Amy Bloom - Lucky Us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll never see Gus again,” she said.

I said that we didn’t know that.

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

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

“Do you?” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Iris worries about him,” Reenie said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you in school?” she said.

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

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

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

“Oh, you can fake pretty,” she said.

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