Amy Bloom - Lucky Us

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

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

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

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

Your sister,

Iris

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you Bobby?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

“I did.”

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

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

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

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

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