Amy Bloom - Lucky Us

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

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

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.