Lucky Us

18 Going Home, Going Home

I HAD BEEN GONE FROM THE SALON FOR WEEKS. I WAS BROKE again and couldn’t borrow from anyone. As my father would have said, if he could talk, One should only take advantage of those who can afford it. I told Danny he had to start taking the bus home, and I went back to work. When I finished reading the cards for Mrs. Russo and her never-returning husband and made contact with Mrs. Rubio’s son, lost at sea, Bea said, Stay for a drink. Francisco came into the salon with a box of cookies. Bea said, Looky here. We love you. That Danny is a nice little boy. He’s funny, Carnie said. Guess what, she said. Bea, here, got married last week. She and that Artie eloped, like a couple of kids.

I said that was a wonderful surprise, and then Carnie said, You could say that — she’s got a miracle bun in the oven. Oh, I’ll look like a beached whale by Thanksgiving, Bea said. And did Carnie tell you? She’s being chased all over East Brooklyn by a dentist with a little girl. Dead wife, not divorced. He’s nice, Carnie said. Rabinowitz.

I said I was glad for both of them. I said they’d done plenty for us and no one could have done more. That card table, I said. You set me up in business. You and Mrs. Vandor. We still don’t know what had happened to Mrs. Vandor, Carnie said. Life’s a mystery. I think she ran off with her piano teacher, Mr. Shmottlach. Bea nodded. That’s what we think. Good-looking guy. Foreign.

Can I keep reading cards here? I said. They looked embarrassed. Of course, Carnie said. No one’s throwing you out. We’re just saying things have changed, so we can’t take the two of you in and we wish we could.

Francisco would — he loves you like a daughter (You know what she means, Carnie said) and he really likes Danny — but he has his hands full. I understand, I said. Bea and Carnie made big eyes and they looked over at Francisco and shook their heads. He has his hands full, they both said, with setting up a new barbershop in Penn Station, with a manicurist and a shoeshine stand. (Inside the shop, Bea said. You know he’s smart.)

I said that was great and Francisco said his sisters had been generous in backing him and they both thanked him for thanking them and then everyone looked around and we all had some cookies.

This is where you want someone, a Mrs. Vandor or a Charlotte Acton, to grab the plate of cookies and say, Aren’t these marvelous?

Also, Bea said, Francisco’s got his hands full at home too. Carnie looked like she wanted to cry. I have a boy staying with me, Francisco said. He’s straight from Mexico, he’s a hard worker, and he’s staying with me until he gets on his feet. Your little taco de ojo, Carnie said, and they were off and running in Mexican but quietly, until Francisco slammed his hand on the table and the sisters shut up. It’s just for a while, Francisco said. Believe me, I know what you know, he said to his sisters. I’m teaching him English. Carnie said, You’re cooking for him. I am, Francisco said. I cook for him and I play conquian with him. Yes, Encarnación, we do play cards. It’s shocking, I know. He sleeps on the couch. Jorge is a beautiful boy, Francisco said. He’s beautiful and I’m not a fool. He starts night school in two weeks.

Carnie rolled her eyes and said, We’ll see. And we did see. Jorge went to night school and he met an Anglo girl named Gracie Shreve from Long Island City and he brought her to Francisco for his blessing. They married and Francisco went to the wedding and hung pictures of Gracie and Jorge slicing the cake, of Francisco and the Shreves lifting their glasses, of Francisco waltzing with the bride. Gracie sent a card every Christmas, with a picture of her and Jorge and their two little boys, all looking very well, and Francisco put them up on the mirrors of the barbershop, near the framed photographs of Francisco and Mayors La Guardia and O’Dwyer.

Francisco sighed and put his hand on my shoulder. I’ve got something for you in my car, he said. Before you go. In the car, he rummaged around and found a brush-and-comb set with fire trucks on it for Danny and some rhinestone combs for his sisters. We went back into the salon, and Bea and Carnie were sitting still, arms flung on my tarot table like they’d been shot in the back.

“It’s the president,” Carnie said. “He’s dead.”

“In Warm Springs,” Bea said. “Ah, he’s dead. Who killed him? Our president.”

Francisco pulled me onto the dirty velvet couch. I cried in his arms and Bea and Carnie cried in each other’s arms and we all sat around the table and wept and listened to the radio, which reported every detail of the president’s aneurism and his collapse and the moment he said, “I’m afraid I have a terrific headache.” We could all imagine him saying it, that plummy, patrician voice that managed to be the voice of people who never spoke that way, never dressed that way, never went to a single place Franklin Delano Roosevelt had ever been, and he spoke for the three of us.

“I have to get Danny,” I said. “Do you think the school told the kids?”

Francisco said, “You tell Danny the president was a great man. You make sure, no matter what some lying, Republican schoolteacher pendejo tells him, that your little boy knows we won’t see another like that man. You tell him.”

“We all have to go home,” Bea said, and she turned out the lights.

People were driving all over the road, and on the shoulders. I passed men driving toward the city with tears streaming down their faces. I could see the people on the buses above me, white handkerchiefs pressed against dark faces. I picked Danny up and he was shaking. I told him what Francisco told me to say and when we got home, the two of us got into my bed and listened to the radio all night. I missed my sister, then.

OUR OWN FUTURE, BY which I mean mine and Danny’s, was not so clear and, where clear, not so rosy. We’d moved. The Torellis were as good to us as anyone could ask. I certainly hope that if I found myself with a lot of money, four children, and a big house on the water and my butler fell ill and my cook died and my kids’ governess hightailed it to England, that I would be as generous and patient with the survivors as the Torellis were. But I doubt it. Mrs. Torelli said we could take the living room couch and the hutch and the pots and pans and she handed me an envelope with two months’ rent for a small house on Old Tree Lane. She’d found it through the new maid’s sister and put a deposit down before I ever saw it, which was reasonable. I was eighteen and taking care of a sick old man and an eight- or nine-year-old boy I hardly knew, making my living as a fortune-teller in East Brooklyn, and I wasn’t likely to say, No, thank you, not quite, let’s keep looking. Mrs. Torelli said good-bye to us pretty much the way she’d said hello — kind and a little surprised to find herself in our company. Mr. Torelli had had plenty of experience with damaged goods and the wishes and hopes of all his scheming cousins, and my guess is that he knew us by the end. He stood in the fork of the driveway and watched Ozzie Patterson carry my father like a pile of firewood and plant him head up and feet down in the back of his car. I carried down carton after carton, like an ox on a muddy hill, and when I was about to go upstairs for a final sweep, Mr. Torelli gave me a fifty-dollar bill.

“My mother died when I was eight,” he said. “Good luck to you.”

I packed Danny into the car with his Tinkertoys and Raggedy Andy and the pilot’s jacket Reenie had given him for his last birthday. I stood in the big, curving driveway and wished what I always wished, that I could turn left and go to the Torellis’, instead of taking a quick right to the carriage house. Clara waited for us at the new house, sipping a cold drink at the kitchen table and supervising Ozzie’s idiot cousin (her words, not mine) in unloading our beds from the Sears truck, a gift from Ozzie Patterson. The Sears driver was Negro. Our next-door neighbors on both sides were Negro too. The old man across the street was white and sat on his porch, smoking and watching. Little Ruthie Post, Danny’s dearest friend, who lived only a couple of blocks away, sauntered past (always as if she’d been touring her estate and just happened to pass our cottage) and invited Danny to walk her to the park, so he missed the tearful shifting and unloading of my father, of our few furnishings, of Reenie’s clothes, which were too big for me, and of Iris’s clothes, which I refused to send her.

OZZIE CARRIED EDGAR TO the attic and tucked him in, and when he came down, he washed up and offered Clara his arm. They left. I cleaned hard for the rest of the day and then gave up for a good, long time. I made pancakes for me and Danny and soft scrambled eggs for my father. I sat with Danny while he prayed to Saint Joseph of Cupertino and he let me kiss him goodnight, in his new bedroom, with the new bed and airplane-shaped rug, courtesy of Ozzie Patterson and his devotion to Clara.

I went back to the attic to sit by my father. His brain tumor was killing him. He wouldn’t get better and he wouldn’t die. People say that even if the dying seem not to hear you, they do. After a few nights at the new house, while changing a bedpan, I told him, “It’s all right — you can let go.” My father must have heard this as a call to arms. He rallied. He started opening his eyes for a few hours every day and muttering in Yiddish. Clara said we (meaning I) should get someone who spoke Yiddish to encourage Edgar, and I did. I found Bernie Smedresman of Bernard’s Fine Dry Cleaning. Mr. Smedresman was short, round, unstoppably kind. He was a bowling ball of good will. He brought the bagels and accoutrements, and sometimes Clara and Ozzie stopped by for bagels and lox. Mr. Smedresman brought herring in cream sauce, but only Ozzie tried that.

Falling in love with Ozzie Patterson didn’t stop Clara from directing my father’s care. She supervised what I cooked for him and when I fed him and she made it clear that I would now be giving him his sponge baths, not her. And I thanked her every day, just for showing up. Twenty minutes after my father died, she’d be gone, in a puff of smoke and a shimmer of silk, and I didn’t blame her. She came most mornings to make herself a cup of coffee, kiss my father on the forehead, sing a few songs to him, and come downstairs to smoke a couple of cigarettes and laugh at me. What a mess, she’d say. A baby with a baby. She’d poke Danny in the back, telling him to stand up straight and be polite, telling him no girl wanted a mealy-mouthed, hunchbacked boyfriend. She’d hand him a comic book and me her red lipstick. Fix yourself up and eat a decent meal, she said. God knows, the way you look now, you got to get up twice to cast a shadow.

THE WAR ENDED. THE blackout drills were over and the streetlights came on. We hadn’t ever kept the garden hose, metal buckets, and long-handled shovel we were supposed to have at our house. I didn’t have anything more than a broom, a sponge, and a box of borax. We didn’t even have a ladder, and when Danny threw a ball on the roof, I had to climb past my father, out the attic window, and get it while Danny told me to be careful. The Victory parade went up Middle Neck Road, from All Saints’ Church to the green, on January 12, just like the big one in the city. We had two drum majors leading the band from the Merchant Marine Academy, and high school girls handing out flowers and flags, and a jeep covered in red roses, carrying three soldiers, waving stoically. The ministers and a priest and a rabbi stood in the gazebo on the lawn behind the library and read the names of our dead. Danny and I cheered for the living and cried for the dead, like everyone else. I hoped that Gus was in the first category, but I doubted it.

If you’d asked me what I understood about fortune-telling, I would have told you that no one came to see someone like me because they were happy. I would have said, People come because they are so frightened, they wake up in a sweat. They look into the well of their true selves, and the consequences of being who they are, and they’re horrified. They run to my little table to have me say that what they see is not what will happen.

The end of the war turned everything upside down. (Maybe not for the Germans and the Japanese, but they weren’t coming to my little table.) People were getting married and having babies and buying houses, going to school and getting divorced, all double-time. Aside from the two grieving Gold Star Mothers who came every week, to see if I could give them a reason to live, the women at La Bella Donna came to ask me about the future, not the past, and they were not taking no for an answer. A friend of Mrs. Russo’s came by to say that she was thinking of moving back to Pennsylvania without her husband. I’ve got a farmhouse there, she said. And friends. What do the cards say about that? One woman came to me, a new bride. All she wanted to hear was how many boys, how many girls, and would she be pregnant by Christmas. Two of each, I said, and absolutely.

When the soldiers came back, business boomed for the car dealers and the beauty parlors and for me.

Francisco and I had found a pair of rooms for my little business on Danny’s first day of school. Francisco kept muttering, High traffic, low rent, easy parking, and he found what he was looking for. He’d negotiated my low rent with a man his age and size and when they finished, they smoked their cigars on the back step. Who’d you say I was, I asked. You’re my youngest daughter, he said. Plus, you have a gift, just like my late wife, may she rest in peace. You won’t charge him for a reading, if he ever wants one and you lock up by eight o’clock. No funny business.

We carried up my shepherdess lamp and two small chairs and the folding table I brought back from La Bella Donna. (Take the chairs, Carnie said. Take the tablecloth too, Bea said. Good luck, honey, they cried out from the steps of La Bella Donna.) We bought four fat safety candles from the hardware store and covered the furniture with pieces of Iris’s old dresses (lace over black silk for the table and green velveteen stapled to the chairs). Francisco painted every piece of glass black. He got a bolt of chicken wire for the windows and layered old scarves and sheets over them until every view was of a cloudy night sky.

Psychics, like dress designers and psychoanalysts and madams, have to pay attention to their place of business. If I’d had money, I would have gone for opulent fabric and Oriental rugs and maybe a little samovar whistling in the corner. Malachite objects would dot the shelves, along with a mysterious, large mahogany box and a faded photograph of a sad-eyed little girl with long curls and a floppy satin bow. Depending on the customer, she could be a relative, a murdered Romanov, my young self (And who’s to say that you yourself are not an escaped Romanov, is what my father would have said), or my spiritual guide. (You’d be amazed. Every kind of child, every kind of medieval healer, every kind of dear departed auntie, serves as someone’s guide to the spirit world. I have noticed that no one uses foreigners, unless they can master the accent. You don’t see Italian psychics, for example, with Norwegian guides. Or vice versa. The afterlife is worse than East Brooklyn.)

Francisco liked my setup. He liked that the women could pick up cookies from Stricoff’s and a roast chicken from Arrandale Rotisserie and finish their reading with me before the kids came home from school. He said he wasn’t sure that men would appreciate all that. But, he said, a man who has to go to a psychic is in such deep shit, he doesn’t care where he is.

I hung a small sign in the window, ASSOCIATION FOR METAPHYSICAL RESEARCH. Like the Star of David at Danny’s orphanage, meaningful to those in the know. I offered free readings to the ladies at Stricoff’s bakery, in exchange for day-old everything. I offered a two-for-one for sisters and I offered packages of five, for those who expected to need it. The whole world was bursting with things for women to buy, and I was one of them.

19 Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year

Letter from Gus

Trutzhain, Germany

August 1945

Dear Evie,

A tree is measured best when it’s down. That’s what they said about Lincoln and that’s what they’ll say about Roosevelt. I hear that in Tel Aviv, they trimmed all the flags in black and flew them at half-mast. I hear a Negro man played Haydn on the accordion as the funeral procession passed through Warm Springs, Georgia. The women here are weeping like they’re all Eleanor. Maybe all Jewish women are Eleanor Roosevelt — better-looking, not as good a writer, but the good heart, the sharp mind, the endless mixing into other people’s business. We have four rabbis now, so we had a lively service. No one here says, He didn’t do enough. One man here, his brother was on the St. Louis when it got turned around and the relief people got him to Israel, where he’s now eating oranges. So, no harm, no foul. The people here loved that fucking jaunty cigarette holder, the stiff upper lip, the expensive overcoat. Our goy. I remember the Republican bankers and the fat cats who accused him of being secretly Jewish. The Jew Deal. President Rosenfeld. Clearly, there was no other explanation for the man’s decency and concern for the poor. Flattering, I guess.

The Jews say there were three worlds, Drei velten:

Die velt (this world),

yene velt (the next world)

Roosevelt.

I can make a joke in Yiddish, which brings me to—

I’m Jewish now, which I wasn’t when we knew each other. (I don’t think it’ll bother you but the anti-Semitism of decent people keeps surprising me.) With four rabbis hanging around, we steamrolled the conversion process.

I worry that when we next see each other, I’ll be looking at a grown woman, smart as a whip, funny and straight as a die, and you’ll see a dried-up piece of salami, with a bum leg and a missing incisor. Did you go to college yet? Did some smart guy propose?

I have to tell you, I’m not exactly making a living. I got myself to a DP camp in Trutzhain, not the best, not the worst. The Trutzhainians, the Trutzhainiks, got rid of all the Nazi criminals. (Except the ones they didn’t get rid of, who are back in their old offices, pretending they were fucking monarchists. I prefer the honest bastards, spit-shining their boots in prison and greeting each morning with “Heil Hitler!”) Then the camp had to make room for the Poles. (Forgive me, but the most anti-Semitic people on earth, with the possible exception of the Ukrainians, who are butchers. I’m hoping none of your people are either one.) We’ve got Polish Jews, some nuns, some whores, and some German Quakers. The lice are unstoppable. You shave your head on Monday and find the little bastards back on Friday. There’s not enough food, and some people are still wearing their uniforms from the camps, prayer shawls wrapped around their feet, tucked inside the boots they’ve been given. God help them. Once a week, we count off to see who’s died.

I came the way most of us came, limping and bare-ass, the soles of our shoes tied on with string, or wood slabs held to our feet with half a shirt. We had learned to leave everything behind, except food and weapons. I had some rabbit meat and a knife tucked into my belt. The man next to me, a Gypsy who’d lost his way, had black rolls in every pocket and a crowbar down his pants leg. We carried the others, dragged the dying, and dropped the corpses at the feet of the nurses. Some of these people are goodness itself. The rest are the usual mix: liars, cheats, lazy bastards, sadists who couldn’t beat a man in a fair fight but will hold back a bar of soap from forty kids with running sores.

I’m teaching English — what do you think of that? We call it Rudimentary Conversational English. I give everyone a name Americans will be able to pronounce. When a lot of Jews named Bob wash up in New York with heavy accents, don’t be surprised. I’m teaching them all to say, “Gus sent me.”

I have a pal, Lev, from Moscow. He told the Americans that he’d be tortured and murdered if he went home. He recited our Declaration of Independence — phonetically. He doesn’t speak English yet. He said, The Poles won’t budge and neither will I.

In July, they sent a couple of hundred Polish Jews home, in patched pants and jackets, wearing borrowed shoes, carrying one loaf of bread each. They were murdered in Kraków, in Sosnowiec, and in Lublin. In Kielce, they were beaten to death by eight hundred Polish Worker party heroes, who came at them with crowbars and clubs. When some decent people carried the Jews to the hospital, Polish soldiers robbed them. They stole the shoes off the unconscious. Jews ran to the train station and got on trains going anywhere. Passengers threw the Jews off the moving trains. Our Polish correspondent reported that Cardinal August Hlond said that violence in Kielce was unfortunate and probably caused by the concerns of Poles for the safety of their children. Cardinal Adam Stefan Sapieha said that the Jews had brought it on themselves. So, in the last year, a hundred thousand Jews — don’t say we can’t take a hint — left Poland. Here in Trutzhain, we’re not going anywhere. Obviously, I’m a special case. The International Red Cross workers can’t believe I’m even here. They refer to it as the “misunderstanding.” I agree that there seems to have been a misunderstanding.

Grusse und Kusse, kiddo.

Gus

January 1946

Zei gesundt, Evie!

This means Be in good health. The Yiddish is coming along. I am now the senior lecturer in English at the Free University of Trutzhain (there’s no junior lecturer). I make up job application forms and have people practice filling them out. I’ve explained that Americans are as punctual as Germans but more casual in their speech. I tell them someone will give them a nickname and they should accept it. I don’t tell them that even in America, they can round you up and keep you in with barbed wire. Why rain on their westward-ho parade? Everyone here will settle in the Bronx, Brooklyn, or Queens, places where I know the street addresses. My dead parents are now sponsoring twenty-seven people. Also, I’ve given everyone here an advanced degree from 1932, when that could have happened. I gave myself a certificate from Bonn (engineering) and an advanced degree from the University of Pforzheim (mathematics).

(Do you remember Pforzheim? Did those letters reach you? Do these? Exactly once, we’ve had mail. A woman got a letter from New Jersey. Everyone in the camp touched it, for luck.)

Six weddings and four babies in the last three months. Lev changed his name to Lew Stern. For a few days, he was Louis Smith, but since he couldn’t pronounce his own goddamn name (Louise Smeet, he kept saying), we decided to aim a little lower.

Two starving Jews, Mr. Cohen and Mr. Ellenbogen, are sitting on a park bench, sharing their last piece of bread.

They look across the park and a priest’s putting up a big sign in front of his church: CONVERT NOW AND WE’LL GIVE YOU $1,000!

“Oh, boy,” says Cohen. “I’ll do it!”

An hour later, he comes out, looking happy.

Ellenbogen says to him, “Did they give you the money?”

Cohen spits in his direction. “Is that all you people ever think about?”

Your Gus

February 1946

Dear Evie,

We have six soccer clubs. We’ve got one made up entirely of orphans, Die Yesomim, and another, A Schanda und a Charpeh (A Scandal and a Disgrace), for cripples. They are some tough, toothless SOBs and to watch a pair of them on crutches, scrambling down the field is to believe in … something. You tell me.

Yesterday, Mr. Schwartzwald, six blue numbers tattooed on his left arm, called Mr. Warburg, also with six blue numbers tattooed on his left arm, a Nazi. They were in Auschwitz together. They lay in a ditch next to the crematorium chimney and watched their wives and children go up in smoke. They crawled here, lame and sick with grief. They’ve recovered, so they can fight over our infirmary supplies. After Mr. Schwartzwald called Mr. Warburg a Nazi, Mr. Warburg called him an anti-Semitic SOB. I’m sure there is a phrase in Yiddish for this kind of thing, but I don’t know what it is.

Your Gus

20 To Each His Own

RUTHIE POST WAS OUR SAVIOR. SHE HAD LOVED DANNY SINCE the beginning of third grade (or whatever it was she felt for him — she dragged him around town like a pull toy). Her friendship and Mrs. Post’s introductions to the small grocery store and the smaller candy store (making sure that Mr. Herman and Mr. Davis knew that although it seemed unlikely, I could and would pay my bills) made our new life on Old Tree Lane manageable. Ruthie was our guide to all aspects of Arrandale School’s fourth grade. What Ruthie said, went. She told Danny what kind of Buster Browns to wear, to keep his ears clean (Billy Moore did not and no one would sit with him, ever), and that it was important to start out with a lunch ticket in fourth grade. Apparently, everyone knew who had a card and would experience the satisfying exchange with the lunchroom monitor and the sharp sound of the paper punch, and who would not. According to Ruthie, if you established your high status in September, no one held it against you if you were brought low and forced to carry a lunch from home in November.

Ruthie Post had told Danny that the school bus came to our corner at 8:18. She told him that he’d be standing with three skinny little white girls (and she didn’t say white trash, because Mrs. Post would not have let her, but her eyelids drooped and we knew) and a Negro boy with thick glasses. Ruthie felt that the three girls were not the troublesome kind and that Danny’d have no trouble with Roger, the Negro boy (son of the idiot cousin). Ruthie told Danny to be nice, but not too nice. She said he should say hello to her cousin Roger but not sit with him on the bus. Ruthie told Danny that that would be bad for both of them. Danny asked Ruthie if she would be on the bus both ways and walk him home. Ruthie said, as I wanted to, and never did, “You’re big. You walk yourself home.” I was so grateful to have such a brutally plainspoken girl around, I promised Danny I’d wait for him with milk and cookies on his first day.

Francisco had promised to come help me with the finishing touches at the shop and I lay on the couch and stared at our blotchy, blooming ceiling until he came. I put the milk back in the refrigerator because I couldn’t buy any more milk if it went bad. I left the cereal bowls and Danny’s crusts and my own socks and shoes and old newspapers and Danny’s toys scattered around, like flares at an automobile accident. I was trying to put a shape to my life with Danny and I don’t know which one of us was more surprised and distressed at my failure. Every morning, I yanked the covers off him and said, Good morning, like I meant it, and watched him wash his face and brush his teeth and cheered him and hustled him through breakfast and out the door. Our day of crying on the couch in the carriage house was behind us. We were like the soldiers in Stalingrad, moving forward only because backward wasn’t possible.

21 Not in the Day and Not at Night

RUTHIE POST LIKED DANNY ACTON BETTER THAN HER GIRLFRIENDS and she liked his strange little family. Her own family was nothing special. Danny sat right next to her in Mr. Hoerger’s class and he was the only other person reading at the Bluebird level. Danny lived three blocks from Ruthie on Old Tree Lane. He had his own room, like Ruthie, and his grandfather lived there, and Danny’s aunt, who was raising him, and the Negro lady, who was like a visiting nurse. Ruthie’s mother had expressed a lot of interest in the Negro lady.

“I’m just asking you, Ruthie, is she a member of the family?”

Ruthie said she didn’t think so. She said that Clara Williams sang at the Nite Cap, which was the jazz club on the Island (and Ruthie said it the way the lady did, stretching out “the”). Ruthie didn’t say that she couldn’t say what color Clara Williams was, although Ruthie was sure that the lady was a Negro. She had Negro hair. Her hair looked and smelled like it had Glossine in it, which Ruthie’s mother used on all her ladies. Her skin was no color — it was the color of fat on a pork chop, the frizzled edge of a bug bite after your bath. One time, when Clara Williams was visiting, she didn’t close the bathroom door and Ruthie and Danny watched from the hall as she did her makeup. She patted her face all over with foundation, on a sponge. (“You wipe it off when you use your fingers,” Danny said. “Francisco said you shouldn’t even bother putting it on without a sponge, you’re just coloring your hands.”) She did her eyelids with a tiny brush and a bigger brush for her sparkly plum powder and she spat into a little black box to do her mascara. Danny started to explain and Ruthie punched him in the ribs. She knew. She watched her mother do it every morning. She did not need some fat little white boy telling her about eyelashes. Then Clara Williams did her rouge and they both watched.

Clara Williams unbuttoned her blouse and Ruthie got goose bumps.

When she was a grown woman and had learned to look through white people like they weren’t there, had learned to close her ears to the murmurs of black men sitting on stoops and white men passing on the street, their brows lowered over pale, hot eyes, long after she’d memorized the poetry of Nikki Giovanni and could quote Angela Davis on freedom like she’d sat at the sister’s right hand in a previous life, when someone referred to “people of color,” she would think of Clara Williams stroking foundation down her rounded, colorless arms until they turned a pinkish tan, pulling a compact from her emerald-green purse and powdering her now-pink arms, from armpit to fingertip, paying extra attention to the crooks of her arms, pushing the powder into her skin.

Ruthie and Danny watched Clara Williams come out of the bathroom. She put on her red lipstick and smoothed her eyebrows and snapped her compact closed. She twisted the gold clasp on her purse, and Ruthie and Danny threw themselves back on the rug in Danny’s room. Ruthie thought that Clara Williams might check up on them, and she glued her eyes to Betty and Veronica in the comics, joyriding.

22 Step We Grandly

CLARA WASN’T ENTIRELY READY FOR GOOD-BYE. SHE’D COME UP the walk with a bouquet of flowers Edgar wouldn’t see and a Dutch oven of soup he wouldn’t eat, and Danny watched her struggle and went to find his baseball under the hedges. She forgave him for not helping her. He would miss her, and she would miss him in a different way, and his way was worse. She handed Eva the flowers and the soup and went upstairs.

She shook her head until her neck was loose, and when she composed herself, she looked toward Edgar. It wasn’t really Edgar anymore. It was just a shell, but it was terrible to leave even his shell. One evening at the Nite Cap, when Edgar was still well and had just got paid and it seemed to everyone there that Clara was, that night, about to knock Ella Fitzgerald right off her high horse, Edgar had put a milk-glass vase of white roses on the piano.

“Marry me,” he’d said that night.

SHE’D SAT AT THE foot of his bed, grateful and sorry that she’d let Ozzie drop her off. She should have kept Ozzie out of it. It was shaming to Edgar, not that he knew. It was shaming to both men. She didn’t want to stay. She felt for Danny and Eva and she hoped things would get better for both of them, and she had no wish to be part of what happened next. She was almost middle-aged and had been loved by an interesting man and was now loved by a better one, a man who would be around for a long while and love her until they were old people, rocking on the porch. Clara couldn’t picture rocking on any porch, anywhere, with Edgar. Ozzie might not make her laugh the way Edgar did, but she could do without. She could amuse herself.

Bei mir bist du schoen, it’s such an old refrain,

And yet I should explain …

EDGAR ACTON, NÉ ISADOR VOGEL, DIED ON TUESDAY. THEY BURIED him on Thursday. Clara left on Sunday.

During the funeral, Clara thought about the packing she had to do. It was relaxing to have the bits of Hebrew, which meant nothing to anyone, making an odd, old music of their own, and it was good to have the rabbi for comic relief. He was like no rabbi Clara had ever seen, thin, American, eager to please. Mrs. Torelli was there, in dark-gray silk, for all the Torellis. Danny was a drooping pile of clothes, and she saw Eva pull him up gently a few times and he sank as soon as Eva’d turned back to face the pulpit. Neither of them cried. After the funeral, Eva hid the Torellis’ giant ham in her room so as not to offend Mr. Smedresman, who’d brought the bagels and lox and four kinds of herring, and that’s what people ate. The big Mexican makeup man they all loved brought a tower of Italian cookies and took Danny for a walk. When they got back, Danny’s little Ruthie had come by with her impeccable mother, and the woman eyed Clara until she’d moved under Ozzie’s big arm, protecting herself. Mrs. Post left a casserole of macaroni and cheese on the table, hugged Danny, patted Eva on the shoulder, and pushed Ruthie out the door.

The day after Edgar’s funeral, Clara helped Eva pack up his clothes and belongings. She had two more days before she and Ozzie would jump into his big, clean car and drive west to Detroit. She and Eva walked Edgar’s worn clothes and worse underwear to the bin behind the AME Zion Church. Eva asked if she’d thought Danny would recover. Clara said that she thought that depended on Danny’s nature, that some people bounced back from a train wreck and some people couldn’t get over a bee sting. They dumped the clothes and Clara offered Eva a cigarette.

“Ozzie wants to marry me,” she said. “In Detroit.”

“Absolutely,” Eva said, and she ground the cigarette out on the brick wall behind them.

OZZIE DROVE SLOWLY THROUGH Great Neck and then faster and with purpose, the summer dust flying behind them, a little of it settling like brown talc on her dress and in Ozzie’s hair. Clara touched his thigh, like a steel spring under her hand. They drove to Detroit in three days. Ozzie listened to the radio, Clara thought her thoughts. Edgar would lie like a white field of bits and bone just beneath the green layers of her life, for the rest of her life. She’d hear a deep English baritone on the radio or a white man holding forth somewhere, the way men do, or see a picture of John Barrymore, who Edgar must have copied, right down to the white wings at the edge of the dark, glossy hair, and Edgar would pop up right beside her.

Now all she wanted was to put some serious distance between her and his funeral. She made Ozzie stop for pie at the first farm stand they came to.

IN HER OLD AGE, her color was almost all gone. The only brown left was a thin ribbon of it around her neck, but she kept up with the ultraviolet light because she felt good afterward; she didn’t feel hopeful, the way she had when she was a girl, but she liked the doctor. She had a black dermatologist and she told everyone about him.

It was hard to go from relaxed (if you call hot acid relaxing) hair to natural, and the first haircut left her feeling naked, but from the first time she saw those beautiful Negro girls on television, their hair explosions of self, big, beautiful treetops above their bright faces, she’d been thinking, Let me have a little of that. She found herself a young woman to do her hair and she liked the beauty parlor. They loved her enthusiasm and she loved their acceptance. On Sunday mornings, she did a little gardening and she thought about writing to Danny, and even to Iris and Eva, but it’d been too long. She pictured Danny with no trouble. She saw young men like him all the time at the library, sometimes at the movies. He’d have longish hair and those crazy bell-bottom pants and a bright-yellow shirt, blue aviator glasses, and maybe a leather peace sign around his skinny neck. In her imagination, Danny was slim and smooth, bouncing in his Beatle boots, but things might not have worked out so well. He might be pudgy, with thick glasses and facial hair that looked like something from between your legs. One time, she’d taken Danny into town on her errands and a good-looking Negro man stopped to say that she looked like Miss Lena Horne. Danny pulled himself up to the man’s rib cage, adjusted his glasses, and said, Oh, mister, I don’t think Lena Horne can hold a candle to Miss Clara Williams. Danny had been her little man, and she should have made more of him.

On Sunday afternoons, in good weather, she took a drive through the countryside. She’d found a radio station that played oldies and she took one Kool, only one, from her glove compartment, drove with her window rolled down and her elbow on the door, like a cool cat, and when she found the radio station, drove for hours. She missed Edgar and Ozzie, she spoke to them both all the time, although not at the same time, and at bedtime, she pictured their graves beneath a willow tree, with a space for herself in between. When the state trooper came upon her wrecked and twisted car, with not an inch between the guardrail and the steering wheel, she heard his footsteps. He spoke softly and Clara heard him say, Ma’am.

Letter from Danny

220 Old Tree Lane

Great Neck, New York

The United States of America,

The World,

The Solar System

May 11, 1946

Dear Iris,

I found an envelope with your address on it in Eva’s nightstand. The Torellis wrote FORWARD on it. My teacher Mr. Hoerger says that I am a good reader and a good writer. I am way ahead of most of the other kids in fourth grade reading. I wrote some poems that are sort of like Langston Hughes, except not about the Negro people.

I hope when you go to bed at night, you think about us. I hope you think, Boy, that was pretty bad, what I did. Here are the people who were in my life and now are not: my brother, Bobby. My mother, who died making dinner for you. Clara. Ozzie Patterson. Poppa. You.

Poppa died. I’m sure Evie wrote to you but you didn’t come to the funeral. It was me and Evie and the Diegos and Ozzie and Clara and Mrs. Torelli but not their kids. And Mr. Smedresman, who used to bring the bagels. Knowing Mrs. Torelli, she wanted to show respect but she was scared to have her kids in a synagogue. The rabbi was not like a regular rabbi. I have Jewish friends who go to Temple Beth El. Rabbi Waxman looks like he should be vice president or governor. This rabbi looked like Bugs Bunny. Evie sat down with me before and told me she thought that Poppa was really Jewish. I don’t remember him doing anything Jewish. When we lived at the Torellis’, I used to sit in the Torellis’ back room, off the kitchen, and help Poppa sort the mail. I hardly saw him after he got sick. Mom said he got confused and thought I was his own little brother, who he hadn’t seen in a really long time. And then Mom died in the fire and you left, and Poppa got worse and then — did you hear about this? — Evie and I had to move, with Poppa, because, since he couldn’t be a butler and Mom was dead, the Torellis needed the carriage house for a new butler and cook. Evie said that I’d have my own room, which I do. We never see the Torellis. Cathy, Mary, and Joey go to Catholic school. I don’t miss them. I have a best friend, Ruthie Post. We are the best readers in fourth grade.

After Poppa’s funeral, the Torellis left a big ham for us and we ate ham sandwiches and split-pea-and-ham soup for a week. Jews don’t eat ham.

A lot of nights, before Poppa died, Ozzie and I played catch. Ozzie is a very big man. He was a three-sport captain in his high school. He played football at Alabama State University, which is a good school for football. Ozzie was the one who helped us move Poppa. I sat in the front with Clara and Ozzie and Ozzie’s idiot cousin drove the pickup behind us, with all of our stuff. Mrs. Torelli gave us some old furniture so that when we got to our new house it wasn’t empty. Clara visited us but she didn’t live with us anymore. Ozzie said that growing up in a house of women and a sick old man wasn’t good for me. Sometimes Ozzie threw the baseball right at my head. He said that a boy like me should know when to duck. We worked on my spitball. When it got dark, Clara would come out to get us. She was always dressed up, in her sparkly stole and her dark-blue dress and her silk high heels, so she waited in the driveway — she didn’t come onto the grass. Ozzie and Clara would get in his Oldsmobile and go out for dinner or to the Nite Cap. Ozzie said, Hi-de-ho, and I said that back. Then I’d sit on the steps until Evie made me come in.

I don’t know what you took me from that orphanage for. (Evie told me I wasn’t left on the steps, in a basket, like you said. She said you saw me and you liked my looks and tricked me into coming with you and then you and Mom kept me.) My friend Ruthie Post is a Negro girl, and she says that the Negro people have suffered a lot in America. And Ruthie says that she feels sorry for me.

You don’t have to write back. Evie and I are in a nice house, on Old Tree Lane.

I asked Evie if you were dead. She said that she didn’t think so. She asked me if I wanted to write to you or send you a photograph. I said no, but I did want to write you this one letter.

Danny Lombardo Acton

23 They Can’t Take That Away from Me

CLARA’S LEAVING WAS SO HARD TO BEAR, IT MADE ME SAY AND DO things I was sorry for. On Monday, Danny dropped a bottle of milk and we watched it break and flow to every corner of our little kitchen. She left us flat, Danny said. He kicked the wet glass against the wall. She left us flat as a pancake and never looked back, he said. She never loved us. I slapped him, and shame on me. Danny went to his room. I stared at the milk on the linoleum until it began to set and then I got a sponge and cleaned it up and piled the milky glass in the garbage can. I sat on the picnic table in the back and smoked and thought, and not for the first time, that it was hard to believe that Reenie was dead and my sister had flown the coop and all the rest was going to hell in a handbasket, leaving just me and Danny. Whatever the opposite of miraculous is, that’s the word I was looking for.

If it had been up to Reenie and my sister, Danny’d be back at an orphanage and I’d be in some crap apartment, with a Murphy bed and a bathroom down the hall, trying to forge a college diploma. Sometimes, Danny and I took a walk to the far end of Old Tree Lane, where the nicer houses were. We passed window boxes and stone planters full of geraniums. Danny’s eyes got big and he’d breathe in deeply. Every time, as we’d head back home, Danny’d exhale and say, “This street smells like my mother.” He had dreamed up a version of Reenie, half actual Reenie and some bits and pieces of radio shows and a little Eleanor Roosevelt and his faint memory of a woman leaning over his crib, smelling of geranium powder. He must have been sleeping in a crib until the day we took him. When he got to the carriage house, he fell out of bed four nights in a row and Reenie put pillows all over the floor. Every morning, I’d walk past his room and see him lying on the floor, waiting for Reenie. He made a small waving gesture if I looked in on him, and it meant Hello and Move along.

I DIDN’T ARGUE WITH Danny. When I made him do things he didn’t like, he threw Reenie at me. My mother was beautiful, he said. My mother never made me eat eggs, he said. My mother was the greatest cook in the world. My mother and I were going to move out of that stupid house and far away from you and stupid Iris, he said. My mother sat by my bed until I fell asleep, every night. I agreed with everything he said about Reenie and sometimes I said that I was sorry for both of us, not to have her around. One night, after we’d fought over meat loaf (I won’t eat it, he said. Don’t, I said.) and he’d taken himself to his room and gotten into bed with his clothes and holster on, I sat at the foot of his bed. He made sure that no part of him, even under the covers, was touching me.

You should complain, I said. This is pretty bad. Sometimes, I said, I am so angry and miserable, it makes me want to cry and scream right in people’s faces. It makes me want to kill people. Who? Danny said. Well, considering, I said, I’d like to kill Iris. Danny nodded. I stretched out next to him, but not touching. Before I went back to my own room, I put his toys in tableaux I thought would make him laugh in the morning: Raggedy Andy on the brown pony, his old blue rabbit stuffed into a truck.

“It’s just us,” Danny said. I turned out his light.

He did not then list the people who were gone, and neither did I. He never said that of all the people to wind up with, I was undoubtedly the least equipped and, overall, the worst. I thought it was too bad that he had to be so tactful, so young.

THE NEXT DAY, I washed the kitchen floor, which I had managed to do not once in my short lifetime, set the table, and made dinner, and afterward, I washed the dinner dishes and made Danny dry. I took out some cookies and chocolate milk, to bribe him through the cleanup, and he watched me as if I had some bad news I was going to share.

“Everything’s fine,” I said. “I just thought a chicken dinner might be nice.”

“It’s nice,” Danny said.

“I thought I could tell you a story,” I said. “Not a bedtime story. You’re too old. But, still. I could tell you a story.”

Danny said, “Can I go outside?”

I listened for the whapada-whap of the tetherball and watched the clock for five minutes. I went outside and grabbed the ball.

“My serve,” I said, and I hit the ball hard, but a little low.

We were remarkably evenly matched. I had some height; he was determined.

“ONCE UPON A TIME,” I said, afterward, “there was a little boy named … Harry.”

Danny smiled and stretched out on the couch.

“Or Roland De Rapscallion,” I said, rolling my r’s. “Maybe his name was Fat-Fingered Louie.”

Danny flipped around, so his head was near mine.

“No,” he said.

“All right,” I said. “You got me. His name was Danny. Danny was an amazing boy. He had light-brown hair, which was, amazingly, just the right color for a boy with brown eyes, and when he got to be big, he wore amazing eyeglasses, which was especially good because it helped him see, and he saw a lot. A lot. He needed to be good at seeing and thinking because Danny’s life had not gotten off to an easy start. When Danny was born …” I stopped.

All I knew about Danny’s past was what Reenie told me — that he’d said his mother had died and his father had put him and his brother in the Pride of Israel. I didn’t know if he remembered more and didn’t say or if the door had shut firmly on all that and there was no reason for me to poke my nose in. On the other hand, I was a lot older and had forgotten very little and forgiven less, and it might be the same for him. I wiggled my hand, for Danny to take over.

“Danny was born to his mother and father and his brother. When Danny was very little”—he made his voice squeak, to show how little—“his mother died. He was too little to know what happened but Danny had a brother, Bobby, and Bobby said that their mother fell off a roof and their father was so sad and so messed up, he had to take Danny and Bobby to the orphanage, to take care of them. Which wasn’t so bad, but Danny didn’t like it. He wanted to go home. His brother, Bobby, said they didn’t have a home anymore, that Pride of Israel was their home, and Mr. Greenberg was like their father.”

“After a while,” I said, “he sort of got used to the place. And Mr. Greenberg was …”

“Okay,” Danny said. “Danny was one of the little kids. Everyone was okay.”

“So, then a crazy thing happened. These two women came along — out of nowhere …”

“Out of the blue,” Danny said.

“That’s right — out of the blue. And they wanted a little boy. They wanted an amazing little boy with brown hair and brown eyes. They wanted a little boy to join their family. And most of all, at home, there was Reenie Lombardo, who was waiting for her friends to find her the perfect little boy.”

“Why didn’t she go herself?”

“That’s an excellent question,” I said. “Why didn’t she?”

“Because she was cooking,” he said. “She was a really good cook and she made dinner for the Torellis every night.”

“That’s right. She was a great cook. So, these two women, Itsy and Bitsy, saw this one little boy. ‘Holy cannoli,’ Itsy said to Bitsy. ‘That’s the one.’ ”

“Who was Itsy?” Danny said.

“Who do you think?”

“You’re Itsy,” he said.

“So Itsy said, ‘There’s something about him.’ ‘You’re right,’ Bitsy said. So they asked the little boy to come home with them. He said okay, even though he had to leave Bobby. They took him home and after a long trip—”

“And a bath,” Danny said. “Reenie gave me the longest bath ever. I never had a bath like that.”

“That’s right. He had a very long bath and he was amazingly clean and when the steam cleared, he looked at Reenie and she looked at him, and I know she felt that she had found the amazing little boy she was looking for.”

Danny turned his face toward the cushion. I put my hand on his back.

“Come on, hero,” I said. “Maybe that’s it for tonight.”

We put our arms around each other and I tucked him in.

“It’s a good story,” he said. “But kinda sad.”

WE TOLD EACH OTHER the story every night for weeks, and we managed to get in some unkind remarks about Iris’s disappearance and a few jokes about the rabbi at Edgar’s funeral. I said that Edgar had saved Danny’s life during the fire and we both liked that. We didn’t dwell on the fire but Danny told me he could see the smoke, even from Edgar’s window, and I knew that meant that he had heard the sounds as well. We told the story of our move from the Torellis’ and the happy landing on the shores of Old Tree Lane. (So long, Torellis! Hello, Old Tree Lane and crazy Mr. Mason across the street, with the overalls and no underwear!)

I made myself drive back to the Pride of Israel orphanage to find Danny’s brother, the awful and adorable Bobby, but I failed. Narrow mattresses were stacked on the lawn. Window screens were propped against the railings. I walked across the playground and through the front door, propped open with a rock. They had found a permanent home for every American child, the social worker said. The end of the war was a good time for that. They were closing their doors at the end of the month. I saw boxes and crates and bed frames behind her. I was glad to go home and go on with the story of Amazing Danny, whose original last name was lost to him, and to me.

24 Prisoner of Love

RUTHIE POST USED TO TELL DANNY THAT THE HOUSE OF THE Lord had gold plates and sparkling fountains and beautiful fruit piled on silver platters. Dorothy Berman’s house was just like that.

“Pure gold basins. Wicker trimmers. Gold spoons and hinges of gold, for all the doors and inside and outside. Everywhere. That’s what it says in the Bible. Kings seven fifty.” Ruthie whispered to Danny while an old lady in a gray dress with a white lacy apron led them to Dorothy’s room. “Everywhere.”

They didn’t even like Dorothy. No one liked Dorothy. Ruthie’s brother told them that in junior high, some people got made fun of and sometimes it was really bad. But in fifth grade, most everyone was in a big pool, moving from year to year. Dorothy Berman stuck out already, and she liked Ruthie and she liked Danny.

Dorothy took them downstairs to the finished basement, set up like a soda shop, with a counter and spinning stools and big pink neon sign that said BERMAN’S. Dorothy leaned against the soda fountain, like it was a baby grand piano. She stretched out an arm, bent her elbow, and rested her brown curly hair on her hand, looking right at Danny. She sang, “Don’t know why there’s no sun up in the sky, stormy weather …” She showed her dimples.

It was worse than embarrassing. It was scary.

Dorothy pulled Coca-Cola bottles out of a red chest and they all drank their sodas, silently. Danny thought the visit seemed so likely to go bad. The gold hinges. The frosty bottles of Coca-Cola. The privacy. In Ruthie’s house, which was more like a normal house, there was always a mother or an aunt swinging by purposefully to see that there was no nonsense and no scuffing of the floor and no eating of things meant for dinner. It was like the Berman house was empty.

Dorothy cleared her throat and went back to the soda fountain. She indicated with her chin and Ruthie and Danny sat down at their bistro table, with the red-and-white leather seats. Dorothy put her hand to her heart.

“Good morning, heartache, what’s new?… I’ve got those Monday blues, straight through Sunday blues …,” she sang. “Sit down.”

It was worse than before. It was beautiful and breathtaking, the kind of performance Clara Williams talked about sometimes. It was giving voice to the heartache of being Dorothy Berman, which Danny thought was a lot. Dorothy was the apple of no one’s eye. Her mother drove her to school every day in a clean dark-blue Caddy, and dressed her as if she were a fairy-tale princess, in wide pink skirts with a petticoat and party shoes, and it only made her look worse.

Danny leaned toward Ruthie, so they’d be in it together, and Ruthie, who usually pulled away, leaned toward him. Dorothy threw her head back, showing her fat little neck, and the pink neon letters behind the soda fountain lit up the tiny hairs on her jaw and her gold locket and she sang blue and low and slow. She sang like Billie Holiday. Clara said that Billie Holiday woke up crying. Clara said that if you sing the blues, you know that if you can’t make friends with grief, you’ve got to at least make way for it.

Dorothy curtsied and joined them at their table.

“I’m pretty good,” she said, and she was so pleased with herself, Danny felt better. “How about a game?”

Danny and Ruthie knew dodgeball. Ruthie was good at double Dutch and Danny was very good at shooting marbles. He relaxed. He knew how to play games.

“Let’s go over here,” Dorothy said.

“Over here” was the storeroom, beyond the soda fountain (Dorothy called it the lounge). It was stocked with cases of soda, boxes of crackers, tins of sardines, plastic boxes of drink stirrers and frilled toothpicks, little glass jars of curled anchovies.

“Each one of us will go in and then come out and do something … surprising. Danny, you come out and surprise me and Ruthie first.”

Ruthie and Danny looked at each other. Ruthie liked to scare Danny because he was easy to scare, and once she fried his hair flat and steaming with a hot comb and once Danny picked a handful of honeysuckles and stuck the bunch under Ruthie’s nose, which did surprise her. This wasn’t that.

Dorothy turned on the light and pushed Danny in and shut the door. Danny rested his forehead on a case of crackers, sweating, until Dorothy finally opened the door. She looked disappointed. Ruthie looked at Danny and said, “Dorothy, you go. You’re the one who knows how to do this. We’re just guests.” She said “guests” like it was code for idiots and Dorothy smiled and pushed them both out.

Danny and Ruthie sat with their empty Coca-Cola bottles. Dorothy came out in her underpants, with a serious look, holding a big blue box of matches.

Danny put his hand on top of Ruthie’s. Ruthie said, “Thankyouforhavingus.” Danny said, “SeeyouMonday.” They ran past the old lady who had let them in and past the little black dogs with the bows on their heads, past the gold clocks in the front hall and the gold faucets in the front hall bathroom, and they walked, very quickly, to the corner.

The corner was no help. The corner was a thick green carpet of lawn and another big house with columns set far back from the lawn. You could see water past the house.

Ruthie said, “I’ll sit over there and you ring the doorbell and you ask can you call home for someone to come get us now.” Ruthie was very careful to say someone and Danny appreciated it. Ruthie didn’t say a thing when his mother died, because it was too terrible to even talk about and when he and his aunt Eva moved from the Torellis’ to Old Tree Lane, just three blocks from Ruthie’s, surrounded by other small houses, with nothing but a picnic table and their rusty tetherball set instead of the Torelli pool, all Ruthie said was, “It’s nice.”

Eva would be at work, telling people’s fortunes. Eva would say, Oh, big guy, is there any way you can take the bus?

Danny said, “You ring the doorbell and call your mother. I’ll sit here.”

They had been secret best friends for a long time. Danny knew that Ruthie would be better at bell-ringing because she had a way about her, but he knew that this was not a neighborhood with Negro girls in it. Danny knew that he should offer to go to the door, because he was white, but he was almost pissing himself already and when the lady of the house asked him why he was standing on her doorstep, he knew he would throw up on her black pumps. They walked back to Dorothy Berman’s house, where Dorothy sat on a stone bench, in the middle of her vast front lawn, fully dressed, her bare feet on a granite tortoise, sipping a Coke.

“You guys,” she said fondly. “Where’d ya go?”

DOROTHY TOOK THEM UPSTAIRS. They trooped past the old lady, who opened and closed her mouth while she slept in the library. Dorothy Berman’s room was the most beautiful thing Danny had ever seen. It gleamed. It shimmered. The silver centers of the embroidered pink daisies on her bedspread shone. She had her own pink velveteen couch, which Ruthie was edging toward, and she had a pink-and-white desk, with a white wood desk chair. The cushion on the chair matched the pink and silver and white pillows on her bed. There were eight pillows for nothing but decoration, two of them shaped like stars.

Danny wanted to sprawl out on the bed. He would take his shoes off and his belt, and then he would stretch his arms under the covers and feel the silk all over him. He would roll off his socks, where the girls couldn’t see him. It was very hard to just stand there and not touch any of the pretty, pointless, expensive things. He wanted to chase Dorothy Berman out of the house and tear through the rooms, ripping and running, and then set it all on fire. Fire trucks would roar up, Dorothy Berman and her stupid dogs would sit on the big front lawn and eight firemen in their black-and-yellow coats would pull out their hoses and there’d be nothing left of the Bermans’ house but black wood and wet grass. It was good luck, Danny thought, that Joey Torelli hadn’t had a room like this. Joey had a nice room, with a carved headboard and curtains with sailboats on them and fancy lights with sailboats painted on them, but he didn’t have anything like this, so Danny had never wanted to kill Joey.

DOROTHY OPENED HER TOY chest. She had Monopoly and Sorry! and Chutes and Ladders. Ruthie said, Let’s play Sorry. Monopoly can take all day, she said.

They played through a game of Chutes and Ladders. “Some people call it ‘Snakes and Ladders,’ ” Dorothy said, and Ruthie and Danny nodded. With another girl, Ruthie might have rolled her eyes and Danny would have shrugged, but the image of cheerful, saucy Dorothy in her blue-sprigged underpants and the big blue box of matches, Dorothy’s smooth white chest, her two chubby little mounds and her rosy nipples, and all of these very disturbing things together rose up in front of him when Dorothy spoke. Danny saw her sailing down a chute, brown curls gleaming in the sun. She climbed the ladder and Danny could see her bottom in her underpants. Dorothy smiled when Ruthie beat her and when Ruthie eyed the four gold lockets lying on Dorothy’s pink dresser, Dorothy put one in Ruthie’s hand. “ ’Til butter flies,” Dorothy said. “I can give you one too,” Dorothy said, and Danny put his hands in his pockets.

WHEN DANNY IS A teenager, and Ruthie has moved hundreds of miles away, he will find himself, with new friends in darkened movie theaters, watching horror movies in which some idiot feels the need to explore the dark, menace-filled basement. The entire movie audience shouts, “Don’t go in the basement!” but Danny never shouts. He grips the armrests and thinks, in the last row of the Playhouse Theater of Great Neck, he thinks, Dorothy Berman.

Letter from Gus

Trutzhain, Germany

April 1947

Dear Evie,

Spring is busting out here. More goddamn babies, more homely girls marrying schlemiels like there’s a white sale at Macy’s. We’re breeding. We got green grass. We got flowers. A small blue flower the little girls go crazy for. They make a game of weaving grass baskets and filling them with the flowers. They leave the baskets on people’s pillows. Not mine, but other people’s.

Hey, there, I’m now Gersh Hoffman, Jewish schoolteacher. Hey, you’ll say, where are the records of your life, Gersh Hoffman? I say I don’t know why no one can find my records. I say I was interned at Stringtown and Camp Forrest. The government people here are a little embarrassed about my deportation, so no one checks too carefully. As everyone here now knows, I’m here “through a shameful miscarriage of justice.” I’m quoting a visiting Brit who was glad to throw a little shit on the Americans. (Meanwhile, the Brits are practically chaining Jews to their bedposts to keep them from going to Palestine.) People want to get me home before another bad thing happens to me. They better fucking hurry.

Your Gus

25 On the Sunny Side of the Street

LUCKY JEWS. GUS THOUGHT THIS EVERY TIME HE STOOD IN THE steam of Stricoff’s bakery waiting for his rye bread, every time he caught a hot doughnut from the cart near the high school, every time he ate brisket at the railroad station luncheonette, watching the bookie in the corner booth go about his business. And lucky Gersh Hoffman, he thought. Just when the school board had decided that since they were going to have all these smart Jewish kids tumbling in, it might be good to have a few Jewish teachers of the right kind (preferably veterans, and truly American, preferably teaching math or Latin, the kinds of subjects troublemakers were not drawn to), Gersh Hoffman showed up, a limping, accentless, hawk-eyed Jewish teacher of math and engineering. Instantly hired at a decent salary after only one quick round with the Loyalty Oath (“I further swear that I do not advise, advocate or teach, and have not within the period beginning five years prior to the effective date of the ordinance requiring the making of this oath, advised, advocated or taught, the overthrowing by force, violence or other unlawful means, of the Government of the United States of America or of the State of New York …”), which he swallowed like cold coffee.

He was happiest in the stores. He shopped almost every day. Just the sight of food made him happy, and he loved the food of Great Neck. Six whole roast chickens, turning on a spit in the front window. Tuna fish decorated with a tomato rose, and a bowl of egg salad with the day of the week spelled out in olive slices. Sandwiches the size of lunch boxes. The German deli was run by a distant cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm and the Great Neck Jews loved the place; they flocked to Kuch’s. They said to one another, What a character he is, Otto, strictly old country, I’m telling you. Gus didn’t think that Negroes would rush to shop in a store run by some retired slave owner, eager to share memories of fun times on the plantation, praising Massa’s old-fashioned Mississippi charm. Jews were still chasing that absurd, wishful feather. Eventually, Jews would become like everybody else. They’d elevate smaller grievances; they’d cherish hurt feelings and ill treatment like they were signs of virtue.

In fifty years, Gus will read about Jewish young men and women writing long essays, even whole books, about their experiences as the grandchildren, or the grandnieces and — nephews, of Holocaust survivors, as if that entitled them to anything, and some of them will choose to tattoo the string of numbers on their forearms, and none of it surprises him.

We tried, he thought, watching the nice families drive to the synagogue, religious but not fanatic, the father parking about a block away, giving the wife a hand getting out of the Olds, then Sylvia, Rachel, and David climbing out and following, like ducklings in blue wool. All of us, the DPs, the soldiers who liberated the camps, even the survivors who came here — we tried to keep it from you. We protected America from what happened, like a man takes care of his wife. The man doesn’t mind when she closes her eyes at the scary part of the ride, of the movie. He loves her for that sweet, willful ignorance. She gives him something to protect, a nice world in which bad things don’t happen. It’s a pleasure, and a relief, to keep that ignorance intact, even as it comes between them.

As much as Gus loved the food and the bustle of Middle Neck Road’s sidewalks (a dozen different pairs of high heels, all staccato, a big-assed drum line), Gus loved the Chase National Bank even more, and he read everything he could about the bank and the Rockefellers; when Chase merged with the Manhattan Company, he followed the purchase like he had skin in the game. The Chase Bank was the archway through which Gus’s new and lucky life was running.

When all the real estate moguls and movie stars and orchestra leaders lost their shirts, their houses, their ridiculous racing yachts, and their unpaid-for Rolls-Royces, the sensible men at Chase foreclosed. George Dodge and Walter Chrysler and their friends moved out of Great Neck or moved on or died. The bank took back their half-timbered Tudors with carriage house, pool house, and pool, their Bauhaus-on-the-Sound, their Nantucket-style seventeen-acre estates with the white gravel circular driveways and Moorish lawn decorations, divided them into three and four and even six lots, and said, Someone’s got to buy them. And the Jews said, Please, let it be us. And the sensible men at Chase, who did not themselves live in Great Neck, said, Fine, we haven’t had a Jew since 1891, when that rich Irishman got a house for his own tailor, to always have him nearby, but, let it be Jews. Eventually, they would let African Americans buy too, but not in the 1950s. (Ralph Bunche, no. Joe Jones, a little later, yes, because every town needs a good taxi service, and eventually, East Asians, yes, with their very smart kids who frankly made the Jewish kids look like slackers, and when the Iranian Jews come in the 1970s, it’s the Ashkenazic version of Katie-bar-the-door, as far as Gus can see, but too late. Gus knew his history; unless you actually kill the people you have let move into your town, there is no getting them out. Their children will mix with your children. Sooner or later, their children will marry your children. Sooner or later, they will be jumping the broom and smashing a lightbulb in the same joyful, fierce move. Their children will be more beautiful than any child ever produced in your otherwise monochromatic family tree.)

The Jews came in, from Brooklyn and Queens. They came to houses near the railroad station and on Baker Hill, with cheap suitcases. They came in on the G.I. Bill, and the lucky veterans, who held the top tickets in the lottery, put their five hundred dollars in cash in an envelope and drove their in-laws’ cars from Flatbush Avenue to Ramsey Road. The Great Neck News carried prim editorials, complaining of dirty-faced city children dashing out of overcrowded moving vans, trailing firecrackers and bad habits from the outer boroughs. (Eventually, the rich men building Long Island Jewish Hospital, with their Jewish partners, told the editors to shut up and confine themselves to writing about the lovely rhododendrons of Kenilworth and the prompt service of the Fire Department, which they did. Five years later, the Great Neck News carried ads for Fein Furniture and the Cohen Brothers’ Steem-Cleaning.) The Jewish veterans moved their pregnant wives into three-bedroom houses, which looked a lot like the three-bedroom houses to the right and left of them. On summer nights, twenty-five noisy Jewish kids — and the occasional Castellano and O’Brien — poured into the wide streets, playing running bases or monkey in the middle or flipping baseball cards until someone’s little brother was left empty-handed and started to cry. They ran from one end of the block to the other, through six narrow backyards, chasing fireflies and one another and hurrying to watch Bobby Feldman throw himself out of the willow tree again. Gus had introduced himself to the two Mrs. Schwartzes, at either end of Ramsey Road, who made iced tea and lemonade and put plastic pitchers on a card table on the front lawn, and he’d met the fathers, accountants and shoe salesmen and furriers, called out “Hey, Koufax,” “Hey, Helen Keller, heads up!” and took turns throwing and catching for the kids until it was too dark.

Gus walked down the streets where the families were and slowed down to listen and look, to see if Eva was among them.

Letter from Iris

Queensberry Place,

South Kensington, London

January 2, 1948

Dear Eva,

God is Milton Berle.

Diana left me. Or I threw her out. One says — at least I do; who knows what you say. Perhaps this has never happened to you—“It isn’t that you are leaving me; it’s the way you’re doing it.” This is complete horseshit. She’s leaving me pretty much the way I expected, which is to say, she’s leaving me the way I would have left her, if I’d been quicker off the mark. She piled all her clothes into a friend’s car while I was working and I came home to a great, gobby violet-scented (and misspelled) letter of self-justification.

What I should find is a bearable, bendable producer of the older male variety. We would look good in the papers and at opening nights and he would go his merry way with boys or girls and I would have a very, very pleasant suite of rooms somewhere in Mayfair. I actually picture my suite sometimes. Terra-cotta walls with cream trim, a charming watered-silk living room, with mohair throws, warm and light, with a few moth holes, to show that we are just plain folks, au fond. My bedroom would be grand, the size of Mrs. Torelli’s with no Mr. Torelli to mar the picture, suspenders slipped off those thick, furry shoulders and a face full of shaving cream.

I know what I should do and I certainly understand how to do it. Only an idiot could be Edgar’s daughter and not know how to size up and seize opportunity. Apparently, I’m that idiot. I hope you’re not. I hope you’re married by now and have a nice Jewish husband to help you with Danny. All of my friends tell me that Jewish husbands are the best kind but the only one I know here drinks like a fish and has a chorus girl on every limb. When I was in Hollywood, people talked all the time about who was Jewish and who was not. Eleanor Roosevelt, although this seems unlikely to me. Walter Winchell, Danny Kaye, Jack Benny, the Gabor sisters, and Lauren Bacall, which is fabulous. If I were the prime minister of Israel, I’d put her face on all the stamps. I don’t know why Jewish people find this all so interesting.

I got to see Diana and the lovely earrings I gave her, twinkling like starry nights on the earlobes of some knock-kneed writer last night. And I thought of Mrs. Gruber, who would at this moment tell me it’s time I faced facts. Azoy gait es, don’t you know?

I’m giving up on love entirely. The soap opera pays the bills right now, and the rest of the time, I’m fund-raising for my favorite plastic surgeons, Drs. McIndoe and Litton. We want to start a clinic in London. I am known more widely, and with great affection, as the Singing Guinea Pig. Could be worse.

I hope to hear from you.

Iris

26 Find Out What They Like

I THOUGHT I WOULDN’T TRY TO FIND MY MOTHER UNTIL I WAS forty. I thought that by then, I wouldn’t be angry. I thought, I hoped, that by then, she’d be near the end of her wretched, empty life and I’d be in the happy middle of mine, understanding that her leaving me, dumping me and that cheap brown suitcase on the porch of my father’s house, had not doomed me. Au contraire, is what I hoped. By forty, I’d be a more forgiving person. I might, by forty, have a nice apartment with a beautiful black poodle. Instead, twenty-one and Danny and I could not stop thinking that if I could do it, surely she could have too.

I couldn’t wait. I needed to tell Hazel a few things.

It wasn’t as hard to find her as I thought. She’d become a little bit famous. Not Lana Turner famous, but famous in Chicago, where she’d become the next Aimee Semple McPherson. (Edgar despised evangelists more than the tarot cards. He said that if religion was the opiate of the masses, they should demand a better drug.) There was a condescending article about her in The New York Times—“Divine Healing and Hope, Promises Hazelle Logan” (Please note the new spelling). And a nice big picture. I would know her anywhere, in any costume. She’s wearing a pleated Grecian-style thing with a wide belt, and her head is thrown back, overcome with something. I showed Francisco the article. He asked if I was going to forgive her or punish her and I said I was pretty sure that I was not going to forgive her. Good, he said. I’ll babysit. When I left, he and Danny were playing cards.

DURING THE WAR, I’D seen every newsreel about the Kindertransports in Europe, all those poor Jewish kids sent far and wide to save them from the Nazis. I dreamed about little Jewish children crushed into trains, with their little bags and teddy bears, their weeping, hopeful parents on the platform, tying little notes to their coat buttons and making them sandwiches. I thought about them during the day, sweeping up at the beauty parlor. Your parents are on their knees with grief as you grow smaller and smaller, on your way to a better life. Oh, you lucky little bastards, I used to think.

Maybe my mother hoped I’d have a better life with Edgar. When I was younger, I liked to imagine her driving south from Windsor, tears falling as she drove, maybe pulling onto the shoulder when she was just overcome with shame and loss. Even when I was a kid, I suspected she felt more like a woman who’d dropped off a very bulky package. An easing of soreness and relief. Shake out your wrists and fingers, arch your back, and turn your face toward the sun.

This package arrived in the Chicago station and checked into a decent hotel. I took a shower and left my clothes in the bathroom to steam (thank you, Iris). I pulled my hair back in what I hoped was a chic little bun and I put myself together as Bea and Carnie would have. (And I could hear my sister saying, You let that bitch get a good look at you, Evie. Let her see who you are.) I threw up in the bathroom and I took another shower. I caught a cab to Hazel’s temple, the New Jerusalem. The cabbie asked me if he should wait. If I had been a more realistic and reasonable person, if I had not been twenty-one and still fooling myself, I would have said, Wait.

THERE ARE HOUSES LIKE my mother’s temple all over Great Neck. The smaller estates, is what the Realtors call them. Doric columns and wide white porches. Maybe a pair of stone lions, or swans or griffins at the beginning of the driveway and a set of very tall, carved front doors, with a golden eagle or a bronze fist, for the knocker. Two acres, not twenty. My father told me not to be impressed by those houses. That’s not what people with real money build, he said. He said, Real money is privacy, real money is that if you scream, no one hears but the servants. This is just show. This is vulgar.

Nevertheless, my sister used to say, it beats the hell out of poverty.

A TALL, CORPSEY-LOOKING GUY in a white robe and a silver belt answered the door. He told me to wait for Mother Logan. That about killed me. I sat in the hallway, admiring the bits and pieces of marble. (I was enough Edgar’s daughter to notice that although the effect was of marble, it was not actually a marble hallway.) Hazel came gliding down the hall, her arms outstretched. And then she saw it was me and her arms dropped to her side.

“Charles thought you were press,” she said.

She stood very still, looking me over.

“All grown up,” she said.

“I’d like to talk to you,” I said. It wasn’t true. I didn’t want to talk to her. I wanted to gut her like a fish.

She led me down the hallway and through an auditorium with the predictable burgundy curtains and a two-story gilded organ and some kind of crazy gold elves or babies riding silver swans on either side of the stage. I pretended not to notice. I set my face like I was walking through a New Jersey bus station.

She sat me down in her office. A civilized person would have offered me tea or a cold drink. I could hear my father’s voice rocketing through me, sitting with her. She didn’t say a thing. She smiled at me, in a new way. My mother, as was, smirked at the world and grinned when I had amused her, and she used to have, for my father, a very soft look. Her smile now was false and pearly, prissy and ecstatic. And frightening.

“I missed having a mother,” I said. Go for broke, I thought.

“How old are you?” my mother said.

“I’m twenty-one.”

“I was fifteen when I had you.”

I have to say, she looked great. She looked better than me. Her hair was blond now, her brows were still dark, and she didn’t have a line on her face. The gray silky thing she wore did a good job of showing off her assets and covering what looked like a pretty big caboose.

“How could you leave me on that porch,” I said.

“I was twenty-seven. I gave you more than enough years, didn’t I, and you know I took good care of you.” And she had. “You seem fine. I wasn’t cut out for teenagers. Plus, your father and I were going to be finished sooner or later, and my money was on sooner. And when he was done with me, baby, he’d be done with you. I know the type. I did you a favor.”

It was hard to concentrate on what she was saying, when she looked the way she did, and she kept her voice low, and soft. There were seraphim painted on the wall behind her.

“Call me impulsive. It worked out,” she said.

I couldn’t ask her anything. There wasn’t a single question to which I’d get the answer I wanted. The wicked people of the world are not supposed to be calm and composed. They are supposed to have hysterics and take poison like Hitler and Göring, or fall on their swords like the Japanese soldiers when they had to surrender. They are not supposed to cross one leg over the other and show off their white stockings and nice ankles.

“How is your father?” she said.

The greatest struggle in my life is between a dignified silence and having my say.

“Dead,” I said. “Of heartbreak.”

“Not over me,” she said.

I stood up. My mother sat for another second, looking at nothing, and then she stood up too. We were, not surprisingly, about the same height. She walked me back through the auditorium and down the fake marble hall. The man in the white robe was waiting for me.

“Are you staying long in Chicago?” she said.

“On my way even now,” I said.

“If you want to see a show—”

“See your show?” I said. “I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.”

That was the only part I felt good about, afterward.

BACK HOME, I GAVE Francisco the highlights, after Danny went to sleep.

“People,” he said. “They can’t be underestimated.”

We drank our beers.

“Carnie called me. She got elected president of the PTA, in Rye,” he said.

“That’s a good thing to do,” I said, and we laughed.

He told me that Bea and Carnie had closed La Bella Donna. He said it’d be a lot harder for us all to get together. Plus, he said, what with the dentist and the little girl, Bea’s new husband and their new baby.

“Even if I don’t see them for years,” I said, “I’m always going to be really happy to see them.”

“They ask after you,” Francisco said. He raised his beer bottle toward me. “I say you’re making money, raising Danny, and living right.”

27 Now Is the Hour

THE THIRD THURSDAY OF THE MONTH WAS MRS. RONSON’S DAY. She was twenty-five and looked forty. She dragged herself up my stairs, every month, to talk about her dead baby daughter. Linda had died in her crib a year ago. They tucked her in at night and in the morning, Mrs. Ronson found her blue and still. The doctors had nothing useful to say. Mrs. Ronson paced around my room at every visit. She talked about how angry she was at God, and at the doctors, and at her husband, and she talked about trying to get pregnant.

I flipped over the cards because she expected me to, and as soon as I got to a card with a man on it I said, “You have to forgive your husband. He’s grieving too.” I turned over the Ace of Wands, upside down, and said, “You won’t get pregnant as long as you’re so angry with your husband.” Last month, she asked me to contact her daughter. I said Linda couldn’t send a message, because she was just a baby. But I threw my head back and gurgled and leaned from side to side, rocking my chair. When I sat up I said Linda was beautiful and happy. I saw her. She wore her little yellow romper with the ducks on it. She was playing with other little children, on a big blanket, in a great green field. I felt worse for Mrs. Ronson than for anyone else I read for, and I wished she wouldn’t come.

She was a few minutes late for her third Thursday and she was transformed. She had lipstick on and a pretty shirtwaist and she’d pushed her sunglasses on top of her head, like a movie star. She looked at my cloudy-sky windows and tossed her purse onto a chair.

“Gosh, it’s a little gloomy in here.”

I shuffled the deck and put it in front of her.

She smiled and held the deck, shaking it like a martini.

Mrs. Ronson told me she was pregnant. She said she owed it all to me. She giggled. She said that, of course, her husband deserved some of the credit. She’d been talking to her husband about me. She said Mr. Ronson worked for the FBI and she said that he was one of the head men for missing persons in New York. It’s been nearly ten years since they declared Judge Crater dead, Mrs. Ronson told me, and almost twenty years since the judge disappeared. It was a very big case, she said. I started to shuffle the deck but Mrs. Ronson put her hand on my wrist.

“I told Ted how good you are,” she said. “I told him how you’ve found things for people, you found those diamond earrings for a friend of mine, and how you even found that missing girl.”

I’d found Mrs. Cohen’s earrings by making her trace her steps from Best & Co., where she’d tried on six suits, to her driver taking her home, where she drank too much, waiting for her husband to get home, and fell asleep on the wicker couch in the sunroom. The earrings were caught under a cushion. I’d found the runaway, a young woman living in the Village, waitressing at Caffe Reggio, and sleeping around, but I did that by thinking about what I would do if I’d had the girl’s money, and her awful parents.

“They’re doing a big search for Judge Crater. With a psychic from Interpol. Ted said I should ask you if you’d like to come along and assist. He said he’d talk to you and if you were cleared, you could assist. And get paid.”

I SHUFFLED THE CARDS as Mr. Ronson came up the stairs. He had questions and questions and forms for me to sign. I would have said no but my whole body lit up with yes at the sight of Mr. Ronson. I wasn’t going to sleep with him. I wasn’t even going to flirt with him. I was so tired of baloney sandwiches and lost eyeglasses and paying the bills and the greatest pleasure of my life being tetherball with Danny and the occasional neck rub from Francisco. I just wanted to hike along behind big Ted Ronson, and watch the sweat come down his thick neck, watch his hard shoulders press against his suit jacket. I wanted to watch him swagger up the dirt trails in the Catskills as we looked for Judge Joe Crater, Good Time Joe, once of the New York Supreme Court, last seen getting into a cab on an August night in midtown Manhattan in 1930. And that’s what I did.

HENK CROISET LOOKED LIKE a psychic. It was a hot summer day and every other man with us wore a black suit. They all had the clipped, sharp FBI haircut, wide circles of clean pink skin over their ears. Monsieur Croiset, as I was told to call him (I was Miss Acton, who is helping us with this inquiry. She’s in your line, Croiset, is what Ted Ronson said.), wore a safari suit and had hair like Albert Einstein. He wore a red beret and carried an oak walking stick with the head carved to resemble a fox. M. Croiset lives in France, his interpreter said. M. Croiset’s most recent success with Interpol was finding the bodies of two girls who’d been kidnapped from France. He found their corpses in an orchard of cork trees in Portugal. M. Croiset didn’t speak English. Ted Ronson and the other men wanted to show that they weren’t impressed by him, but they were.

M. Croiset was having a great time. He talked to himself as we walked along and he hummed. He pulled together some wildflowers and handed them to me. When my hands were full, he put a few in his buttonhole. He chuckled at the rabbits and squirrels. He waved his hands at the butterflies. When he spoke, the interpreter shouted out the translations as we walked. One time, M. Croiset called out “Sally Lou Ritz,” and laughed. Sally Lou Ritz was the showgirl Judge Crater was dallying with hours before his disappearance. “O-hi-o,” M. Croiset said. The FBI men looked at each other. One of them said he’d interviewed Sally Lou Ritz about six years ago. She took care of her aging mother in Youngstown now and she looked like hell, he said. M. Croiset said “Sally Lou Ritz” a couple of more times, just because he liked the sound of it, and he pointed toward a stand of trees.

Under the biggest tree was a circle of flat, mossy stones. M. Croiset told us, through the interpreter, that there were some bones under the largest stone. While the men took off their jackets to pull up the stones, the interpreter said that M. Croiset was sorry but the bones didn’t belong to the judge.

The men kept pulling. We all stood around. M. Croiset leaned against the tree, wiping his face with a handkerchief. “C’est dommage,” he said a few times. “C’est une femme. Ce n’est pas Sally Lou Ritz.” We both watched the digging with interest. The FBI agents got excited and the FBI photographer started snapping. There was a medium-size skeleton under the rocks, and M. Croiset crossed himself and went over to look. He talked and the interpreter told us that this was the skeleton of a dead girl from about sixty years ago. M. Croiset had tears in his eyes. The interpreter said that the girl was a servant, that she had told her lover that she was pregnant and he had killed her. Then he went to sea. Ted Ronson told the two youngest men to stay with the skeleton and the rest of us walked back to the FBI cars. They dropped me and M. Croiset and the interpreter at a diner and said they’d be back in an hour.

“We’re probably going to stop for the day,” Ted Ronson said. “We have to check out this body.”

The diner was dark and sticky, hot air pushing at us from the big fan in the corner. The pies were sweating. I told the interpreter that we might just want to have lemonade and ham-and-cheese sandwiches and potato chips. I said I was sorry about the food, which would probably be awful. He told M. Croiset, who smiled and said, “Limonade! Parfait.” M. Croiset spoke to the interpreter for a little while and the interpreter said that while we waited, M. Croiset suggested that we could play a game. I said sure. The interpreter told me to picture anything in the world. Anything, he said. From anywhere, even outer space.

I was sweating like a pig. My skirt stuck to my legs and even my feet were sweating in my sneakers. I pictured the window of Holman’s toy store in Abingdon, when I was a little girl. My mother and I went every year, a couple of weeks before Christmas. We went to admire the windows, which were always beautifully decorated, and we went to pick out one toy that I really liked. My father would come the day after Christmas or the next day and the toy I wanted would be produced. Mr. Holman and my father and mother came through every year.

I pictured my favorite of all the Christmas windows. Mr. Holman had hung dozens of glittering snowflakes on a fishing line, so they seemed to float in the window. The window was framed in candy canes and there was a little village, all red and black, in front of a lake made out of a mirror. Around the lake, spreading out to the corners, was a miniature countryside of fields and forests, of green, snow-dusted pine trees, old-fashioned villagers, rushing by with packages, a couple of Model T’s and at the very edge, a barn, glowing from within, its doors flung open and a cow and calf lying down in the middle. And all of that, including the cow and the calf in the golden light, is what M. Croiset sketched on the back of the place mat. He smiled at me and put down his pen. He took my hand in both of his hands and he nodded to the interpreter. He was so intent and his face was so expressive, I felt I knew what he was saying before the interpreter spoke.

“Vous n’êtes pas fait pour ce travail.”

The interpreter spoke very quietly and kindly. “You are not cut out for this kind of work.”

“Ne vous inquiétez pas. Votre secret es dans de bonnes mains.”

“Don’t worry. Your secret’s safe with me.”

M. Croiset pressed my hand. He handed me a napkin so I could wipe my eyes. M. Croiset spoke again, but this time I didn’t know what was coming.

The interpreter said, “M. Croiset feels that you have not found your gift.”

M. Croiset spoke again, and this time, he seemed a little annoyed with the interpreter.

“I beg your pardon. You have not yet found your professional calling. M. Croiset sees that you are a mother and a daughter.”

M. Croiset spoke.

“Like a mother and a daughter. He sees the little boy and the older man, from Spain. You are loved. He says that soon you will find your calling.” The interpreter paused. “He says do not lose your nerve when the time comes.”

M. Croiset kissed my hand.

Ted Ronson came through the door, sweating like the rest of us. I didn’t look at him twice. They bundled us into separate Oldsmobiles and took M. Croiset and the interpreter back to the city. The two junior G-men drove me home and told me not to talk about what I’d seen or repeat anything that’d been said. I told Danny and Francisco what happened. I included finding the skeleton, not finding the judge, and the amazing place mat. I left out the part about my being a complete fraud. I told them that M. Croiset had mentioned them both, but I didn’t say he said I was a mother and a daughter. Danny said that he might become a G-man and Francisco and I nodded, as though we would not strip naked and publicly declare ourselves Communists to keep that from happening.

Francisco slept over the whole week. It was so hot, I let Danny sleep on the living room floor, on top of a sheet. The crickets made a racket every night. We all woke up at dawn every morning because of the heat. On Saturday, at dawn, Francisco said we might as well have breakfast. He squeezed a dozen oranges and made scrambled eggs and sausage. I made cinnamon toast for Danny, who tore the crusts off and ate my sausage.

Francisco stamped his feet. He stood up suddenly. He pointed to his chest and pushed his fork and plate and the eggs and the rest of the sausage onto the floor. His face became deep, dark pink. Danny and I stared at him. I pushed Danny out of my way and dialed the operator. Danny was bouncing up and down in terror.

Oh, God, please, I said, I need a doctor. My father is choking.

The operator was smooth and friendly. Where do you live, she said, and I told her and she said, Well there’s nobody right near you — and I thought she meant white and I screamed, I don’t care who you get, get me a doctor on the phone, and she did.

This is Dr. Snyder, he said.

Oh, Doctor, oh, Doctor, I said.

Francisco was almost purple.

Oh, he’s choking, he’s choking. He can’t breathe.

The doctor’s voice was like silk. That’s all right. You take two deep breaths. Now, how old is he? And can you tell me what he was eating?

I said he was old and had been eating sausage.

All right. Hit him hard on the back a couple of times.

I stood behind Francisco and pounded him as hard as I could. He grabbed the back of his chair but nothing changed. Danny was crying in the corner.

It’s not helping, I said. Oh, God.

Okay, now, lie him down on his back. I made Danny help me get Francisco on the floor. He was rigid with fear and his face was getting even darker. His hands were fists.

A pillow, I said. Does he need a pillow?

Not right now, the doctor said. Is he lying down?

I said he was.

Here’s what we’re going to do — it’s going to be a little scary but you have to do this, and you have to do this now.

Tell me, I said. Do I have to wash my hands?

We’re not going to worry about that now, he said. Get your sharpest knife and get a napkin.

A napkin? A linen napkin?

I waved my arm frantically at Danny — Get a napkin! Hurry!

Now, tell him that you’re going to help him.

I’m going to help you, I said to Francisco, and he kept his dark eyes on me. I told the doctor, I told him.

That’s good. Get on your knees on your — are you right-handed or left-handed?

Right.

Get on your knees on his right side. Feel his Adam’s apple. Do you feel that?

Yes.

Good. Do you feel that there’s a smaller bump a little farther down?

I did feel it but I had to press on Francisco’s soft skin and his fleshy neck and I apologized to him.

Now, in between, the doctor said, there’s a little valley. Use the edge of the knife in that little valley and make a sideways incision. Just a cut, sideways, just through the skin and half an inch across. And then you’re going to open up the cut a little bit. You’ll see a membrane, a thin, translucent membrane, like frog skin, and you’re going to cut through that too. Then you’re going to keep that incision open with your thumb and forefinger.

I worried that I would cut his throat.

And you’ll need the napkin, to blot the blood that will come out. It won’t be a lot of blood. It’ll be okay.

Danny, I screamed, Napkin! Danny was standing right next to me and put it into my hand. I gave him the receiver.

You tell me what the doctor says, I said, and you look away.

I pressed the knife into Francisco’s neck until blood began to seep. I spread the edges of the cut apart with my thumb and forefinger.

He says you need a straw, Danny whispered, while staring at the kitchen clock. You need two.

Go get the straws, I said, from the pantry. I kept the knife in. I picked up the receiver with my left hand.

I made the incision. He looks like he’s going to die.

He’s not going to die. Take the paper straws and put them in the incision.

Do I take the knife out?

He paused.

Yes, take the knife out right now. Put the straws in and blow into them a few times. Four times. Puff into them.

Danny handed me the striped paper straws and I put them into the incision, like into a milkshake. I puffed into them. Francisco turned dark pink, then pale pink. Tears ran down his face.

Yes, yes. Will he be okay?

Well, he can’t talk, the doctor said. But he can breathe. Keep the straws there. Do you have any tape?

I turned to Danny. Do we have tape?

He brought me the Scotch tape and held the phone to my ear, because my hands were starting to shake.

Now, wrap the straws with tape and then tape the bottom to the skin. You want to stabilize the straws. I looked at Danny and he gave me the receiver. He wrapped the straws in tape and then pressed the ends to Francisco’s throat.

Do you have scissors? the doctor said.

Scissors, I said, and Danny ran to my room and got my sewing scissors and he made two very neat cuts in the tape.

We’ve taped it, I said.

Good, the doctor said. This is very good. Now, trim off all but two inches of the straws.

I did that.

Now, he said, I’m going to call the operator and get an ambulance.

I gave the doctor our address and phone number and he gave me his phone number and Danny and I sat on either side of Francisco, stroking his hands and watching the straw.

You saved someone’s life tonight, Dr. Snyder said.

I washed my face and hands over and over, trembling, until the ambulance came. I told Danny what a wonderful job he’d done. We followed the ambulance, in Francisco’s car, with Danny leaning forward the whole time, his chin on the dashboard, peering through the fog. We got to the hospital twenty minutes after they’d checked him in and gotten him settled. There was really nothing for us to do, but we couldn’t sit or sleep. We walked around the hospital and ate the stale pastries in the cafeteria. I told Danny that for the purpose of visiting hours, we were going to say that I was Francisco’s daughter and Danny was his grandson, and Danny beamed. Who was your mother? he asked. I said that I never knew my mother. He shook his head. I know, I said. What a pair.

We begged the nurse to let us sit in Francisco’s room and watch him sleep. Danny slid off my lap to stare at the sleeping man in the next bed, whose leg was held up with pulleys and was the size of an entire mottled human being. Danny asked me what the man had and I told him to ask a nurse. He stood in the hall and waited for a nurse and he whispered his question. She said, Elephantiasis, and Danny reported back and we liked how awful that sounded. Danny said elephantiasis about ten more times.

We went to the hospital for the next four days, at dinnertime, and each time, we just missed Bea and Carnie. We brought in some fruit and Francisco said, “Oh, the Torellis of yesteryear.” We smuggled in vanilla milk shakes from Kriegel’s and shared them. We took turns holding hands. On the last day, I met Dr. Keith.

“You’re the little surgeon,” he said.

“I am.”

The nicest nurse, the one Francisco liked, said, “You’d make a great nurse.”

Dr. Keith didn’t say anything until the nurse walked away.

“You wouldn’t,” he said. “You don’t have the right temperament. But you are damn good with a knife.”

DANNY AND I BROUGHT Francisco home. I thought we might move him into my father’s old room but Danny said, “He won’t like it up there. It’s lonely. If you put him in your room, I’ll be right across the hall and I can get him things. Like water, or anything. I can help.”

I opened the windows in the attic bedroom to get rid of the smell of urine and old man and menthol. I cleared out every trace of my father, except his glasses and his books and an almost empty bottle of my father’s aftershave, Zizanie, which he’d worn since I was a little girl. The scent used to last from Sunday to Tuesday in my mother’s house.

I slept on the living room couch for a couple of days, in case. Finally, I looked in on Danny and on Francisco and gathered up my blanket and pillow, my radio, my books, and my pajamas and I went up to the attic room, which was just what I wanted. I put my father’s glasses in their alligator case into my nightstand and the Zizanie bottle in my bottom drawer. I set my pile of Little Blue Books and poetry on the bookshelf next to his books. I could hear my father quoting John Cowper Powys on Whitman: “ ‘He restores to us courage and joy even under circumstances of aggravated gloom.’ ” He would always say “gloom” in his deepest voice, lowering his eyebrows and making me laugh. My father quoted everyone, from Shakespeare to Emerson, on the subject of destiny, and then he’d point out that except for the Greeks, everyone agreed: The stars do fuck-all for us; you must make your own way.

I CALLED ON DR. Snyder. There wasn’t a nurse out front. I sat in his waiting room with a bottle of Macallan Scotch in my lap, leafing through magazines, until he walked in. I was a little disappointed. He was plain and furrowed, with thinning hair. I had to say my name twice, and my address, before he knew who I was. He brought me into his office, a room just big enough for his desk and chair and my chair. I put the Scotch on his table and told him that Francisco had come home, and he said that was great news. We looked at each other. I told him what Dr. Keith had said about my surgical skills and he laughed. Bob Keith’s no fool, he said. I crossed my legs and let my skirt ride up to my garters. Dr. Snyder came out from behind his desk and pulled me up. He pulled at my bra until he held my bare breast and I pressed my hand against him until he was so hard, I thought he’d hurt himself. We necked on his desk, pushing his files and his pens to the floor, until his nurse knocked. I straightened my skirt and my bra. He straightened his tie. I took a quick look in the mirror and reapplied my lipstick, while he watched. He looked over my shoulder and wiped the red off his chin. We looked at each other in the mirror. We were breathing hard and still a little excited and beyond that, deeply pleased with each other and ourselves.

FRANCISCO MADE MEXICAN CHICKEN soup and tortillas and Danny showed us his spelling test, with the big red 100 across the top. Francisco kissed him, and while Danny was setting the table, Francisco showed me a contract for the Penn Station barbershop. He was selling it to Jorge and Gracie, who wanted to expand.

“I’m retiring,” he said. “And we got some money in the bank.”

“I’m going to be on the spelling team,” Danny said. “We’re going to have a tournament.”

We cheered for ourselves, and ate the soup, and when the ice cream truck came, I gave Danny a dollar. The three of us sat in the back on the picnic table, blissfully eating our Creamsicles. I thought, I’ll be a doctor.

28 It’s Been a Long, Long Time

I BEGAN TO THINK I SAW GUS HEITMANN EVERYWHERE. HIS long, foxy jaw. The sharp, pocked cheekbones. His wide shoulders, dipping to the left, driving the car ahead of me. It was ridiculous to think I’d seen Gus in Great Neck, as if he hadn’t died or, having not died, had chosen to come back here. I told Francisco, who said, “Yeah, I saw De Gaulle in Nassau Hardware. Right behind me.”

IT TURNED OUT, GUS had seen me. He’d been looking for me. He’d called the Torellis three times and he said that each time he’d felt sicker than when he’d reentered Ellis Island and had to claim to be Gersh Hoffman, Nazi victim. He never reached Mrs. Torelli, who I think would have told him where I was. He got a snippy girl with an English accent, who was probably the new governess, and he got a shy Negro maid, who thought he was selling something. Twice, he got Joey, who yelled, HelloHelloHello, into the receiver and hung up. Once, he dialed his old number in Lake Success but the woman didn’t know any Reenie Heitmann and a man took the phone from her and told Gus to stop bothering his wife. Gus said that he’d never thought he was a coward until he sat looking at my name and address and phone number in the Great Neck telephone book, and couldn’t bring himself to dial.

He didn’t want to be Gus Heitmann anymore. He wanted only to be Gersh Hoffman, Jewish math teacher, and he wanted to find me. He never told me what he would have said to Reenie if she’d answered the phone.

DANNY AND I WENT to Stricoff’s bakery like other people went to church. We were Sunday regulars, and if it was a bad week, you could find us picking out a chocolate babka on a Wednesday afternoon. That’s where Gus saw us. He said we looked like the tall and the small of the same person. He watched me give my ticket to one of the Stricoff sisters and get handed a box and a small white bag and right before we made our way through the throng of Sunday shoppers, the old men with their lists and the other young women with their small children, Gus got into his car and followed us home. He parked his car a block away, like a real spy, he said, and stood on our corner. He watched me and Danny carry in our groceries. Francisco held the door open for us, saying, as he always did, “Hail the conquering heroes.”

Gus said when he saw Francisco, he hated him. He said that he couldn’t imagine why I had married a man like that, but he saw me hug Francisco and it looked like I loved him and he thought that there was no reason to get in touch, after all. I put on my dungarees and Danny and I played while Francisco put the groceries away and started dinner. Gus watched us, hidden by our hedge, batting the hell out of our tetherball. When Danny wrapped the ball around the top of the pole, I cheered, and we went back into the house for Danny’s math and my med school applications. I looked back, at nothing, at the sound of a car starting, and Danny tugged on my sweater.

THAT NIGHT, IT WAS raining like the Flood. Trees bent toward the ground, the sky cracked white every few minutes, and black, oily water ran in the black streets. Thunder woke Danny up twice and I sang to him. On the third verse of “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball,” he fell back asleep. I tucked him in with his old holster, just in case. Francisco was reviewing the transcript we’d devised before typing it on our state-approved and watermarked paper. I was taking a break from organic chemistry, skimming my Little Blue Book on modern mathematics. Francisco had already aged the parchment for my high school and college diplomas and done the calligraphy. A man he used to shave had a brother-in-law who had the state seals for New Mexico, New York, and New Jersey, and now, so did we. Francisco had amortized all our medical school expenses over the some thirty-five years I could expect to practice and he said I was a good investment. He kept a ledger book of what I owed him. Sometimes he wrote in things like Teaching Danny Spanish: $10,000.00, Eva’s Eyebrows: $2,000.00. We graduated me magna cum laude from the University of New Mexico. (Not summa. Do not overreach, my father had said.) I applied to medical schools in New York and I hoped that they felt about New Mexico the way I did, that it was American, and legitimate, but wide open and a little unknowable. My UNM transcript showed that I had aced everything, including classical music and botany (well rounded), and had spent three years as a lab assistant for the recently deceased Dr. Andrew Azores. His reference letter emphasized that he had never recommended a woman before; nevertheless, he believed that without in any way compromising my femininity, I would contribute to the field of medicine. Dr. Azores approved of what he felt was my natural interest in pediatrics. He emphasized my devotion to medicine, my skills, and my modesty. There was a suggestion that I would never marry. Francisco and I both thought Dr. Azores was a pompous ass but he was, entirely, our pompous ass. We didn’t give me Phi Beta Kappa, on the off chance that someone on some admissions committee would give a damn, and thinking to help or hurt my cause, call the Phi Beta Kappa office.

29 How High the Moon

Letter from Iris

Queensberry Place

South Kensington, London

September 3, 1948

Dearest Eva,

I understand why you never wrote. I’m sorry that I stopped writing. It was too hard. It was like etching my awfulness on every mirror. I have tried to be a better person. I even look in the mirror less often.

The clinic is becoming a reality. I continue to be the Singing Guinea Pig, and now I am on the board, which means I beg rich people for money, every single week, on behalf of Dr. McIndoe and the boys, and, in my own mind, on behalf of Reenie. I am usually partnered up with a very handsome, badly maimed RAF major. I don’t know that most people see his handsomeness. I imagine they see the ruined remains. That’s what we count on — because just as the rich person begins to wince (usually as Teddy is knocking a tray of crab puffs to the floor with his stump, or misjudging the distance from the glass to his twisted mouth), I cut in with my pretty ways and waltz them into another room, so they can write us a check in comfort. We have perfected this. I love Teddy and he loves me. If I was going to sleep with a man, it would be a short Scotsman with one arm and half a face and a taste for morphine.

I’ve been a guest star on Café Continental six times now and it looks like our West End revue will run forever. I am enclosing a check, which I hope will be helpful to you all. I’ll send you a check every month that I’m working, from now until I die.

Oh, Eva, please forgive me for every shitty, unspeakable, unforgivable thing I did to you. I know that as lists go, this is one with real depth and real breadth. I have no business staying away — except that I think you are better off without me and at least here, I make myself useful. If you write me and tell me to return, I will.

If you can, forgive me. If you can, let me make amends.

Your sister,

Iris

GUS HEITMANN STOOD AT MY KITCHEN DOOR, WATER DRIPPING off his hat. He looked worn out and he was soaking wet.

“Gus,” I said. “My God.” I kept my voice down, because of Danny.

He smiled at me, uncertainly.

“Look at you. You’re all grown up,” he said. “Married, with a little boy.”

Francisco snorted.

Gus and Francisco said hello. Francisco was not going to say, I’m not her husband, you moron, so I said so, politely. Francisco settled back in at the kitchen table and picked up his magnifying glass. I wish I’d thrown my arms around Gus’s neck and kicked up my back foot or squealed his name or any of the things that a normal woman would do, seeing a man she was fond of, who she thought was dead. I let Gus in and I put his wet hat on top of the refrigerator.

WE SAT IN THE living room and Francisco stayed in the kitchen, listening in. Gus told me that he had been living in Great Neck for a few months, and he started teaching at the high school in a month. He was kind of a loner, he said, and everyone knew him now as Gersh Hoffman, that he’d changed his name while he was in Germany. It made no sense to me, changing one German name to another. He talked about his hard times in Germany and looking me up and not calling and then seeing me in the bakery, and I could hardly listen. I was just waiting for him to ask me about Reenie.

“Let me get you a drink,” I said. “I guess you’re trying to find Reenie.”

He said that he had looked for her and he had looked for me, but he’d lost his nerve.

I had to tell him what had happened. I told him the short version, without the details, which, even so, was awful to tell. He put his hands in front of his eyes.

He said, “Oh, Christ. Oh, poor Reenie. I am so sorry.” He put his head in his hands, and I apologized too. I said that Reenie was dead by the time they got her to the hospital, and I started to explain that we didn’t have a hospital close to us but that would be changing soon, and Gus lifted his head to look at me. I thought it might be now that he asked me what had been going on with Iris and Reenie.

He said, “How’d the fire start?”

I said I didn’t know, that no one knew.

“Spontaneous combustion,” he said. “How ’bout that. Where’s your sister now?”

I told him that she had gone to England for surgery and we weren’t in touch.

He said, “Too bad. You didn’t have much family.”

I said the same was true for him. Gus asked me about my father and I told him that Edgar had been sick for a while and died and he said he was sorry about that too. He asked about my husband and my son and I heard Francisco muttering in the kitchen. I said that I really did not have a husband and that Danny was my adopted son. Gus looked furious, and I thought that the details of Danny’s life could wait until another time. Or never. Gus asked me if I had gotten his letters. I said no and he sank down in the couch.

“That’s too bad,” he said. “If you’d gotten my letters …”

Francisco said, “I’m making coffee. Who wants some?”

Gus stood up. “Good to see you,” he said. “We should have that drink next time. Maybe we’ll play cards,” he said.

I said that I’d be glad to do that. I told him that I worked near Stricoff’s bakery and that I was usually home by five o’clock. I asked him if he had a day in mind to get together and he said no. He asked me what I did for work and I said that I was a psychic, that I did tarot card readings. I wasn’t happy to say this.

“She’s worked with the FBI,” Francisco said. I knew that he thought I should tell Gus that I was applying to medical school, that I was not planning on spending the rest of my life as Madame Fruitcake, peddling bullshit to decent, unhappy people, as Gus might see it.

“You don’t say. You’ll have to tell me my future sometime.” He walked into the kitchen and got his hat. He shook Francisco’s hand on his way out the door.

I sat at the kitchen table and Francisco moved the valuable, watermarked papers that would be my transcript and closed his typewriter case.

“He thought you were my husband,” I said.

Francisco smoothed his hair and he arched an eyebrow. “Naturally.”

“What was that about?” I asked.

Francisco poured us beers.

“The lightning stopped,” he said. “Danny can get a good night’s sleep.”

“What was he in such a goddamn state about?” I said. “I mean, I understand. About Reenie.”

“It was very sad about Reenie. On top of that, the man was disappointed. He thought that when he finally pulled himself together and came to find you, there’d be magic and he would be transformed by your loveliness, which he has, probably, exaggerated over the years, and then the two of you would melt into each other, in an incandescent moment of mutual and perfect understanding. As one. Forever. I think, in his mind, Reenie was already out of the picture. Not that he wished her dead. And here you are, not waiting for him, with the little boy and the fat old man and no incandescence anywhere.”

“Christ Almighty,” I said.

“I’m going to bed,” Francisco said. “Tomorrow, we send in your magnificent transcripts. I gave you an A-minus in organic. Say goodnight, kiddo.”

“Good night, kiddo,” I said. I sat at the table until I fell asleep. At dawn, I dragged myself to bed. I had gotten used to the idea that people lived and you loved them, or didn’t, and then they died and you were bound to miss them, often even if you didn’t love them. I was used to Gus being dead and now he was not only alive, but stupid and angry, and he’d trailed all my dead and gone people into my house, right along with that sad, wet hat and his lined, hard face.

I DROVE TO GREAT Neck High School and read The Fundamentals of Physics in the parking lot until the three o’clock bell. It was Firenze Gardens all over again. I watched Gus make sure a bunch of boys got on the bus without killing each other or falling under the tires, and when he lit his cigarette and the last bus pulled out, I walked over. I apologized for the other night. I wasn’t the one with the problem, but I was certainly sorry. I was surprised when I should have been gracious, and I had given him nothing but very bad news. I was sorry about that and I said so.

Gus pushed his hat back on his head until he looked like a farmer. I’m glad I heard it from you, he said. Maybe we could have dinner. I was a knucklehead, he said. We could start again. I said that I thought that was a good idea and he said, How about my place? I can cook. I thought he needed to be careful with a buck, like I did, and I said yes. I told Francisco where I was going and he told me to wear slacks and my blue sweater and my navy-blue loafers. He said a little lipstick wouldn’t kill me. Are we acting like this is a date, Francisco asked. We are not, I said.

Gus’s place was neat and clean and close to empty. The couch was a mustard-yellow brocade with one brown pillow on it and there were no pictures on the walls. There was a rocking chair with no cushion, an old rag rug in the living room, and another small rug in front of his kitchen sink. I was seized with love for my house at Old Tree Lane and Danny’s trucks and racing cars and his grimy socks and Francisco’s three pairs of reading glasses and the path my stockings took every Friday night, from the tub, to the stairs, to my room, each of us helping my stockings get back to where they belonged.

The place smelled like spaghetti sauce, and not the kind that Francisco made. Gus asked me what I liked to drink and I said a whiskey sour. I don’t have that, he said. I said whatever you have is fine, and he poured me a glass of red wine that tasted like a saddle. I sat down on the couch and thought how much I should never have come. Gus sat down next to me, dropping an arm over my shoulder.

“Oh, my,” I said. “Like kids at the movies?”

“I’ve missed you. I thought about you a lot. If you’d gotten my letters …”

“I didn’t,” I said. “I thought you were dead, somewhere. Or not dead, but not coming back. I didn’t think you were a German spy. None of us did.”

“Good. Thanks. So, you don’t have a husband.” He narrowed his eyes. Like, I maybe didn’t have a husband, but I had a lover. Like, I may have said I didn’t have a husband but probably I was an inveterate liar. I asked how the dinner was coming along and he went back to the kitchen. We ate the spaghetti and the burned meatballs and our two salads and Gus poured us the whole awful bottle. We found ourselves back on the ugly couch, drinking brandy.

“I really wish you’d gotten my letters,” Gus said.

I AM NOT AN expert in normal sexual behavior. I’ve had my crushes, flaring and fading in a week, and most nights I dreamed about sex with everyone from Ozzie Patterson to General MacArthur. Despite that business with Dr. Snyder, things had stayed pretty quiet for me in that department. I had Danny and a man who loved me and shared the cooking and I was surrounded by married people. I wanted something slow and romantic and even a little frightening. I wanted us to hold hands and find ourselves unable to let go. I wanted Gus to kiss me on the neck up to and around my ear (which I always thought I’d like) and back down to the nape of my neck, under my ponytail, and then a string of warm kisses along the top of my shoulder, where he pushed my sweater aside. My head would fall back against the yellow brocade and slowly, slowly, like opening a present, Gus would undo the buttons of my cardigan. He would carry me to his bed, never mind his bad leg, and unzip my pants and I would slip out, naked and smooth as the day I was born. He would kiss every part of me, my breasts and between my legs, and at last my sensible body would surprise me. It would do new, wild things that were as different from cooking and comforting and managing as can be. Waterfall of desire, is what I was hoping for.

In the event, Gus was drunk, following his own uneven tune. He kicked over the brandy bottle and we righted it and mopped it up and the whole room smelled like a French accident. Gus pulled my sweater over my head and it caught on my earring. I sat upright with my hands in my lap, like a woman on a bus in a bad neighborhood, except that I was just in my bra. He kissed me frantically, not always connecting with my actual skin. He had trouble with my bra and I thought he would tear it, so I unhooked it myself and let it drop to the couch. He tossed it on the floor, onto the brandy stain, and he kissed my breasts. He rubbed his face over them. I said, Ouch, a couple of times and he stopped. He looked at me, his eyes still unfocused, and I put my hands over my breasts. You scratched me, I said. He saw my face and my bare breasts and I think he did see me. He put his hands over his face and then he stood up. He handed me my sweater.

“You should go now,” he said. “I’m sorry. You should go.”

I pulled my sweater over my head and stuffed my damp bra into my purse. Gus was crying.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I was sorry.

He opened his front door.

“I won’t bother you again,” he said.

FRANCISCO WAS SITTING UP when I came in.

“Awful,” I said.

“You or him?”

I DID BETTER THAN average on my med school exams. I sent in my impressive transcripts and my stellar letters of recommendation and, waiting to become, I busted out as a psychic. I picked up M. Croiset’s habit of saying things out loud, naming the creatures of the world, just because I liked the sound, and my clients leapt up, like trout, to agree with me, and see their happy futures unfolding. I was doing five readings a day, putting money in the bank, and I rented a saxophone for Danny so he could join the sixth grade jazz band. He wore a red vest every Wednesday evening for band practice. A friend of Ruthie’s told Ruthie that Danny was cute. Wednesday nights, Francisco went to Society for Human Rights meetings, which were, as he said, lousy with old Reds and old Scotch and some new Judy Garland records and on Wednesdays, I couldn’t settle down until they were both back home.

IT WAS WARMER THAN usual. The snow had left a few narrow white strips on the slick bright-green grass, as if spring were right around the corner. I had put away Danny’s things and lain down to read the newspaper and fallen asleep. I dreamed that my father, younger and healthy, was in white tie (which would have suited him), carrying bottles of Champagne down a flight of glossy marble steps. They were slippery, so smooth light bounced off their rounded edges, but he walked confidently, with his shoulders back. He didn’t look down. He tossed the bottles into two big ice buckets and looked in my direction and winked. I came toward him and the white flotsam of wherever we were brushed past me like tumbleweed.

“One’s Champagne,” he said. “One’s egg cream. And I brought sandwiches.” And floating near the ice buckets were dear Mrs. Gruber’s fried-egg-and-cheese sandwiches, each in a soft white nest.

“Everything you need, as the chorus girl said to the vicar.” He tapped his show-biz silver-topped cane a couple of times.

IT WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT and I was in my pajamas and Gus was at the door.

I made us tea and we sat in the kitchen, saying nothing, watching it steep. I put out a plate of cookies, not that I wanted to.

“Are you mad at me?” Gus said, in the tone of a man who is sure he has every reason to be angry and the other person has none.

I was. I was as angry at him as if he’d been standing me up, night after night, in some fancy restaurant on Northern Boulevard.

“I don’t know what you want,” I said. “I don’t even know you.”

“You know me,” he said. “I know you.”

YOU KNOW ME.

I don’t think the best beginning is loneliness or the memory of a man making you laugh while your sister is kissing his wife in the backyard or the strong feeling that if you do not leap now, unprepared and inept as you are, onto this buckling train, you may be sorry, but I don’t think it’s the worst.

Gus took my hand at the kitchen table and came forward to kiss me. I put my saucer over my teacup to keep it warm and Gus laughed. He did kiss me, not on the lips, but below my ear.

“Everyone’s asleep?” he asked.

“I hope so.”

We went up to my attic room and lay down on my bed.

“No one’s seen me without my clothes for a long time,” he said. “It ain’t pretty.”

I never wanted anything the way I wanted to see Gus without his clothes on and then to have him see me.

“Oh,” I said, “please let me.”

It was the end of winter and we were in layers. I put his sports jacket on the little wooden chair in the corner and then I came back to the bed. He kept his eyes on the ceiling.

“Look at me,” I said. “I’m so glad to be seeing you.”

“I hope so, kiddo,” he said, and he closed his eyes.

The white shirt and all of its buttons, the undershirt, the belt, the pants, and then I was down to his boxers and shoes and socks, in which I’m pretty sure no man looks his best. I untied his black shoes and pulled off his socks. I had seen my father like this, and Danny. I had seen pictures of Michelangelo’s David. Gus looked nothing like that.

“Getting cold here,” Gus said.

I put my mouth on his smooth chest. He tasted like coffee. I kissed him from one shoulder to the other and down the dark line of his belly and I stopped, to gather my thoughts. I said his name.

Gus opened his eyes. He leaned up on one elbow and took off my clothes, one piece at a time, until I had on nothing but my underpants and socks. He kissed my breasts. Sorry for last time, he said. He kissed me through my underpants. I didn’t take my socks off until the middle of the night. Everything surprised me and nothing frightened me.

Gus talked and I listened. He told me about the long march to Trutzhain and the Gypsy man he’d walked with and the people they had had to leave behind. I fell asleep and woke up, reaching for him. He was still talking, about a crippled boy on the ship that took him to Germany and about Greta and her two little girls. Anna and Carolyn.

We heard Danny’s door creak open and we heard him pee into the toilet bowl. His footsteps stopped at the bottom of the stairs to my room and then I heard him get back into bed and leave his door open.

Gus got up and put on his boxers. He looked silvery and beautiful in the moonlight, released from his usual boxer’s stance. His bad leg looked slim and elegant, like it balanced him. Gus smiled and reached for his glasses.

“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Wish me luck.”

I fell asleep and woke up to Gus laughing.

“I met Danny,” Gus said. “He could use some help with math, he thinks you should get out more, and we agreed that a bright moon, like tonight, makes it hard to sleep. I said that I had always found that a couple of cookies and a glass of milk helped. So we tried that. Also, you’re low on cookies.”

He lay down beside me, on the side of the bed I never slept on, and he lay on his back and sighed. He pulled me onto him. He talked about people in Pforzheim, about a man with no legs who got around in a cart, until I fell asleep again, my hand in his hair, his hand on my hip. I woke up at dawn and saw that he was crying in his sleep. I wiped his face with my hand and he curled around me, still sleeping, not an inch between us.

IN THE MORNING, WE tiptoed out of my room, absurdly, as if in my little house, another person wouldn’t be noticed. Danny was dressed and sitting at the kitchen table. He stood up when Gus walked in the room.

“Good to see you again,” Gus said. He stuck out his hand and Danny shook it.

“Do you want some breakfast?” Danny said. “Eva makes good pancakes.”

Danny poured Gus a glass of orange juice. He acted as host and butler for all of breakfast. It was as if my father had entered Danny’s body and soul. He poured coffee. He made remarks about the weather. He filled the sugar bowl and brought it to the table. Discreetly, he folded a napkin next to Gus’s elbow and set a teaspoon on it. When Gus lifted the little bottle of syrup to pour on the pancakes, Danny put his hand on Gus’s arm.

“Do you want that warmed?” he said, and cast an eye at me, as if to say, Hop to.

After breakfast, Gus washed and Danny dried. I said that I had some errands to run, and if Danny was not the nice boy that he was, and hadn’t absorbed the Acton rule of good manners in the face of all, and if he didn’t on top of that, love me, he would have said, Who’s stopping you, lady?

Gus left his horrible apartment and moved in, with a suitcase and a box of books. He fixed the front step and fussed over Francisco’s car until it purred and Francisco shook his hand. Gus slept on the couch for two weeks, in a gesture of something more benign than hypocrisy, but not much. Finally, Francisco and Danny sat us down on the second Sunday night and suggested that the following Friday would be a good day for us all to have our hair cut and our shoes polished and go to Town Hall, which we did.

Letter from Eva

220 Old Tree Lane

Great Neck

New York

April 2, 1949

Dear Iris,

Come home.

Your sister,

Eva

Telegram from Iris

TO: EVA ACTON

220 OLD TREE LANE

GREAT NECK, NEW YORK

MAY 2, 1949

ARRIVING SEVEN PM. BOAC LAGUARDIA AIRPORT.

CRYING ALREADY.

THERE IS A BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTOGRAPH, WITH WHITE SCALLOPED edges, in my red leatherette photo album, in Iris’s padded white leather one that has IR monogrammed in the corner, and in a silver-plate frame that Danny took with him to college: five people on a wide, striped picnic blanket unrolled over thick green grass, at the edge of the beach in Steppingstone Park. A fat, handsome old man, dark, with beautiful silver hair curling over the collar of his loose white shirt, smiles warmly. He lifts up a beer bottle, toasting the camera. A younger — but not young — man raises his bottle. You can see the condensation on it. The sun shines against his horn-rimmed glasses and you can’t see the man’s eyes. His smile is wide and a little watchful. A boy who might be eleven or twelve lies on the grass, on his stomach, under the arc of beer bottles. His horn-rimmed glasses are a little big for his face. He looks right into the camera, his smile almost covered by his hands, his elbows buried in the grass. His round, bare feet stick up behind him, and on one foot, someone has placed a blue-and-white Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap. The two women in the photograph lean in from opposite edges, making a canopy over the group. The taller woman kneels, in light-colored slacks and a pale, sheer, sleeveless blouse. You can see the edges of her lace bra underneath. Her dark hair is piled up and she wears long, glittering earrings. She smiles and you can see her white teeth. She dangles her sunglasses from the fingers of one upturned hand, as if she’s just been told to take them off. In her other hand, she lifts a silver thermos in the air, toward the center, and the long tails of the scarf around her neck billow out behind her.

The other woman also kneels, arching over the group sitting beneath her on the blanket. She wears dungarees rolled above her ankles and a white blouse and you can see her bare feet on the blanket. Her dark hair is in a ponytail and her glasses shine on the top of her head. A pair of loafers is on the grass beside her. Her right arm is outstretched, her hand almost touches the other woman’s. Her left hand rests on the boy’s back and the man with the glasses’ hand is on top of hers.

You can count four sailboats in the water behind them and there is a gull’s wing in the upper right corner of the photograph. The sun is directly overhead, behind great sheets of cloud, and the light falls evenly on them, on the picnic basket almost hidden behind the old man, on the one gull approaching a ball of waxed paper, on the listing boathouse, on the smooth pale sand, on small whitecaps breaking in the distance, on everything we see.