Angel of Brooklyn

by Jenkins, Janette

  ‘All that’s missing is the skin,’ she told a plain white collarless shirt. The skin had gone for now, but she had it in her head, like everything else it seemed, there was room for it, the solid curve of the shoulders, the dark hairs sitting at the back of the neck, almost invisible, the moles, freckles, the pale brown lake behind his left knee, the veins on his feet, the small smooth mound of his stomach. She folded the sleeves of the shirt behind its back. She ran her fingers down the spine of cracked buttons, pressed her hand against the front, soft and hard, soft and hard, and still the shirt said nothing.

  5. Savings

  ‘Mrs Crane,’ said the man from the bank tapping his fat inky fingers, ‘you have more than enough funds to lend some to the nation. This war,’ he said, with something of a whisper, ‘is costing over one million pounds a day.’

  ‘War bonds, war loans, war savings certificates, I’ve really no idea what my husband would have asked for,’ she told him.

  ‘They’re all pretty much the same,’ he said, ‘and a double investment, for your family, and the nation.’

  She wanted to ask him, will we get it all back if we lose? Will the Germans take it? Will it matter? And what if we win? Will we get interest? And what if I need all the money after all? Behind the man’s head hung a row of framed certificates, an etching of Britannia, and a sheet advertising war savings certificates, a picture of a father with his children. Save for their Education and Give them a Start in Life. The boy looked like Elijah. The girl had a ribbon in her hair.

  ‘We’ll take the savings certificates,’ she told him.

  ‘Excellent choice,’ he said. ‘Have you brought your chequebook?’

  6. Family

  Beatrice had never held a baby. Her family was so small and far apart that babies were something of a rarity. Of course, she’d seen acquaintances pushing their creaking perambulators through the streets of Normal, and she’d stopped and glanced inside, giving appreciative nods and comments to the small pink heads that looked somewhat crunched on top of the pillow. Babies were dolls.

  ‘Three years ago today,’ said Ada without looking round. ‘My last one, my Rose.’ She was on her knees doing something with a trowel. The gravestone looked too bright against the mildewed weather-worn slabs that surrounded it.

  ‘I am so very sorry,’ said Beatrice, who had come wandering into the cemetery at the end of her walk. ‘I don’t know what to say, I know nothing about babies and how it feels to have them, or to lose them, so I can only imagine your sorrow.’

  Ada stopped what she was doing and rolled the trowel into a dirty piece of hessian. ‘Oh, but you will have them,’ she said, ‘and yours will grow up into little people like they usually do.’

  They sat on a bench looking out across the cemetery. There was the slow steady whirr of a lawnmower in the distance.

  ‘It’s peaceful,’ said Beatrice, sitting on her hands.

  ‘But I hate this place,’ said Ada. ‘Sometimes I think I’ll never come back, because what’s the point of fussing over babies that don’t even know you’re their mother?’

  They sat in silence. The sun was burning their faces. They could see Mary’s grave in the distance, the grass still broken; a vase of brown stems sitting crooked and missing most of their petals. At the top of the hill there were several new white crosses for the soldiers that had died of their injuries in the local infirmary.

  ‘We’ve been lucky in this war,’ said Ada, standing up.

  ‘Yes, we have been lucky.’

  ‘It won’t last. The odds are stacked against us.’

  ‘It might last. It has to.’

  ‘Look,’ said Ada, clutching the hessian wrapped trowel to her chest, ‘I’m telling you it won’t.’

  7. Reassurance

  ‘Jim, Frank, Tom and the rest, they’ll come back in one piece. Of course they will. We all will. Heavens, they’re only part of the battalion. I’ve lost other men. Plenty of other men. Their luck will last. And mine. We’ll come marching home one day, arm in arm, and you’ll see us for yourself.’

  He would say that. She could hear the confidence in his voice and a touch of anger at her lack of faith. His fist would be drumming into the chair arm. ‘You must listen and believe,’ he would say, ‘because there is no doubt about it, what I’m telling you is true.’

  8. Exterminator

  He would stamp on all the cockroaches. (These her very worst enemy, she would rather have a thick-tailed rat than a cockroach.) Set traps for the mice that ran into the house from the fields. Scoop spiders the size of his hand from the bathtub. Remove flypapers. Collect earwigs. Powder bluebottles. Wasps. Beetles. Woodlice. Etc.

  9. Inspiration

  After studying the weather reports and looking long and hard at the sky, he would then remind her of the last picnic they’d had. The poached trout. Sweet apples. That bottle of gooseberry wine. The blanket that was folded in the box was snagged with dried grass and thistles and he would shake it out, whistling. Eggs would be boiled. Sandwiches cut. The basket, smelling of other picnics, and with specks of stale crumbs in the latticework, would be packed. It’s too heavy, he would grimace. How much do you think the two of us can eat? Honestly. He would walk with a tilt for the first couple of minutes, then he’d forget, and looking at the sky they’d head towards the stile, to the part of the reservoir they felt was their own, and perhaps it really was possible that no one else had discovered it. The way the trees spread across the shore like curtains. Shiny brown stones, smooth as a carpet. In the distance, a single rowing boat, the arms and the oars clipping the water, like they were dredging up silver.

  10. Protection

  She saw the telegram boy, how he’d sacrificed what was left of his cigarette, throwing it into the lane before scratching under his cap and knocking at the door. Ada had taken her time. Didn’t people know that she was busy in the shop? All right, so there weren’t any customers, but things needed doing, the shelves needed cleaning, those tins gathered dust, a bottle of gravy browning had been leaking over the tiles. Floors didn’t wash themselves.

  Her head had appeared. The boy had his arm out, he was looking down at his boots, he’d been doing this for three months, and he never knew what to say. He looked up slowly, listening to the birds. There was a rustling from the breeze that caught the back of his neck. Eventually a hand grabbed at the envelope and the door slammed shut in his face. Still, it could have been worse. A week or so ago, he’d been spat on.

  Beatrice couldn’t move. ‘Is he going to turn around? Will he come here? Will he? Will he?’ Then the relief as the boy retrieved his cigarette and walked back towards his bicycle. Her nails were pressed hard into her hands. She should go and fetch Madge.

  Madge said nothing, but swept past her, running towards the shop, her own front door still open. Beatrice sat on the step. She could hear Billy and Bert squabbling over something around the back. A catapult. A peashooter. Something. When Madge reappeared half an hour later, her face was grim and she was tutting at the world that still appeared to be turning, the bees around the lupins, the white birds in the sky.

  ‘How is she?’ Beatrice asked.

  Madge looked her in the eye as her voice began to tremble. ‘Jim’s dead. Perhaps they all are.’

  ‘No, don’t say that.’ Beatrice wrapped her arms around herself; she started nervously stamping her feet.

  ‘They might be. How should we know? Ada’s beside herself. Trouble is, she’s still got hope where there isn’t any. “Missing Presumed Dead.” What kind of wording is that to put on a telegram? You should hear her. “Perhaps he’s just lost?” she keeps saying. “They’re only presuming that he’s dead. He always was a one for getting lost. Remember that time in Morecambe on his way back from the amusement arcade? We were waiting for an hour. Remember that? You see, that’s the thing with my Jim, he doesn’t know his left from his right.”’

  ‘I’m sorry. Poor, poor, Ada.’

  ‘Poor all of us,’ said Madge.

>   PHOTOGRAPHS

  Brooklyn, New York

  May, 1912

  THE NIGHT BEFORE the photographs, she had taken off her clothes in front of Nancy.

  ‘I need to prepare myself,’ she’d said. ‘Tell me if I look right.’

  Nancy had walked around and nodded, and then she’d gone and spent her wages on two bottles of good French wine, and tried to dissuade Beatrice from doing any pictures.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ said Nancy, struggling with the cork. ‘You’re a good Methodist girl and I’ve ruined you.’

  ‘I don’t feel ruined. Is this what ruined feels like?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I’m very disappointed.’

  ‘I should know, I was ruined long ago.’

  ‘But you liked it.’

  ‘Sure I did.’

  ‘Then why can’t I?’

  ‘Because you’re a good girl, and that’s why they want you. You look like an angel, even without those blessed wings, and men with dirty minds get a kick out of that.’

  ‘I just want to give it a try.’

  ‘Why? Do you need the extra money?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Then stick to selling pictures of the funfair.’

  ‘It’s too late. Those wings were made to measure.’

  ‘It’s never too late,’ said Nancy. ‘You didn’t sign anything?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Then you shouldn’t feel obliged.’

  ‘I don’t, I really want to do it.’

  ‘Look, Bea, I’m telling you, it won’t just stop at the pictures. There’s the podium after that. Think how you’ll feel standing in the full heat of the summer, or freezing in the fall wearing nothing but those goddamn heavy wings whilst men look you up and down, slavering into their filthy bulging laps.’

  ‘I can take it if you can.’

  ‘But I’m as hard as nails,’ said Nancy. ‘Look at me.’

  Beatrice sighed. Her room looked smaller tonight. The window with its view of the dusty yard, like an eye that needed washing. The wine had left a dull metallic taste in her mouth.

  ‘So, where has it come from?’ asked Nancy. ‘You wanted to work in a jewellery store. You told me. I could ask Abe Templeman. He owes me a favour. He has an uncle in the gold trade.’

  ‘I changed my mind.’

  ‘Your brother is a priest.’

  ‘Preacher. Well, he was.’

  ‘Same thing. Are you doing this to punish him?’

  ‘I’ve thought long and hard,’ she said, ‘and believe me, it has nothing to do with either you or my brother.’

  It had been a month since she’d sat with Mr Cooper looking down at Aurora with her pale translucent skin and thick wavy hair. She had bought herself a notebook and a hard leaded pencil that sometimes tore the paper. She’d scribbled things down. There was the life she could have led. She pictured Bethan Carter, that old ring on her finger, and a house beside a railroad track. She thought about her family. What would they think? When she looked at herself in the small cracked mirror in the bathroom down the hall, she didn’t see any of them, but was she really so different?

  She dreamed about her father who would be sitting at the table, his sleeves rolled up to the elbow, opening a parcel, spilling its contents, a hundred glass eyes, bouncing like hail and blinking over the floor tiles. Walking to work, she would watch all the birds that had perched across the railings, and as they cocked their heads at her, she would picture them on stands, immobile, unblinking, feet wired and glued, their feathers tinged with borax, their beaks from a place in Duluth. And then there was Elijah. He was being pummelled by a crowd. He was uncurling his shoulders until his back was ramrod straight. He was standing on a bar stool singing, ‘And Can It Be?’

  ‘You know something,’ she told Nancy, who by now had wine-stained lips and heavy-looking eyes. ‘The only thing that’s bothering me are those wings. They reek too much of home. Will I look like a fool?’ she asked. ‘Tell me.’

  Nancy shook her head and yawned. ‘A fool? You won’t look like a fool. You’ll look like something that has just dropped down from the heavens.’

  The room was full of people. Mr Cooper was pacing up and down, chewing an unlit cigar. Maurice Beckmann was setting up his camera in front of a blue-and-cloud cloth. Girls in snowy-white aprons sat on stools next to dressing tables that were covered with unopened sticks of greasepaint, skin creams and bowls of fine powder. There were screens. Trunks (of what? she had puzzled). A table stacked with combs, brushes and hair oils had been pushed against a wall. The goose-feather wings, made by Eton & Foster, Fifth Avenue, New York, were hung on a tall wooden stand, like Gabriel himself had just gone to take a shower bath. They reached past her ankles and weighed twenty pounds.

  The philanthropist from the heart of Manhattan reached for her hand, and dropped his head into a bow. ‘Miss Lyle, we are more than thrilled to have your company,’ the man said. His name was Laurence Hoff. He spoke with something of an accent – German? Hungarian? Swiss? – and with his sweep of yellow hair and fading blue eyes, he looked like an older, fainter version of the man advertising spearmint gum on the billboard at the Dreamland entrance to Coney.

  ‘There are so many people, I just didn’t realise …’

  ‘Miss Lyle,’ he said, taking her by the elbow and leading her to a plump velvet chair in the corner, ‘take a seat whilst I explain how things are done.’

  She did as she was told. Her mouth was dry and she had to stick her tongue between her teeth to stop them from chattering.

  ‘As a boy I worked at the opera,’ he told her, pulling up a stool. ‘Of course, I was merely a lackey, sweeping, cleaning, moving things around. I would take flowers into dressing rooms. Deliver telegrams. I’d make sure the leading man had his tin of favourite lozenges. It is not a myth. Oh no. Actors can be demons. Let me tell you, backstage in a theatre there is nothing but madness and chaos. It’s a noisy pandemonium full of heavy machinery, crashing scenery, the colourful shouts from the stagehands. Of course, sitting in the stalls with your box of violet creams, you would never, ever know it. At the front of the stage there is peace. The scenes drop from the fly tower with little more than a swish, the orchestra hums, and the stage has been transformed into a magical place, a box where the story can be told, and the audience are lost in it. And that’s what we have here.’

  ‘We do?’

  Beatrice looked around. A man in a pair of grey overalls was pushing some screens that had something to do with the light. The floor was being painted. A girl was saying, ‘Did you get the magenta? I meant stick number five. Five. The real magenta, not the one that looks like an orange.’

  ‘When we have prepared the way, then we will all depart, leaving you in the capable hands of Mr Beckmann and perhaps another female, to help you with your things. After all this crazy chaos, you will have peace, calm, tranquillity. You will feel relaxed. Only then will you change into “Angel”.’

  Beatrice walked over to Nancy, who was sitting on the window ledge with a glass of iced tea, looking sceptical.

  ‘Didn’t have none of this when I was turning into a geisha,’ Nancy said. ‘It was just you, Maurice and that cranky-sounding phonograph.’

  ‘It’s scary.’

  ‘You want to scoot?’ said Nancy.

  Beatrice shook her head. ‘It’s just stage fright,’ she said. ‘It’ll pass.’

  Maurice had done some sketches, showing Mr Hoff what he hoped the pictures would look like.

  ‘I’ve kept it very simple,’ said Maurice. ‘See? That face and those wings will say everything.’

  ‘And the rest,’ said Hoff.

  She changed into a blue-and-green kimono and as a girl with cold hands sculpted her hair, she and Nancy talked as if they were sitting in the beauty parlour, and sure enough, another girl appeared to do her nails.

  ‘Can’t you do me as well?’ asked Nancy, spreading her fingers like starfish. ‘My nails are crying out for
some attention. Look at them.’

  ‘They look better than mine,’ said the girl.

  Beatrice’s head ached. It had been pulled and scraped until her eyes watered. Her scalp had been rubbed. Stray hairs plucked. Something smelled of fish oil.

  ‘Do I still look like me?’

  Nancy shrugged. ‘Like you,’ she said, ‘with a gloss on.’

  She could hear Cooper laughing with Mr Hoff, a kind of hollow guffaw that said he was nervous. Had he handed back the book? Did he still have nightmares about grease on the pages? ‘The slightest blemish and I’ll have to pay the full amount,’ he’d said, ‘and it’s an amount that will have me penniless and living back with my folks in their dreary deadbeat stretch of Idaho which would not look well on a postcard.’

  ‘Would you like something to eat before I do your face?’ a girl asked. ‘We have a cold plate, noodles, chicken, fruit. If there’s something else that you’d like, I can always send out for it.’

  She managed to nibble at some warm black grapes, though she thought the skins might choke her.

  ‘You all right?’ asked Maurice. ‘Look, honey, when all these people have gone it will be like playing dressing up, hell, I’ll even take my clothes off with you if you like.’

  ‘Oh, Lord,’ said Nancy rolling her eyes. ‘Please tell him, no.’