Amy Bloom - Lucky Us

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

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

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

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

How are you? How is Danny?

Peace in our time.

Iris, the Singing Guinea Pig of Queen Victoria Hospital

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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