By the Rivers of Brooklyn

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  What happened? Annie didn’t ask. “It must be hard on Ralphie.”

  “It’s tearing him apart,” Ethel said. “He adores his father. It’s better here than it was back home though. At least here Bill pays some attention to him, and there’s you and Mom and Pop too, and my mother. He’s got people all around him.”

  There was so much here that Annie wanted to ask, wanted to pry open Ethel’s shell and poke around inside. She had never thought of Ethel, her friend Ethel, as someone who carried a shell, but Ethel had grown a hard outer coating in New York. She’s been hurt bad, Annie thought, and I can’t get close to her.

  “If you do go back, what will you do about Claire? You don’t mean to take her back with you?”

  Ethel looked shocked. “No, no, Rose wanted her sent home, she was clear on that. And anyway, I couldn’t cope with two babies, and the boys as well.” She paused, looking up at Ralphie still perched in the tree. “I don’t know but Rose is right. Maybe this is a better place to raise a child. Ralphie couldn’t do that, climb a tree, back home in Brooklyn.”

  Home in Brooklyn. Annie met her sister-in-law’s eyes. Ethel looked away and changed the subject.

  Jim said something similar a few days later, watching the boys play in the yard. “There’s nothing here for me, Annie,” he told her after another fruitless day looking for work. “Sure, even Bill is fed up with it, and he belongs here.”

  “Bill’s not thinking of moving away?” Annie said sharply. If Bill went to New York too…

  “Not to the States, you’ll never get Bill down there. But he’s talking about moving out around the bay with his uncle. He says if he can’t be in here working he might as well be out there fishing, where at least he can grow and catch and shoot what he needs. I don’t know but he’s right, but that’s no life for me. I’d be better off back in New York, doing what I knows best.”

  “So, will you go back before school starts?” Annie said. “Ethel’s been wondering if she should sign Ralphie up for school here.”

  “She can do what she likes about Ralphie,” snapped Jim. Then, in a lighter tone, he added, “I don’t see us leaving here now before the baby is born. And as far as Ralphie goes, he’s happy here. I don’t know but this is the best place for him.”

  Slowly, Annie saw what was unfolding around her. “They want to leave Ralphie behind when they go back,” she told Bill one Sunday night. He was walking her back from service: she was free to go more often now that Ethel and Jim were at the house.

  “Ralphie? Why would they leave their own son behind?”

  And Annie, of course, could not explain. “I don’t think him and Jim get on very well,” she said lamely. “Jim is kind of hard on him, he favours little Jimmy. It’s hard to say what’s in their minds from one day to the next,” she added. “But then it’s hard to say that about your mind either. Jim tells me you’re thinking of moving out around the bay?” She tried to keep her voice light, but wasn’t sure she had succeeded.

  Bill looked at her sharply. “I’m sorry, Annie. I meant to say, but it was hard to bring up to you. I don’t know what to do. My uncle’s getting up there, he could use a hand around the house and in the boat. Fishermen aren’t getting much for their catch these days, but at least you got the land under your feet, the fish in the sea, everything you need to survive. People are coming in from the bay to the city and only going on the dole. There’s no work for me here and I’d be happy down in Bonavista. I knows I would, but I don’t like to leave you.”

  “I can get by, Bill. I’ve got a lot of worries I know, but I can always find someone else to help me. People from church will help out now and then, with Pop and all.”

  “Come with me, Annie,” Bill said suddenly. He stopped walking there on the corner of Freshwater Road and Rocky Lane. “Come down to Bonavista with me.”

  “Bill, that’s foolishness. I can’t do that. How could I haul Mom and Pop and the baby and Ralphie, if they leave him behind, all down to Bonavista?”

  “Not the whole crew! Let someone else in the family take some responsibility, someone else look after them all. I know you couldn’t leave the baby, but I’d be glad to have her along with you.”

  “Along with me?” Annie echoed.

  “I’m sorry, I’m doing this all wrong.” Bill took off his cap and tried to grin, but it was a little lopsided, like only half of him was smiling. “What I should have said first was, Annie, will you marry me?”

  Annie turned, walked a few steps away. “Bill, this is…I didn’t expect this. I can’t think about all this now, not when I don’t know what’s going to happen. You have to give me time…time to work it out.”

  He looked relieved, and put his cap back on. He drew her arm through his and they walked on. “You can have time if you needs it, Annie. I’m not going nowhere before winter, anyway.”

  No-one, it seemed, was going anywhere before winter. Ralphie started Grade One. Jimmy learned to climb the fence to get out of the yard. Claire learned to crawl. Jim looked for work. Pop developed a flu and they all worried it could turn to pneumonia. And on the first of October, Ethel had a baby girl she named Diane.

  After Diane was born Ethel and Annie worked side by side, bathing the babies, changing diapers, preparing bottles. Diane was a plump, contented baby, dark-haired and dark-eyed like Ethel’s people, not like the Evanses. One morning shortly before Christmas, as they bathed the babies in the big metal washtub in front of the kitchen stove, Ethel said, “Jim’s got his mind made up to go back to New York as soon as spring comes. Harold tells him things are picking up a bit there, he might be able to find work.”

  “And what do you think about that?”

  Ethel was silent, soaping Diane’s abundant hair into a curl atop her head. “Annie,” she said at last, “there’s things I haven’t told you. But I can tell you this if you don’t ask no more questions: Jim’s got his mind made up Ralphie’s staying here, not coming back to New York with us. And I can’t stand the thought of leaving him, girl, it’s tearing me apart. Jim told me last night that he’s going back to New York, and he’s not taking Ralphie back with us. As for me and the other two, he says, I can decide what I wants: stay here with Ralphie and all of you, or go back to Brooklyn with him, he doesn’t care. But his mind’s made up to those two things, and I don’t know what to do.”

  Annie nodded slowly, pouring a cup of warm water over Claire’s head. She squealed and shut her eyes. “If Ralphie stays behind,” Annie said at last, “I’ll take the best kind of care of him. I’d treat him like my own, Ethel. And he’s good with Claire, he’d be like a big brother for her. If you can’t change Jim’s mind, Ethel, at least you can rest easy that Ralphie would be well taken care of.” She saw Ethel’s slow nod, and knew what Ethel would decide. And it was right. A wife’s place was with her husband, when all was said and done.

  Bill, too, had his plans made. He wanted to live around the bay, try his hand at fishing and maybe a bit of farming. He wanted Annie, he wanted Claire, he wanted them to have a family of their own. Annie sometimes wondered if it was really her he wanted in that life. It had always been Rose he wanted, and now he wanted to look after Rose’s baby, Annie was sure. And since he couldn’t have Rose, and every man needed a wife, Annie would do. If she said no, he’d find someone else down in Bonavista, that fall or the next fall, Annie thought. But she held her tongue, and only told him she couldn’t see her way clear to getting married and moving down there. Maybe next year they’d see.

  ROSE

  BROOKLYN, AUGUST 1932

  DINNER IS A BOILED egg, cooked over the hot plate in her room. Since there’s only one burner she uses the egg water to make her cup of tea afterwards, giving the tea a strange aftertaste. It’s not the dinner she would have chosen. She wouldn’t have chosen to eat at all, in fact: she hasn’t eaten all day and feels no hunger, no urge to taste anything. She likes the idea of a restaurant meal: chop suey, or a nice steak. She likes the thought of it appearing all colourful and b
right on the tray in front of her, but she cannot imagine lifting the fork to her mouth. The effort seems incredible.

  The dingy room has a mirror about one foot square, coated with dust, hanging at chest level behind the door. Rose rarely looks at it. She knows she has gone to pieces. She worried so much about getting fat with the baby, which turned out to be a joke. She was so sick and miserable for most of the pregnancy that she gained barely five pounds. Since the birth those have dropped away and taken several others with them, till her hip bones jut out like spars and her wrists seem as fragile as matchsticks. Every day there is less and less Rose, more and more of the world.

  The strange malaise, the world-weariness that muffled her like a heavy blanket in those strange months before she found herself pregnant, only increased once she realized that she had a baby inside her. Tony Martelli’s baby, who had stolen her chance at another kind of life with Andrew Covington, who was sucking away her strength, growing bigger and stronger at her expense. A parasite, really. Like fleas on a dog.

  The journey toward birth was a long, strange, lonely one. Most of that time Rose saw and spoke to nobody. Every few days the idea of going to see Tony would arise. She was carrying Tony’s baby, and the last thing he’d said was that he wanted to marry her. No. The last thing he said was for her to go to hell.

  When the money ran out and her time got close she had to look for charity. Her landlady told her about a shelter for girls in trouble. It was run by nuns. Back home, Rose had had Catholic friends who went to school with the nuns and told horror-tales of their strictness, their whippings and beatings and curses of hell that sounded exactly like Tony’s mother.

  These nuns did not whip or beat or even talk about hell – or if they did, Rose didn’t hear it. They were careful and practical and, once in awhile, even gentle, though their disapproval showed clearly in the white-framed circles of their pinched narrow faces. Their hands were kinder than their faces, when the time came to touch her. A midwife guided her through the awful hours of birth, the unimaginable pain, the pushing that felt as if she would be torn apart.

  Afterwards, they brought her the baby girl, a scrawny, squalling, appallingly strong red bundle of life and energy. She arched and twisted in Rose’s arms without the slightest urge to cuddle or snuggle in. This made Rose like her better.

  “Do you want to give her a bottle, or to nurse her yourself?” the nun at her feet said, in a voice that clearly implied that whichever choice she made would be the wrong one.

  Rose looked at the baby’s hungry little red mouth working. She imagined that little mouth clamping down on her nipple, sucking hard, drawing even more life out of her. As if there was a cord connecting her breast with the heart below it, Rose imagined the baby drawing out not only nourishment but love, sucked from her unwilling heart.

  Rose handed her back to the nun. “Get her a bottle,” she said.

  But she didn’t let them put the baby up for adoption. She kept her, and struggled with her tough little body and gave her the bottles herself. She called the baby Claire, a simple and strong-sounding name, and when her recovery was over she left the shelter with Claire in her arms.

  As soon as she was out of the hospital, though, out of the care of the nuns, her lethargy and sadness returned full force, and she found herself lying in her bed in the boarding house, listening to the baby scream, knowing she was wet and hungry and yet not being able to get up and pick her up. The cries would go on and on and Rose would think, In a minute, just one minute I’ll get up and get her, until finally the landlady or the neighbour across the landing pounded on the door and said, “Mrs. Evans! Mrs. Evans! Can you do something with that baby?”

  On the days she felt strong enough, Rose walked the wintry streets for hours with the baby, a shapeless bundle of blankets in her arms, while she tried to think what to do. She could only see three possibilities: go back to the nuns and give back the baby, go find Tony and give Claire to him, or see if her own relatives would take in Claire.

  Finally she settled on the last choice as the safest. Different as she was from her brothers, they were more like her, because of blood, than anyone else on earth. They were good men and their wives were good, if dull, women. Claire deserved someone sensible and dull to raise her. So one night Rose dressed and combed her hair and took baby Claire to Jim and Ethel’s apartment, and when she found that they were going home she asked them, “Please take the baby home to Mom and Pop.”

  She left Ethel and Jim’s place and walked the streets enjoying the freedom: her arms no longer heavy with their burden, her feet lighter. She breathed the air that was free of the hundred and one married tensions she could feel and sense in Ethel and Jim’s apartment. She walked back to her boarding house, alone, and felt wonderful.

  Now she drifts through the weeks in a daze, eating next to nothing but not feeling hungry, sleeping most of the day and night but always feeling tired. She’s heard of women suffering from bad nerves after they have babies. But if the baby is gone, given away, why would her nerves still be bad? And what, if anything, is the cure?

  One day she goes downstairs into the hall and sees her landlady’s purse lying on the hall table. Rose looks inside and there’s a change purse with small change: coppers, nickels, dimes. She takes five dimes and walks out onto the street feeling rich and, briefly, energized. At a diner on the corner she sits down and orders a meal – the first real meal she can remember in a long time, something more than tea and toast and an egg. She orders chicken, always her favourite, with a cup of coffee and a piece of lemon meringue pie for dessert.

  The only trouble is, she can’t eat more than a mouthful or two, feels as sick when she tries as back when she was pregnant. Back out on the street she tries to think of a way to spend the rest of the money that won’t wear her out, won’t require a thing out of her. She wanders aimlessly up and down the street, a dingy, dirty grey backstreet where poor people with no colour and no energy, people like herself, are condemned to live. Walks till at last she sees a movie theatre and almost laughs in relief: how could she have forgotten? She hasn’t seen a movie since before Claire was born.

  The movie is Laughing Sinners, with Clark Gable and Joan Crawford. Rose hasn’t heard of the movie but she likes Gable and she likes Crawford, so she figures she can’t go wrong. She sinks into her seat, glad to have this one escape still left to her.

  She’s not far in before she learns it was a terrible mistake. Clarke Gable is playing, of all things, a Salvation Army officer, uniform and all. Joan Crawford – blond in this movie – is a wayward girl of the streets who joins the Army. The audience seems to take it all in good fun, but seeing all the uniforms reminds Rose too vividly of Sundays at home, walking into Salvation Meeting next to Annie, Annie dark and sober in her bonnet and uniform, a Salvation Army lassie, and Rose defiant in everyday clothes beside her. Rose remembers it as a sea of black, a swamp of holiness reaching up to suck her under. When Joan Crawford’s character slips back into sin and goes to bed with her old, bad boyfriend, Rose wants to stand up and cheer. But Clark Gable ruins it all at the end, showing up all shiny and righteous in the uniform and sweet-talking her into going back with him, back to the black-clad, tambourine-banging, happy-in-the-Lord army of holiness. Rose feels sick once again as she leaves the theatre. But she has a dime left in her pocket, so the day hasn’t been a total waste.

  Rose walks out of the theatre onto a drab street under a grey sky. She thinks about baby Claire. Rose pictures her, not a baby or a little girl, but grown up, looking like Rose herself but sharper, smarter, able to pull her mother together and get her to shape up. She closes her eyes against the vision, against the troubling sense that she will never see her daughter again.

  PART TWO

  1944 - 1957

  CLAIRE

  ST. JOHN’S, FEBRUARY 1944

  “I’M GOING TO GET a letter from Diane today,” Valerie said, clambering over a snowbank. “I’ve got a Feeling.”

  Claire knew
about Valerie’s Feelings. Feelings, vague but intense and hardly ever reliable, ruled her life. Claire, mercifully free from Feelings, Intuitions, Omens and Presentiments, thought her own life was a lot simpler, though perhaps less exciting.

  “Wait for meeeeeee….” came the faint echo of Valerie’s brother Kenny, ploughing along through the snow behind them. It was a long walk all the way up from Springdale Street, but this was the worst part in winter, coming through Hennebury’s Pinch with the wind blowing snow down from the field on their left and the road a churned mess of icy slush beneath their gaiters.

  Actually, Claire corrected herself, neither of their lives was interesting at all. They lived in St. John’s on the same piece of land in Freshwater Valley in two different houses, Valerie with her father, her mother and her two little brothers, and Claire with her aunt and her grandmother and her cousin Ralph. They were both in Grade Seven at the Salvation Army College. They lived very average, unexciting lives, even though they were living in wartime, which in a book would be exciting but in real life wasn’t particularly. But Valerie’s life seemed thrilling to her because she had such a great imagination.

  They both went in the kitchen door of Aunt Annie’s, Kenny trailing behind, stamping snow off their boots, laying down their satchels in the porch, taking off their coats. The heat from the stove hit them both in the face. Aunt Annie had the kitchen done in yellows and reds, bright yellow paint on the walls, red canvas on the floor, yellow and red in the tablecloth. It looked like a room where nothing ever changed, not even the calendar on the wall with the picture of the kittens curled up asleep next to the mother cat. When Claire heard the word “home,” a picture of the kitchen came to mind.