dollars under Iris’s pillow for the move to Mrs. Gruber’s. The bell rang three times. We stood there. We were ducking the manager of the Firenze Gardens. We could pay him for last month or we could pay Mrs. Gruber for next month and have something left over. Mrs. Gruber and the Hollywood Plaza Hotel were our future. Francisco looked at Iris.

“It could be Rose,” Iris said, and I cut in front of her to get to the door. It would not be Rose and I didn’t want my sister to spend even one second thinking that it could be Rose Sawyer, whose name was now my private shorthand for true evil in the world. Rose Sawyer made my mother look good.

“Oh, little Evie,” my father said. He had a white bakery box wrapped with red twine swinging from one finger, a bouquet of sunflowers crushed under his arm, and a suitcase in his other hand.

“Christ, what ugly flowers,” Iris said.

FRANCISCO FOLDED THE DISH towel and moved over to the door. He put his hand on my shoulder. My father looked elegant and exhausted, and I thought that if Francisco couldn’t beat the shit out of him, which he probably could, Iris and I could pile on.

Iris sat down on the couch. Francisco kept his hand on my shoulder. I came to and said, My father, Edgar Acton, our dear friend Francisco Diego, and I was very pleased with myself. They eyed each other. No one made claims. No one asked anyone for money. No one offered Edgar a cup of tea or a drink or leftover baked beans. No one told to him to come inside and no one told him to beat it.

My father cut the twine with his pocketknife and passed around the box of cookies, in silence. I ate six and Iris ate two. Francisco put his hand on his belly and declined. My father ate the rest of the cookies. At ten o’clock, I stretched out on the couch, next to my father. He made room for me and rested his hand on my shoulder. Iris closed her magazine and stood up.

“I’m beat. I’m going to bed.” She unpacked one of the blankets and put it over me and went into her room.

My father said, “Terrific poise.”

Francisco said, “Superb.”

In the early morning, I found the two men heaped on the floor, sofa cushions under their heads. An empty Scotch bottle was next to the coffee table. I sat on the couch and watched my father and Francisco sleep, and when I started to cry, I stood up and got into bed with Iris.

“Never a dull,” she said.

IN THE MORNING WE went to the diner for breakfast. The men walked ahead. My father ordered eggs and toast and he said that breakfast was on him. He said that he was very, very proud of Iris, that not a lot of girls could do what she had done. Iris said, Don’t bother. You’re too late. My father said that he was sorry he hadn’t come sooner but that he had had to tie up his affairs in Ohio and my sister said, We’re broke. Oke-bray. Francisco said that Iris was telling the truth. He said that no one even remotely connected with the movie business, not a restaurant, not a dress shop, nor a beauty parlor, was going to hire Iris after what happened. My father asked, What happened? and Francisco and I watched Iris, because it wasn’t for us to say. I got caught kissing another girl, Iris said. Miserable, puritanical sonsofbitches, my father said, and he patted Iris’s hand. That’s all? he said to Francisco.

We walked back to the apartment and Iris whispered that Edgar would be gone soon. There’s nothing for him here, she said. Francisco went down to the courtyard to make a call and the three of us looked at one another.

“What’s your plan?” my father asked.

Iris said that we were moving back to Mrs. Gruber’s and she’d keep looking for work. I said I’d do some dog-walking. My father raised his voice.

He said, “You’ve suffered an untoward blow from which you are not going to recover quickly. You can’t pay the bills you have and you’ve no expectation of paying bills in the future. You must see that you will be taking advantage of poor Mrs. Gruber. One does not, if one can possibly help it, take advantage of one’s true friends.”

I started to ask exactly how that worked for him when Francisco came back into the room, beaming.

“What do you do for a living, Edgar?”

“Oh, poetry and prose. I was an English professor. Now retired.”

“Must be nice,” Francisco said. He turned to me and Iris.

“You know my sisters in New York,” he said. “Encarnación and Beatriz. Carnie and Bea. The girls say they know about a job for Edgar, being a butler”—he didn’t look at my father—“and for you, Iris, teaching some little kids. Let’s say, a governess.”

No one even looked my way.

My father shook Francisco’s hand (There are no words, he said) and came back a few hours later with a 1938 Chevy station wagon. Nothing to it, he said. We packed up everything we owned and a few things the Firenze Gardens owned, and Francisco brought over his two suitcases and his huge makeup box. I ran down to Mrs. Gruber’s and brought her back with her bottle of crème de menthe. We all took a swig. My father kissed her hand. Mrs. Gruber said, Good-bye, all of you. She kissed me on the lips and walked away.

“And, wheresoever thou move, good luck shall fling her old shoe after. That’s Tennyson,” my father said and slid into the passenger seat.

Iris and I crammed into the backseat, with a Firenze Gardens lamp at our feet. Francisco winked at us. My father clapped his hands. It was, pretty much, his finest moment.

6 Every Day’s a Holiday

WE SANG EVERY MORNING. MY FATHER SANG “IT’S COLD WITHOUT Your Trousers” and “A Little Bit of Cucumber.” Francisco and my father sang “Hey! Stop Kissin’ My Sister,” snapping their fingers, my father yelling, “You swine! To the pigpen!” Iris and I sang “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” and “You Made Me Love You.” We drank watery coffee. Iris and I ate fresh doughnuts, the oil still spitting in them (and bismarks and bear claws and brown bobbys, whatever the local pastry was, since, finally, briefly, my father was paying) and my father and Francisco ate ham and eggs and blue-plate specials. We all had our assignments. Francisco drove all day and haggled for gas every morning. Six nights, the four of us slept in a motel room. No one blinked at us. It was the war and people were showing up in all sorts of fatherless, motherless, husbandless combinations. Francisco got a bed, Iris and I got a bed, and my father took the floor and a bedspread. In Kansas, he taught my sister how to drive, just to pass the time. In Missouri, Francisco turned straight north to Illinois. My father said he’d like to see Missouri. Francisco said, Not with me, you won’t. He said Missouri was like the South and the only part of the South he planned to ever drive through was South America.

I knew that we were near Windsor, Ohio, before I saw the highway signs. There was the comforting flatness, the pleasant brown haze, the solid houses that looked like the solid people. I thought that we hadn’t left much behind. I had my father and my sister and Francisco, who seemed like a part, a better part, of our little family. The only thing I missed was my nice room at my father’s house and Mr. Portman’s poodle. Iris poked me and said, Our house isn’t that far, and I poked her back. My father never said a word. He read until dark and in the morning, we were out of Ohio entirely.

My father read up on butlering. (Or buttling. Edgar and Francisco argued, many times, about what it was called. My father said that whatever you called it, it came down to arse-licking and silver-polishing.) My father had snagged an Emily Post book and my job was to ask him questions, to try to stump him. (Mustaches on man-servants or no? No. Who is the head of the table? The wife. Val-et or val-ay? Val-et, which seemed awful to me. My father promised me that he would refer to any valet he met as a “val-ay” and that he would not wear a mustache — or a flower in his buttonhole, which was quite a concern on page 297.) Occasionally, there was a memorable line or warning in Emily Post, and Francisco would sing it out, like opera. All through western Pennsylvania we warbled, “Better to be frumpy than vulgar.” I bet if you walked up to my sister today, she could quote you chapter and verse of Emily Post.

Iris’s job was to become a governess in six days. According to Emily Post, governesses were better educated than nannies and better paid. They were supposed to teach the children something until someone thought they were old enough for school. How old are these kids, Iris asked, and how many are there? Francisco shrugged. I think there are three, he said. I could be wrong. Iris said she didn’t know how to pretend to be a college graduate; she’d scraped through Windsor High and no one had expected her to do anything except star in all the shows and help out at ceremonies. My father said that she was officially twenty-one and a recent graduate of the Windsor College for Women. He said that he’d take care of her letters of reference. Iris said he should make her Phi Beta Kappa in that case, and my father sighed. He said he didn’t care for her overreaching. My other job was to sum up Shakespeare’s plays and recite crucial passages to Iris.

My father handed me a pile of the Little Blue Books on English literature and then, when he got tired of butler questions and Francisco stopped doing his Arthur Treacher imitations, my father made me quiz Iris on the Shakespearean plays and the sonnets. You don’t have to actually know, he said. You only have to know more than they do. A little self-discipline is all that’s required, he said. One hour before bedtime to stay ahead. Same for you, he said to me, but I didn’t know who I’d be staying ahead of.

I peppered Iris every day. Who was Beatrice? Why was she so mean to Benedick? What was The Tempest about? When Iris stumbled, my father would roar whole soliloquies at her. When we couldn’t stand it anymore, I’d read aloud from one of the other Little Blue Books.

The Little Blue Books were little marvels. The Art of Reading. The Egypt of Yesterday. Balzac’s Short Stories. A Guide to Aristotle. My father said that there was not a single thing an educated man — even a gentleman — needed to know that was not in one of the thousand Little Blue Books. Emanuel Haldeman-Julius created the Little Blue Books, my father said, and he was a genius. A Jew and a socialist and a genius. He was not one of Nature’s aristocrats. When you hear that phrase, my father said, they mean the peasant who did them a favor, some gobshite by the side of the road whom they’ll never see again. Believe me, darling, they do not mean the Jewish gentleman whom we have just invited to join our country club. Later in my life, in fact, for my whole life, I’ve relied on the Little Blue Books to finish my education, and I saw why my father loved them so.

Every night, in the motels, I wanted to take a shower and wash my hair, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it while the other people sat in the next room, listening and waiting. My father and Francisco used the bathroom. My sister used it for hours and came out, her face lit up with cold cream, her hair in tight pin curls. I could sit there just long enough to pee.

On our last day on the road, I turned fifteen. I waited for someone to remember and then, finally, around the middle of the day, I said, during a lull, Oh, happy birthday to me, and Francisco pulled off the road. My father got out of the car and hugged me and my sister and Francisco kissed me on both cheeks and right in front of a Burma-Shave sign, they sang “Happy Birthday.” My father said that we needed to celebrate and we stopped for lunch, which we usually didn’t. We all had Coca-Colas and the house special, which was ham sandwiches on homemade bread. (“Those are our own pigs too,” the waitress said. “Marvelous,” my father said, and he winked at me.) My sister put her silver barrettes in my hair and Francisco went into his makeup box and gave me a tube of red lipstick. My father said he would wait until we got settled to give me my birthday present. I thought maybe they would spring for two rooms and dinner out but my father and Francisco went to an all-you-can-eat chicken dinner (“And they watch you like hawks,” Francisco said) and lined their pockets with waxed paper and napkins. They came back to the room with chicken legs and drumsticks and squashed biscuits and Iris and I ate everything, sitting on the floor of the motel room. We slept the way we always did, and in the middle of the night, I woke up and saw my sister leaning next to Francisco on the floor. I tiptoed to the bathroom, bumping the wall as I went.

“We can see you, birthday girl,” my sister said.

I said I didn’t want to bother them.

“Oh, it’s fine,” Francisco, said. “We’re just passing the time. Iris is in mourning for her life!”

“Not a chance,” she said. “Turn me loose.”

Iris cozied up to Francisco and my father slept on. I went back to bed.

OUR LITTLE PIECE OF Hollywood hadn’t been much like Windsor, Ohio, but East Brooklyn was like Mars. I kept my head out of the window to get a good look at the apartment buildings fifteen stories high and the wide boulevards, the sidewalks crammed with people in a hurry, buses and trains running right through and across the city, restaurants with awnings, Chinese food and Greek food and Polish food and Italian food, nice houses like my father’s in Ohio, and small shabby houses so close to their neighbors they could pass each other breakfast. It had a hat factory, now making helmets for the war, an elevator factory, and a carpet mill, women in pants going to and from the factories, and thousands of people minding their business, which was definitely not show business.

We walked up two flights of stairs, and Francisco’s sisters threw themselves on him, like he was back home from the front. They hugged Iris and me in a friendly, mechanical way and they eyed my father.

Looking back, I forgive them everything. They took in a skinny fifteen-year-old girl with thick glasses and a stubborn look and her sister, a stuck-up former starlet (with a former starlet’s ways) and a snooty Englishman with fancy manners and nothing else. They gave us beds and dinners and they stayed out of our way during the next days’ fierce cram session for the job interviews in Great Neck. When Bea suggested that my sister would look more governess-y (whatever that was; we were six people who had never seen an actual governess or a home that required one) with less red and more mouse brown, the two of them went up to Bea’s apartment and my sister came down looking like Olivia de Havilland. I’d never seen a husband, but I thought that both sisters were married, because they both wore wedding rings. Iris said I was an idiot and that anybody, including me and Francisco, could wear a wedding ring and no one could prove them a liar.

It’s the great thing about the war, she said. Anyone can be anyone.

BEA ASKED ME IF I wanted to get out and walk around the neighborhood while Francisco and my father did the last round of Emily Post’s rules for modern living and my sister recited Shakespeare and the forty-eight states. Carnie gave me twenty-five cents to go. I walked up to the corner store and bought some Turkish taffy. I walked around the block a few times and crossed the street, over toward some bigger houses and bigger trees and past a big brick building the size of a hospital or a high school. It had a big Jewish star over the tall white doors and Hebrew letters carved into the corners. The white wooden sign said PRIDE OF ISRAEL ORPHAN HOME. Around back, there was a playground, with a slide and a jungle gym and a teeter-totter. There were fifty kids playing in it. There were a bunch of boys around my age, playing baseball. The leather flapped when they hit the ball. It rolled toward me, and one of biggest boys, tall and blond, scooped it up and eyed me, then threw it to the pitcher.

“You ain’t in school,” he said. I walked to the corner of the building, leaned one hip against the brick, and ate my long roll of taffy. When the tall blond boy caught the ball again and tagged some short, fat kid out, he pushed back his hair and looked at me again. I took an actress pose, leg bent against the brick, arms folded. I put my glasses in my pocket and let him see my profile.

I walked past the orphanage every day. I kept my eyes open for the tall blond boy. These were my people: the abandoned, the unloved, the phenomenally unlucky. Plus, they were Jews, and my age, and their cousins were being slaughtered every day in Europe. Germans could even come and invade and slaughter them here in Brooklyn. They, like me, must be worrying all the time. Sometimes I liked thinking about how brave I would be if I were facing Germans. I knew that it was disgusting to contemplate my own bravery and, even worse, I knew the brave one would be Iris, flirting with the Nazis, stuffing passports into her bra to save the old people and the Jewish babies. I’d be sitting on some staircase somewhere, with my nose in a book, squeezing against the banister when they came running past me.

7 Dream a Little Dream of Me

WE WERE EARLY. WE STUDIED THE TORELLI HOUSE FROM ACROSS the road, parked underneath a big oak tree. There were no sidewalks and the driveways were so long, the houses were a quarter mile past the stone walls or wrought-iron fences. A big forsythia bush draped over Carnie’s car. My father thought this was good camouflage.

He said, “Mediterranean style. Naturally, they’re Italian. I like the red tile. I imagine there’s a pool.”

Iris said, “It’s like Hollywood. They have houses like this all over Beverly Hills.”

My father said, in his quoting voice, “ ‘They were careless people … they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their … vast carelessness.’ The Great Gatsby.” Iris got out of the car to smooth her skirt and I got out to help her.

Francisco said, “I don’t think these people are careless. This money, they just got their hands on it. I tell you what, I bet Grandpa Torelli was running a fruit stand when this guy was a baby. Look at it, the bushes, the driveway, that’s a lotta Belgian block. Everything new.”

My father said, “All those in favor of the new and costly?” and Iris and I lifted our hands. We looked and looked at the lovely house, from all angles, trying to see into the rooms. We studied the white balcony on the second floor and the long gray cobblestone drive winding through the sea of green lawn. Francisco sprayed my sister’s hair again and told my father not to wear a hat, and after they disappeared up the driveway, Francisco and I sat back in the shade and played conquian until they came out.

Letter from Iris

27 Portobello Road

London

January 1947

Dear Evie,

I remember spying on the Torellis through the forsythia. Francisco did my hair in a chignon.

I thought the Torellis were very sweet people from day one. (Well, Joe Torelli looked like he’d been loading trucks all day. He smelled like provolone and he did love his family. I think I’ve just written everything I ever knew about Joe Torelli.) I remember the twins, Catherine and Mary, and the little boy, Joey, and Baby Paulie. The baby was known, pretty much, as The Baby, and he was not my responsibility. You probably liked him.

Mrs. Torelli answered the door. Edgar introduced us and came up with some impressive horseshit about his experience and mine, and he offered dignified silences, and barely stifled sounds of admiration for the furniture (big, dark) and the views (long, green). He offered his letters of reference and mine and I did everything he did, because my experience at MGM was not for naught. He put his hands behind his back and slid over to a big picture window. I slid right behind him. We watched the Long Island Sound while Mrs. Torelli read our letters (written in a beautiful script by Francisco) and then handed them back. Mrs. Torelli indicated that butler was maybe not the exact word one would use, that maybe the Torelli household did not really require someone of Edgar’s stature. Edgar was unfazed. He was gracious. Majordomo, he suggested. One might, he said, do whatever driving is required for Mr. Torelli and the family, and serve on more formal occasions, and run the household in a general way. Mrs. Torelli was not a poker player. She beamed. She wondered what they would be calling him and Edgar said that Acton would suit him fine. Mrs. Torelli tried out Mr. Acton and Edgar stiffened, fractionally. Just Acton is suitable, madame, he said, and put his hands behind his back. She was wisely reprimanded, happily forgiven, in thrall. Between you and Edgar, I’m surprised I ever got on the stage at all. Mrs. Torelli was not formal, and not used to being rich, but she was European and she understood class differences, even if she’d been mostly on the short end of them before. This move to Great Neck was as much of a leap for them as it was for us.

We were never anything except Miss Iris and Mrs. Torelli. She’d gathered the children around her in an Old World tableau in the vast burgundy living room. The two girls were round and pretty in navy-and-white sailor dresses, with black curls heaped up and down, and Joey was a stick of dynamite in navy shorts and a vest and a half-done bow tie. The baby was in a domed lacy bassinette fit for a little prince.

“The girls start school next year,” Mrs. Torelli said. “I’m not gonna bother with the kindy-garden. They’ll start first grade. I want them to be … they need to be …”

“Prepared,” I said.

She nodded and put her hands on Catherine’s (or Mary’s) hair. We were in business.

I felt bad that I was selling her this shoddy bill of goods, myself, when what she wanted was the best for her girls, so that the other girls, whose mamas were slim and blond-streaked and casual in their shirtwaists and Cadillacs, would play with her Cathy and her Mary. She walked us through the house and I made the same kinds of noises Edgar did. There was nothing not to like. The kitchen was fit for a good restaurant, with miles of marble and a pair of bright-yellow refrigerators. It was a sun shower. Very cheerful, madame, Edgar said, and Mrs. Torelli said whatever she said and I said nothing because Reenie walked in then, holding a bag of groceries, and I thought I would pass out.

Do you remember how she looked? I don’t think we ever talked about how she looked. If she were a man, I would have said to you, What a dreamboat, what a catch. You don’t say to your little sister, Oh my God, isn’t the Torellis’ cook the sexiest thing you’ve ever seen? Isn’t she a dish, with that wide Madonna forehead and big eyes and big red mouth, everything wonderfully big and nothing too much? And even an infidel like me could see she had the soul of a saint, all goodness. No, you don’t say that. And I know you didn’t see in her what I saw.

I hope I never love anyone again.

Hoping to hear from you,

Iris

WE MOVED INTO THE CARRIAGE HOUSE, ALSO KNOWN AS OVER-the-garage. The Torellis had two cars, a black Cadillac and a black Lincoln. We settled ourselves and it wasn’t really that different from back in Ohio, except the carriage-house living room was smaller, the food was better, and we didn’t have a piano. I was apparently never going back to school, and I had a pool to swim in when the Torellis weren’t home. My father and my sister went to work on the other side of the swimming pool every day and I stayed out of the way, or went to Brooklyn to visit Bea, Carnie, and Francisco, who now had three apartments in the same building, and Bea and Carnie still had invisible husbands. Four days a week, I got myself to East Brooklyn (I could do it in my sleep: bus to the subway station, train to Flushing, subway to Gates Avenue station, turn left, and walk six blocks to Bea and Carnie’s salon, La Bella Donna). For fifty cents a day, I swept up hair, folded towels, cleaned the bathroom, and made lunch for Bea and Carnie and me. Bea was teaching me to shampoo (Don’t pull, never rub, use your finger pads), and the ladies liked the feeling of my small hands. Carnie introduced me as a niece and they told everyone, like my father had told the Torellis, that I was a genius, and a little small for my age and had already graduated high school at just fifteen. No one asked why a genius like me was the maid-of-all-sorts at a beauty parlor. I took notes about hair color and eyebrows, matching lips and tips, and beauty parlor rules. (You do not say, Hey, your roots are showing. You say, Maybe a little touch-up. You don’t say, Holy Mother of God, what happened to you? You say, Maybe Evie could get you a cuppa tea or a Coke.) I worked my way through Charles Dickens and I kept up with Photoplay. I walked past the orphanage, on my breaks, watching for the tall blond boy.

AND IRIS WAS WATCHING Reenie Heitmann. Irene Lombardo Heitmann. Iris sat in the Torelli kitchen for six months, pretending she wanted to learn all about roasting chicken and the many interesting things you could do with green beans. She brought the Torelli girls into the kitchen and made cookies with them. She sat at the big table in the middle of the kitchen, after dinner, and offered to dry dishes or bring Reenie a glass of water, and if I came in for a snack, Iris looked daggers at me and I moseyed along. I couldn’t see it, about Reenie. She reminded me of one of the ladies on a spaghetti-sauce jar, but with a better figure. To give Iris room, I stayed in Brooklyn a couple of nights a week, on one of the couches, and once in a while, if Reenie went home early, Iris joined us. And talked about Reenie. She talked about what a special person Reenie was, and what a great cook, and what a beautiful soul, and her pretty eyes and the beauty mark right near her left eye and how unhappy Reenie was with her husband, Gus, because they couldn’t have a baby, but how good she was to him. Bea and Carnie didn’t say a word about any of it, and before it got too late, Francisco would walk us to the subway. One night he said, Iris, make a move, or move on. You’ve officially become the most boring dyke in America.

Iris listened to him. When Gus came for Reenie after dinner and the washing up, Iris told them that we were bored silly in the evenings and wanted to get away from the Torellis. (There was no reason to get away from the Torellis. They gave us platters of leftovers from Reenie’s four-course dinners, they put a washing machine in our house, and they made Catherine and Mary go to bed at eight. In the three years we were there, they never expressed an opinion about what we did after hours and they never knocked on the carriage-house door in the evening.) Iris said to me, Gus is a nice guy — spend some time with him. Play cards.

Gus Heitmann was what people called a man’s man. He fixed things and he had a deep laugh. He looked like he could carry you out of a burning building and he looked like the kind of man who would go back in to get your poodle. And even though he made fun of his own looks (Gable’s ears and Durante’s nose, he said), I liked his face. He looked like a big, wise animal, the kind that saw you before you saw it. There were no card games Gus didn’t play: poker, five-card stud, blackjack, gin, and even the crazy ones like Egyptian cut-ups and palace of my fathers, which I still don’t understand, except that you can hold twelve cards at any given time. Reenie and Gus drove us to their house on the other side of the train station once a week, and the four of us sat around and played cards and had a couple of beers. When Reenie wanted a late dinner she didn’t have to cook, Gus made spaghetti and meatballs, German-style, with cream and dill, and he did the dishes too. He was nice to Reenie, and always polite, but even I could see it wasn’t love. I asked him once how they met. We were both at a dance in the city, he said. She didn’t like the guy she was with, and I didn’t like the girl, so in the middle of the dance, I said, Maybe we should switch partners. So we did. The other couple, they’re married, three kids. Woulda been nice, he said.

When Reenie left the room, Iris’s face fell. Gus’s face didn’t change a bit.

After a couple of beers, Reenie would start to talk about how she wished they could have babies, or that she was tired of cooking Italian all the time, and then she’d say her feet were killing her. Iris would give me the eye and we’d split up into Iris and Reenie, Eva and Gus. Reenie and my sister would go outside for a smoke in the backyard or Iris would take Reenie into the bedroom and rub her feet with almond oil and then Reenie would give Iris a manicure and peace would prevail. Once in a while, Reenie would call out, How you guys doing out there? and Gus and I would say, We’re fine. Sometimes Gus said, Enjoy your hen party, but he said it in a nice way. Gus and I would play cards for another hour without them.

Gus asked me if I was interested in cars and I said I wasn’t. He asked me if I was interested in people and I said that people were pretty much the only thing I was interested in, and he told me stories about his customers. Sometimes he’d say, What do you make of this one? And he’d tell me about the widow lady with the bad carburetor and her three sons and the fact that the third son wasn’t hers — he was the child that her husband had with the lady’s sister, before he passed away — and even so, that was the child the lady loved the best. He told me about the priest with the pale-blue Buick and the soft brakes and his girlfriend, who stood across the street from Gus’s garage every Wednesday at four and always acted like they had run into each other by accident. I said I thought that maybe the man wasn’t really a priest in that case, and Gus said, He’s a man, kiddo. Gus asked me, Do you want me to tell you he wasn’t a priest? I told him that I appreciated hearing the truth about things and Gus said that I shouldn’t think that the truth was just ugly.

One time, he asked me how old I was and I said almost sixteen and Gus put his hands over his face. When he looked at me again he took my hand and turned it palm up. Let me tell your future, he said. You’re not going to be working at the beauty parlor for the rest of your life. You’re going to meet some boys here and there, and he pretended he was looking very closely at my palm, so his nose was almost touching it. I could feel his breath in the valley of my palm. Not as many as I’d expect, he said, but boys can only think with one head and we’re slow learners, as a group, so no one should be surprised about that. And then you’re going to meet a good guy, a stand-up guy, a guy who loves you like crazy, and you’ll know he’s the one.

I put my other hand palm up too, in case there was more. Yeah, he said, you’ll know he’s the one because when he says he’ll do anything for you, he means it. Don’t you fall for the big hearts and flowers, acting like it’s the movies. Bunch of bullshit, he said. Pardon me. You want the guy who’ll get your medicine in the middle of the night, even in a blizzard, even after twenty years. You want the guy who shows you every day, shoveling the walk, carrying your groceries, shows you how much he loves you. It’s not about talking the talk, Eva. You must have met my father, I said.

On the drive back home, Iris would curl up in the backseat and Gus would ask me about Bea and Carnie and La Bella Donna (he said it was his favorite soap opera) and he’d talk to me about college. One time he said to Iris, You don’t think Eva ought to be going to college, smart as she is? Iris said that it was entirely up to me.

THE LAST NIGHT WE were over, Reenie and Iris had been in the backyard for a long time. Gus laid down another winning hand and told me I was down a thousand points. He asked me if I wanted a beer and I smiled. He said, They treat you like a grown-up. Why should you get all the grief and none of the fun? We split a beer and then he yawned and asked me to get Iris, so he could drive us home.

I went out to the backyard. It was a perfect spring night. The air had just gotten warm and I could stand outside in just my shirt and blue jeans and feel the breeze and the damp grass. Even in the dark, things were green, from top to bottom. I couldn’t see Iris and Reenie and I didn’t want to yell because the people next door had a baby. I crept around the edge of the yard, near the boxwood, like I had when I was a kid, playing Indians. I could see their bodies heaped together in the darkest corner of the yard. The streetlamp touched Reenie’s white hair ribbon on the grass. It touched Iris’s white socks and Reenie’s white bra. Reenie must have seen me creeping, because she screamed and then she muffled it.

“Hey,” Iris said. “Don’t trip over us.”

“Okay,” I said. “Gus wants to take us home. He’s beat.”

Iris lay down in the backseat. She said her stomach was killing her. Gus and I talked about baseball, which was more interesting to both of us than other sports, and he told me that he’d seen the Girls Professional Baseball League and it was our loss that they’d fold up when the men came home. I looked at Gus’s big wrists on the steering wheel and at his dirty nails. He smoked while we talked about the war, about his bad leg, about my going to college. He said that his bad leg was no one’s fault but that if I didn’t go to college, he’d hold it against my father and my sister. I said that it was up to me, and he said he’d heard that opinion and he admired my attitude but that I was mistaken. I turned around to look at Iris when we went through the lights on Middle Neck Road. She lay with her arms around herself, crumpled on her side. She looked at me and she held a finger up to her lips. She was crying so hard, her whole shirt was wet. She had Reenie’s hair ribbon tight in her hand.

Letter from Iris (Unsent)

South Ken, London

England

March 1947

Dear Eva,

You would think it’d be hard to get a man plucked out of his everyday life on Long Island and shipped off somewhere. You’d think it’d at least be awkward. You had read that whole article about Ezio Pinza aloud at breakfast. Famous opera singer, basso cantante, and before this, famous only for his voice and for his first wife having sued a soprano at the Metropolitan Opera House for alienation of affection. According to you and Time magazine, he married another American girl (not the alienator of affection) and they had a daughter. The article said he was released after two months at Ellis Island and that he went back to singing opera right away. That’s what stuck with me. The man didn’t spend a day in jail. He wasn’t even arrested. He just went away for two months. Do you know, at the end of the war, Ezio Pinza sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” for General Patton and General Doolittle and the man who had ordered his arrest? This, also courtesy of Time magazine.

I was so scared, I thought I’d vomit on the bus. I walked past the railroad station, to put enough distance between it and me. I always ran into people I knew at that end of town. I had a handful of dimes in my bag. I put a handkerchief over the receiver. A man answered and I thought that they must all sound like J. Edgar Hoover, with his high, flat voice. I couldn’t remember the agent’s name five minutes after I hung up. I’d made up a character for the phone call. I was a single lady from Hartford, Connecticut, visiting friends in Great Neck. I worked in a bank. I told the man that Gus Heitmann might be, maybe, a German spy. I said that I knew that everyone had to do their part in the war effort. My voice shook like I was on a train. I said I hoped I was doing the right thing. The man did not say, You lying bitch. He said that I was doing my duty. He repeated Gus’s name and the address of his repair shop and he thanked me, twice. I was sweating like a whore in church, not surprisingly, and I wiped my face with my mother’s blue lace hankie and I threw it in the trash can at the train station.

I knew that if there was a God, I would be punished for this in unimaginable ways. My life would be like one of those medieval paintings, where misshapen devils climb out of the brain and across the body, with their tiny black pitchforks and sharp, silvery tails. I can only say I was unprepared. Love for Reenie had knocked all the sense out of me. What I’d had with Rose was lust (with great lighting and some terrific moments, but still, just lust) and what I felt for Reenie was a million times that. I was dancing in the street and singing in the shower. I’d walk into the empty kitchen, my heart hammering away, and find a note in Reenie’s schoolgirl script, saying that she’d gone home early, or driven to the grocery store with Edgar, and I’d stumble down to the water and cry like I had two weeks to live. I tried on three or four outfits every morning, before I walked over to the Torellis’. I applied all the face masques Francisco recommended, sometimes three at a time, and used salt scrubs on my arms and did the exercises I used to do in Hollywood. I sang Edgar’s old songs while I did them, because I knew that one of these days, Reenie would see me and love me and turn her life upside down for me.

I didn’t know a thing. I watched Reenie with Gus and their kindnesses to each other and their mild companionship and sometimes I despised them both and mostly I just despised myself. I worried when Gus made Reenie laugh and the night he tied one of her scarves over his head and did his Judy Canova imitation, I hoped Reenie thought he was a fool. You laughed your head off. I worried when he made Reenie tea and patted her shoulder as he walked by. I had in mind a fight to the death with a depraved brute. He would have strength on his side and I would have true love on mine and I would take him down like David took Goliath. It was terrible that Gus wasn’t a brute and after a while, I decided that was his strategy. His cleverness was to appear kind and decent, so she would never see how he stood, like the Rockies, between us. I made you distract Gus, so I could get close enough to profess my love in their dark backyard. I tried to be cleverer. I flirted with Gus and suggested that a man with his skills and wit could move out into the wider world. I made fond, damning remarks about Reenie, that she probably couldn’t keep up with a sharp customer like himself, and Gus said only, Don’t kid a kidder. Do you remember one morning, you got up early and you made me banana-stuffed French toast and you asked me if I was all right? I said that I was fine and you took my hand and you said that if I was dying, I should tell you, because there was an awful lot to do, if that was the case. I did eat that French toast. I hope that I did.

I found Reenie in the kitchen and, having failed at strategy and seduction, I sat on the floor and put my arms around her knees, until she pulled me up to her. (What can I say? I wasn’t a man, so I couldn’t go down on one knee and I did think that some abject pose was right for the occasion. I certainly felt abject.) I cried on Reenie’s leg and then on her shoulder and I tried to give her a pearl ring from Lutzmann’s on Madison Avenue. Reenie put the box back in my pocket. She backed away from me. I begged Reenie to open the box, and when she finally did, those beautiful brown eyes filled with tears. “I’m not stupid,” she said. “I know what this means.” I put the pearl ring on her finger and she took it off. She wiped her eyes and she stood there, sensible and kind, as if she hadn’t cried. “What would I say? Come on, Iris, you can’t give me a ring.” I took it back to Lutzmann’s and gave Reenie the silent treatment for two weeks.

I had failed, worse than in Hollywood. On the other hand, she had cried over me.

Every day, I threatened her with the loneliness and heartbreak of what we could have had, and I’m sorry to say that I made some noise about doing away with myself (I can see the look of disgust and disbelief on your face), at which point poor Reenie said she’d go work elsewhere. I made Reenie cry sometimes, for that dark pleasure, like pressing a wound, and then I begged forgiveness, which I got. (“I know,” Reenie said. “It’s okay. I know why.”) Edgar would pass me at the Torellis’ and roll his eyes.

Finally, finally, we got there. I came up close to her, the way I did whenever I had a chance. I pressed my lips to the back of her neck, where the black curls were pinned up, and this time she turned toward me, not away, and the door that had been between us swung open. The Torellis were all at Mass and we took advantage of the guest room. That became our time. During the week, we whispered to each other in the kitchen and in the rose garden and she said that she loved me. She said she loved me with all her heart, that when we held each other she thought at last, her life was beginning. She said she couldn’t turn her back on her wedding vows and her hope that a baby would come. She said she had made a promise, not just to Gus, but to God. I kissed her because she never said that she loved Gus. She said that she would love me, just me, until she died. I said I understood, because I did. I said that I would always love her, and I would always be there for her. We both lay on the floor of the guest room, crying like broken things.

After I made the phone call, I hung around the train station for a while and then I started walking home, waiting for one of the Middle Neck Road buses. It was a warm night, for May, and people were glad that summer was coming. Everyone had their front doors open. Men were smoking and drinking coffee and reading the paper, in their shirtsleeves. Women were doing the dishes, wearing their aprons. Everyone had the radio on.

Iris

Letter from Gus

U.S.A.

May 20, 1943

Dear Eva, my Yankee Doodle pal,

On May 4, while I was checking out Millie Brown’s carburetor, after I gave Sticky the afternoon off because things were slow, who should come into the shop but three guys with ties and jackets and machine guns. Well, kiddo, I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. They tore up the shop, including the girlie magazines (what can I say — Reenie asked me to keep that crap out of the house, so I did), and they read through all my bills and threw everything out of my desk. They banged around my tools for a little while, like my crescent wrench was going to turn into a Nazi flame-thrower, and I sat there, on the bench, hands cuffed.

I don’t remember exactly what I said, but you could call it inflammatory. It got me nowhere. I changed my tune. I said, How can I help you, fellas? And the biggest guy hit me in the gut and ground my face in the floor pretty good before he put me back on the bench. That was that.

Why aren’t you in the military? the little one said.

Possibly because of this, I said, and I pulled my pants leg up to the knee and showed them my left leg. I said I’d been limping since I could walk. I said that being sucker-punched just now hadn’t helped but he shouldn’t blame himself — the limp was really the fault of poliomyelitis and possibly my mother, who was pretty lax about hygiene. Surprising in a German, I said.

Next thing I know, I’m in a car with two of the bastards. They drive all day and night, in shifts. Wherever we are, it’s goddamn flat. After that, I’m in a cell for two days. No one says nothing. The hearing is four new guys, dressed like the ones who dragged me out of the shop, but not a weapon in sight. There are two American flags, in case you thought that somehow you had left the U.S.A., and a big sign behind them that says United States Department of Justice. I tell you what, you ever walk into a room with a sign like that, you run right out and keep on going.

Me and the four guys palaver. They say, What is your relationship with Standard Oil, and I say I worked for them for a year, 1934. They say, How did you come up with the capital to open your own shop? I tell them I bought out Gibby Schmidt. That’s like a fart in church, another German name — now it’s a goddamn conspiracy. How about your wife? one of the assholes says. I tell them Reenie is Italian-American on her father’s side and her late mother was Irish and now we’re doubling down on Reenie’s gene pool. I mention her father was an American war hero in World War I and her brother is a priest. I say that her father’s Medal of Honor should balance out her innately untrustworthy Italianness. We go back to why I sometimes work at night and what kind of shortwave radio do I have. They won’t say who dropped the dime on me. They tell me that decent Americans everywhere are keeping their eyes and ears open for threats to America, especially threats within our own borders.

I tell them that if they think a fat, gimpy mechanic with a German last name is a threat to America, I am more worried about this country than I was when the Japs hit us. (Later, I’ll tell you about the Japs at this camp. They garden and the men wrestle. You haven’t really lived until you’ve seen some little Nip drop-kick a two-hundred-pound Bavarian and leave him facedown on the canvas. We do have some times here.)

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 turns out to be important. I should have paid attention in school. You may ask yourself, Exactly who were our enemies in 1798 beside a bunch of Indians, but I don’t say a word. The old guy at the table tells me that under the terms of the Enemy Alien Control Program, they can offer me two choices: stay in beautiful Fort Lincoln in Bismarck, North Dakota, or be repatriated to Germany. Back to Germany, one guy keeps saying. I say to him, I’ve never been to Germany. My father didn’t speak German at home because he wanted us to be real Americans. I tell them the German I know—“Shut up, the kids are listening” and “I’m going give you an ass-kicking you won’t forget.” The old guy shakes his head slightly, like it’s too bad I’m such a fucking ignoramus but the big man in the middle brings his hand down like a gavel and says, Mr. Heitmann, at this time, you will be residing in Fort Lincoln, enjoying the hospitality of Uncle Sam, while we keep America safe.

You know me. I’m capable of brooding. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about who did this to me and what I’m going to do to him when I get out. I think I got shopped by Louis Ringer, an auto mechanic at the edge of town. The little wall-eyed bastard never liked me. It happened I took a couple of customers away from him, probably because his shop was such a goddamn pigsty. At night, I picture Louis Ringer, in bed with his big, soft-looking wife, and I see Mary Ringer in a pink nightgown with a ruffle at the neck, her tits showing through and bright-red lipstick on her doll mouth. I drag Ringer out of bed and I punch him in the jaw. He goes down but I pull him back up. Then I drive one right into his gut. Mary’s kneeling on the bed, opening and closing her red mouth like a rainbow trout. He gets in one punch and that’s all I need. I finish him off. I leave him on the bedroom floor, his wife crying and begging me not to kill her too. There’s more, but you were always a girl with some imagination so I’ll leave it there.

I hope life at the Cut ’N’ Curl is going okay. Say hi to those hot tamales, the Diego girls. If you get this and you see Reenie, tell her I’m sorry. Tell her I wish her luck.

Gus Heitmann