Lucky Us

8 You’re Not the Only Oyster in the Stew

CLARA WILLIAMS HATED THE TIME BETWEEN SETS AT THE NITE Cap. The whole half hour was sweating and setting and refinishing her skin. Her vitiligo never took a night off. Clara drank one big glass of water and one hot tea with honey in the nasty dressing room and she sat at the bar for only two minutes before she went back onstage. She did notice that when she made herself up as white, she was more conservative all over. Light-pink lipstick, pearl earrings, a-tisket, a tasket. She hadn’t gotten as many chances lately. Since the war started, people looked at one another more carefully. Negro and white people looked twice at dark-skinned white people, at Chinese and Japanese people, at people with accents. Before, if you said you were white, by God, people took you for white, and if you said you were Negro, people certainly took you for Negro. Clara thought that it might be pushing her luck to impersonate a white woman too often, although she had an itch, every now and then, to bust out her Doris Day and she had the tight pink sheath and white gloves to do it. In Reno, she’d done Doris Day for about a week, with a white quartet behind her.

That Reno trumpeter wasn’t really a man. He was a tubby, sweet-faced little guy and no one mentioned to his wife or three sons — and Clara had wondered about those three strapping boys — that he was really a tubby, sweet-faced gal who could swing all night on the trumpet and had decided that her chances were better if she wasn’t a woman. Sometimes, in spite or annoyance, when the band stayed half a beat behind her all night, Clara’d imagine swiping a lipstick across the trumpeter’s round face or pulling his pompadour forward into a pixie cut. It would take only one gesture and she would never be he again.

Sometimes, when Clara filled in her face, connecting all the blank seas and inlets of the vitiligo to the smaller and smaller brown islands of her real color, it was hard not to feel that she was impersonating a Negro. The dark, arched eyebrows. Ruby-red lipstick shaping her pale, streaky mouth. Her nose, which was sometimes a contouring challenge when she was white, was a comfort. It was a Negro nose. When she was Negro, she sometimes put a little beige cream down the bridge to broaden it, in case someone failed to notice. Clara understood that race was more than a matter of appearance, but it was also a matter of appearance. Like Rudolph Valentino’s nose. How did people not notice that schnoz everywhere? Clara saw that nose on fancy white men from Philly to Boston. She saw it on half the Italians in New York, every other Tony and Guido. She saw it on almost every handsome colored flying ace, in newsreel after newsreel. That bony arch and hawklike tip. How did people not see that it was the same nose? It was probably the same dick too. Clara knew a girl who had met Errol Flynn in Hollywood and she said it was no longer than your forefinger but as wide around as a biscuit, and Clara had heard the same was true of many Italian men and of the Tuskegee Airmen too.

Pond Road

Great Neck, New York

18 June 1943

Dear Miss Williams,

I am writing to you after an evening at the Nite Cap. I am the chap who bought you a stinger between sets, but you have so many admirers that that description may not help my cause. Your performance tonight was splendid. I think that Lena Horne herself would have applauded your “Stormy Weather,” and your version of “There Are Such Things” was truly beautiful. I will be at the Nite Cap next Sunday. If I may, I will again buy you a drink between sets.

Yours, in admiration,

Edgar V. Acton

Edgar wrote the note ten times. He didn’t write, I am the white man who bought you a drink, because it was possible that there’d been other white men at other shows, although he hadn’t seen any. Edgar felt that the letter had more Jeeves-and-the-country-house than he’d intended. He’d never used the word “chap” in his life, but he was an English butler in a Negro nightclub and he thought that foolishness might be his trump card.

HE HADN’T THOUGHT ABOUT how it would be inside the Nite Cap. He had a free Saturday night, which he rarely did. (Saturday night, the Torellis usually had twenty or thirty relatives over for dinner and Edgar tended bar, served the priests, supervised the buffet, and drove the resentful cousins he had not been able to keep out of Joe Torelli’s Scotch back to the Bronx. “From whence they come,” Joe Torelli said.) The Irish bars of Great Neck were rough and charmless, and Manhattan was a big pond, after Ohio. He wanted a place he could listen to jazz, where no one knew him and no one wanted to. Inside the Nite Cap, Edgar was not invisible. He shone, and not in a good way. The bouncer was Negro, the tall, creamy coat-check girl was Negro, the broad-shouldered, bald-headed bartender and all of the men and women around him were Negro. At Windsor College, he was often the only man in a room full of women and it never bothered him. To be the sole man was not unpleasant; sometimes it was charming. Nice women rarely turn on a man they know, and even if they do, they’re women; their weapons are words. The Nite Cap was filled with tired cleaning ladies and baby nurses who worked hard for their living, and a few working girls and men with nicked, thick hands and cut faces; laborers, cooks, truck drivers, fighters. After Edgar had sat ten minutes at a rickety table, a waiter brought him a gin. He let go of Edgar’s glass reluctantly, not opening his hand until Edgar gave him five dollars and told him to keep it. The waiter moved a little more briskly, as if service could now be expected. Edgar’s first impulse was appeasement. If he knew what would make these men smile, and these women forgive him, he would offer it. He would soft-shoe across the small stage, make fun of his own accent and pallor, demonstrating his essential harmlessness, so he could stay in the Nite Cap, and not get hurt.

Pond Road

Great Neck, New York

1 July 1943

Dear Miss Williams,

It was a pleasure to see you again. I fear that I may have interrupted your conversation with your colleague the drummer, and I apologize. I’m delighted that you remembered encountering me outside the Silver Star Diner. I certainly remembered you. Would you consider joining me for a late supper at Gino’s this coming Wednesday evening? I understand that Mr. Circiello is quite a jazz fan and I’m sure he would be honored to have you at his restaurant.

Yours,

Edgar V. Acton

There would be difficulties in courting Clara. He was almost twenty years older. He was white. He wasn’t rich. He wasn’t certain that even by the standards of a Negro jazz singer on Long Island, he qualified as good enough. He gave a lot of thought to which places would be welcoming to them as a couple and he felt that Greenwich Village was his first choice. From what he’d heard from Earl, the bartender at the Nite Cap, there were a few nightclubs in Harlem that would be a distant second.

Clara, having been born and raised in America, didn’t give it another thought.

“Do you have your own home?” she said.

THEY WALKED DOWN HUDSON Street. It was a cool night and Clara pulled her shawl around her. Dinner at Gino’s was what Edgar had hoped for. The food covered the plate, the tomato sauce was mildly spicy and thick, and one could imagine a warm-hearted, chubby woman, who was not like Edgar’s mother and probably not like Clara’s, stirring a pot in the kitchen, humming some Neapolitan tune. Mr. Circiello didn’t welcome them with any special attention but he didn’t raise an eyebrow and he gave them a good table and he did say, Good night, signorina, good night, signore. It was a tremendous success. They had been seen and served and thanked. Edgar drove them back to the house Clara shared, to the room she rented from a cousin of the drummer. They sat in the car. Edgar put the radio on.

“Like a couple of kids,” Clara said.

“You, of course, are a spring flower,” Edgar said. “I should be bringing you to The Ritz.”

Clara sat still.

“You think if The Ritz was handy, I’d let you take me there?” she said.

Edgar’s sympathies were all with Clara.

“Clara, I’m too old for you and I’m not rich. I want to take you out every evening that we are both free and I want us to go to the best clubs and eat dinner at places like Gino’s, which I can hardly afford on a butler’s salary. If I follow my impulses in this matter, I will have to steal the Torelli silver, pawn it at that place we passed tonight, and, unless I am very clever, spend the rest of my quiet life in the state penitentiary. Breaking rocks.”

“I see that,” Clara said. “I see you on the chain gang. I see you singing ‘In the Jailhouse Now’ from can to can’t.”

“I do know ‘In the Jailhouse Now,’ ” Edgar said.

“You do not.”

“I may struggle with the tune,” he said, and he sang, not badly and in no accent but his own.

He’s in the jailhouse now. He’s in the jailhouse now.

I told him once or twice quit playin’ cards and shootin’ dice.

He’s in the jailhouse now.

Clara smiled and shook her head.

Edgar said, “Oh, I know. I cannot impress you.”

He leaned forward and kissed Clara on her neck and her cheek. He wanted to lick off her makeup, to kiss the perfect, bare Clara underneath.

CLARA THOUGHT THAT IT would be good if he did; it would be cool water on her blistered heart if he did.

9 Pennies from Heaven

THE TORELLIS WERE MY FAIRY-TALE FAMILY. I BELIEVED THAT their house was so much nicer and their family so much sturdier because they were better people than we were. My mother and I had been the worst people, so we’d had the worst home. We had had the worn-out first floor of a worn-out two-family and I saw, the day I was left on my father’s porch, that everything we owned had been shabby and just cheap to begin with, including my clothes and my person. At my father’s house, which was really Iris’s mother’s house, things were lovely. My father didn’t really qualify as a lovely person but he did rescue us from Hollywood, is how I saw it.

Everyone told me Iris’s mother, Charlotte, had been wonderful, and I thought that her perfection had probably made up for my father’s shortcomings. I believed that the Torellis, unlike my family, had souls, and their souls, if you’d hung them on the clothesline behind the carriage house, would have billowed bright white and sheer, smelling like sunshine. Mrs. Torelli, as I saw her, took motherhood seriously. She talked to Reenie about what her children liked to eat, she talked to Iris about their feelings (their “crazy ideas” is what she said, but still, she was interested), she told everyone about Mr. Torelli’s digestive problems, which little Joey had inherited, and when Baby Paulie had a bumpy, purple rash on his fat little neck, Mrs. Torelli made Dr. Fishkind come to the house to treat it. She could not have left a child on the front porch of any house, anywhere, ever.

Mr. Torelli talked to me once in a while when I was snitching something from the kitchen early in the morning or when he passed me at the end of the day on the walk from the garage to their house. Sometimes he patted my head and said, How’s the genius? Sometimes he just started talking the way you do to a dog, and I’d follow him up to the kitchen door until he went inside.

The Torellis liked daily naps for their children and big meals of good food. They liked large, clean cars, a clean kitchen, and nice clothes, with no stains or tears. As long as we made this possible, the Torellis didn’t bother us. (Reenie dropped the “Heitmann” when Gus was taken away and went back to “Lombardo.” She moved into the carriage house with us, and my father only said, Well, aren’t we Opéra-Bouffe-by-the-Sea.) Mrs. Torelli did say to me, over her morning cantaloupe and Baby Paulie’s rice cereal, which covered half her silk housecoat, that it was good that we had taken Reenie in. That poor girl didn’t know which way was up, Mrs. Torelli said.

Reenie and Iris shared a room now and Iris went into the city to audition twice a week. (I meant to tell you, she said. I took my mother’s maiden name. Reardon. We’re still sisters. People do it all the time.) When Iris was catching the morning train, she asked me to take her place with the little girls, and we’d play Geography and I Spy, which seemed like very educational games to me. Sometimes we would act out our version of Little Women, in which Beth didn’t die and Joey played the March family dog. Mrs. Torelli didn’t mind. She managed her household with one chubby white hand and the help that really mattered was my father and Reenie. Iris called my time with the kids “enrichment.” Now that the girls were in school, Mrs. Torelli focused on the boys during the day, and she let them run around the garden until they were wet and dirty and hungry. When I was home, I brought out sandwiches and apple juice. Iris’s absences bothered only Reenie, I think. Iris invited us both to see her onstage. Reenie said, “I don’t have time to do that. I’m working.” “Me too,” I said, and it gave me some mean satisfaction to let Iris know that this time I had better things to do than sew the sequins and wait in the wings.

When Iris was gone two days in a row, which happened more and more, I’d rehearse the Torellis’ children one evening and have them perform the next. We did Cinderella, with Catherine as Cinderella, then with Mary as Cinderella, and always with Joey as a madcap pumpkin. We did an abbreviated Tempest, mostly storm and rescue, with Mary as Miranda (“You’re the princess”), Catherine as Ariel (“You’re a magic fairy,” I told her), Joey as Caliban (“You scare the crap out of the girls”), and Baby Paulie as Prospero (carried by me, his lines uttered by me — that long drive to East Brooklyn had not been for nothing), and I made my father, Mrs. Torelli, and Reenie watch.

They clapped and Mrs. Torelli took the kids upstairs. My father said, Interesting experiment, and walked back to the carriage house. Reenie sat weeping at the kitchen table.

“I’ll never see Gus again,” she said.

I said that we didn’t know that.

“I’ll never have children,” she said, and I thought that was about the shortest mourning period on record.

“Do you think he was a German spy?” Reenie said.

“Do you?” I said.

Reenie wiped her face with a dish towel. “Of course not. He was a good man.”

I said I thought so too, and Reenie got up and took off her apron.

“You could write to the government to find out what’s happened to him,” I said. “Or I could.”

“I did that,” she said. “It’s not as easy as you think. None of it.”

Reenie put on her coat and picked up a dish of fruit compote she’d made for us at the house, bits and pieces of fruit that were starting to go bad, all stewed together with cinnamon and white wine. Iris and I ate bowls of it.

“Iris worries about him,” Reenie said.

Like fun, I thought. Reenie wanted a baby and Iris wanted Reenie and it seemed to me that the only person who heard Gus’s big laugh, who missed his sharp look and those thick, quick fingers shuffling cards like a croupier, was me.

CLARA WILLIAMS WAS THE next morning’s surprise. My father introduced her to me, pretty much the way he had introduced me to my sister, back in Ohio. When it came to immediate family, Edgar was all for plain talk. Oh, Evie, glad you’re up. Iris has been in and out. This is my very good friend Miss Clara Williams. We hope she’ll be visiting us quite a bit.

Miss Clara Williams, pale and dark, put out her pretty light-blue suede glove (my mother would have killed for those gloves, with the tiny, flat pleats at the wrist and two blue pearl buttons) and I took her hand and mumbled. She smiled and the dimple in her left cheek was deep as a dime. I wanted to make her smile again. She sat down and pulled off her gloves. I saw her hands, speckled with white patches and dots of white skin. She said that maybe I’d stick around and have a cup of coffee with her, if I wasn’t too busy. I poured two cups. My father put on his butler’s coat, patted my shoulder, and went to the door.

“For God, for country, for Joseph Torelli,” he said, and left.

Clara stirred her coffee and sat with her spoon hovering an inch above the table.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I put down the two scorched linen napkins my father had taken (rescued, he said) from the Torellis’ laundry pile.

“Isn’t this just fine,” she said. “Fine.” In East Brooklyn, there was an Italian café my sister and I liked, and for a treat, we would order affogato, hot espresso poured over vanilla ice cream, the dark streaming into melting ivory pools. Like that.

“Are you in school?” she said.

I went through my song-and-dance, which began with my implying that I had already graduated and ended with me saying I really was giving a lot of thought to City College.

“Your father says you’re the smart one.”

“Not the pretty one,” I said. I was mortified.

“Oh, you can fake pretty,” she said.

CLARA CAME TO OUR house most nights after that, and she stayed in my father’s room. In the morning, I’d wake up early to watch the light-blue cab come for her and see her run down the stairs with a dress over her arm and her enormous crocodile makeup case. The three of us never ate together and I chose to think that was my father’s possessiveness and not Clara’s lack of interest. Iris said that for Clara, we were just duckpins to be bowled over. I said I didn’t think Clara was after his fortune.

I was sixteen and I was used to Iris and Reenie, and used to the happy Torellis and now used to my father pretending to be a butler, although watching him bow his head, just an inch, when Mr. Torelli told him to pull the car around, bothered me. Clara Williams was extraordinary to me. I was embarrassed to be so fascinated by her odd, smooth skin and her cool manners and to be so enamored of her voice. My lucky father.

WE WERE ALL BROKE, but I was more so. I took money, very carefully, from everyone’s open purse or wallet. Reenie kept a couple of quarters in her old black coin purse and Iris always had loose change now, now that she was back in business. She was Irish Maid, Second Debutante, Silly Shopgirl, appearing nightly near or on Broadway. Iris was working hard, and not just onstage. She told me about the agents she had to woo, and the stage managers. She told me it was important to pay for your own drink when the cast went out after the show and she told me that putting an extra dollar in the pot made people like you more. She did her exercises every day, she said, and she was taking dance and she’d gotten into an acting class. She said her voice was an instrument and her body was an instrument. And my ass is a Stradivarius, she said.

I JUST WANTED TO begin my own life, one that didn’t include my relatives. I showed up at Bea and Carnie’s in time for lunch, most days. They were interested in Clara too. Was she really Negro, what did she use on her skin, what kind of singer was she, would she ever let a white person do her hair? I loved that Bea and Carnie thought that Clara and I sat around, chewing the fat at our kitchen table. Francisco didn’t have time for me. He had a skinny boy with Frank Sinatra hair sweeping up and shampooing at his shop and he had two barbers working for him. He didn’t need me, he said. He said that as much as he loved me, I’d be better off working for his sisters. He trimmed my bangs and the skinny boy watched us and swept up the tiny snips of hair with a big flourish. I went back to La Bella Donna.

Bea and Carnie said I’d done so well at the shop, I should come with them on house calls and pick up some more pin money. You’re not a baby, Bea said. Start planning ahead. House calls meant more and more careful sweeping up than at the shop. I did notice that the ladies were very happy for me to use the lint brush on their furniture, make tea, and empty the trash, and would you mind, there’s a good girl, just take the dog for walkies while I’m drying. I took small things that I thought would not be missed. The house-call ladies were rich but not Torelli rich. Cigarette lighters would be missed. Brooches would be missed. I took a can of peanuts, a pair of navy kneesocks. I found five dollars in a man’s raincoat pocket and took it. I thought, I’m planning ahead.

Bea and Carnie spent weeks talking about whether or not to take me to Mrs. Vandor’s. Mrs. Vandor was their prize. Her first husband had been a Hungarian nobleman (Bea said) and he died in World War I (or in France, in a car accident, Carnie said). Mrs. Vandor had escaped Hungary and come to this country (with just the clothes on her back, Bea said, or with gold coins sewn into her underwear, Carnie said) and married a White Russian who died of TB. Now she had a beautiful apartment in the nicest building in East Brooklyn and she was their favorite client, ever.

I’d become a good assistant. I thought this was not surprising but Carnie said just the opposite was true. You don’t see yourself in ten years, still sweeping up piles of hair and drying the sink with a rag and scrubbing the hair color off someone’s face so they don’t look spotty, do you? You don’t think you’ll be doing this forever, do you? I said that I didn’t. (My vision of the future was like the paintings I’d seen of the Old West, mysterious, serious, with great beauty at every vista and terrible things happening whenever any people appeared.) There you go, Carnie said. I’m saying, the best kind of assistant is Dora’s girl, Kimmy, who wants to be an assistant. Wants to. You see how happy she is when she gets every hair off the floor? I did. I swept for praise, for Francisco’s hooded look of approval when he dropped by, for lunch and a dollar and a place at the table. I did not sweep for the pleasure of a job well done.

Kimmy was our mascot. She had a lazy eye and she was a little slow. I never saw anyone be unkind to her. When Kimmy was in the shop, Carnie made a point of saying good things about the nuns, about convents, and how much fun the sisters had. Bea said that a nunnery sounded like a great place to live. In the end, even with the lazy eye, Kimmy married well, a much older man, with his own business and no children, and they moved to Astoria. When her mother got heart trouble, she moved in with Kimmy and her husband and Carnie said to me, See? No one knows anything.

They were not bringing the likes of Kimmy to Mrs. Vandor’s. Neither of them wanted to do the cleanup. They liked spending the afternoon with Mrs. Vandor. I think she was the only woman they considered more worldly, more truly cosmopolitan than they were. They looked at the newspaper pictures of socialites and their Greek playboys, of women in tiaras in front of summer houses in Italy and estates in Rhode Island, of men with three last names resting their hands on their horses and sports cars and I never heard a bitter, envious word from them. They mused about famous people’s errors in judgment, the same way they did about their neighbors, about my family and theirs. They frequently said, as I do now, Too bad money and taste don’t live together. They said, as I could say every day of my adult life, God doesn’t give with both hands, honey.

Mrs. Vandor’s apartment was to all the homes I’d seen, as Jackie Kennedy would be to all the previous first ladies. It was fresh and chic but soft and so assured that as soon as you walked in, you understood that not only did you live with the wrong furnishings, in whatever unfortunate place you came from, you also had chosen the exact wrong outfit just that morning. You would have had a very hard time persuading me that Mrs. Vandor was not an exceptionally lovely human being, even if she’d walked in dragging a bleeding body and proceeded to kick the living Jesus out of it. Which she didn’t. She was tall, fair, and regal, rather than thin (if I hadn’t been star struck, I would have said that she looked like a very pale camel), wearing long gray silk pajamas, the top unbuttoned over a long white satin shirt. (Which I couldn’t get over — I thought about it for days. Was it underwear, even though it was satin, where else did she wear it, was it something that she wore only at home, the way my mother had, on some Sunday mornings, worn a cotton housedress while she got ready for my father?)

Bea and Carnie introduced me as their niece and Mrs. Vandor said, Don’t be ridiculous — she’s not a relative of yours. Some Scotch-Irish and Russian mix. Bea and Carnie looked at me and I shrugged. Mrs. Vandor made us all tea poured into cups I was afraid to hold and afraid to sip from. I tried to keep my lips over my teeth, so that I wouldn’t bite the china by accident. Carnie looked at me hard. I put down my cup, rattling it in the saucer, and I held on to a ginger cookie (with lemon cream filling) like it was a life preserver.

Carnie colored Mrs. Vandor’s gray hair ash-blond and then Bea did her hands and feet. Mrs. Vandor closed her eyes until they were finished. I offered to wash the cups and empty the wastebasket and Mrs. Vandor said, with her eyes closed, I wouldn’t make that kind of thing a habit. One wishes to be useful, but not indispensably so. She gave me two dollars and a Bonwit’s bag with books in it.

“Books make a room,” she said. She gave Bea and Carnie each a heavy silk French scarf, red for Bea, emerald green for Carnie, and then she said, at the door, “I’m taking a little trip, my dears. We’ll see each other before Christmas.” (We would not.)

Bea and Carnie talked about where she was going and why and with whom, all the way home. I took BUtterfield 8 out of the bag and read it on the train to Great Neck, and on the bus to Pond Road.

THAT NIGHT, I WALKED into the Torelli kitchen for a snack, and almost tripped over my father, drinking a cup of coffee. My father and I were hardly ever alone together. Reenie and Iris were a couple. My father and Clara were a couple. I was, to everyone, including me, odd man out.

“Hello, stranger,” he said.

He asked me what I thought about Iris and her friend Reenie and I said, Not much.

They seem very fond of each other, he said.

I said they certainly did and I might have rolled my eyes a little, disloyally, just to show my father that I wasn’t such a fool as Iris to be losing my marbles over other people, other girls, all the time. My father smiled. He said, You know what Oscar Wilde said — women are meant to be loved, not understood. Applies to both of them, darling. And I nodded, although it seemed to me that I was going to be a woman too and I would like it if someone thought they should understand me.

What’s in the bag? he asked. I showed him the books. He whistled when he saw BUtterfield 8 and he asked me if I found it racy. I said I found it sad, and I could see that he liked my answer, and I hoped he’d ask me about the other books and that I’d come up with deep, interesting answers.

“You know what I like to read,” he said. “Those Little Blue Books we read on the great trek east. There are thousands of them. As Phineas T. Barnum said, something for everyone.”

My father washed and dried his cup and we walked back to the carriage house in the dark. He put his hand out to keep the forsythia branches from smacking me in the face.

When I need to call up my father, when I want to feel loved by him, I remember him dancing with me in my bedroom back in Abingdon, before my mother left me on his porch. I think of him guiding me through the forsythia bushes, his fingers brushing the moths away from my face at the carriage-house front door.

There was nothing wrong with our carriage house. It was not as nice as my father’s house in Windsor but it was nice enough in its practical, un-showy way. Everything in it was useful, a little worn, mostly brown. Nothing matched. Nothing was lacy or embroidered. My father and I sat in our living room while he hung up his jacket and put on his slippers. He took all of the books out of Mrs. Vandor’s bag: Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perelman, more John O’Hara, and O Pioneers! by Willa Cather. At the bottom of the bag was an old deck of cards, with green plaid on the back and all kinds of pictures.

“Tarot,” my father said, biting off both t’s. “The secrets of the universe. God help us.” I was not averse to knowing the secrets of the universe. My father threw the top two cards on the table: the Queen of Cups, a grim blonde in a long white dress, on a granite throne. The Lovers, Adam and Eve holding hands under a winged god with flaming hair. He threw down another three, a man weeping in his bed under a stack of nine swords, a dwarf standing on big, star-stamped coins, a rainbow of ten gold cups. My father snorted. “Not the woman her library would have led me to believe,” he said. “Appalling.”

IN THE MORNING, I found a box of thirty Little Blue Books outside my door. His note said, “Educate yourself.”

History of Evolution; Poems of John Keats; Auto-Suggestion — How It Works; French Self-Taught (heavily penciled); What Every Married Man Should Know; What Every Married Woman Should Know; How to Make All Kinds of Candy; Psycho-Analysis — The Key to Human Behavior; Proverbs of Japan; Proverbs of China; Proverbs of Italy; Proverbs of Russia; Proverbs of Arabia; Chekhov’s Short Stories. And underneath a dozen more: An Introduction to the Reading of Tarot.

THE SEVENTY-EIGHT CARDS CAME with a small, stained instruction booklet. Every picture told a story and the stories suited me. Occasionally, the pictures were cheerful: a juggler skipped along holding big coins, the naked lady dipped her pitcher into a starry pond (the Star) but more often, Death rode in on a big white horse, dogs bayed at a frowning moon, lightning struck a forbidding tower and it burst into flames.

I came to love the Tower. Unlike the other seventy-seven cards, whose meanings can be reversed, or at least muted when the card is turned upside down, the Tower is always the Tower. Right side up, catastrophe. Upside down, damn near catastrophe. It scared the bejesus out of my clients, when I got them, and led to extra readings, until I’d choose to tuck it away. Major and minor arcana. Instead of clubs, spades, hearts, and diamonds, the suits were wands, cups, pentacles (the big coins), and swords. You could use them to represent the four seasons, the four elements, the soul, the body, the mind, and the heart. You could use them to represent just about any four things that anyone might want to hear about.

I brought the cards and the booklet to the beauty parlor and I asked Bea and Carnie if I could set up in their shop. Bea and Carnie were great respecters of enterprise, and since — as Bea said — I didn’t seem like the kind of girl who was going to land a successful husband or a rich beau anytime soon, they gave me a card table in the waiting area. Neither of them knew anything about tarot but they both flipped through the cards (Bea crossed herself, quickly) and by the time they’d finished checking the cards for anything that would not be in keeping with the high tone of La Bella Donna, they’d already made rules for me. Ten-minute readings, because we had to keep traffic flowing, unless there was a slowdown in the shop, in which case I could expand. (This was fine with me. I didn’t think I had more than ten minutes of hocus-pocus in me.) One dollar a reading. (Bea thought maybe fifty cents but Carnie said, What, now she’s gotta make change?) And they agreed that sometimes people didn’t tip for this kind of thing.

Are you going to tell them bad news? Carnie said. I said that I thought a little bad news was probably part of it. Carnie said it’d be better for business if I didn’t give out with imminent death or something really bad happening to a client’s child, right there in the salon. (None of us thought for a minute that I had psychic powers.) I wore a skirt and blouse and Carnie did my hair and makeup. (You don’t have to be a beauty queen,” she said. You just have to look normal attractive because you’re in our shop. You represent us. But you need to look like you know something special, Bea said. She dotted a beauty mark near my mouth.)

They steered me to Mrs. Russo. Mrs. Russo’s husband had left her six years ago and she’d never gotten over it. She thought she saw him everywhere. She called the police once a month and on their last two anniversaries she had tried to kill herself. Bea thought that if anyone would give me a dollar, it’d be Mrs. Russo.

Mrs. Russo and I faced each other over the little table. I’d wrapped the cards in one of Iris’s silk scarves. I made a big show of unwrapping them and I asked Mrs. Russo to hold the cards. She squeezed them like they were Mr. Russo. I flipped over nine cards, for past, present, and future. I said I saw Mr. Russo, lured away by evil companions. I said that he had been in a car accident and lost his memory. I described the present as filled with strength (the woman with a chain of flowers, holding a lion) and said that the future held peace for Mrs. Russo and no pain for Mr. Russo. Mrs. Russo thought this was the best thing she’d heard. She told her sister, who gave me another twenty-five cents, just to say thank you. Mrs. Russo’s cousin Sylvia by marriage, with the reputation, watched while I laid down the cards for her cousin. Nice, she said. After my henna, you can do me. I gave Sylvia Russo a man madly in love with her, who wanted to marry her. She looked very pleased. I said that she should not marry this man because he wasn’t good enough for her. He was not telling her the whole truth, I said. Mrs. Russo and her sister stood over their cousin’s chair. I told Sylvia that within a year, after she turned down the current no-good liar, another man would come along. A good man. That man she should marry. The Russos dabbed at their eyes. I was launched.

The ladies liked that I was an innocent vessel. I described whatever salacious goings-on seemed called for, as if I barely understood what the cards were showing me. The ladies liked that the cards and I seemed to be on their side. After a week of the Russos, and more Russo cousins, I had clients every day. I advised that a miserable, no-good bitch of a daughter (about whom I’d been hearing for six months, from her aunt) should not be given a loan, according to the Justice card, and might come to no good end, according to the Six of Swords, which had a sad woman and child in a canoe, floating away from a dock. Mrs. Sorita should not go to Atlantic City with an old beau from high school, not even just for fun (Three of Pentacles, faintly disapproving). Mrs. Benjamin should let her daughter take night classes and Jeannie could start out local, before she applied to Brooklyn College (Ace of Wands, heigh-ho for education). No one who sat at my table was encouraged to have a fling, to leave the country, to go in or go out of this world like gangbusters.

Suddenly, I had money. I opened a bank account across the street from the shop. I hadn’t had a dime of my own that I hadn’t stolen, since we’d left Ohio. My father paid for his own immaculate self and for evenings out with Clara. Iris paid for herself and helped Reenie, who’d never been paid much, now that Reenie was single. I’d been wearing Iris’s hand-me-downs for four years, badly, and had hardly noticed. Now I bought college-girl clothes and did my hair the way college girls did and I stuffed my bra. I had two pairs of new shoes. The pain in my chest, which I had had since the day I was left on the front porch, eased up. It wasn’t grief. It was being broke and badly dressed, and now I wasn’t.

10 Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen

Letter from Iris

Upper Richmond Road

Putney, London

April 1947

Dear Eva,

Pride of Israel orphanage. You knew your way around that place like you lived there. You were my tour guide. You must have timed our visit for the baseball game and the boy you had a crush on. (You kept your glasses off and your chest out until the baseball players were called inside.) Then the little ones came out. We stood there like people at a museum, admiring, assessing the different children. There weren’t that many different kinds, were there? Skinny, dark-haired, dark-eyed, beaky boys, the occasional little blimp with fat wrists and knees and a wary look, a few blondes. I had said that I would like a baby, but there were clearly no babies to be had, or if the orphanage did have babies, they kept them properly stored inside.

I know you understood that I needed a child for Reenie. I must have told you a million times how much she wanted a baby, how sad it was for her that now that Gus was gone, she’d probably never have one. She told me, and I told you. She looked into adoption and discovered that the adoption agencies would give a pair of married monsters triplets before they’d give one baby to a single woman. You ventured once that Reenie might meet someone else, a man that she could have a baby with, but I squelched that. I’m sorry. I had no business making you snatch that little boy (I can see it now, that awful pile of bricks and Stars of David discreetly carved into the cornices — proudly Jewish but not too Jewish, just in case).

I don’t have much confidence in what people remember. It seems to me, I remember some things at a gallop, some moments from Ohio bearing down upon me in huge detail, and other things are no more than small leaves floating on a stream. Memory seems as faulty, as misunderstood and misguided, as every other thought or spasm that passes through us. I know I wasn’t so much younger then that I can use youth as an excuse; let’s just say that I still thought I was made to triumph. That I was, in fact, owed a triumph. I planned to give Reenie a little boy, the way a rich man buys his wife a Cadillac. I thought she would love me even more for my unexpected, staggering generosity. And because Danny was a child, and not a car, we’d be like the Nelson family, except we would be Harriet and Harriet and Danny, and Danny would be exceptionally well behaved.

How was I to know? I was raised by a completely normal, lovely mother, with hot breakfasts and sudsy baths and walks to the library, and she died just as I was turning awful, shrieking about my spots and my hair and getting my monthlies — I remember you getting yours. You were fourteen. It was just before everything went bad in Hollywood. You, being you, had read up on menstruation in my Margaret Sanger book. You just sat on the toilet until I got home and then you gave me your list of sundries, on the back of an envelope. You must have been sitting there for hours. When I got back with the goods, both your legs had fallen asleep and I had to hold you up. I strapped in that enormous pink slab of a sanitary napkin, I assured you that you could get pregnant but that did not mean you had to have anything to do with boys if you didn’t want to, and I threw your soiled pants into the trash can behind the apartments.

What I want you to remember is that I cared for you. I want you to see that between my nice mother, who had a maid and two sets of china and a life history of ease and no consequence, and our blithe, inscrutable, crooked father — I had no way of knowing what was required.

You saw Danny before I did. I don’t know what caught your eye. I should have had stronger feelings, I suppose. My heart should have filled with love, knowing that this was the exact little boy (you said he was four or five, I had no idea) we were meant to have, but it didn’t. I felt the way one might if one were asked to choose among pearl bracelets of rather poor quality, when one has no interest in pearls and never has. We visited three more times and every time, we looked for Danny and smiled and waved and we pulled a bit more at the hole in the wire fence, until a child could crawl through it. You found some scrap lumber that we laid up against the hole, so no one would see. I don’t know why we thought anyone would stop him, or us — those children were all at the orphanage because no one wanted them.

Do you remember what Danny said when he started talking to us? He told us that his mother had fallen off a roof and his father was so sad, he had to bring Danny and his brother to the home. We did look at the other boys, but you had your heart set on Danny. You said he seemed nice and smart. You were right, but I certainly saw no evidence of that at the time. What he seemed to me was undersize, possibly nearsighted, and pitiful. When we got his attention and I finally put out my hand to him at the hole in the fence, he just stared at his shoes. I have to tell you, I worried that he was slow and that we should have found a smarter child, but you put the candies right in my hand to encourage him and he toddled over, like a badger coming for his snack. There’s a hotel in the north I’ve been to a couple of times (married lady, Scots, and very keen … for about two months) and at teatime, they put out a huge dish of milk and chunks of bread around it and the badgers come around and dip, like matrons at the Connaught. I watched them every day.

Had we gotten a car? Did we bring him home on the subway? That seems impossible but I know we didn’t have a car (our father was so strict about not borrowing the Torellis’ car for our personal business; that must have been the only ethical fence he wouldn’t jump). I think I carried Danny in, wrapped in a red-and-white blanket. (No one can say we didn’t plan ahead. Why, we had a sack of candy and a blanket.) Danny hadn’t cried at all when we pulled him through the opening. He just looked behind him, wiped his dirty little nose, and took my hand. He did look a little the worse for wear in our bathroom, eyes rolling around and his heart beating so fast in his chest that I could see it. Reenie washed his face and hands with a warm cloth (she was afraid that he’d never had a bath and all that water would scare him) and made him a cup of milky tea and we put him in our bed. The sight of Reenie, with the little boy’s head on her breast, her hand smoothing his hair, holding the cup for him and singing some Italian lullaby, was all that I wanted. That, and her beautiful smile when he fell asleep. She did ask me where we had found him and I told her the thinnest lie, that a neighbor of the Diegos had abandoned their child to return to Mexico and no one knew what to do with him. Reenie seemed a little surprised that he was Mexican; he didn’t look Mexican, she said, but in the end, she saw only his sweet face and big eyes and his stubby hand gripping her skirt, and if I had told her he was Robert of Scotland, she’d have believed that too. I must have thought that Reenie’s Catholic heart would seize up at the thought of his being stolen and she’d make us take him back. I had told her once that she could have a baby with Francisco and we’d raise it, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

Edgar came in and took off his shoes and watched Reenie rocking this little person he’d never seen. I told him our story about the Diegos and he lit a cigarette. “How extraordinary,” he said. “Mexican? Is there any coffee left?” I got him coffee and put a few shortbread cookies around the cup, which I hoped he understood to mean, Don’t say a word, please. He drank his coffee and he patted Reenie’s shoulder. “I’m sure someone will tell me all about it in the morning,” he said. “What’s our little fellow’s name?” Reenie picked “Dante” and we Americanized it to “Danny” and I suggested “Lombardo” was less troublesome than something Mexican, and Reenie agreed.

In the morning, you and I shopped for clothes at Woolworth’s and Reenie practiced the story of Danny Lombardo to the Torellis, making the nonexistent Diegos into Reenie’s nonexistent Italian cousins, just to be on the safe side. Mrs. Torelli asked to meet Danny. Reenie steam-cleaned him. At five, we presented him, and whatever Mrs. Torelli was looking for, Danny passed muster. He looked straight into her eyes and smiled shyly. Mrs. Torelli was devastated that any Italian mother could be so cruel. She apologized that she had nothing but dresses for hand-me-downs, because Joey was only three. Danny didn’t show his awful orphan teeth and she didn’t have to hear his pure and appalling Brooklyn accent. I worked harder on that child’s accent than I did on my own. Do you remember? In first grade, he got top marks for diction, elocution, and public speaking, thank you very much.

I assume I never hear from you because of Danny. If you were me (well, there we are, aren’t we?), I know you would have pulled up your cotton socks, bound your burned hands, and gotten on with the business of taking care of poor Danny. As I’m sure you have.

I’m enclosing a couple of favorable notices. I have been on the BBC pretty much nonstop since leaving the hospital. The wisecracking American gold digger, the hand-wringing, fragile American secretary, the deluded Southern belle. I play older (the camera doesn’t love me the way it would you, and I have the permanent air—quelle surprise—of the older sister). I have saved the BBC a fortune in airfare. And now I’m on a soap, as the conniving American sister-in-law who our genteel and plucky heroine can’t get rid of. (Our entire country is, apparently, grasping but resolute, too coarse to be insulted and too stupid to go home when we’re not wanted. I don’t know who these people think saved their skinny spotty asses just the other day, but I guess it wasn’t us.) Nothing makes you love America like winter in England.

Your sister,

Iris

I DID HAVE MY HEART SET ON DANNY. HE SEEMED TO HAVE NO one, and maybe worse than no one, and I could tell from the way he tilted forward that he needed glasses. I would give him to Reenie and Iris and stand by, wings fluttering, in the background. For the first two days, Danny didn’t say a word. He didn’t say, Who are you, where are you taking me, who are all these people, when can I go home? He stared at each of us when we spoke to him and Iris was afraid that he was deaf and dumb. She snapped her fingers next to his ear and he flinched but he didn’t speak. He woke up when Reenie did and dressed himself and followed her to the Torellis’ kitchen. While she cooked and washed up, he pressed up against her. While she served, he sat at the kitchen table and laid his head on it. Reenie carried him back to the carriage house when she was done for the day and put him into bed. She kissed him goodnight and Iris kissed him goodnight and my father and I called out, Good night, from the living room and then Danny spoke.

“I got a brother,” he whispered to Reenie. “Bobby.”

Reenie got the truth out of Iris and insisted she go back to the orphanage. I wouldn’t go. I’d done what Iris wanted me to do and offered up my rescue of Danny to the universe. I wanted to get on with my tarot cards (I had seven clients now) and my makeup and my daily reading about the war, and, above all, my limitless fascination with my body, which was changing every minute. I balanced on the edge of the tub to study myself in the steamy bathroom mirror: pinup girl, mystery woman, farmer’s daughter. I could spend an hour examining my underarms and elbows and another hour on my eyebrows.

Iris said nothing had changed at the orphanage. Older boys tossed a tattered baseball. Little boys jumped over piles of trash, throwing rocks at tin cans. Iris went up to the wire fence and scanned the boys. She saw Bobby right away. He was Danny, four years older, and still beautiful. He stood on a stack of bricks, posing confidently, and a much older boy sketched him. Iris said he was a little junkyard Salomé and she didn’t want him anywhere near us.

The other boys saw Bobby being sketched by the artist and they muttered, but they didn’t speak. The artist was a tall, well-built boy with a heavy brow, and Iris said if she’d been a little kid, she wouldn’t have wanted to cross him either. He noticed Iris.

“Hey, miss,” the artist said. Bobby hitched up his trousers and twisted slightly toward Iris. The turn in his ivory torso, the neat little fold above his hipbone, was as beautiful as the rest of him.

“Are you Bobby?” she asked.

Bobby stared back. Iris said she could see it all unfolding. She’d chat with Bobby. She’d tell him that Danny was with us. Bobby’d walk out of the orphanage in nothing more than his filthy T-shirt and his loose khakis and he’d come back to Pond Road, with expectations. He’d share a bedroom with Danny and break his toys. Bobby’d become the arbiter of what was right and normal and male, and what Reenie and Iris thought wouldn’t count. Bobby had a blackmailer’s cool look. He reminded Iris of Rose Sawyer.

“I heard the boys calling him Bobby,” Iris said to the artist. “I was just in the neighborhood, visiting friends.” She used her Gracious Guest voice. Bobby’s eyes lingered on the big vermeil pin on Iris’s collar and she knew she was right.

“I must be going,” Iris said. “Good luck with your art.”

“ ‘Good luck with your art’? You said that?” I asked.

“I did.”

“Did Bobby look sad? Did he look disappointed?”

“He looked like a cheap little monkey,” Iris said. “I’m telling Reenie I never saw him.”

11 You Made Me Love You

BEING FAIRY GODMOTHER DIDN’T WORK OUT FOR ME. REENIE loved Danny the way I never saw anyone love anyone, and it made me sick. She teared up when she washed his pasty little face. She grabbed his hand in the middle of breakfast and pressed it to her lips, right over the scrambled eggs. It was a festival of maternal love, all day, every day. And if Danny didn’t flourish, he certainly recovered. He got less pasty. He talked. He followed Reenie like a cheerful little tugboat and he didn’t flinch when people spoke to him. I avoided them both.

Before Iris’s downfall, I’d had crushes on whichever movie star the magazines were pushing. (Why hold back? Grant, Gable, Flynn, and Randolph Scott.) Now I refused to have a crush on anyone. Women were fools. Men were lucky fools. In my rewrite, Mrs. Torelli would be my mother, Francisco my father, and Mrs. Gruber the beloved, eccentric aunt. Danny, that watered-down, crybaby, weak-kneed version of me, would not even be an extra.

Iris used to say I was a born stagehand. I had attached myself to the Torelli show, like a limpet. I basted the chicken when Reenie let me. I shelled peas. I tied the girls’ hair bows and cleaned Joey’s face. I removed the morning newspaper (and Mr. Torelli’s racing forms, and Mrs. Torelli’s hairpins) from the breakfast table, to get the house ready for company. I watched out the window for Mrs. Torelli’s hairdresser (her French hairdresser came out from the city on Fridays and Mondays, just for Mrs. Torelli). I watched for handsome Father Dom, who came once a week, to take a walk with Mrs. Torelli and praise the children. On the first Sunday in October, the most beautifully windblown day that month, we had about thirty Torellis in the living room, waiting for Father Dom. Mrs. Torelli told me, in the kitchen, that Father Dom had been crushed by his rejection from the army, turned down as a soldier, and as a medic, and even as a chaplain. In wartime, before a dangerous maneuver, army priests can absolve the Catholic soldiers of all past and future sins, including whatever ones they might commit in combat. Father Dom decided that, because there was a war going on, he could offer field absolution to the Torellis. He accepted all confessions in the solarium, with a bow of his glossy head, and all future transgressions were forgiven, as the Torellis, of all ages, from all boroughs, took a knee in the living room, ate a huge dinner, and marched onto the field of life. I watched from the kitchen and contemplated conversion (Mrs. Torelli would be so pleased, I thought, and all my lies and future lies forgiven), and I helped serve eggplant parm after. Reenie’s head was killing her, so I said I’d take over.

BY EIGHT O’CLOCK, EVERYONE was absolved and fed. The big kids were asleep. Mr. Torelli went out to a special meeting with the greengrocers. Reenie was lying down. Danny was in bed and Iris was at the theater, playing someone’s saucy Irish maid. Baby Paulie was so fussy, he was twisting out of Mrs. Torelli’s arms, arching like a pink fish. Paulie was miserable, coughing and sniffing, in and out of his million-dollar crib. Mrs. Torelli gave him baby aspirin crushed into applesauce, which he threw up three times. The fourth time, I helped her ladle it into him and he slept. I got the girls quieted down and I told Joey the story of Cowboy Joe, which was basically Puss in Boots comes to Wyoming. Mrs. Torelli said I was a godsend and I went to make us both tea. I looked for mothers the way drunks look for bars. Big ones, little ones, Italian ones, Negro ones. All I wanted was some soft, firm shoulder to lean against, a capable hand setting me right and making me breakfast.

I fell asleep on the divan in the Torellis’ bedroom and I woke up to Paulie barking like a seal. I ran to Paulie’s bedroom. He wasn’t hot. He wasn’t crying. He was shiny along all his creases and sweating, a little, with the effort of breathing. If every cough sounded like a circus seal, every inhale was a thin train whistle. Mrs. Torelli took us into her bathroom. She hung up her cashmere robe with the silk piping.

“Turn on the shower,” she said. “Very warm. Not hot.”

She handed Paulie to me and shut the bathroom door. She took off her nightgown and his diaper and stepped naked into the shower with Paulie. “Take off your socks and your shoes,” Mrs. Torelli called to me. “You might as well take off your skirt.” I did. I counted to one hundred, Mrs. Torelli sang “A-tisket, A-tasket.” She sang opera, and then Paulie stopped coughing. There was a soft wheeze and then the sound of his baby laugh. Mrs. Torelli stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around warm, pink Paulie and put him in my arms. He laid his head on my shoulder and I pushed his wet brown curls off his face. I saw Mrs. Torelli before she pulled the bath towel around her, a series of ivory ovals, dashes of pink, and splashes of black. I wanted to never leave that room.

PAULIE WAS ASLEEP AND Mrs. Torelli and I were dry and wide awake. I asked her to sing opera again. She looked away, like a shy girl, and sang what she sang to Paulie, “Come per me sereno.” She told me that her mother had wanted to be an opera singer. Who lives by hope, dies by hunger, Mrs. Torelli said, and I said that I hoped that wasn’t true. She said, See, hope.

I offered to read her cards. I laid out a Celtic Cross. I gave Mrs. Torelli the reading of all time. I gave her healthy children (And one more, she asked, and I said, Absolutely, if you really, really want one, because I thought that probably, in the end, she wouldn’t) and success for all of them. I gave her more Torelli Markets (because that seemed likely). I gave her good health for her and Mr. T., and better luck for her sister, who had multiple sclerosis (and I didn’t say what better luck would entail). I gave her the Lovers and the Sun and the High Priestess, in a neat pile. I gave Mrs. Torelli deathless love, which she deserved.

Letter from Gus

Fort Lincoln, North Dakota

January 1944

Dear Evie,

I fixed the roof in the dining hall, so dirt and shit and snow don’t fly in all day. We made a baseball diamond, so people can play. Mostly the real Americans play. I don’t know what Germans play in Germany and the Japs don’t play with us. After dinner, a German guy will get up, sharpen his mustache, and sing a little Wagner. The older men pound the tables like it’s a Munich beer hall. The Japs do not sing Japanese songs after dinner. We are all potential or actual traitors here at Fort Lincoln, but some of us are white.

The guy I fixed the roof with showed me the letter he sent to the INS. He wanted me to tell him that the INS would read it and say, This is a huge mistake, Mr. Hauser. No way that you — fat, dumb, and happy as you were — could be a German spy. Even though you worked for New Jersey Nickel, and were a member of the German American Social Club of Elizabeth, even though you do tend to talk people to death about Germany’s past glories — no way you are a spy.

Here’s what Karl Hauser wrote to the INS: “I have been in this great country for fifteen years. I have been a hardworking businessman and I have paid taxes. I went to night high school in Bayonne to further myself. My wife, Greta Mazur Hauser, was born in Garden City, New York, and she is an American citizen. My two children, Anna and Carolyn, are American citizens. They were both born at Elizabeth General Hospital. I am not a member of the Nazi party. I do not sympathize with the goals of the Nazi party. To my knowledge, I have no relatives who are members of the Nazi party. We have been in this camp at Fort Lincoln, North Dakota, for one year. Please review my case. Sincerely and patriotically, Karl M. Hauser.”

I told him it was a good letter and not likely to get him anywhere. He told me that back in New Jersey, two FBI agents visited his house five different times and took him to some shithole in Maryland the day before Christmas. They asked his wife if their radio was transmitting messages to and from Germany. They asked the little girls if they loved Germany more than America. On New Year’s Day, two armed guards took Greta and the kids to Fort Lincoln by train and kept the three of them in the rear car, alone.

I’d been reading about Germany since ’37 and I know I said to you, more than once, that I thought most of what I read was a load of bull. I said that I didn’t think the German people would stand for that. So, now I know that not only will the German people stand for it, so will the Americans. It turns out we’ll stand for any goddamn thing the government will do on our behalf, and if that includes a boot in the kidneys or taking everything a man has and throwing it on his front lawn for the neighbors to pick through, we’re okay with that. We’re better than they are, I hear, because we’re not exterminating a whole people. Future generations will admire our restraint.

It’s ten acres here at Fort Lincoln, with ten-foot-high wire fences and another three feet of barbed wire and dogs. We’ve got two sets of guards, Surveillance for the towers and fences and Internal, who are like beat cops. There is a long list of rules in every building. Right after how to make your bed, it says anyone trying to escape will be shot.

Karl’s the good-soldier type. No doubt his German nature. He’s volunteering to work on the Northern Pacific Railroad, which a bunch of guys do to get out of the camp. There’s a rumor that the guys who help will be freed first. I would go, but I have eyes for his wife, Greta. I figure Karl can go on the railroad and I’ll keep the home fires burning.

February 26, 1944

We got an outbreak of TB. The men working the railroad brought it back from hanging around with the Lakota Indian women. I guess misery loves company. So Karl’s got it, but not Greta. I’ve told her to stay the hell away from him and keep her girls, Anna and Carolyn, on the other side of the camp.

March 3, 1944

Karl died last night. Ice is still hanging off the roofs. We’ve got icicles in the dining hall. This morning, they brought in some more families and single men, about a hundred enemy aliens. In the hustle and bustle, I say to Greta, Let’s just have Karl slip away and I take his place. No one wants to breathe near the dead people, so I volunteer to help the hospital people move bodies. We all have towels over our faces and gloves on, and I fall right into line. I say to Greta, Call me Karl. Some broad. She waves to me and calls me Karl. She gets the girls waving to me too, grinning like monkeys.

So, I’m a married man, once more and now, with kids. Don’t tell Reenie. Call me Karl Hauser. Throw some rice my way, kiddo.

12 I’m Beginning to See the Light

EDGAR WAS IN A BAD WAY. HE HAD TO TURN SIDEWAYS TO SEE out of his right eye and his balance was off. He was having trouble with all the words he loved. The right, necessary words had come to him his whole life. Les mots justes. In the worst weather, in the worst possible circumstance, he’d always known what to say, and now those glamorous, undulating multisyllabic beauties he’d built his life on were failing him, wandering away as soon as they appeared. He drove Joe Torelli off to the hinterlands of the Bronx and spent three hours in the Mott Haven public library, looking up his symptoms. The Little Blue Books hadn’t been any real help, although they were reassuring; he didn’t have venereal disease or polio.

HE DIDN’T EXPECT CLARA to stop taking care of herself just because he wasn’t right. She did her vocal exercises before she went to work, she did her hair, and every day she rubbed the ointment into her skin: hairline, forehead, eyebrows, nose, cheeks, around her lips, onto her lips. Edgar knew she didn’t bother anymore with her stomach and thighs. The ointment was like gritty Vaseline, green sludge in a milk-glass jar as big as a box of salt. When he looked in on her, gripping the doorway to keep upright, Clara was working it into her wrist, rubbing the thin lines of white, of worse than white, of nothing.

“Concordia.”

Clara smiled and kept rubbing at her wrists. He had said to her that it wasn’t worth it to hide the vitiligo from him. He said it was a divine mark of something, a tattoo, a lasso of love. “Lasso of love” had made her smile.

“Yes sir, that’s my baby, Concordia with the vitiligo. A Fats Waller number, if only he’d known you.”

However, I’m convinced, completely, fully, firmly convinced,

You’re the only one for me!

“Rest a little,” Clara said. “You oyster, you.”

EVERY TIME EDGAR CLOSED his eyes, he dreamed about the past. He dreamed about his life with Charlotte in Windsor, Ohio. He dreamed about his childhood in Chicago. He dreamed about Shorty George at the Savoy. He dreamed about Chez Paree and the Chez Paree Adorables. Jeanette, Gracie, and Harriet. They used to let him into the dressing room at intermission. Gracie threw her black gloves and short black skirt at him and he collapsed in the corner, struck down by red-hot desire and embarrassment. He dreamed about dancing with Clara, the way people had danced when he was a boy, like Vernon and Irene Castle. Sophie Tucker was singing “A Little Bit of Bad in Every Good Girl.”

“DID I EVER TELL you about my first wife?” Edgar said, poking at the tapioca pudding Clara’d made. He pushed it around the bowl, coating the sides, to make her think he’d eaten some. Nursery food. He had to laugh at himself. He was going to keep up his Englishness, all childhood rose gardens and Tennyson, and keep quiet about his true self, until he dropped dead from whatever was making him so dizzy, dim, and half blind.

“Go ahead,” Clara said. “Tell me about your first wife.”

She washed out the bowl and cleared the table. She never asked him about his childhood. Clara was a smart woman and a suspicious one. Edgar wondered if she really believed that he was an English aristocrat, fallen on hard times and then harder ones. Charlotte had believed it, but Charlotte believed everything any strong-minded person ever told her. Edgar had made a killing in the early days of Prohibition and left Chicago right on time. He’d managed to lose his Maxwell Street accent and hoist himself up to the better kind of people, with the help of a good suit and the Lobb shoes and gold watch he bought at a pawnshop. He found a man who taught at Windsor College, who drank too much and needed a friend. Edgar became that friend and then he became a visiting professor in elocution and rhetoric and then he married Charlotte. Just as his mother had said, “Is gut tsu zain klug, is besser tsu zain masidich. It’s good to be smart, it’s better to be lucky.”

SOME NIGHTS, WHEN HE was lying very still, so there was no vertigo and no nausea, and in the dark he didn’t worry that the blindness was getting worse (which it was), Edgar wanted to say to Clara, We’ve met. When you were a little girl, your brother Smoke used to bring you on his rounds, and sometimes we crossed paths. I worked for Jake Solomon, fifty cents a day, and your brother worked for whoever the Negro gangster was. I can see Smoke now, rolling an oak barrel of hooch through Bronzeville, his skinny arms working like pistons and you sitting on the top step of the nightclub stairs, watching Smoke come along. You swung on the brass railing, the tip of your little tongue sticking through that gap in your front teeth, where I can stick my tongue now and feel the tiny bite of your teeth on either side. I used to take a handful of mints from the maître d’s stand — that was just about my whole lunch some days — and I’d give you a mint every time I saw you and you’d smile but you never said a word. Clara Williams, Smoke Williams’s baby sister, from Armour Square in Chicago. I knew you then and I know you now. At night, this was the most comforting thought he had.

“MY WIFE CAME FROM a very good family. The Reardons of Ohio. I had gotten quite a good position at Windsor College, elocution and rhetoric. Charlotte’s father was the president. That man sat at the same grand old desk, in the same grand old wing of South Hall, for forty years. I thought he’d outlive me. Charlotte graduated from Windsor the year I arrived. Her mother had passed several years before, so her father needed Charlotte to play …” The word “hostess” had just dropped out of his verbal lineup.

It was tempting to say that Charlotte was beautiful. It’d be good for Clara to hear that, that someone young and beautiful had loved him. Charlotte had been crazy about Shakespeare and sweet as a kitten, and just twenty-one, and perfect, the way youth is. She had wavy brown hair that she pinned up most of the time, and when girls were going to barbers and getting bobbed, Edgar and her father forbade it, and that was the only thing they ever agreed on.

Clara, at two or twenty, would never let him tell her how to wear her hair.

He can’t remember the exact color of Charlotte’s eyes anymore but she had a nice, old-fashioned figure, with soft, large pale-pink breasts and a tiny waist, small even after Iris was born. She had the most beautiful arms, slim, smooth, perfectly rounded. He did everything he could to keep her in white sleeveless evening dresses.

“She was just a lovely woman. No one admires this anymore but she was very feminine, very … a woman.”

Clara struck a match on the stove and lit an Old Gold. He should stop now, but he kept going.

“I didn’t bring much, I’m afraid. I was an assistant professor and she had the Reardon name, which was not insignificant in Ohio. Lots of family money, and an inheritance to come, and, I think I may have said, my family was nothing but an old English name. The very picture of genteel poverty, and of course I had no people in America at all.” He knows that this is what he has meant to say, that it sounds slick and smooth inside of him, and even elegant, after a fashion, but he has had to simplify it, in order to say it and all that’s left is, I married a rich girl.

Clara slipped off her loafers and stretched. She did her exercises and vocalized for about a half hour. She bent over and touched the floor with her flat palms. Edgar, in the old days, even just a few months ago, would have hugged her from behind, pulling her to him, while she laid her forearms against the floor. Stop bothering me, she’d say, but she always laughed and went limp in his arms.

“I was brokenhearted when Charlotte died.”

“And poor Iris,” Clara said.

At the wake, his father-in-law pulled Edgar onto the back porch and told him to behave himself. He said that if Edgar couldn’t look after his own daughter, Iris could live with him at the president’s house until she’d finished college or married. Edgar went back into the parlor and recited Browning until every woman in the room cried. Brigid, the Irish maid he’d paid in full before Charlotte died and never again, passed sandwiches and the monogrammed linen napkins Charlotte had had in her trousseau. Ecru with brown embroidery. Haute Ohio. (He used to say things like that to Charlotte, jokes about Ohio, even about the solid, stolid wealthy Reardons and her disapproving father, and sometimes Charlotte laughed, briefly, but after Iris was born, she’d leave the room, carrying the baby, and he knew now that only a fool mocks his wife’s people.) Everything in her trousseau was watered silk or Scottish cashmere or heavy linen, stiff as whipped cream, some distant relatives of Brigid’s having gone blind with the stitchery, which was carefully only brown and tan, so no one would think they were overreaching. He’d told Brigid to use every scrap of monogrammed linen in the house. Coasters curled under drinks, guest towels lay over the racks, and little linen squares rested under plates.

Iris sat by her grandfather and held his hand. She repeated what the guests were saying to him or improved on their remarks in her husky, penetrating voice. Edgar took on the professors and their wives’ sympathy until the sun set in the parlor. His father-in-law left, sad and angry that it was Charlotte, not Edgar, in the casket. Brigid lit all the lamps and cried in the kitchen. Edgar gave her a basket of leftovers and he looked in on Iris, who was asleep on a couch, in her clothes. He has no memories at all of the next six months. He’s a little hazy on the arrival and departure of Hazel and on life with Iris and Eva, except that it was bloody hectic and the girls either fought or Eva sulked or they conspired like thieves. Which they turned out to be, making off with everything but the Reardon family silver, which he’d had to sell by the time he left Ohio. And then there was that great trip east, with the girls running their lines and singing with Francisco, whom he will always love like a brother, his large Mexican homosexual brother. Even if work and life keep them apart, they have a drink every year on Zapata’s birthday and they know there is more if they need it. And now, Great Neck and the Torellis, whose innocence and kindly self-absorption are a gift from God. And, now that odd little boy, a good kid, whoever he is, and his girls, and Iris’s Italian girl, and Clara. Everything else falls like shuffled cards, but the details of each day of his life with Clara stay with him.

13 Never a Day Goes By

Letter from Gus

May 1944

Dear Evie,

They’re offering one-way tickets to Germany again. I talked to Col. Lennart the night we set up for our talent show and he told me he’d seen official papers telling the camps to prepare to keep some of us here after the war ends, just to be on the safe side. When the war is over, they’ll let the Japs go, the idea being that they won’t be hard to find. But Krauts, white and English-speaking, we might be Hitler’s henchmen in waiting, so they’ll be keeping an eye on us as long as possible.

Greta, who has some of that quality of your sister, Iris — that is, she can be a bossy bitch — says, “I have family in Pforzheim.” Since I came to this country when I was a baby, and none of the Heitmanns ever saw fit to take a vacation in Rhineland, I have no idea where Pforzheim is.

“It’s beautiful. It has a big medieval town center. It’s called Die Goldstadt,” she says, “the Golden City. We make watches, we make jewelry, and my aunt and uncle are still there.” I go right back to the colonel and say, with a straight face, that we are volunteering to be repatriated.

We leave tomorrow.

I’ll be seeing you.

Karl Hauser a.k.a. Gus

U.S.A.

October 8, 1944

Dear Evie (and Uncle Sam),

Ellis Island, home of Lady Liberty. We’ve been packed in, like enemy sardines, for two weeks. The other sardines are South American Germans, people with names like Carlos and Juanita Heinzfelt. I have no idea what we are doing with them, or how they got kidnapped by their own governments and delivered to us, but there are hundreds of them, red-faced men in white suits, women in bright silk dresses. We may be enemy aliens but, by God, these people are really foreigners. Most of them don’t even speak English. You hear them screaming in Spanish or crying their hearts out at their end of the hall. Our girls are tired and bored, playing tag all day with a few of the other American kids. No Japs are being sent to Japan and I don’t know if that means that we have something worse in store for them or if it’s just too fucking far. There was talk that the Irish were making common cause with the Germans but I don’t see any freckle-faced people being sent back to Dublin.

They found an old Swedish ship for eight hundred of us, the Gripsholm. It’s bright white and lit up like Christmas. Maybe they hope we’ll be strafed before we get to Germany. It’s the first ocean crossing for us, but some of the older people have been through this before, going the other way, and the South Americans just got off a boat a few weeks before. When we see the Statue of Liberty getting smaller, a lot of people cry and I take the girls to the other side of the ship.

When you and I met, I wasn’t exactly father material. Reenie and I had tried — or we hadn’t tried to avoid having kids — but nothing came of it. I hope it was my fault, that I was shooting blanks. I hope Reenie moves on and I hope she pops out a dozen kids if that’s what she wants.

I’m in love with these two little girls: fat, funny Anna with the biggest blue eyes you ever saw, and Carolyn, with the freckles, already a serious woman. She’s Eleanor Roosevelt at six, but prettier. These are my kids. I can’t imagine how but I hope you meet them.

November 19, 1944

They had a train waiting for us right at the harbor, and down we went, a Noah’s Ark of enemy aliens: miserable Germans, baffled Brazilians, and ten American guards.

Montreux is colder than a witch’s tit. The Swiss are just like the weather. They put the food down on the table and they look away until we leave the dining room. Some of the old people are not so steady on their pins and the Swiss just watch. Fall down, piss yourself, choke on a turnip, it’s all the same to them. Greta’s asked the real Germans for help in making a map to get us to Pforzheim. The South Americans wrap themselves in blankets when they come to meals. They stare at the snow like it’s shit coming down.

The Swiss are not happy to have us here. I bet the Germans will be thrilled.

November 30, 1944

We get to Bregenz. We talk about having a little Thanksgiving celebration but the people born in Germany are not inclined to celebrate and the rest of us feel more like Indians. The South Americans are freezing their asses off and have no idea what’s going on. Greta and I say, “Happy Thanksgiving,” to the kids. Greta asks the kitchen to make an apple pie for the kids. No dice.

December 6, 1944

Friedrichshafen

They swapped the German POWs for American POWs today. The Americans cheered and hugged one another. Then they handed us over to the Germans, like putting out the cat after a long day. The Germans weren’t glad to see us, the Americans didn’t give a damn if we dropped dead, and those South Americans were whisked away so fast I have no idea what became of them.

We walked a couple of miles over torn-up track, with four suitcases, the gold dollars sewn into my shorts, and two cold and weepy girls. We got to a boardinghouse. Greta made herself understood and she got on the phone to her aunt and uncle.

Here’s what her uncle said: Why are you here?

How long are you staying?

What will you eat?

I wasn’t even offended. Who in the name of Christ would leave America to come to Germany?

Karl Hauser, formerly your Gus

14 Let’s Fly Away

MY FATHER’S ILLNESS BECAME A LONG, BUMPY, TERRIBLE ROAD TO a place we didn’t want to go, except that the road itself was so awful, we couldn’t wait to get there. Clara told me that she’d missed her mother’s death and had only heard about her brother’s, and that these long days must be Someone’s way of making up for that.

Sometimes my father thought Clara was his third daughter. The three of us were having dinner around his bed one night, balancing our plates on our knees, and he said, I don’t know what I would do without my girls. I am the happy version of King Lear, a lucky man with three lovely daughters. Iris and I looked at each other and Clara waited until my father fell back asleep and said, You think it’s nice for me? Being the third daughter, and the dusky one, the one who gets to brush his teeth and wash his wienie? I don’t remember that scene from King Lear.

Iris had other fish to fry. She got bigger parts on Broadway, and came home at two in the morning, running up the stairs to Reenie. Iris and Reenie both felt there was no reason for Danny to spend time in a sickroom with a man he’d hardly known before, who didn’t know him now. In the daytime, Reenie cooked, and in the evenings, she watched Danny, leaving a lot of days to me and Clara, talking our way through the washing and the drying and the slow misery of feeding my father.

Clara said, “The first time I saw your father, I was walking out of the Silver Star Diner.”

I said I loved their French toast.

“He raised his hat to me, like I was white,” she said. “I liked that. I haven’t always been in the company of gentlemen.”

I nodded.

“Your father doesn’t mind appearing foolish. That’s a good thing.”

I never saw my father as foolish. When I was a little girl, I saw him as a god, generous with the Hershey bars, and now I saw him as clever and shallow. Thin silver plate over nickel, is what I thought, and the thought must have showed on my face.

“You think this was nothing for him? You think your father lived in his own nice house, with an Irish maid and his own pretty family and taught English poetry three days a week and now he is a symbol of Joe Torelli’s success, Joe Torelli’s Rochester? You think this is what your father was hoping for? To open the front door for Joe Torelli and leave around the back?”

She put her hands in front of her, like she was praying for the strength not to hit me in the face.

My father opened his good eye and looked at Clara. He pressed his left hand over his heart, which was what he did now when he had strong feelings he couldn’t express.

“Here now,” Clara said. “It’s okay. It’s just me. It’s just Clara. And Eva.”

He put his left hand on hers. “I’ve forgotten some things.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Clara said and she lay down next to him. She put her head on his chest and pulled his hand down to her shoulder. I picked up the leftovers from breakfast.

“My dear,” he said to her. “My love.”

Then he said, “Mamele.” And Clara lifted her head.

“Oh, boy,” she said to me.

“Darling girl,” he said. “I know you.”

“I know you too,” she said, still looking at me.

“No. I know you. Your brother took you everywhere. I never saw a guy so crazy about his little sister. Smoke Williams. I know you.”

My father turned his head and fell into one of his quick, restless sleeps.

He didn’t make much sense anymore. He talked about the green river Wye and the stately homes of England and sometimes about me and Iris, when we were very little girls together, which never was. Sometimes he would get very sentimental about my mother, which I found unbearable, but I didn’t know how to tell my dying father to please shut up.

Clara said, “I did have a brother called Smoke. His name was Henry. I loved him. I’d go on his rounds with him, delivering liquor to different clubs. Everywhere we went, he made sure someone gave me a glass of milk, or a cookie or a little sandwich. I don’t remember your being there.”

“We played pool,” my father said, with his eyes closed. “The Green Mill. Smoke ran the table. Who could forget?”

Clara said to me, “Honey, I have to get ready for tonight. Can I leave him with you?”

My father persisted. “No? Nu? Izzy Vogel, the Jewish boy at Chez Paree? You don’t remember me? See the ears, see the big blue eyes? What happened to your brother?”

“He died in the riots,” Clara said. “I’ll take that stuff down,” she said, and left the room.

“Yisgadal yis …” my father said, raising his hands to the sky.

ALMOST EVERYTHING HE SAID after that was in another language. Clara said it was Yiddish. He sang to us in Yiddish. He sat up in the bed, frowning, and said, “Ich voyn bei Grand Avenue, Chicago.”

One afternoon, my father put his hands on Clara’s shoulder and stood up. He gestured for his slippers, and I couldn’t get his swollen feet into them. He shrugged. He took Clara’s hand for a few steps and, barefoot, led her onto a dance floor, somewhere.

“Oh, the turkey trot,” Clara said, over his shoulder. “Years ago. My aunt and uncle used to do all these crazy dances. Turkey trot. The camel. The grizzly bear.”

My father danced another few steps and stood still, in the middle of the room.

“Oh, I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate,” he said and fell, bone by bone, to the floor.

THE DOCTOR CAME TO the house in April, when the tulips and forsythia were everywhere. Where there weren’t enough flowers, the Torellis nestled small pink and white plastic chicks. They placed a pair of three-foot-tall porcelain bunnies and bouquets of giant pink and yellow ribbons at both ends of the driveway, and the doctor drove over the ribbons. Every time someone rang the bell at the carriage house, Clara would sit down in whatever room she was in and say, Doorbell.

“I’m not the maid,” she said.

Clara and I had both read the article in the Great Neck magazine, written by an anonymous maid, complaining about no privacy, shitty leftovers, and notable stinginess in vacation and salary. Clara told me that one evening at the Nite Cap, a regular customer, a big woman from Alabama, read the entire article aloud from the stage.

“She says, ‘And I say to you, ladies and gentlemen, next white woman ask me do I mind watching the kids for them on Thursday night is gonna get “I sho’nuff do and here’s my foot on your fat white ass.” ’ And you know who bought her a drink?” Clara said. “That nice Ozzie Patterson. Patterson’s Cleaning Company. Patterson’s Livery. And you know what else he did? He bought me a Manhattan. He bought me two and he drove me home. In his Oldsmobile.”

“That was nice,” I said, as if Ozzie Patterson, with his two businesses and his famously kind disposition and his obvious good health, were of no concern to me.

THE TORELLIS SENT A priest to sit with my father. It was a very Torelli thing to do: kind, well intentioned, a little tone-deaf. Not a single person in our extended family was religious, except Danny, who did actually pray on his knees every night, asking for miracles (bicycle, train set, hang glider). Danny was devoted to Saint Joseph of Cupertino, the patron saint of aviators, which he must have picked up from Reenie. When the Torellis told Reenie that Father Dom was coming over, Reenie walked out of the kitchen and into the garden to cool off. She came back in and told Danny to go play outside. She walked over to the carriage house and started setting the table, in the middle of the day.

“You want to give me a hand, here, missy?” she said.

Reenie threw down the plates. She said she’d given up on the Church. She said she wasn’t one of those cafeteria Catholics, picking and choosing. She knew women who used diaphragms and took communion and men who committed adultery every week and never even bothered with acts of contrition. They opened their filthy, sinful mouths wide for the body and the blood of Christ and Reenie did not believe in that. She said she understood that the Church wasn’t open to her, any more than her mother would have been. Most Italian men were like her father, she said, may he rest in peace. Their attitude toward the priest is You mind your business, I’ll mind mine. Reenie said she didn’t care for Pope Pius XII, who never said a word about the murder of the Polish Catholics, never mind the Jews. She said that she thought there were two possibilities, that Jesus was as the Bible described him, and her soul was in good and blessed hands, or Jesus was a cardboard figure pasted together by a bunch of smug priests and cowed nuns, and her soul, if she had one, was on its own. And so is yours, she said.

If Reenie didn’t send Father Dom home, I thought Clara would. Clara leaned in the doorway, watching Reenie assault the table. Clara said she didn’t like to talk to priests. She didn’t like to talk to Baptist ministers either, but she certainly knew how. She told Reenie she didn’t understand a thing about Catholics. It’s all praise Mary, she said, women doing all the hard work and letting men run the church and calling the shots for everyone. When she was growing up, she said, her minister was a good-looking man, shiny black hair curling down to his snowy white collar. The ladies quoted him when it suited them, fussed over him, and carried on but didn’t they manage to spin the churchly world on their strong brown fingers. The doorbell rang and Reenie poured us each a glass of wine. After five minutes, Father Dom, who clearly knew when a confession was coming and when that ship had sailed, came back downstairs and left. Reenie went back to the house, looking like a woman who’d wrestled and won.

If our paths had crossed earlier, Clara said, if someone had brought you when you were a baby to the Pilgrim’s Hope Baptist Church in Chicago, you would have heard me sing when I was fourteen. I had a vibrato like a hummingbird. You could hear me almost every Wednesday at midnight, she said, and people I didn’t even know talked about me and my sweet voice. Do you believe in Jesus? she said.

I said that I didn’t. I said that I hadn’t been raised that way.

Good, Clara said. She said it was bad enough when white people believed in Jesus but it was insane for black people to believe in Jesus, although she didn’t go around saying that. She didn’t believe, ever, that Jesus was going to deliver her to anything, anywhere. She said she absolutely did not believe that after two thousand years a white man was going to come back from his own lynching to help out Clara Williams or take her hand or be her friend.

When I had started having trouble with my skin, she said, I went out and got the names of doctors and I lay under special lights and bought jars of gray powder and a bottle of blue paste that burned so bad, I cried just opening the jar. You know what I didn’t do? she said. Pray. I know your momma left you, she said. I left my mother. I had a pretty voice and ugly skin and I thought my best bet was a world of pink lights and heavy makeup. You know what my mother did when I told her I was going? She gave me five dollars and a ham sandwich and she went to church. What’d your mother give you, she said.

My mother left me a suitcase, I said. That was all I’d ever said, and “a suitcase” was always enough to get me a kind look from whoever I was telling. Francisco had practically burst into tears when I told him.

What was in the suitcase, Clara said.

I described my two white blouses, my cardigan, the two sets of underwear, and two pairs of socks. There was my brush-and-comb set and my nicest hair ribbons. I said that she hadn’t left me a photograph of herself or of the two of us.

That’s right, Clara said. She was saying to you, Look ahead, not behind.

THE DOORBELL RANG AGAIN.

“Oligodendroglioma” is what the doctor said. Iris sat with us for that and listened while we told the doctor everything: the new language and his all-day headaches and now the vomiting and his bowels and his right side entirely paralyzed and sleeping most of the day. The doctor said, Yes, that’s what this tumor is like. And he said, He didn’t learn a new language, you know. Whatever that is, it’s the tongue of his childhood.

Mamaloshen is the word he was looking for.

15 Harbor Lights

I SMELLED SMOKE. I RAN INTO MY SISTER’S EMPTY ROOM AND heard Iris screaming outside, on the patch of lawn near the kitchen door. I should have gone to Danny, or to my helpless father, but I ran downstairs. There were no flames anywhere. Smoky threads rose from Reenie and Iris, rolling on the grass as one person. Iris rose up on one knee and Reenie lay on the grass, crying out weakly. I ran into the house and called the ambulance. Then I carried Danny to my father’s room and lay him in bed next to Edgar.

“Vos?” he said. “Vu?”

I wrapped Edgar’s arms around Danny.

“Just keep him here,” I said. “We’re fine.”

“Of course,” he said. He shifted over. “Looks like a nice kid.”

I heard the sirens and ran back downstairs. In the red and blue flashing lights, three big men in white jackets put Reenie on a stretcher. I wanted to say, Save my sister, but Iris wasn’t dying. She was calling Reenie’s name.

I’m here, I kept saying. Iris was weeping and panting as they put Reenie into the ambulance. Two of the big men came beside us.

“Now, you, miss,” the biggest man said to Iris. “Easy does it.”

I touched her warm hair.

“Let me die,” Iris said.

The big man nodded gently and the other two put her on the stretcher and shut the ambulance door behind her.

“You can follow,” the man said to me. “Lenox Hill Hospital.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t drive.”

MR. AND MRS. TORELLI came down the gravel drive, in their thick bathrobes and velvet slippers. Mrs. Torelli put her arm around me and asked me what had happened. I said there was a fire but it didn’t spread and she said, Thank God. Mr. Torelli asked me where they were taking them and he said that Lenox Hill Hospital was a good hospital, with good doctors. My cousin’s a doctor, he said. I’ll give him a call tomorrow. Mrs. Torelli pushed back my hair. You’re gonna want a shower, she said. I could see the soot on her hands.

I looked in on my father and Danny, heads together on my father’s big pillow. The kitchen had black streaks above the stove and toward the door and a pot of sauce splashed over the floor. I cleaned the floor and washed the pot. I shut the door to the kitchen. Mrs. Torelli would pay someone to fix it. I threw my smoky pajamas in the garbage. I took a shower and watched the gray water pool around my dirty feet. I used Iris’s special chestnut shampoo and her rosewater face cream and I wrapped myself in her pretty blue robe. This is the Tower, I thought.

Letter from Iris

7 Queensberry Place

South Ken, London

April 1947

Dear Eva,

One of Carnie’s ladies has caught up with me in London. She knows that you and I are sisters and that I am on the stage, which she finds thrilling. She is no longer a smart young lady from East Brooklyn (talk about your jumbo shrimp!) but is now a VIL–Very Important Lesbian — around town. She called on me to give a little hometown news and to get some Hollywood stories from me. I sang for my supper with stories of Mr. Thalberg getting frisky with his cigar and Garbo not wearing underpants and being a complete cow — all true. So, Diana Lapidus, as was, tells me that you’re well and happy and still reading palms. She said, with much wink, wink, nudge, nudge that she hears you have a son, and I assume this is Danny. It must be Danny; you wouldn’t have gotten rid of him — although you might have wanted to. He was not going to be the handsomest or easiest child. I could be mistaken, of course.

Let me start again. I was thinking about the two big trips we took, Ohio to Hollywood, Hollywood to Brooklyn. On my way up, on my way down.

I know I am leaving out the big middle.

I have this dream about once a week. I take Nembutal sometimes and then I have just the remains of the dream, the watery marks it leaves on me and the bed.

In the dream, you and I are dancing to “We’re in the Money.” Do you remember this? When you first came to live with us (and wasn’t that a pip? I don’t think there was another man in the world who would have said to his sixteen-year-old, recently bereaved daughter, “Yes, dammit, stop bothering me. Obviously, she’s your sister. Now you have someone to play duets with.” Didn’t he just take the cake?), from time to time, you’d do a whole routine from Gold Diggers of 1933. I don’t know what possessed you, but you were much better than the eyeglasses and cut-in-the kitchen hair had led me to expect. You had done the routine with your mother, I think. Or for her. I never got the feeling that your mother was an artiste.

First you did the parade from “Remember My Forgotten Man,” which was hilarious. You marched across the living room, changing hats, helmet to newsie to baseball cap, and then you froze for a second, eyes down, hands in pockets, to demonstrate the plight of homelessness. Suddenly, you lifted your chin like a mad chorine and did the tap dance that the girls in the gold-coin hats had done. We did that number together, once, right before we left Ohio. The Rotarians’ annual talent show, first prize, one-hundred-dollar bond. I made us gold hats, and Mrs. Drysdale (that fat widow next door, who always had her eye on Edgar?) gave me yards of gold braid and we sewed it onto the lapels and cuffs of our blazers. I put pancake on your legs and mine and I wouldn’t let you wear socks with the tap shoes because it wasn’t sophisticated. You had blisters like grapes after, and I’m sorry. I couldn’t figure out how to make those gold-coin bottoms, so we wore short skirts with gold-ball fringe, also courtesy of Mrs. Drysdale, who would have done anything for Edgar’s approval. Poor old thing, I never said a word to Edgar. Of course, we didn’t tell him about the show, and two days later we were on the bus with every bond and dollar bill I’d hidden away.

In the dream, we’re tap-dancing to “We’re in the Money” and we are too, too marvelous. “We’re in the money, come on my honey, look up, the skies are sunny …” We are shimmering, from our gold caps and gold capelets to the gold lamé halter tops down to the giant paillettes of our short shorts and our gold tap shoes. We are Ginger Rogers vulgar and cheerful. We are like white-girl Nicholas Brothers — sharp and sexy, fearless and exuberant. We are not trying to please, we are the Gods of Pleasure, and lucky them who get to see us. We leap from tabletops onto piano tops and then back downstage, light bouncing off our gold coins, gold sweat flying. We come down two long gold staircases, on opposite sides, and dance downstage once more. I give you a twirl, you give me one, and we hold it — I hear myself whispering to you, One, Two, Three, Four, and the camera — I now see we’re in a movie and this is the final shot, a long shot of our bodies, behind a fountain of gold coins, filling the screen.

It would be great if the dream ended here.

In the dream, I’m in a restaurant, just like real life that night when I met Mr. Fox and Mr. Fletcher at Sardi’s after the show. They said I had star potential and they wanted to offer me something big. That’s what hooked me. Directors may be complicated and intellectual (you couldn’t prove it by me) but actors are so simple. Give us the good stuff and we’ll follow you anywhere. Genuine praise (not the “Darling, how do you do it?”), sincere gushing from someone important and not on our payroll and not in our bed and we do whatever you want us to, sucking in that reefer, fucking that donkey. Sorry.

In the dream, Fox and Fletcher are in green suits and I am sitting between them. The table is covered with food, which is not how it was. I didn’t want to seem, one, impressed, two, unladylike, three, presumptuous, so I ordered a small steak, a green salad, and a glass of red wine. They kept saying, Have the shrimp, how about lobster thermidor, and I thought, Not yet, I won’t. In the dream, just like in real life, I am thrilled and suspicious. I had this kind of dinner in Hollywood, and look how that turned out. In the dream, it’s like Rome before the fall: small birds stuffed with glazed, glimmering things. Everything surrounded by frosted grapes and vegetables carved into flowers, a jeroboam of Champagne in a giant bucket (finally saw one this past year, at New Year’s — huge), and two rings of enormous shrimp hanging off a crystal bowl and all facing right, like the Esther Williams swimmers.

In the dream, I drive home with the crystal bowl of shrimp on the passenger seat. This is what I really did want to do. There was a big bowl of shrimp on the table, and I wanted to bring some home to Reenie. She would have made scampi for us, or we would have just sat up and devoured them at the kitchen table. In real life, I didn’t say much to Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Fox that evening, Thanks for the swell meal and the compliments and the expression of serious interest. In the dream, I say thank you and I keep looking at the truly enormous shrimp, thinking about how pleased Reenie will be with them, and me.

In the dream, just like it was in real life, Reenie is waiting up for me, in her pink kimono, with her hair piled up on her head. In the dream, she’s happy to see me, her eyes are sparkling. In real life, she was steaming. It was the way it always was when I came back late. She yelled that she didn’t leave Gus (which is not how I would describe it but …) so she could be my mistress. She didn’t turn her back on her church and her family so she could be my dirty little secret. Once she threw a plate at the wall and once she broke my tortoiseshell sunglasses. I go toward her, to say I’m sorry — and I am sorry but I did think that a little discretion wouldn’t kill us and I was not prepared to have Messers. Fletcher and Fox over for a home-cooked meal in the carriage house with Danny yelling for Mama, and you and Edgar playing dominoes in the front room.

The dream is no different from real life, at this point. Reenie did have a pot of sauce on the stove. She did say, I wasn’t gonna start cooking till you walked in the door. I’m not sitting down to cold food anymore. I did say, Honey, I ate. She lit a cigarette off the stove, and I won’t ever know what she was about to say. A rope of flame leaped from the burner to the end of her hand and wrapped around her chest and shoulders like a blue-and-orange curtain, like a bit of stagecraft pulling her up to the fly loft. Fire ran down the back of her robe. I started screaming and pulled Reenie out of the kitchen, rolling her around and around on the damp grass, until my hands were too burned to be of any use and Reenie had stopped screaming.

In the dream, just like in real life, the yard is dark, no light except for the porch lamp. I can hear Reenie breathing. Her whole body was black and red and ash, a deep shadow on the dark grass in the black night. I’m glad that I can’t see her clearly, although I feel her hair on my arm. I can’t feel my hands. They hang like red, blackened meat from my wrists. My fingers flutter like thick ribbons.

In the dream, the light from the porch fades until I can’t see a thing. Edgar sleeps through everything. You come running downstairs in my fancy green silk nightgown, crying, reaching for me. There’s no Danny. He’s not missing. It’s like he never was.

In real life, the last thing I saw was you beside me in your pink pajamas, fumbling with your glasses. You told me later that Edgar and Danny slept through the whole thing.

I don’t think I was at Reenie’s funeral. I hope it was lovely. I hope someone sang “Night and Day,” because that was our song. I imagine the funeral was while I was in the hospital. Lucky us, that there were Torellis who specialized in things other than perfect fruits and vegetables. Dr. Andrew Torelli, taller and presumably smarter than Joe Torelli, was on his way to being a big man in burns and trauma at Columbia Presbyterian. Did you meet him? In my recollection, I was alone in the hospital most of the time. Dr. Torelli checked my hands where the burns were worst and he said the best person for this kind of damage was Dr. Arthur Litton, who practiced in England, where they saw a lot of this during the war. Dr. Torelli had studied under Litton at Columbia. The Torellis had a driver take me to the airport and to the gate. My hands were essentially useless and everyone did everything for me on the plane, although I could turn pages with the outside edge of my left palm and I could hold a cup between my forearms. I drank cups of gin for eight hours and someone took me to Queen Victoria Hospital, and there, in short, I recovered use of my hands. In not so short, eight months of exfoliating and grafts that didn’t take and physical therapy the likes of which you have only seen in reenactments of Mary, Queen of Scots’s imprisonment. The nurses were thoroughly bovine or as tough as the pilots they cared for (and I knew, and they told me, that they were there to take care of the airmen. I told everyone that I’d been burned while trying to save my sister, who died, and that did get me some sympathy). At night, I wept over Reenie and my hands. A nurse gave me hot milk with a little codeine for the first two months and then she saw I liked it and cut me off, saying, Enough, meaning enough codeine, enough grieving, and probably, that she’d had enough of me.

Dr. Litton was young and smart and second in command. Dr. McIndoe was the great man, and the savior of the RAF and other burned pilots. I met Dr. McIndoe once, and when he saw I was not a pilot, had my whole face, use of my legs and at least eight distinct fingers (as opposed to the slabs of pink patty so many of the men had), he lost interest. “ ‘Not my cup of tea,’ as the chorus girl said to the vicar.” He let me stay at the hospital, anyway.

The airmen gave me hope. I doubt that most of them had started out as exceptional. They started out young and patriotic and full of that masculine excitement over testing themselves and, generally, full of themselves. They had a Guinea Pig Club (named for Dr. McIndoe’s endless, often successful, experimenting on their limbs and faces) and they got used to me. Boys with half-faces, skin like red fungus from neck to hip or legless and rolling their wheelchairs to bring me a beer because the Guinea Pig Club was celebrating something. We celebrated Fridays. We celebrated that no one had died this week. That William Best had been offered a job in the office of British Airways. That Tom Marshall’s glass eye fit like a charm, after three bad ones. I loved being their girl, and I sang my heart out for the Guinea Pig Club on every occasion. I gave them Noël Coward like they’d never had before, and I gave them the last of the red-hot mamas, complete with patter, and I cannot tell you how much I wish that everything I learned there stayed with me. You know, the crisis passes, the crucible cools, and there we are, slightly improved, not much altered. I expressed gratitude every day and I tried to be charming, as we’d had enough money only to cover the first month of my treatments.

How are you? How is Danny?

Peace in our time.

Iris, the Singing Guinea Pig of Queen Victoria Hospital

16 After You’ve Gone

IN THE DAYS AFTER REENIE DIED, I MOVED AS FAST AS I COULD. My plan was to help everyone, but sorrow made me deaf and blind and awkward. I poked Danny in the ear with a comb when I tried to fix his hair. I dropped scrambled eggs on my father’s bare chest, because Clara wasn’t around to feed him. I tripped getting the mail and skinned both my knees. Danny ducked when he saw me coming. I didn’t understand why I kept falling over. It was much worse, and more awkward, than my worrying. Worrying was my nature. My father had been a beaker of etiquette and big ideas, Iris was a vase of glamour, and I was the little brown jug of worry. I worried about my father, almost immobile except for the tiny tremors and startling, meaningless gestures. I worried about Iris, because the last time I saw her she was being shoved screaming into an ambulance, smelling like charred meat. I worried about Danny, because I had no choice. Clara, who could have shared the worrying and helped with Danny, was on tour for another three weeks. By the time she came back, I planned to have nothing to say to her. She would beg me to tell her about this difficult time; she’d put both of her hands over mine and I’d turn my back on her. Oh, it’s over now, I’d say.

Telling Danny that Reenie was dead, that Iris was in for a long recovery in a hospital somewhere, and that the person taking care of him for now and the indefinite future, was me, was the worst day of my life. I would rather have been left on that porch, sick to my stomach, watching my mother motor down an endless road, for every day of my life than ever relive, or even recall, telling Danny his mother was dead.

His mouth opened and closed a couple of times and he looked up at the ceiling. He smiled, as if this were one of our odd, grown-up jokes, the kind he didn’t get but always wanted to. His face stretched and reddened around his wide, painful smile and then he turned his face away from me and cried, pressing himself into the back of the couch. Oh, how could we, I thought.

I am so sorry, I said. I am so sorry. I am so sorry we let this happen. I know I’m not at all the person you want taking care of you. I don’t blame you. I know I am no kind of mother at all but I will try. Danny, I swear to God, I will not leave you and I will try.

Try, he said and we lay down on the floor, crying over what we didn’t have.

REENIE’S FUNERAL WAS JUST four days later and short and small. I let Father Dom preside because who was there to object but me, and I didn’t have the energy. Mrs. Torelli made the arrangements. Francisco came, to represent, and the five of us sat in the smaller chapel of the Torellis’ church on Middle Neck Road and Father Dom spoke kindly, and even warmly, about Reenie and her loveliness and her devotion to the Torellis (leaving out Iris and glossing over Gus, the German spy). He focused on Danny, which I appreciated, and on God’s will, which was appalling, as my father would have said. He wrapped it all up in a half hour. I thanked the Torellis and Francisco and I took Danny out for ice cream.

The next day, the Torellis had brought over a basket of fruit for me to deliver to Iris, for when she got out of her coma at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. All the Diegos came to take me there. If I’d been left alone, making sure Danny caught the bus and that my father didn’t fall out of bed, I might have been so busy, I wouldn’t have gone to see Iris at all. Carnie banged on the door at 7 A.M. I told her I couldn’t really drop everything to drive over to the hospital. She picked up the Torelli basket and handed me my loafers. Danny stood in the doorway of his room, pulling on his lip, which drove me crazy.

Let’s put on our shoes, I said. I found his Raggedy Andy doll and most of his bagel and we all went to the hospital, Danny on my arm like a barnacle.

Bea kept Danny in the hospital cafeteria. (“What can you do?” she said. “Reenie’s dead. Iris is a mess. Who needs to see that? You have to, he doesn’t.”) Carnie and Francisco stepped back to let me go into Iris’s room first, to find a way to hug my sister gently, but with great feeling. My great feeling was that this was all a bad dream, that it was impossible that Reenie, adored by Danny and Iris, was dead and gone. I hadn’t loved her but I had liked her and she had taken care of Danny and made my sister happy and that was, pretty much, good enough for me.

Iris opened her left eye (the right side of her face and neck was layered with gauze and tape), and even that did not look like my sister’s eye. That bright, sometimes acid, leaf-green light had gone out of it. Francisco kissed Iris’s forehead, and I did the same. Carnie sat at the foot of the bed. She told Iris a few stories about hijinks at La Bella Donna. I sorted everything in the basket and made a tower of the chocolates. I peeled a tangerine. Francisco said that I was taking care of everything at home, not that it was all on my shoulders, but I was doing a great job and Iris didn’t have to worry about a thing. Iris closed her eye. Carnie went to relieve Bea and Francisco said, You need to rest. I’ll leave you girls alone. He took the tangerine and went into the hall. He didn’t come back.

I walked around the room. You know, I said, I thought it was better Danny didn’t come in and see you like this. Iris nodded and the tubes taped to her chest and the cocoons on her arms and shoulders moved slightly. I said, We probably have a month at the Torellis. They need a butler and a cook and a governess. And I don’t think Danny and I can cover those bases. Iris closed her eye.

We sat for a few moments and she opened her eye again.

She mouthed the word Reenie.

“Can I touch you here?” I said, and I rested my hand on her left leg. She nodded. “I thought someone would have told you.”

Iris held my eye, furiously.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “They did everything they could for her. She was … she wasn’t … she was not alive by the time she got to the hospital.”

She mouthed the words I know.

“You know? You mean you already knew?”

Iris nodded.

“Does it help to have me tell you?” I said.

“No,” she said.

ON THE WAY HOME, Francisco let Bea drive and he sat in the back with me, with Danny sprawled across us, half asleep. Francisco told me that when Iris’s hands were healed, he had some tricks to help her, to make her hands look pretty. In the backseat shadow, he traced designs and contouring on my hand. (You shade the tips of the fingers in pearl, he said, so they catch the light. The burned areas, if there are any, you layer with a sheer foundation and then a peach one and then you use just a little brown to slim the fingers. Plus, she has to wear nail polish, always, to make her hands look finished.)

Iris was in the special burn unit for another two weeks. The Torellis sent more fruit baskets, to her, and to me. Danny and I ate fancy pears and ginger cookies and Golden Delicious apples, and I have to say that he never asked for a decent meal. I figured that when he lay in bed, praying in his mysterious way, he asked God: What kind of people steal you from your life, however miserable, and give you a better life, however peculiar, and then take it away, just when you’ve just gotten a tiny bit comfortable?

Every morning, I fed my father poached eggs and jam from the little jars tucked into the fruit baskets and then I took Danny to school. I quit going to La Bella Donna, even though I knew that wasn’t the smart thing to do, and looked after my father, who didn’t really need anything except a milk shake and a bedpan. I didn’t have it in me to tell women what might happen to them.

I’d walk to Danny’s school and sit outside his classroom until the bell rang. We’d take the bus into town and go shopping for things we liked. I stole nail polish for me and Captain Marvel comics for him. We bought ice cream cones at Kriegel’s and walked over to Grace Avenue Park to do my nails and read. We watched the kids play. When it got a little cooler and darker the kids went home and Danny and I put our goods in my bag and we played on every piece of equipment, and perfected a standing double on the slide and then we took the bus home, for our fruit and cheese and cookie dinner.

I don’t know who visited Iris. Even though I think that I am, really, in the red cul-de-sac at the bottom of my heart, a better person than Iris, I know that if it’d been me in that hospital, she would have slept in the chair beside my bed.

17 Hitler Has Only Got One Ball

Letter from Gus

Pforzheim

January 2, 1945

Heil Hitler! Just kidding. People here salute all different ways.

Fick dich and the horse you rode in on. Or, Mein Gott, when will this war be over? Or, You can have my sister if we can have your chicken. Or, What are you looking at, Hurensohn? (SOB, to you.) Or, I’m doing my best here — don’t shoot me or steal from me or turn me in. (I’m working on that last one. I hope it will keep us alive.)

The little girls Sieg Heil! like you wouldn’t believe. If this country weren’t being strafed, shit on, and starved, we’d have to take them downtown and buy them little Bund Deutscher Mädel outfits. BDM is like the Girl Scouts — if the Girl Scouts gave badges for Jew-killing and world domination. The girls goose-step around the little square of dirt in front of the house all morning. I don’t discourage them. I’m hoping their enthusiasm makes us look good. Greta just flaps her hand up at the wrist and looks away.

Her aunt and uncle are decent people, what we think people in the old country should be. Salt of the earth. We’ve got no butter, no chickens, and no gas. The old man tinkers with this and that, sharpens knives, and does a little black market in cigarettes when he can. The aunt cleans the kitchen twice a day and makes potatoes sixteen ways. Occasionally, there’s a mashed turnip that we could use to patch tires, if we had tires. These people wish we’d never come. The old lady hisses when I come into the kitchen. We make the girls play outside until their lips are blue. But the aunt and uncle share their dinner with us every night and twice, the old man and I have hitched out to a farm so I could fix some prehistoric tractor. Most mornings, we just keep walking until someone with a few eggs needs a knife sharpened.

They lost two sons on the Russian front. They don’t know where their third boy is. I haven’t seen another man in Pforzheim with all his limbs, and under forty. There’s a young guy up the road and he gets around with a cart on four wheels, like a kid’s wagon but big enough to accommodate a grown man. He must have been six-two when he had legs. We’re friendly, and sometimes, after a few shots, Hans asks me to tell him the story of our coming to Germany. He laughs until he cries and sometimes I do too.

There’s no work for me in town. There were watchmakers and jewelers on every corner and now there’s nothing.

January 28, 1945

We got bombed for the first time last night. Greta was throwing dishwater in the yard because the drain was backed up and I was pulling the curtains. The girls stood on the porch, calling the cat. The bombs started falling and the girls looked up. I don’t think they knew what they were seeing or hearing. The alarm screamed out and we hustled down to the cellar. I carried Carolyn, Greta took Anna and the old people, and the cat hurried down behind us. The lights went out. We slept in the cellar, in the smoke. In the morning, Uncle Horst and I pulled down the back door and what was left of the kitchen. We are all fine.

Your pal, Gus

GUS AND HANS LISTENED to the radio address of Marshal Harris, from London. The marshal said, “It should be emphasized the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale … are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories.”

The man was as good as his word, Gus thought.

DRESDEN HAPPENED TEN DAYS before Pforzheim. Herr Altmann’s brother drove his old truck three hundred miles from the outskirts of Dresden, where there were still some roads, to Pforzheim. Gus helped him out of the truck and he made the girls play in the yard while Greta changed the dirty bandages around the old man’s neck and ear. He talked for an hour, and Greta translated for Gus. The center of Dresden was destroyed. He’d driven past piles of rubble taller than the people who came out from the cellars. He said the rubble was brick, stone, bicycle frames, burning tires, wood framing, people’s coats and hats and shoes, and underneath and in between that, people. He said he passed dead people without a mark on them; they’d died from asphyxiation. Gus asked Greta if she was sure that’s what the man was saying. Greta said, I’m sure. His name is Klaus, Greta said, and Gus shook his hand.

GUS HERDED THE THREE elderly Altmanns and Greta and Carolyn and Anna in and out of the cellars six times in two days, with small bombs falling and small planes flying low overhead. Gus asked Greta to ask Klaus if this was how Dresden had started. Klaus said no — Dresden had started with a bang, and Gus and Klaus laughed in the cellar.

After the first round of bombs, Gus and Klaus and Herr Altmann drove the old truck around parts of Pforzheim to view the damage and see if there was anything they could do. They saw half-buildings, walls with window spaces, transoms without doors beneath them. A church spire lay in the street, leaning up against the library, closing off the road. A nurse ran under it. At one house, flames were still running up and down the house like imps, having blown out the windows and opened the roof.

They drove home, and the bombs fell as they got out of the truck. Girls, into the cellar, Gus yelled. Greta, mach hinne! He felt the fire roll down the steps, old wood or dirt steps, into the cellar, right behind him and the girls. Jars of cherry preserves exploded. The cellar lights blinked and flared up and then snapped into darkness. The bombs stopped and Anna stood up and stamped her feet, to get out. Klaus said, Sometimes when people run to get out of the cellar, they burn their hands and arms on the metal hasps. Gus wrapped his hand in his coat and pushed the door open, just two inches. He found the world on fire. Light rained down. It lit up the sky like the town had done on New Year’s and the light pooled, still bright and burning, on the cold ground. Blood-orange flames spread through their yard and through their iron fence.

For three days, ashes fell like snow. Gus kept the girls in and they watched the flakes coming down and drifting up. All the German women Gus knew collected something; his mother and his grandmother collected snowbabies, Schneebabies. His mother had loved the ones with a prickly white bisque all over them, only their pink, smooth china cheeks and dark eyes visible. Schneeflocken. Snow-covered. Everything around what was left of the house was schneeflocken. There was one last series of bombs, for most of a day. His family lay in the cellar for hours, on the dirt, their coats on top of the broken glass, as the sky thundered and the rest of the house blew apart and the floor above them rolled up, like an old rug. When Gus came to, all three of the Altmanns lay dead, side by side, near the cellar steps. Anna and Carolyn had died next to Gus, arms and legs out wide, like starfish. He couldn’t find Greta’s body.

Afterward, people said more died in Dresden than in Pforzheim. More died in Tokyo than in Dresden, Gus said, and who cares. Before he left Pforzheim, Gus walked to his friend Hans’s house. Hans’s body was still in his yard, his arms around his mother. The four wagon wheels lay on them like wreaths.