Lucky Us by Amy Bloom

Author:Amy Bloom [Bloom, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781400067244
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

U.S.A.

October 8, 1944

Dear Evie (and Uncle Sam),

Ellis Island, home of Lady Liberty. We’ve been packed in, like enemy sardines, for two weeks. The other sardines are South American Germans, people with names like Carlos and Juanita Heinzfelt. I have no idea what we are doing with them, or how they got kidnapped by their own governments and delivered to us, but there are hundreds of them, red-faced men in white suits, women in bright silk dresses. We may be enemy aliens but, by God, these people are really foreigners. Most of them don’t even speak English. You hear them screaming in Spanish or crying their hearts out at their end of the hall. Our girls are tired and bored, playing tag all day with a few of the other American kids. No Japs are being sent to Japan and I don’t know if that means that we have something worse in store for them or if it’s just too fucking far. There was talk that the Irish were making common cause with the Germans but I don’t see any freckle-faced people being sent back to Dublin.

They found an old Swedish ship for eight hundred of us, the Gripsholm. It’s bright white and lit up like Christmas. Maybe they hope we’ll be strafed before we get to Germany. It’s the first ocean crossing for us, but some of the older people have been through this before, going the other way, and the South Americans just got off a boat a few weeks before. When we see the Statue of Liberty getting smaller, a lot of people cry and I take the girls to the other side of the ship.

When you and I met, I wasn’t exactly father material. Reenie and I had tried—or we hadn’t tried to avoid having kids—but nothing came of it. I hope it was my fault, that I was shooting blanks. I hope Reenie moves on and I hope she pops out a dozen kids if that’s what she wants.

I’m in love with these two little girls: fat, funny Anna with the biggest blue eyes you ever saw, and Carolyn, with the freckles, already a serious woman. She’s Eleanor Roosevelt at six, but prettier. These are my kids. I can’t imagine how but I hope you meet them.

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