She shook her head until her neck was loose, and when she composed herself, she looked toward Edgar. It wasn’t really Edgar anymore. It was just a shell, but it was terrible to leave even his shell. One evening at the Nite Cap, when Edgar was still well and had just got paid and it seemed to everyone there that Clara was, that night, about to knock Ella Fitzgerald right off her high horse, Edgar had put a milk-glass vase of white roses on the piano.

  “Marry me,” he’d said that night.

  SHE’D SAT AT THE foot of his bed, grateful and sorry that she’d let Ozzie drop her off. She should have kept Ozzie out of it. It was shaming to Edgar, not that he knew. It was shaming to both men. She didn’t want to stay. She felt for Danny and Eva and she hoped things would get better for both of them, and she had no wish to be part of what happened next. She was almost middle-aged and had been loved by an interesting man and was now loved by a better one, a man who would be around for a long while and love her until they were old people, rocking on the porch. Clara couldn’t picture rocking on any porch, anywhere, with Edgar. Ozzie might not make her laugh the way Edgar did, but she could do without. She could amuse herself.

  Bei mir bist du schoen, it’s such an old refrain,

  And yet I should explain …

  EDGAR ACTON, NÉ ISADOR VOGEL, DIED ON TUESDAY. THEY BURIED him on Thursday. Clara left on Sunday.

  During the funeral, Clara thought about the packing she had to do. It was relaxing to have the bits of Hebrew, which meant nothing to anyone, making an odd, old music of their own, and it was good to have the rabbi for comic relief. He was like no rabbi Clara had ever seen, thin, American, eager to please. Mrs. Torelli was there, in dark-gray silk, for all the Torellis. Danny was a drooping pile of clothes, and she saw Eva pull him up gently a few times and he sank as soon as Eva’d turned back to face the pulpit. Neither of them cried. After the funeral, Eva hid the Torellis’ giant ham in her room so as not to offend Mr. Smedresman, who’d brought the bagels and lox and four kinds of herring, and that’s what people ate. The big Mexican makeup man they all loved brought a tower of Italian cookies and took Danny for a walk. When they got back, Danny’s little Ruthie had come by with her impeccable mother, and the woman eyed Clara until she’d moved under Ozzie’s big arm, protecting herself. Mrs. Post left a casserole of macaroni and cheese on the table, hugged Danny, patted Eva on the shoulder, and pushed Ruthie out the door.

  The day after Edgar’s funeral, Clara helped Eva pack up his clothes and belongings. She had two more days before she and Ozzie would jump into his big, clean car and drive west to Detroit. She and Eva walked Edgar’s worn clothes and worse underwear to the bin behind the AME Zion Church. Eva asked if she’d thought Danny would recover. Clara said that she thought that depended on Danny’s nature, that some people bounced back from a train wreck and some people couldn’t get over a bee sting. They dumped the clothes and Clara offered Eva a cigarette.

  “Ozzie wants to marry me,” she said. “In Detroit.”

  “Absolutely,” Eva said, and she ground the cigarette out on the brick wall behind them.

  OZZIE DROVE SLOWLY THROUGH Great Neck and then faster and with purpose, the summer dust flying behind them, a little of it settling like brown talc on her dress and in Ozzie’s hair. Clara touched his thigh, like a steel spring under her hand. They drove to Detroit in three days. Ozzie listened to the radio, Clara thought her thoughts. Edgar would lie like a white field of bits and bone just beneath the green layers of her life, for the rest of her life. She’d hear a deep English baritone on the radio or a white man holding forth somewhere, the way men do, or see a picture of John Barrymore, who Edgar must have copied, right down to the white wings at the edge of the dark, glossy hair, and Edgar would pop up right beside her.

  Now all she wanted was to put some serious distance between her and his funeral. She made Ozzie stop for pie at the first farm stand they came to.

  IN HER OLD AGE, her color was almost all gone. The only brown left was a thin ribbon of it around her neck, but she kept up with the ultraviolet light because she felt good afterward; she didn’t feel hopeful, the way she had when she was a girl, but she liked the doctor. She had a black dermatologist and she told everyone about him.

  It was hard to go from relaxed (if you call hot acid relaxing) hair to natural, and the first haircut left her feeling naked, but from the first time she saw those beautiful Negro girls on television, their hair explosions of self, big, beautiful treetops above their bright faces, she’d been thinking, Let me have a little of that. She found herself a young woman to do her hair and she liked the beauty parlor. They loved her enthusiasm and she loved their acceptance. On Sunday mornings, she did a little gardening and she thought about writing to Danny, and even to Iris and Eva, but it’d been too long. She pictured Danny with no trouble. She saw young men like him all the time at the library, sometimes at the movies. He’d have longish hair and those crazy bell-bottom pants and a bright-yellow shirt, blue aviator glasses, and maybe a leather peace sign around his skinny neck. In her imagination, Danny was slim and smooth, bouncing in his Beatle boots, but things might not have worked out so well. He might be pudgy, with thick glasses and facial hair that looked like something from between your legs. One time, she’d taken Danny into town on her errands and a good-looking Negro man stopped to say that she looked like Miss Lena Horne. Danny pulled himself up to the man’s rib cage, adjusted his glasses, and said, Oh, mister, I don’t think Lena Horne can hold a candle to Miss Clara Williams. Danny had been her little man, and she should have made more of him.

  On Sunday afternoons, in good weather, she took a drive through the countryside. She’d found a radio station that played oldies and she took one Kool, only one, from her glove compartment, drove with her window rolled down and her elbow on the door, like a cool cat, and when she found the radio station, drove for hours. She missed Edgar and Ozzie, she spoke to them both all the time, although not at the same time, and at bedtime, she pictured their graves beneath a willow tree, with a space for herself in between. When the state trooper came upon her wrecked and twisted car, with not an inch between the guardrail and the steering wheel, she heard his footsteps. He spoke softly and Clara heard him say, Ma’am.

  Letter from Danny

  220 Old Tree Lane

  Great Neck, New York

  The United States of America,

  The World,

  The Solar System

  May 11, 1946

  Dear Iris,

  I found an envelope with your address on it in Eva’s nightstand. The Torellis wrote FORWARD on it. My teacher Mr. Hoerger says that I am a good reader and a good writer. I am way ahead of most of the other kids in fourth grade reading. I wrote some poems that are sort of like Langston Hughes, except not about the Negro people.

  I hope when you go to bed at night, you think about us. I hope you think, Boy, that was pretty bad, what I did. Here are the people who were in my life and now are not: my brother, Bobby. My mother, who died making dinner for you. Clara. Ozzie Patterson. Poppa. You.

  Poppa died. I’m sure Evie wrote to you but you didn’t come to the funeral. It was me and Evie and the Diegos and Ozzie and Clara and Mrs. Torelli but not their kids. And Mr. Smedresman, who used to bring the bagels. Knowing Mrs. Torelli, she wanted to show respect but she was scared to have her kids in a synagogue. The rabbi was not like a regular rabbi. I have Jewish friends who go to Temple Beth El. Rabbi Waxman looks like he should be vice president or governor. This rabbi looked like Bugs Bunny. Evie sat down with me before and told me she thought that Poppa was really Jewish. I don’t remember him doing anything Jewish. When we lived at the Torellis’, I used to sit in the Torellis’ back room, off the kitchen, and help Poppa sort the mail. I hardly saw him after he got sick. Mom said he got confused and thought I was his own little brother, who he hadn’t seen in a really long time. And then Mom died in the fire and you left, and Poppa got worse and then—did you hear about this?—Evie and I had to move, with Poppa, because, since he couldn’t be a butler and Mom was dead, the Torellis needed the carriage house for a new butler and cook. Evie said that I’d have my own room, which I do. We never see the Torellis. Cathy, Mary, and Joey go to Catholic school. I don’t miss them. I have a best friend, Ruthie Post. We are the best readers in fourth grade.

  After Poppa’s funeral, the Torellis left a big ham for us and we ate ham sandwiches and split-pea-and-ham soup for a week. Jews don’t eat ham.

  A lot of nights, before Poppa died, Ozzie and I played catch. Ozzie is a very big man. He was a three-sport captain in his high school. He played football at Alabama State University, which is a good school for football. Ozzie was the one who helped us move Poppa. I sat in the front with Clara and Ozzie and Ozzie’s idiot cousin drove the pickup behind us, with all of our stuff. Mrs. Torelli gave us some old furniture so that when we got to our new house it wasn’t empty. Clara visited us but she didn’t live with us anymore. Ozzie said that growing up in a house of women and a sick old man wasn’t good for me. Sometimes Ozzie threw the baseball right at my head. He said that a boy like me should know when to duck. We worked on my spitball. When it got dark, Clara would come out to get us. She was always dressed up, in her sparkly stole and her dark-blue dress and her silk high heels, so she waited in the driveway—she didn’t come onto the grass. Ozzie and Clara would get in his Oldsmobile and go out for dinner or to the Nite Cap. Ozzie said, Hi-de-ho, and I said that back. Then I’d sit on the steps until Evie made me come in.

  I don’t know what you took me from that orphanage for. (Evie told me I wasn’t left on the steps, in a basket, like you said. She said you saw me and you liked my looks and tricked me into coming with you and then you and Mom kept me.) My friend Ruthie Post is a Negro girl, and she says that the Negro people have suffered a lot in America. And Ruthie says that she feels sorry for me.

  You don’t have to write back. Evie and I are in a nice house, on Old Tree Lane.

  I asked Evie if you were dead. She said that she didn’t think so. She asked me if I wanted to write to you or send you a photograph. I said no, but I did want to write you this one letter.

  Danny Lombardo Acton

  23

  They Can’t Take That Away from Me

  CLARA’S LEAVING WAS SO HARD TO BEAR, IT MADE ME SAY AND DO things I was sorry for. On Monday, Danny dropped a bottle of milk and we watched it break and flow to every corner of our little kitchen. She left us flat, Danny said. He kicked the wet glass against the wall. She left us flat as a pancake and never looked back, he said. She never loved us. I slapped him, and shame on me. Danny went to his room. I stared at the milk on the linoleum until it began to set and then I got a sponge and cleaned it up and piled the milky glass in the garbage can. I sat on the picnic table in the back and smoked and thought, and not for the first time, that it was hard to believe that Reenie was dead and my sister had flown the coop and all the rest was going to hell in a handbasket, leaving just me and Danny. Whatever the opposite of miraculous is, that’s the word I was looking for.

  If it had been up to Reenie and my sister, Danny’d be back at an orphanage and I’d be in some crap apartment, with a Murphy bed and a bathroom down the hall, trying to forge a college diploma. Sometimes, Danny and I took a walk to the far end of Old Tree Lane, where the nicer houses were. We passed window boxes and stone planters full of geraniums. Danny’s eyes got big and he’d breathe in deeply. Every time, as we’d head back home, Danny’d exhale and say, “This street smells like my mother.” He had dreamed up a version of Reenie, half actual Reenie and some bits and pieces of radio shows and a little Eleanor Roosevelt and his faint memory of a woman leaning over his crib, smelling of geranium powder. He must have been sleeping in a crib until the day we took him. When he got to the carriage house, he fell out of bed four nights in a row and Reenie put pillows all over the floor. Every morning, I’d walk past his room and see him lying on the floor, waiting for Reenie. He made a small waving gesture if I looked in on him, and it meant Hello and Move along.

  I DIDN’T ARGUE WITH Danny. When I made him do things he didn’t like, he threw Reenie at me. My mother was beautiful, he said. My mother never made me eat eggs, he said. My mother was the greatest cook in the world. My mother and I were going to move out of that stupid house and far away from you and stupid Iris, he said. My mother sat by my bed until I fell asleep, every night. I agreed with everything he said about Reenie and sometimes I said that I was sorry for both of us, not to have her around. One night, after we’d fought over meat loaf (I won’t eat it, he said. Don’t, I said.) and he’d taken himself to his room and gotten into bed with his clothes and holster on, I sat at the foot of his bed. He made sure that no part of him, even under the covers, was touching me.

  You should complain, I said. This is pretty bad. Sometimes, I said, I am so angry and miserable, it makes me want to cry and scream right in people’s faces. It makes me want to kill people. Who? Danny said. Well, considering, I said, I’d like to kill Iris. Danny nodded. I stretched out next to him, but not touching. Before I went back to my own room, I put his toys in tableaux I thought would make him laugh in the morning: Raggedy Andy on the brown pony, his old blue rabbit stuffed into a truck.

  “It’s just us,” Danny said. I turned out his light.

  He did not then list the people who were gone, and neither did I. He never said that of all the people to wind up with, I was undoubtedly the least equipped and, overall, the worst. I thought it was too bad that he had to be so tactful, so young.

  THE NEXT DAY, I washed the kitchen floor, which I had managed to do not once in my short lifetime, set the table, and made dinner, and afterward, I washed the dinner dishes and made Danny dry. I took out some cookies and chocolate milk, to bribe him through the cleanup, and he watched me as if I had some bad news I was going to share.

  “Everything’s fine,” I said. “I just thought a chicken dinner might be nice.”

  “It’s nice,” Danny said.

  “I thought I could tell you a story,” I said. “Not a bedtime story. You’re too old. But, still. I could tell you a story.”

  Danny said, “Can I go outside?”

  I listened for the whapada-whap of the tetherball and watched the clock for five minutes. I went outside and grabbed the ball.

  “My serve,” I said, and I hit the ball hard, but a little low.

  We were remarkably evenly matched. I had some height; he was determined.

  “ONCE UPON A TIME,” I said, afterward, “there was a little boy named … Harry.”

  Danny smiled and stretched out on the couch.

  “Or Roland De Rapscallion,” I said, rolling my r’s. “Maybe his name was Fat-Fingered Louie.”

  Danny flipped around, so his head was near mine.

  “No,” he said.

  “All right,” I said. “You got me. His name was Danny. Danny was an amazing boy. He had light-brown hair, which was, amazingly, just the right color for a boy with brown eyes, and when he got to be big, he wore amazing eyeglasses, which was especially good because it helped him see, and he saw a lot. A lot. He needed to be good at seeing and thinking because Danny’s life had not gotten off to an easy start. When Danny was born …” I stopped.

  All I knew about Danny’s past was what Reenie told me—that he’d said his mother had died and his father had put him and his brother in the Pride of Israel. I didn’t know if he remembered more and didn’t say or if the door had shut firmly on all that and there was no reason for me to poke my nose in. On the other hand, I was a lot older and had forgotten very little and forgiven less, and it might be the same for him. I wiggled my hand, for Danny to take over.

  “Danny was born to his mother and father and his brother. When Danny was very little”—he made his voice squeak, to show how little—“his mother died. He was too little to know what happened but Danny had a brother, Bobby, and Bobby said that their mother fell off a roof and their father was so sad and so messed up, he had to take Danny and Bobby to the orphanage, to take care of them. Which wasn’t so bad, but Danny didn’t like it. He wanted to go home. His brother, Bobby, said they didn’t have a home anymore, that Pride of Israel was their home, and Mr. Greenberg was like their father.”

  “After a while,” I said, “he sort of got used to the place. And Mr. Greenberg was …”

  “Okay,” Danny said. “Danny was one of the little kids. Everyone was okay.”

  “So, then a crazy thing happened. These two women came along—out of nowhere …”

  “Out of the blue,” Danny said.

  “That’s right—out of the blue. And they wanted a little boy. They wanted an amazing little boy with brown hair and brown eyes. They wanted a little boy to join their family. And most of all, at home, there was Reenie Lombardo, who was waiting for her friends to find her the perfect little boy.”

  “Why didn’t she go herself?”

  “That’s an excellent question,” I said. “Why didn’t she?”

  “Because she was cooking,” he said. “She was a really good cook and she made dinner for the Torellis every night.”

  “That’s right. She was a great cook. So, these two women, Itsy and Bitsy, saw this one little boy. ‘Holy cannoli,’ Itsy said to Bitsy. ‘That’s the one.’ ”

  “Who was Itsy?” Danny said.

  “Who do you think?”

  “You’re Itsy,” he said.

  “So Itsy said, ‘There’s something about him.’ ‘You’re right,’ Bitsy said. So they asked the little boy to come home with them. He said okay, even though he had to leave Bobby. They took him home and after a long trip—”