By the Rivers of Brooklyn

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  And so did Jim. Yes, Jim had been wonderful. He gave bottles and had even changed the odd diaper, clumsily. Ethel knew from watching Jean’s husband Robert that some men had no real interest in babies or small children, appeared not to notice them except as noise until they were old enough to throw and catch a ball, if boys, or to look pretty, if they were girls. Jim was never like that. Even when Ralphie was the tiniest thing, Jim would talk to him while he walked the floor with him. He would talk the strangest talk – not baby talk, gushing and cooing like a woman would do, but he would carry on these serious one-sided conversations, or sometimes not serious, sometimes telling jokes and stories. Stories from home. He talked about home a lot to Ralphie, talked about taking him to Newfoundland someday, showing him to his Nan and Pop Evans, his Nanny Moores.

  At those times Ethel had to turn away, busy herself with dishes or laundry, something noisy. She wanted home so bad it was like a pain in her gut. And she knew they couldn’t go, not for years and years anyway.

  Ethel moved to the window and looked out at the back of another house just like the one they lived in. They had two rooms – barely. One L-shaped room had Ralphie’s crib and a chest of drawers in one arm, the stove, sink, and cupboard tucked in the corner, and the table and chairs, with the one armchair, in the other arm. Their other room, the bedroom, was nestled into the crook of the L and was so small the double bed had to be shoved up against the wall. Only Jim could get out on his side; Ethel had to crawl over the foot of the bed to get out. She remembered herself one year ago, a new bride and a new homemaker, proud of this tiny space and loving it. Now the walls were closing in.

  This was Saturday and Jim might have been home early, but lately he had been working all the extra hours he could; all the men were, trying to get more work done before the snow came. Ethel hoped he’d be tired, too, when he got home. Too tired to want anything in bed.

  She used to enjoy it in bed with Jim, at the very first, even though she felt guilty and knew she shouldn’t. She used to pretend, sometimes, that he was Bert and that she and Bert had had a chance to finish what they’d started, making love in a proper bed with sheets instead of on the damp ground with twigs sticking into her backside. Now, since Ralphie was born, all she could ever think was how tired she was and how she didn’t want another baby, not till Ralphie was a little older.

  She was lucky; Jim was tired. In the morning, Ethel let him sleep while she went to church. For several months after her marriage she didn’t go. The church she had attended in her old neighbourhood was farther away now, and anyway she didn’t feel right about going. Then Ralphie came and she couldn’t get out. But a month ago Jean had asked her to come to the Methodist church with her, because Jean’s oldest, Sadie, was going to be in some Sunday School program. Ethel found it was nice to have an hour to herself, out of the apartment, away from Jim and Ralphie. It was wonderful to have a husband who didn’t mind watching the baby for a little while on Sunday morning.

  She liked dressing up a little, going with Jean and her children – Robert, who was brought up Catholic, didn’t go to church at all – sitting in the small quiet chapel on the hard pews, hearing the organ and the choir. She didn’t like the words of some of the hymns anymore, or the sermons. This week, for instance, the minister was preaching about the Prodigal Son. Ethel was the only Christian she knew who didn’t like that story. She felt sorry for the older brother, who always got a hard time when preachers told the tale. What was so bad about staying at home and working hard? she wondered. The older brother could be like Annie – the one who stayed behind and kept house when everyone else went off to seek their fortune. Why shouldn’t he want a feast, a party for himself once in awhile? Was that so wrong? Why was the old father too mean to slaughter a calf for his faithful older son? Just once, Ethel would have liked to see the older son get some credit.

  But the Reverend Darling – what a name! – like every minister she’d ever heard, was all caught up with the younger son, the bad son. He was harping on and on about forgiveness, God’s grace, God’s mercy. How the worst things we’ve ever done can be forgiven, no matter what. Ethel looked up at Reverend Darling, his round milk-white face glowing above his black shirt and clerical collar. His hair curled a little around the temples. He looked like a boy. Little he knows, Ethel thought.

  The small but determined choir stood to sing the closing hymn: “Just as I Am.” Back home in the Army, if they sang this hymn at the end of a sermon about the Prodigal Son – sang it with loud and lusty voices, a steady thumping beat, and a clatter of tambourines – people would be streaming down the aisles, tears running down their cheeks, kneeling at the mercy seat. This did not happen in the Methodist church. Methodists sat quietly in their pews, hymnbooks open, singing along.

  Just as I am, without one plea,

  But that Thy blood was shed for me…

  When she was a girl growing up, Ethel had had a friend, Mary Margaret Murphy, who of course was Catholic. Once she went to St. Patrick’s with Mary Margaret and waited for her to go to Confession. It was dark and mysterious and popish in the big church, and Ethel wondered what went on in the small closet. Mary Margaret was matter-of-fact about it. “I tells Father my sins and he forgives me and tells me how many Hail Marys to say, is all,” she had said. Now Ethel almost wished for a confession booth. Because it couldn’t be that easy, could it? As easy as the hymn made it? Just as I am? Thy love I own has broken every barrier down? Not so easy. Some barriers were bigger than you might think. The lady that wrote that hymn hadn’t done the thing Ethel did. She didn’t know.

  The hymn was over: the minister was praying. Ethel did not know what foolishness she had been thinking, or what it was she wanted so much she could almost cry. But she prayed along with the minister, prayed silently for the first time in months. I’m going to try harder, God. I’ll be here every Sunday. I’ll be a good wife to Jim and a good mother to Ralphie, and I won’t complain. I’ll be the best you ever saw, I promise. Only please, please…

  She did not know how to end it. Reverend Darling said Amen, the organist played the postlude, and she stood up and walked out with Jean and the youngsters. She felt better and stronger, like her backbone had been reinforced with steel.

  ROSE

  BROOKLYN, MAY 1927

  THE BELL ON THE door clangs again. Rose peers over the edge of the ornate gold cash register, praying it’s someone who doesn’t matter, hoping she can stay sitting down. Her feet are killing her, even with her shoes kicked off. If it’s a young kid or something, she doesn’t have to stand up until they actually come up to the counter. Except she might have to watch to see if they’re stealing.

  It isn’t a kid. It’s a middle-aged woman, all starched and pressed in a pink cloth coat, the kind who expects to see a shop girl standing behind the counter and will complain to the manager if she doesn’t. With a heavy sigh, Rose lays down her cup of tea and stands up, pressing on a smile.

  “Help you with anything today, ma’am?” she calls out as the woman begins to paw through tables of five-and-dime merchandise. The woman ignores her.

  Rose keeps a mental list of jobs that would be worse than working at Freedman’s Five and Dime. Being a maid, of course that was worse. Her first New York job was working for Mrs. Clark, who was more picky than Rose’s own mother ever was. Rose quickly got tired of the smell of brass and silver polish, of the horrible brass cabinet knobs and the silver dinner service that had to be shined till Mrs. Clark, the old cow, could see her face in them. Rose hated mopping, dusting, vacuuming, doing other people’s nasty laundry and making up their beds and washing their dishes. She didn’t last long at Mrs. Clark’s.

  Then she worked in a laundry, and that was worse: the heat, the steam, the fourteen-hour days, the living-in. But the girls were fun there. Here, Rose is lonely. The shop is small, only three girls working at a time, and the other two “girls” are over fifty and disapprove of her.

  At five she’ll be off. Mike O’Dea is going
to pick her up and take her someplace for dinner. Rose has a good red dress on under her shop coat, for her date with Mike O’Dea the cop. He is a serious young man – serious about police work, serious about Rose. He fully intends to make Rose his wife. In fact he has only one good point, and that is that he likes a few drinks. When Mike gets drunk, he’s funny. He laughs and sings and spends money foolishly, mostly on Rose. When Mike is sober, he apologizes for his drinking and swears he’ll give it up entirely when they get married. This doesn’t help his position any, in Rose’s eyes. Rose has no intention of marrying a drunk. She knows where that leads: the poverty, the crying, the hungry children, the dirty tenements. But why would she want to marry the sober Irish cop, Mike O’Dea?

  The starched pink woman holds up pairs of cheap cotton drawers and sturdy corsets that remind Rose of the laced steel girders of the bridges and buildings her brother Jim works on. This woman will prod and poke and look for half an hour and buy one item, the cheapest thing on the table. The door clangs again.

  A man walks in, young and very handsome. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, Italian or Greek maybe. Rose feels her cheeks flush, and her smile this time grows as naturally as dandelions in the small green gardens in front of city houses. She has not realized until this moment how tired she is of her job, her life, of Mike O’Dea. She has not realized how badly she needs someone new to walk through the door.

  He comes straight to the counter instead of looking around, asks if they have belts, men’s belts. Yes, they have belts. “Never needed a new belt before this,” he says. His English is good but heavily flavoured: he has not been here long, perhaps not as long as she has. “I been working in the Navy Yards ever since I come from Sicily, two years now. One shirt, one shoes, one pants, one belt. No problem. Then last month, I start working for a guy who owns a fruit store, running one of his pushcarts. Suddenly, the old belt breaks. The old man, my boss, he thinks I’m eating too much – eating up his profits.” His hands dance, his smile flashes, as he looks through the rack of belts and calls his life story across the shop to Rose.

  “You used to work in the Navy Yards? I know lots of guys in the Navy Yards. Did you ever know Paul Starr? David MacKay?” She wonders what kind of girl she sounds like, saying she knows lots of guys, then doesn’t care.

  Her customer doesn’t seem to care either. He tosses names back and forth, casual acquaintances they both share. “But you left the Navy Yards to work on a pushcart selling fruit?” Rose says.

  The Italian boy laughs. “It’s the family business, back home. That’s what I grew up with. I’m gonna get into business for myself someday, own my own store. You know the American Dream, dontcha? That’s what I’m here for. I signed up for my little piece of America.”

  Rose laughs with him. She envies him, too, knowing his dream, having his little piece of America marked out so clearly. She had only one dream, and now she is living it: she lives in Brooklyn, she has a job, she goes out with men, she dances and wears short dresses and smokes and goes to movies. Suddenly her American Dream seems small, and almost worn out.

  He comes to the counter, belt in hand. In front of him sails the pink woman with an enormous brassiere dangling before her. Rose takes it gingerly, rings it in. Next in line, the fruit vendor says, “What time you get off work?” The woman frowns and clucks her tongue.

  Rose hands the woman back her change, takes the belt. “I get off ten to five,” she says.

  After that, Tony Martelli waits for Rose outside the shop every afternoon. Mike O’Dea the cop drops from sight. Rose loves the feeling of having a man waiting for her after work; even better she loves having a new man, someone with crisp edges she has not yet worn smooth, someone whose stories, whose jokes, whose hands and lips, can still surprise her.

  Tony Martelli has plenty of stories. He fills the space between them with his stories as they stroll arm in arm through the streets of Brooklyn towards the fruit store where he works. He talks about his family back in Sicily, their donkey and the little plot of land where they grow grapes and figs and tomatoes to sell, and how that was never enough, how his father and brothers worked as labourers on bigger farms. How poor everyone was during the war, when he was a little boy.

  Rose tries to grasp it all as he talks, tries to form pictures in her mind. Back home she was so good at this, building pictures of New York and the things she would see and do there. Ever since she got to Brooklyn she has been inside that picture, and other people have been telling her stories – about where they’re going, sometimes, but mostly about where they came from, because everyone came to Brooklyn from somewhere else. They always want to talk about where they came from. Only Rose never talks about home.

  They arrive at Romano’s fruit stand and Tony picks a ripe plum and puts it to Rose’s lips for her to bite. Romano’s daughter, a plump girl of fifteen or so, giggles behind her hand. “Tony, you gotta girlfriend!” she calls. “I thought I was your girlfriend!”

  “You gotta grow up first, Gina,” Tony says.

  From the store they wind their way through the streets, away from Flatbush Avenue, away from the heart of Brooklyn, into Williamsburg, to the street where Tony lives with his sister and brother-in-law, where everyone speaks Italian, where a man peddles fish from a barrow in the street, where barefoot children run between the apartment buildings. Rose wants to protest that Tony is taking her in the wrong direction – away from everything exciting and modern and New York, into some lost Brooklyn world. It is a wrong turn, she is sure, but for now she is under a spell, unable to break the charm, wanting only to stay by his side.

  Later, of course, they will return to the real world, after a huge supper eaten at the kitchen table of Tony’s sister, a groaning board of mysterious foods and flavours that, Rose has to admit, taste far better than anything she can buy in a restaurant on Flatbush Avenue. Tony’s sister, barely thirty, is already huge, ballooned into a caricature of Italian womanhood by three pregnancies and God knows how many thousand rich dinners. Rose eats sparingly, causing Tony’s sister to harangue Tony in Italian about Rose’s extreme thinness and possible illness.

  It’s only then that they make their way back to the world Rose knows and loves, the world of movies and dance halls. Tony is a wonderful dancer. The music fills up everything, the outside world ceases to exist, and Rose is perfectly happy. After the dances, Tony always sees her home on the streetcar. But all the time, while they dance, while they sit in the theatre, while they ride the streetcar, even while he kisses her goodnight, she feels the invisible cord that ties him to those dark streets in Williamsburg. She wonders how long the cord is, how far she can pull him.

  ETHEL

  BROOKLYN, SEPTEMBER 1927

  RALPHIE SAT BETWEEN ETHEL and Jim, squirming and twisting, bouncing up and down. A streetcar ride was still a big treat for him. Ethel tried to talk to him about the apartment. “We’ll live on a nice street…there’ll be other families with children in our building, you can play with them…” Ralphie only half-listened; he was only two, after all, and probably didn’t understand most of what she was saying. Really it was Jim she was talking to, or maybe herself.

  She had been delighted, though not entirely surprised, when on Friday evening Jim pushed his chair back after supper, stretched out his long legs, and said, “So this landlord will let us have a look round the place on Sunday, will he?” That was Jim’s way. Ethel had been after him for months about getting their own apartment, but she knew Jim worried about money. They never argued about money; they never argued about anything. When they disagreed, Jim would open up the paper and start to read, or look out the window. Ethel would go about doing her usual chores, but more loudly and with heavier sighs. Jim never actually gave in; he simply said a day or so later that they were going to do whatever she’d suggested, as if that had been his plan all along.

  The building on Linden Boulevard was only a few years old. It was a warm brown brick with a big paved space in front of it. Old women sat on the steps, mo
st of them heavyset, clad in long black dresses, their hair covered with bandannas, talking in foreign tongues. It wasn’t one of the buildings advertised in the Eagle with the words “Christian area.” Ethel didn’t care about that. She didn’t mind living around Jews; she really had no opinion of Jews at all, never having met any except in shops. And “Christian area” buildings were more expensive. On the other side of the paved court sat the old men, chewing on pipes or cigars, muttering rather than speaking aloud, casting occasional glances at the women. Jim and Ethel and Ralphie had to step around a clutch of little boys playing potsy right in front of the front steps.

  Inside, there were marble floors in the vestibule where you went in and a tall staircase stretching up. But the apartment for rent was on the ground floor, which was the main reason Ethel was so eager for it. She was so tired of stairs, of lugging Ralphie up those long steps when he was asleep or tired. What would it be like when – if – they had a baby as well? If she was going to live out her days in a Brooklyn apartment building, Ethel wanted it to be on the ground floor.

  When the landlord – a small man with a low forehead who came scuttling down the stairs as they entered – opened the door for them, they were standing in a short, dim hallway. Directly in front of them, on the long side of the hall, two doors stood ajar, leading into the kitchen and the living room. Closed doors at either end of the hall led to a bedroom and a bathroom. Their own bathroom! Ethel was so tired of sharing a toilet and bath with three other families. Their own bathroom would be reason enough to rent this place, if everything else was all right.

  Ralphie barrelled straight through the living room door, and Jim followed him. But Ethel went into the kitchen, and the landlord hovered near her, knowing that the woman of the house would want to see the small, battered gas cooker, the clean white sink with its own running water, a few dark chips out of the porcelain, the space where she could fit her kitchen table and chairs, the place where an icebox could go if they had one. “Lots of cupboard space here,” he said helpfully, and he was right: the shelves and cupboards ranged above the white countertop to the ceiling, though she didn’t see how she’d ever get at them, short of standing on a stool. She liked the cheerful yellow paint on the walls, which looked almost new.