By the Rivers of Brooklyn
Page 1
BY THE RIVERS of BROOKLYN
BY THE RIVERS of BROOKLYN
a novel
TRUDY J. MORGAN-COLE
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Morgan-Cole, Trudy J.
By the rivers of Brooklyn / Trudy J. Morgan-Cole.
ISBN 978-1-55081-262-6 I.
Title.
PS8626.O747B9 2009 C813'.6 C2009-900834-3
© 2009 Trudy J. Morgan-Cole
Front Cover Photograph: HAER Photographer: Jet Lowe
* * *
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
BREAKWATER BOOKS LTD. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador through the department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation for our publishing activities.
Printed in Canada
Reprinted in 2009, 2010
THERE’S A LITERARY CONVENTION, which I assume has something to do with laws and liability, in which authors place a disclaimer at the front of a book: “This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” Balancing this is another literary convention which claims that all writers mine their own lives for material.
This novel began with an idea about two sisters whose background and early lives were very similar to those of my grandmother and my great-aunt. I started writing them: they moved out of the shadows of memory and took on their own fictional existence. Joined by a sister-in-law who was not very much like any of my great-uncles’ wives, these women went on to make choices and have adventures that carried them far from the paths any of my foremothers had travelled.
This book, finally, is pure fiction, and its story includes things that really happened in my family and in other people’s families and a few things that may never have happened in any family. It is a patchwork of memory, lies and dreams, in which a reader who knows me will occasionally be surprised to see a small square of fabric lifted from a dress she once wore, stitched into an unfamiliar pattern.
I’m grateful for these patchwork squares, for the memories of my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, for the stories of those who went away and those who stayed home. Despite my love for the men in my life – father, husband and son – it is really a story inspired by, and for, the web of women. So this story is dedicated, with particular love:
To the memory of Florence Ellis,
and to
Gertrude Charlotte Ellis,
Joan Gertrude (Ellis) Morgan,
and Emma Charlotte Cole.
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,
yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required
of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth,
saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
PSALM 137
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE: 1976 ITEMS NOT FOUND IN A TRUNK IN ANNE PARSONS’ ATTIC
PART ONE: 1924 - 1932
ROSE: ST. JOHN’S, SEPTEMBER 1924
ETHEL: BROOKLYN, APRIL 1925
ETHEL: BROOKLYN, OCTOBER 1925
ANNIE: ST. JOHN’S, FEBRUARY 1926
ETHEL: BROOKLYN, NOVEMBER 1926
ROSE: BROOKLYN, MAY 1927
ETHEL: BROOKLYN, SEPTEMBER 1927
ANNIE: ST. JOHN’S, MARCH 1928
ETHEL: BROOKLYN, JULY 1928
ROSE: BROOKLYN, SEPTEMBER 1928
ETHEL: BROOKLYN, DECEMBER 1928
ANNIE: ST. JOHN’S, MAY 1929
ROSE: BROOKLYN, AUGUST 1930
ETHEL: BROOKLYN, OCTOBER 1930
ROSE: BROOKLYN, MARCH 1931
ETHEL: BROOKLYN, MAY 1932
ANNIE: ST. JOHN’S, JUNE 1932
ROSE: BROOKLYN, AUGUST 1932
PART TWO: 1944 - 1957
CLAIRE: ST. JOHN’S, FEBRUARY 1944
ETHEL: BROOKLYN, JUNE 1944
ETHEL: BROOKLYN, APRIL 1945
CLAIRE: ST. JOHN’S, APRIL 1945
ANNIE: ST. JOHN’S, SEPTEMBER 1945
DIANE: BROOKLYN, SEPTEMBER 1947
ANNIE: ST. JOHN’S, OCTOBER 1947
CLAIRE: ST. JOHN’S, MAY 1948
ETHEL: BROOKLYN, SEPTEMBER 1949
DIANE: BROOKLYN, DECEMBER 1949
ROSE: BROOKLYN, JANUARY 1950
DIANE: BROOKLYN, OCTOBER 1950
ANNIE: ST. JOHN’S, JUNE 1953
ETHEL: BROOKLYN, MAY 1955
ROSE: BROOKLYN, MARCH 1956
CLAIRE: MANHATTAN, MAY 1956
ROSE: BROOKLYN, JULY 1956
CLAIRE: BROOKLYN, JULY 1956
ANNIE: ST. JOHN’S, FEBRUARY 1957
PART THREE: 1974 - 1989
ANNE: ST. JOHN’S, APRIL 1974
ETHEL: BROOKLYN, MAY 1974
DIANE: MANHATTAN, JUNE 1975
ROSE: BROOKLYN, JUNE 1977
ANNE: ST. JOHN’S, MARCH 1983
CLAIRE: TORONTO, MAY 1984
ANNE: NEW YORK, OCTOBER 1986
ETHEL: LONG ISLAND, JULY 1989
EPILOGUE: ANNE BROOKLYN, MAY 2004
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PROLOGUE: 1976
ITEMS NOT FOUND IN A TRUNK IN ANNE PARSONS’ ATTIC
THE YEAR ANNE WAS eleven, she started looking for a trunk in the attic. Her first glance into the attic made it clear that the trunk could not literally be up there. Every attic she has ever read about has been a cool, gloomy room reached by climbing a ladder at the top of the house, a room filled with old trunks and boxes which, in their turn, are filled with old dress-up clothes, old letters, old diaries. Children in books while away long rainy afternoons opening these trunks and sorting through their contents, losing themselves in past lives, discovering dark or beautiful secrets about their parents and grandparents.
The hatch to the attic is actually in the ceiling of Anne’s closet, although no-one ever goes up there except, very rarely, her father, and he never seems happy about it. One day she drags her desk chair into the closet, piles large books on it, and stands atop the teetering pile, pushing and grunting until she heaves the attic hatch open a few inches. Anne pokes her head into a scratchy sea of pink fibreglass insulation, which continues unbroken to the rafters, only inches away. She quickly pulls her head out and closes the hatch, and sneezes for the rest of the afternoon.
But if The Trunk is not in the attic, this does not mean it doesn’t exist. Somewhere – in the basement of her parents’ house, in Aunt Annie’s house, which is much older than theirs, in some forgotten closet or corner, The Trunk must lie. Someone, among all her armies of ancestors, someone must have kept letters, written in a diary, preserved old ball gowns and the ghostly pressed roses that accompanied them.
Her search for The Trunk is similar to the search she conducted when she was eight or nine, for Secret Passages. Every book she read that year involved houses with secret passages linking the fireplace to the basement, or the bedroom to the attic, or, best of all, linking some ordinary room like the kitchen to a secret room high in a to
wer whose existence you had never suspected. For months Anne went around her house and Aunt Annie’s, tugging at bookcases, pressing the stones in the fireplace, lifting rugs – looking for the carefully hidden signs of a secret door. None appeared. When she finally mentioned her quest to her father, he told her that such passages existed, but only in houses much older than theirs or Aunt Annie’s – houses over a hundred years old, maybe. When Anne asked if anyone they knew lived in a house that old, her father said no.
Now she realizes that secret passages are firmly in the world of make-believe – for her, anyway. But anyone can keep a diary or save old letters. Anne herself keeps a diary and has since she was nine. And she is never, never going to throw it away, so someday her daughter or her granddaughter can find it. One day she asks her mother if she has ever kept a diary, knowing already what the answer will be.
“No, I’m afraid not,” Claire says. “I was never into introspection. That would have been more Valerie’s kind of thing.”
“Well, did Valerie keep a diary?” Anne persists. Her mother’s cousin Valerie moved to Toronto years ago, but perhaps she left the diary behind.
Claire looks both surprised and annoyed. “No, not that I know of. I only meant she would have been the type to.”
“Well if she was the type, maybe she did? Maybe it’s around Aunt Annie’s house somewhere?”
“I doubt it,” Claire says. “Anything any of us ever kept would have been thrown out long ago. Your Aunt Annie’s not the kind for hanging onto old clutter.”
This is certainly true. The spartan neatness of Aunt Annie’s house has already discouraged Anne in her search. The anti-clutter gene was passed on in an even more virulent form to Claire who is, as they have this conversation, opening her mail over the garbage can, slicing open envelopes with her neat little letter-opener and dropping flyers, sweepstakes notifications, and Amazing Offers into the trash without a second glance. The small pile of true mail salvaged from this refining process is swept at once into her office to be sorted into the appropriate file folders. Anne can see that a diary would not have survived long, even if her mother had ever been inclined to keep one.
She tries Aunt Annie anyway. “Did you ever write in a diary, when you were younger?”
Annie, folding laundry, laughs. “A diary? Sure, when I was a girl nobody had time for foolishness like that. We were all too busy working.”
Anne knows for a fact this is not true. Aunt Annie was born in 1907, around the same time as Emily of New Moon, and Emily kept a diary. So did lots of girls in those old books. Yes, they were busy milking the cows and scrubbing the floors by hand with no vacuum cleaners, but they found time to write in their diaries. Some of them did. Not Aunt Annie, apparently.
Anne pokes through whatever old boxes and cupboards she can find, just in case. Maybe no-one has bothered with a Trunk; perhaps she will open an old family Bible or a musty encyclopedia one day and find old love letters pressed and forgotten between the pages. All she finds are rows of Rubbermaid file boxes in her parents’ basement, with their income tax forms going back to 1967, and a few old photo albums in Aunt Annie’s closet. Not surprisingly, she chooses the photo albums, hauling them with their heavy burden of dust into the living room, to her great-aunt’s dismay.
The pages are black instead of white, the photos black-and-white instead of colour, held in place by little triangles at each corner rather than clingy sheets of cellophane lying on top. Aunt Annie, compelled against her nature, sits down on the chesterfield beside Anne and begins to interpret the lost language of old pictures.
“That’s me, with your Aunt Frances, Frances Stokes she was then, that was before she married your Uncle Harold. And that’s Jim and Poor Bert, up in the field behind our old house. That was when we lived out in the country. Look, there’s Jim and Ethel on their wedding day, that wasn’t here, that was in New York. There they are with Little Jimmy and Diane, look at the lovely head of curls on Diane, she was such a pretty baby. There’s your Uncle Harold with–”
“Wait, who’s that one?”
“What? I can’t see.”
“There. Isn’t that you, and…who’s that other girl?”
“I don’t know…oh, I think that’s Rose, me and Rose. Your grandmother.” Quickly, the page is turned.
Anne sits alone with the album later, turns back to that page, to Rose-your-grandmother. Rose and Annie, sisters, somewhere in St. John’s, sometime in the 1920s. Teenagers, though maybe they didn’t use that word back then. Annie: short and sturdy, plain, wholesome looking, then as now. Rose: taller, with fluffy fair hair, pretty in the alien way people from another era look attractive despite the funny clothes and hairstyles. Something about her is brighter, sharper, more vivid than Annie. Or does Anne only imagine that?
There are not many pictures in the album. Little money was wasted on photographs. But there are enough for Anne to piece together the early lives of Aunt Ethel and Uncle Jim, Poor Bert, Aunt Frances and Uncle Harold, Aunt Annie and Uncle Bill, and all the various offspring. And in all those pages, only two pictures of Rose – that one snapshot with Annie, and an even earlier sepiatoned family group.
The photo album contents Anne for a while, but she never really stops looking for more clues, more evidence that the past exists. She has ceased to believe in The Trunk; the Evans family, she concludes, are not Trunk-keepers. But she continues to hope for old letters, old diaries, even old schoolbooks with names scribbled in the margins.
By the time she is thirteen, Anne’s search has turned up little, but it has not stopped. It has narrowed, too. Once she wanted evidence of anyone’s past life, anything that would transport her back to another era. Cousin Valerie’s diary, if it existed, would have been almost as good as her mother’s. Aunt Annie’s or Aunt Frances’ old letters would give her some flavour of the past. But now Anne knows she is searching for something, someone, in particular. Through diaries never written, letters never opened or read, a past never sorted and saved, she is searching for Rose.
PART ONE
1924 - 1932
ROSE
ST. JOHN’S, SEPTEMBER 1924
“YOU STAY AWAY FROM that one Ida Morris,” Rose’s mother tells her as she gets ready to go out. “I’ve heard about her. She goes with the Portuguese and Spaniards.”
Tonight Ida has promised Rose and May that they, too, can go with the Portuguese. They meet the boys – young fishermen named Manuel, Luis, Jorge – on Water Street. Rose is paired with Luis, short but handsomer than the other two. He is about her own age, smiling, sweet in his broken English. She lets him put an arm around her. They go to Ida’s house, where her invalid mother is forever in bed, in her own twilight world, and knows nothing of who comes in or goes out. Rose lets Luis slip an arm around her waist, closes her eyes when he kisses her.
Rose is nineteen. In the one long mirror in her parents’ house, a dusty green oval, she sees an image of herself as faded and discoloured as a flower petal pressed in a Bible. But she knows her hair is blond and curly, that the brown dress with the yellow print is a good fit. In New York, Jim told her when he was home, on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, the girls wear skirts to their knees, bobbed hair, lipstick and high heels. They smoke cigarettes out in the sight of everyone.
Rose’s parents, strict Methodists turned stricter Salvationists, would be shocked at the thought of their daughter among the loose women of Flatbush Avenue. But Rose has been sneaking out to dances, kissing boys, even getting drunk, ever since she left school. Bill Winsor, her first boyfriend, has asked her twice to marry him. She strings him along with promises: later, someday, perhaps.
Her family cannot understand why she doesn’t marry Bill. “He’s so sweet, sure, he’d do anything for you,” her sister Annie says. “And he’s not bad-looking.”
“He’s a nice young fellow,” says her mother, looking Rose up and down as if searching for the hidden flaw. “You could do worse. Given time, you probably will do worse.”
He
r older brothers, Jim and Bert, are Bill’s friends. Bert, the more serious of the two, tells her when he comes home to visit, “You’re cracked if you don’t take Bill, Rose. He won’t wait forever.”
Bill won’t wait forever, and neither will Rose. She is waiting, waiting for her life to begin. Perhaps she will not have to wait much longer, she thinks as she dances with Luis to the hissing scratch of Ida’s gramophone. A girl she knows, Ethel Moores, is going to New York. Rose has never liked Ethel. Round and pale and bland as a custard, proper and churchgoing, Ethel is Annie’s best friend, Bert’s long-time sweetheart. Now, with both Bert and Jim away working most of the year in New York, Ethel plans to go too. She has a cousin who will find a job for her. Rose cannot stand the thought that Ethel will walk on Flatbush Avenue before she, Rose, gets there. As Luis whispers to her in Portuguese, she maps out her battle plan. She may have to pretend to be friends with Ethel. Ethel is so slow, she may not notice the difference between a real friend and a false one. When Ethel steps on board the Nerissa to go to New York, Rose will be at her side.
Luis, who has had too much to drink, has begun to cry. In his torrent of broken English and weeping Portuguese, Rose hears a name again and again: Maria, Maria. His girlfriend back in Oporto, sweet and faithful and unsuspecting Maria, waiting at home as patiently as Ethel waits for Bert on his long trips to New York. For Maria in Oporto, it is the evil women of St. John’s, Newfoundland, who threaten her patient Portuguese happiness.
“She is angel…angel to me,” sobs Luis, burying his face between Rose’s breasts. Rose pulls away. Tonight, lucky Maria will not be cheated on. Rose is skating along the edge of bad-girl, not venturing onto the thin ice. She will not be tricked into having a baby. Bill Winsor’s baby or a Portuguese sailor’s baby: either would anchor her in St. John’s till she died.