Angel of Brooklyn

by Jenkins, Janette

  ‘It’s all scientific,’ he explained as they made their way down the lane. ‘It isn’t mumbo-jumbo. The reason why people are so sceptical is because table turning has always been open to such trickery. Magicians can use their skills to make things appear, for things to knock and float, and so on. People like magicians because they like being entertained, knowing nothing’s as it seems, so when the trickery is revealed, they lift up their hands and applaud, and then they say, “I told you so.”’

  ‘Do you still believe in heaven?’ she asked.

  ‘I believe in another world,’ he told her. ‘Yes, I believe it is easy to get there, it is like walking through a curtain.’

  ‘And God?’

  ‘And God is just there in His glory presiding over it all. With spiritualism, we simply cut out the middleman; we have no need for a priest, because we can hear it for ourselves.’

  ‘But the medium? Surely that’s your middleman?’

  ‘The medium is the vessel and what we see or hear is not open to interpretation, it merely is.’ Lionel clasped his hands behind his back and looked down at his shoes, the laces in his left boot had frayed and were trailing over the stones. ‘Would you like to come in for some tea?’

  Lionel’s cottage was neat and full of things. While the kettle boiled and Lionel opened the caddy, Beatrice stared at all the books and ornaments, the jug depicting the entrance to the Liverpool and Manchester railway, a tourist map of North-East Yorkshire, coronation buttons, cycle routes, guides to ornithology.

  ‘I am something of a hoarder,’ he admitted. ‘My father was the same.’

  She joined him at the table. There was tea and a plate of cream crackers. The cloth was snow white, and she tried to imagine Lionel on washday with his posser and packets of starch. How did he manage it?

  ‘It’s an awful time,’ he said. ‘It’s a time when we often don’t know what to say for the best, though of course I gave my condolences to Ada, knowing as I spoke that words mean very little and it’s such a terrible thing.’

  ‘Yes, and then I feel guilty for thinking, thank God it wasn’t Jonathan.’

  He smiled. ‘It’s human nature. You’ve nothing to feel guilty about.’

  They stirred their tea, the spoons clinking loudly against the pale yellow cups. Lionel looked at her, and then looked away again. He looked older than she remembered as the daylight dug into his tired puckered skin; it made his hair translucent.

  ‘You knew Jonathan’s mother and father?’ said Beatrice.

  ‘Yes, I knew his father very well.’

  ‘Tell me about him. Please? I’ve heard he was a gentleman. Jonathan always speaks fondly of him, and I know he must have had a very difficult time, losing his wife so young, and then bringing his son up alone.’

  ‘It certainly wasn’t easy,’ said Lionel. ‘I was his friend, and he could always turn to me, though what did I know about boys? Of course, I remembered my own childhood, my brother, my cousins and our friends, but that was all so far away. He missed Eliza. He felt nothing without her. Hiding his misery from Jonathan he’d throw himself into his work.’ Lionel went to the window and looked towards the lacy clouds. The sky was trembling. What did it matter now anyway? ‘He met a woman called Margaret Milton,’ he began. ‘She lived in Manchester. He met her at a supper party the year after Eliza died. They formed a remarkable friendship. He kept a picture of her hidden in his wallet, and from what I could see she was a charming-looking woman and not at all hard-faced, or indeed coquettish.’

  ‘So why didn’t he marry her? Widowers remarry all the time. It’s perfectly acceptable and I’m sure Jonathan would have been more than glad of a stepmother.’

  ‘Margaret Milton was already married,’ he said. ‘I suppose you’re very shocked?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not at all. These things happen.’

  ‘Her husband was a brute. He often left her high and dry. She had a big house with extensive grounds, but she had to live off meagre rations, due to lack of funds. In the winter she froze and Martin would find her huddled under rugs wearing her hat and layers of clothes. Her husband was a partner in a pharmaceutical company and he travelled through the Continent with his pamphlets and his potions, picking up things as he went along, including debts and several mistresses. Margaret was miserable, but he wouldn’t divorce her. He said he simply didn’t believe in it. It’s true, she could have dragged him through the courts but she had two small children to think about, a boy and a girl, and her family thought highly of her husband, and she didn’t want to shame them. Martin was in turmoil. When Jonathan was in bed we’d sit by the fireside and he’d unburden himself. I believe he was deeply in love with the woman.’

  ‘Did he ever tell Jonathan?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So what happened? Did they have a lifelong affair?’

  Lionel shook his head. ‘Martin loved her, but he hated himself for what he saw was his weakness. He felt that it was wrong to have relations with another man’s wife, whatever the circumstances. There were lies. Secrets. In the end, he had to give her up, for his own sake, though she begged him not to. There were letters and pleadings. She said that as far as she was concerned she didn’t have a husband, but of course she was married, and Mr Milton with his changing morals, his hold on his wife and all those hollow promises was always there, lurking like a sinister shadow in the background, and so Martin had to end it.’

  ‘That’s a very sad story,’ said Beatrice. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Several years later she died of tuberculosis in a clinic in Austria. She was little more than forty, yet it was a comfort to Martin that she was in the right place. It showed that someone had cared for her.’

  ‘I’m glad you told me.’

  ‘He was a good man. You won’t say anything? To Jonathan, I mean.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘not a word.’

  ‘I keep thinking about Tom,’ said Lizzie. ‘I was worrying before, but now that Jim’s gone, it’s a thousand times worse.’

  ‘We need more distractions,’ said Beatrice.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Picture shows? The varieties? I felt better when I was working with the pigs because it sure is hard to think of anything when you’re being butted by a sow.’

  Lizzie smiled. They were sitting in her parlour. Harry and Martha were staying with their cousins, and she’d invited Beatrice over.

  ‘At times like this I wish I lived in town,’ said Lizzie. ‘My mam and dad still live in town and all they have to do is walk out of their front door and they’re looking at the picture house.’

  ‘I’d be there every night,’ said Beatrice.

  ‘So would I,’ said Lizzie. ‘If I could afford it.’

  There was a knock on the door. Lizzie went to open it.

  ‘Ada?’

  ‘Can I come in?’ she asked. She was wearing a washed-out-looking dress and holding a leather wallet, which she slipped inside her pocket.

  Lizzie nodded. ‘Beatrice is here.’

  As soon as Ada walked into the room Beatrice felt uncomfortable. She stood up, sat down, she didn’t know what to say. Lizzie poured tea and offered a plate of biscuits.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Lizzie asked Ada.

  ‘Sometimes better, sometimes worse,’ she said, taking one of the biscuits and snapping it in two. ‘One good thing. At least I know. The wondering and waiting was making me sick. I couldn’t get to sleep at night. I’d pace up and down, I’d be wearing out the floorboards. I knew that telegram would come, it was just a matter of when.’

  Beatrice knew how she’d felt. She was always at the window, leaving warm greasy marks on the glass. There had been no more letters or postcards. At night she would sit up late reading old magazines, listening to music, tidying the cupboards, anything, because lying in bed was no good, she’d close her eyes, open them, watch the shadows from the moon, listen to the owl, the ticking of the clock, and when eventually she did fall asleep, she would dream, and someti
mes Jonathan was at home and there wasn’t a war at all. They were travelling in the motor car. She wanted to see Wales. They had children. A girl. A boy who looked like Elijah, and sometimes it was Elijah, saying grace, reading The Life of John Wesley, then saying prayers and requiems for all the dead birds, he was digging shallow holes and giving them a funeral.

  For something else to look at, they took their chairs into the yard where they sat in squares of pale sunshine with the scent of the dusty lilac bush.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ said Ada. ‘I thought this was it. Me and Jim. The shop. Our trips out to the seaside. We went to Blackpool one year. It’s like Morecambe, only faster.’

  Lizzie looked pained. ‘I’ve never been to Blackpool,’ she said.

  ‘They buried him, you know,’ said Ada, not looking at Lizzie or Beatrice, but at a small lick of cloud above their heads. ‘They had to, and I’m glad of it, but it doesn’t seem right, he’s such a long way from here, and how will I ever get to visit him? They’re going to send me a picture of the grave. A picture isn’t the same. It doesn’t seem real. And I would have liked to have seen the coffin going in, though now that I think about it, I don’t suppose he had a coffin, did he?’

  ‘They would have given him a coffin,’ Beatrice nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lizzie, ‘I’m sure of it.’

  Ada narrowed her eyes and rubbed at her arms.

  ‘Are you getting cold?’ asked Lizzie.

  ‘Cold?’ said Ada. ‘I’m always cold.’

  They sat looking at the wall, with the moss, the white lilac and a thorny-looking rose bush. Suddenly, Ada reached into her pocket and brought the wallet out.

  ‘This was Jim’s,’ she said. ‘They sent it back to me. It’s a good one. It’s from Letterman’s in town. It was a Christmas present from his mam.’ She opened it out. Beatrice thought she was going to be sick, right there on her boots. Lizzie paled. There were some pieces of paper folded inside it. ‘Letters,’ Ada said, embarrassed to see her own handwriting. ‘And this.’ It was a smaller piece of paper. She unravelled it. Beatrice’s stomach dipped as soon as she saw it, but she didn’t say anything.

  ‘“Solange Devaux, 20.30,”’ she read. ‘French. I wonder what it means? It sounds like a place. I’ll bet that’s where they were fighting or where they were going off to. I wish I knew where it was.’

  Suddenly Lizzie smiled. ‘I know – you could look it up for her,’ she said to Beatrice. ‘You have all those travel books.’

  Beatrice pursed her lips together and gave a little smile. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘If I have a map of France.’

  Ada looked at her. ‘Thank you,’ she said, with a begrudging kind of smile. ‘It would mean a lot to me.’

  It was getting late. Beatrice did a long slow circle of the village, pausing to look at the water with its small inky waves. She passed the cottage where Mary had lived and through the open curtains she could see Mary’s mother and the doctor, sitting side by side on the sofa. A ginger cat was stretching on the doorstep, rattling its claws. She didn’t know what to think. She looked at the sky; a single star was out.

  It was another warm night. Beatrice fell asleep, then woke up with the sheets on the floor. She’d been dreaming about Normal. She was in a dirty room and a man was in the doorway with a bar of buttermilk soap.

  She lit her lamp and read her magazine for a while. When she closed her eyes they were full of gold buttons, feathers, a map of northern France, and in between Bracquemont and Reims was a small black dot that turned into the village of Solange Devaux where soldiers passed between stations, where they could fill their canteens, smoke cigarettes, and talk about nothing, everything, or what it really felt like to be walking in the mud, spitting out rainwater, watching death, dodging bullets, terrified, and all of this such a long way from home.

  WALKING IN THE DARK

  1. Walking in the Dark

  IT WAS ALWAYS light in Coney. Walking home, the sky might be the colour of a telephone, but there’d always be something else to light your way, and not just the moon or the stars; this light was coloured, and at quarter past midnight, when they turned out all the bulbs, it seemed like they’d left the ghosts of themselves behind, that the boardwalk was glowing, that the air was still full of it, like the phosphorescent mist Beatrice had seen all those years ago hanging like a shroud in Hackett’s Wood. But she knew better. She knew that the light came from the tucked-away places down the side streets. Shen Yip had a string of red lanterns outside his shaky-looking bar room where you could sit on dragon-patterned cushions smoking opium pipes with thin-faced men who talked about poetry and ghostly apparitions. The tattooist couldn’t sleep. He’d leave a blue bulb shining by his doorway. Sailors who’d docked for the night could crawl their way over and by morning they could have sirens on their arms, a rose-entwined anchor, or the name of their sweetheart over the initials of the last one. Abdul the Turk slept through the day. He’d eat his breakfast at supper time, a plate of cheese and grapes, or an apricot pastry, then he’d sit by his door watching the crowds walking back to their rooms. Later, he’d light his lanterns and set the kettle on the stove. He’d make mint tea. He was famous for his tea. If you’d been working late, if you were an insomniac, if you were alone with a problem, or you just needed a little company, you could pull on a pair of slippers and a robe and make your way over to Abdul’s. He didn’t care about your clothes. He usually wore a djellaba. Sometimes he slept in it. He was often alone, or he would sometimes have company, but he’d always have room for one more. He always had tea.

  There were lights everywhere. In hazy late-night bars. On funny-face torches, the latest craze of the season. On buggies. Automobiles. Ferry boats. In windows where people packed items into stiff cardboard boxes. Where the baker was just starting his shift between the hot black ovens and plates of rising dough. The twenty-four-hour dentist had a blood-red light in his lobby that made the people who were holding their cheeks and moaning with the worst pain they had ever known, even worse than childbirth, turn right around again, looking for the drug store with those little paper packets that might just do the trick.

  Beatrice knew all these lights. The gambler’s, the whorehouse, the shaky-handed abortionist – who’d once shown Nancy fake certificates, telling her he’d been a bona fide physician when all he’d ever worked on were the horses at the racetrack – the blind woman who used candles to show the world that she was still alive, the coffee drinker, the man who was reading his way through the library and was on his way to C. Beatrice knew all these lights, because she was looking for the darkness. In the darkness she wouldn’t be distracted. She’d be alone. She could ask herself questions and think long and hard about the answers.

  When the lights went out across the park, fizzing on the wires, she’d put a small fruit knife in her pocket and walked down towards the shoreline. There were shadows. The shush-shushing roll of the sea at her feet. Pinpricks of light in the distance showed fishing boats. The moon was a scratch. There was a twinkling from the pierhead where the rod and line fishermen were sitting with their bait. But it wasn’t nearly dark enough. There were the lights shifting from the far reaches of the boardwalk. She could see her hands in front of her face, and when her eyes adjusted, the world was clear as daylight. It made her think about other people. The things she could see. The sign that said Mabel’s Hot Rolls. Buy Our Crab Cakes. Drummond’s Wines and Liquors.

  She walked down the darkest-looking side street she could find, her hand on her fruit knife feeling nervous. She could hear something humming, talking behind windows with the shutters pulled down, and then a wailing. She squeezed the fruit knife tighter. There were men on the corner, she could see the jagged outline of their faces, a soft low groaning; these were the drug addicts who came looking for their own kind of darkness, and in the morning the men taking out their trash would find them on the sidewalk, still slumped inside a bruised kind of daze. Beatrice walked quickly with her head down. A single
light bulb still quivered on the sign for Frankfurter Heaven. The men ignored her. The hungry ragpickers. The drug addicts. They were floating from the kerb. They didn’t need shoes because they were dancing with the girl who sang songs about the boy she’d left in Donegal and they were the boys come to get her.

  She went home. The street lights were lit, and they poured through the window as she made herself a blindfold. The blindfold nearly worked. She made herself another one and pulled it very tight. She sat against the wall with her eyes closed. Two blindfolds. Darkness.

  In Normal she had wrapped herself in night-time. She’d had long conversations with her mother who’d told her that if she was still alive the first thing she’d do would be to get rid of all the birds.

  It wasn’t easy in Brooklyn. She had to throw away the pictures seared behind her eyelids. Nancy, hooking up her wings. Conrad with his hair wet. The men on the opposite chair were cracking their knuckles, rubbing their watery eyes, looking at the picture of her that was supposed to be hidden, and taking it away with them for as long as their memories (or their wallets) would let them.

  She tried to relax. The room was quiet enough and she wanted to see her father. Not the man in the outhouse with the blood on his apron, the man who forgot to wash from one week to the next, reading manuals in the half-light, but her father at his best. Holding her hand on her first day at school, the only man in a room of clucking mothers. Why had she forgotten that? Then hadn’t he dragged her to see Elijah’s only attempt at sport, a fielder in a baseball game, sent off with a headache at half-time? She’d stood on the sideline, bored, but her father had cheered his encouragement, whooping like a madman, hitting Elijah on the back as if his small attempt had made all the difference. She folded her arms around herself. Tight. She saw her father laughing; he was slapping his knees and laughing. What had been so funny? She tried to imagine a time before the birds, a time when he’d stood behind his polished desk with a shiny fob watch, and he’d swung it on its chain while the boys were doing a test. In those days he must have woken early, making sure to trim his beard. He was well respected. Genteel ladies would knock at the door and ask him to tutor their sons. He would come home with a toppling mountain of copybooks, sitting up late, reading every word, and being vigilant with his marking. He would grin over supper. So what happened?