Amy Bloom - Lucky Us

Iris sat down on the couch. Francisco kept his hand on my shoulder. I came to and said, My father, Edgar Acton, our dear friend Francisco Diego, and I was very pleased with myself. They eyed each other. No one made claims. No one asked anyone for money. No one offered Edgar a cup of tea or a drink or leftover baked beans. No one told to him to come inside and no one told him to beat it.

My father cut the twine with his pocketknife and passed around the box of cookies, in silence. I ate six and Iris ate two. Francisco put his hand on his belly and declined. My father ate the rest of the cookies. At ten o’clock, I stretched out on the couch, next to my father. He made room for me and rested his hand on my shoulder. Iris closed her magazine and stood up.

“I’m beat. I’m going to bed.” She unpacked one of the blankets and put it over me and went into her room.

My father said, “Terrific poise.”

Francisco said, “Superb.”

In the early morning, I found the two men heaped on the floor, sofa cushions under their heads. An empty Scotch bottle was next to the coffee table. I sat on the couch and watched my father and Francisco sleep, and when I started to cry, I stood up and got into bed with Iris.

“Never a dull,” she said.

IN THE MORNING WE went to the diner for breakfast. The men walked ahead. My father ordered eggs and toast and he said that breakfast was on him. He said that he was very, very proud of Iris, that not a lot of girls could do what she had done. Iris said, Don’t bother. You’re too late. My father said that he was sorry he hadn’t come sooner but that he had had to tie up his affairs in Ohio and my sister said, We’re broke. Oke-bray. Francisco said that Iris was telling the truth. He said that no one even remotely connected with the movie business, not a restaurant, not a dress shop, nor a beauty parlor, was going to hire Iris after what happened. My father asked, What happened? and Francisco and I watched Iris, because it wasn’t for us to say. I got caught kissing another girl, Iris said. Miserable, puritanical sonsofbitches, my father said, and he patted Iris’s hand. That’s all? he said to Francisco.

We walked back to the apartment and Iris whispered that Edgar would be gone soon. There’s nothing for him here, she said. Francisco went down to the courtyard to make a call and the three of us looked at one another.

“What’s your plan?” my father asked.

Iris said that we were moving back to Mrs. Gruber’s and she’d keep looking for work. I said I’d do some dog-walking. My father raised his voice.

He said, “You’ve suffered an untoward blow from which you are not going to recover quickly. You can’t pay the bills you have and you’ve no expectation of paying bills in the future. You must see that you will be taking advantage of poor Mrs. Gruber. One does not, if one can possibly help it, take advantage of one’s true friends.”

I started to ask exactly how that worked for him when Francisco came back into the room, beaming.

“What do you do for a living, Edgar?”

“Oh, poetry and prose. I was an English professor. Now retired.”

“Must be nice,” Francisco said. He turned to me and Iris.

“You know my sisters in New York,” he said. “Encarnación and Beatriz. Carnie and Bea. The girls say they know about a job for Edgar, being a butler”—he didn’t look at my father—“and for you, Iris, teaching some little kids. Let’s say, a governess.”

No one even looked my way.

My father shook Francisco’s hand (There are no words, he said) and came back a few hours later with a 1938 Chevy station wagon. Nothing to it, he said. We packed up everything we owned and a few things the Firenze Gardens owned, and Francisco brought over his two suitcases and his huge makeup box. I ran down to Mrs. Gruber’s and brought her back with her bottle of crème de menthe. We all took a swig. My father kissed her hand. Mrs. Gruber said, Good-bye, all of you. She kissed me on the lips and walked away.

“And, wheresoever thou move, good luck shall fling her old shoe after. That’s Tennyson,” my father said and slid into the passenger seat.

Iris and I crammed into the backseat, with a Firenze Gardens lamp at our feet. Francisco winked at us. My father clapped his hands. It was, pretty much, his finest moment.

WE SANG EVERY MORNING. MY FATHER SANG “IT’S COLD WITHOUT Your Trousers” and “A Little Bit of Cucumber.” Francisco and my father sang “Hey! Stop Kissin’ My Sister,” snapping their fingers, my father yelling, “You swine! To the pigpen!” Iris and I sang “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” and “You Made Me Love You.” We drank watery coffee. Iris and I ate fresh doughnuts, the oil still spitting in them (and bismarks and bear claws and brown bobbys, whatever the local pastry was, since, finally, briefly, my father was paying) and my father and Francisco ate ham and eggs and blue-plate specials. We all had our assignments. Francisco drove all day and haggled for gas every morning. Six nights, the four of us slept in a motel room. No one blinked at us. It was the war and people were showing up in all sorts of fatherless, motherless, husbandless combinations. Francisco got a bed, Iris and I got a bed, and my father took the floor and a bedspread. In Kansas, he taught my sister how to drive, just to pass the time. In Missouri, Francisco turned straight north to Illinois. My father said he’d like to see Missouri. Francisco said, Not with me, you won’t. He said Missouri was like the South and the only part of the South he planned to ever drive through was South America.

I knew that we were near Windsor, Ohio, before I saw the highway signs. There was the comforting flatness, the pleasant brown haze, the solid houses that looked like the solid people. I thought that we hadn’t left much behind. I had my father and my sister and Francisco, who seemed like a part, a better part, of our little family. The only thing I missed was my nice room at my father’s house and Mr. Portman’s poodle. Iris poked me and said, Our house isn’t that far, and I poked her back. My father never said a word. He read until dark and in the morning, we were out of Ohio entirely.

My father read up on butlering. (Or buttling. Edgar and Francisco argued, many times, about what it was called. My father said that whatever you called it, it came down to arse-licking and silver-polishing.) My father had snagged an Emily Post book and my job was to ask him questions, to try to stump him. (Mustaches on man-servants or no? No. Who is the head of the table? The wife. Val- et or val- ay ? Val- et , which seemed awful to me. My father promised me that he would refer to any valet he met as a “val-ay” and that he would not wear a mustache — or a flower in his buttonhole, which was quite a concern on page 297.) Occasionally, there was a memorable line or warning in Emily Post, and Francisco would sing it out, like opera. All through western Pennsylvania we warbled, “Better to be frumpy than vulgar.” I bet if you walked up to my sister today, she could quote you chapter and verse of Emily Post.

Iris’s job was to become a governess in six days. According to Emily Post, governesses were better educated than nannies and better paid. They were supposed to teach the children something until someone thought they were old enough for school. How old are these kids, Iris asked, and how many are there? Francisco shrugged. I think there are three, he said. I could be wrong. Iris said she didn’t know how to pretend to be a college graduate; she’d scraped through Windsor High and no one had expected her to do anything except star in all the shows and help out at ceremonies. My father said that she was officially twenty-one and a recent graduate of the Windsor College for Women. He said that he’d take care of her letters of reference. Iris said he should make her Phi Beta Kappa in that case, and my father sighed. He said he didn’t care for her overreaching. My other job was to sum up Shakespeare’s plays and recite crucial passages to Iris.