Her eyes lingered on his face, but when they held too long on his eyes, she shifted hers and could not help looking where she had been trying not to look: to his leg, the one pant leg hanging strangely over the artificial limb. His hand gripped a walking stick and she could see from the cords of muscle in his arm that he was leaning heavily on it.
“Sit down, Bill, do,” she said, bustling out from behind the table to pull out a chair for him. He almost tripped over her, trying to get to the chair, and she pulled back, blushing, wondering if she had done the wrong thing. A man pulled a chair out for a woman; you didn’t usually do it the other way, unless the man was old or feeble.
But Bill was looking around the kitchen, a smile on his face. “Annie’s kitchen,” he said. “By the jumpin’s, Annie, it’s good to be back here. Just like I remembered it too…only you got a different tablecloth on today: I was always thinking about the red and white one.”
“That’s worn to rags. I threw that out,” Annie said. She stood uncertainly in the middle of the room, wondering what to do or say to make this meeting normal, comfortable. Then she remembered. “Cup of tea?” she offered.
“Yes, thanks,” Bill said. “A cup of tea in Annie’s kitchen.” He took it from her and instead of drinking at once, cupped his hands around it as though he were chilled, though it wasn’t that cold outside. “I can’t tell you, Annie girl, how many times over there – over in England, but all the more once we got overseas – how I’d be lying frozen half to death in some bombed-out house, listening to gunfire off in the distance, trying to get some sleep, and I’d say to myself, ‘Now, Bill, just think yourself back in Annie’s kitchen, sitting down to that red and white tablecloth, and Annie kneading bread or mixing up a cake at the other end of the table, drinking a cup of tea.’ And I’d build it all up like a picture in my mind, not knowing if I’d ever be here again in real life.”
There was a small, warm, round silence after he finished speaking. “And here you are,” Annie said.
She pulled apart the leftover ends of the dough, making a few toutons to put on for supper. Bill drank his tea and looked around the kitchen as if he couldn’t get enough of it. Whenever his eyes lit on Annie she looked back down at the smooth balls of dough she rolled in her hands. She liked pressing them flat between her palms.
“So now I got to think what to do next,” Bill said at last, and laid down his cup.
“Oh, no rush for that yet, is there? You wants time to…to get used to everything, you know?” Annie waved a hand vaguely; she had heard enough stories about men coming back, adjusting to life at home after all those years overseas. And Bill had his leg, too. Or rather, didn’t have his leg. “Wince and Marge are glad to have you home. I’m sure you can wait till after the winter’s done before you have to go making plans.”
“Never too soon to start making plans, Annie love, that’s what I realized when I was over there,” Bill said. “Here I am now, a grown man, past forty, and there were all these younger fellows around me, fellows with wives and children and homes of their own back here. I thought, ‘You know, Bill, if one of those fellows were to die tomorrow’ – and plenty of them did, girl, plenty of them did – ‘at least he’s lived, you know? He’s had a family, a life, people who love him.’ And what did I have? Nothing and no-one, when you come right down to it.”
“Don’t be so foolish, Bill. You got family, friends, there’s plenty would have missed you if you hadn’t come back. You know…sure, you got my letters, you know how I prayed for you every night, how I would have felt if you’d…if you hadn’t come back.”
He nodded. “Oh, I know, Annie. I counted on those prayers. No, it’s only–” He broke off, a long sigh interrupting his words. He looked down at his hands. “Hard to put into words,” he said, and didn’t try anymore. Annie could hear the clock. She threw fatback into the cast-iron frying pan; its sizzle filled the empty air.
“Do you think you’ll go back down to Bonavista?” she said at last.
Another deep breath, this one sucked in. “I gave it some thought,” he said. “Much like I thought about your kitchen when I was away, I thought about the house down Bonavista – so quiet, so peaceful, like. I’d love to be back there again.” Annie dropped touton dough into the spitting fat and waited for him to go on. “But what would I do down there? I can’t fish now. Six months it’s been since they gave me this leg, and I’m used to getting around. There’s a lot I can do, but there’s a lot more I can’t do.”
Annie turned from the stove and at last met his eyes. This time it was Bill who looked away, once again at the yellow walls of her kitchen like it was the walls he was in love with, down at the teacup with a lover’s tenderness. Annie moved over and started wiping flour off the table with long smooth strokes.
“You got a lot of responsibilities here, Annie, running this house, looking after your mother and Claire all on your own,” he said.
“Claire’s a great help. She don’t really like housework, but she’s a grand hand to do it all the same.”
The back door slammed open again and Harold’s boys bolted through it. “Aunt Annie, Mom says can we come down here for supper, us and Dad?” Kenny said. “She got to go to a meeting at church, six o’clock. She says she don’t have time to give us supper.”
“Yes, fine. Mind you, I only got salt fish. You don’t like that, Danny.”
“I do, I like it now. Can I turn on the radio?”
“Is there drawn butter?” Kenny asked.
“Are those toutons?” said Danny, turning from the radio to the stove.
“Annie! Annie! Come in and give me a hand to get up off this daybed.” Her mother’s querulous voice drifted in from the living room.
Annie darted a look of apology at Bill, who sat with his teacup, an island in the torrent. He stood up and Kenny stared with open curiosity. “Is it true, Mr. Winsor, you got a wooden leg?”
“Hush, Kenny,” said Annie.
“Can we see it?” Danny asked eagerly.
“Hush! ”
“I’ll give you a hand with your mother, Annie,” Bill said. She glanced at his leg, at the walking stick, but having just told the boys to hush she could hardly say anything. He limped along behind her, into the front room. Mrs. Evans was sitting up on the side of the daybed. She blinked at Bill.
“Bill Winsor,” she said. “Back in one piece, then.”
“Nearly, Mrs. Evans,” he said. Annie caught his eye over her mother’s head and they both smiled.
Bill settled the old woman in her big chair at the head of the table as Annie went back to the stove to turn over the toutons. She heard Bill’s uneven step below the clatter of the radio, the boys, her mother’s complaint that the tea was too strong.
He came over and put a hand on her waist, bent his head down close to her ear. “Will you marry me, Annie?”
Tears came to her eyes at once and she didn’t dare look up, not here, in the kitchen, in the middle of everything. The door banged open again and the boys yelled, “Dad!” Harold was home from work, stamping his boots, hugging his sons.
Annie looked at the toutons and nodded. “Yes. Yes, I’ll marry you, Bill, if that’s what you want.” Fatback spat in the pan as she turned over the last touton.
DIANE
BROOKLYN, SEPTEMBER 1947
SATURDAY MORNING, DIANE AND Carol are having breakfast at the A-1 Diner on the corner down from Diane’s building. On Saturday Diane tries to leave home as early as she can, before her mother thinks up a chore for her to do. Today Carol has money because she babysat for the Goldmans last night. Diane thinks how the solid folded pad of money, two one-dollar bills, must feel against Carol’s palm. Diane has fifty cents, which will be down to thirty-five when they finish breakfast.
“Wanna go to a show this afternoon?” Carol says. “I heard Davy say yesterday after school him and some guys were gonna go see the Charlie Chan movie today. You wanna catch that later on? My treat,” she adds, out of the richness of her boun
ty.
In the booth behind Diane are two women about her mother’s age. Diane has seen them here before. One is dark and one is blond – like herself and Carol. Once she said to Carol, “They could be us, in twenty or thirty years.” They had giggled over that, over the idea that in thirty years they might still live on Linden Boulevard, still be best friends, still eat at the A-1 Diner.
The dark-haired woman dominates the conversation in a hard, shiny voice that matches the chrome edging of the tables and counter. “…and I told him, I said, George, it’s not natural, is it? Is it?” Her voice points the question like a fork at her companion; Diane can almost see the gesture. Carol leans over for the ketchup and slops it all over her eggs. Now her plate matches the seats and the tabletops: red on yellow.
“Whaddya think?” Carol demands.
“A movie? Sure,” Diane says. She likes movies, and besides, if Davy Ryan is going, then so are Buster Kemp and Mickey Malone. Last Saturday at the movies, Mickey Malone put his hand on her breast. Just for a minute. She can still feel the handprint there, glowing under her white cardigan.
“No, it is not normal. And I mean, for a man, a man who’s on the road, what…six days? Six days, and he comes home, and there I am, all ready.” The dark-haired woman still holds forth; her blond friend makes small sympathetic sounds. “I have the kids at Ma’s place, I bought a new dress, I had my hair done, and George, what does George do? Comes in, kicks off his shoes, lays down on the couch and is asleep in ten minutes. What kind of a man, I ask you.”
“We could go down to Macy’s on the subway,” says Carol. “I want a scarf to go with this blouse and Mom said I could buy what I wanted with my babysitting money.”
“If I had money, my mom would make me hand it over,” Diane grumbles, poking at her toast with her knife, trying to get the strawberry jam to spread. “She would make me give her every red cent, I swear. She doesn’t want me to have anything, any life of my own.”
But Diane is only half-listening to her own conversation with Carol: the voices of the women behind them are so much more engrossing. “It wasn’t always like this, you know,” says the dark-haired one, her words punctuated by the clink of her knife and fork on the plate.
“No, I know it wasn’t,” says her friend, her loyal supporter. Diane is surprised by how soft the blond woman’s voice is. She sounds wistful. “When me and Frank was married first–”
“Same story, I know it, the very same story,” says the dark-haired woman. “Back when we were married first, George was on the road then, and when he came home, he couldn’t wait to get me into the bedroom. I kid you not, one time – this was before the kids of course – he couldn’t wait. Right there on the living room carpet. I swear.”
Diane feels her toes curl inside her saddle shoes. Quickly she raises her own voice, tries to make it hard and bright like that of her shadow-self in the next booth. “I shoulda gone to Dad for money. Dad’s a soft touch, and if he gave me money, it would make Mom crazy.”
Carol giggled lightly. “She still doesn’t talk to him?” Giggle, giggle. Diane’s crazy family.
“I swear, not a word. She won’t even give me a message for him. She’ll stand in the middle of the kitchen and look up at the ceiling like she’s talking to God. ‘I don’t suppose your father even knows the gas bill is due this week.’” She puts on Ethel’s voice, with the faint traces of her Newfoundland accent that Diane can imitate and always crack up her friends, the same way Levi Liebowitz can make people laugh when he pretends to be his mother, crooning, Ah, mein leetle Levi.Mothers with funny accents, funny habits like not talking to your father for at least two years. If you can get a laugh, use it.
Does anyone else notice that Levi makes them laugh with how much his mother loves him, how embarrassing her love is, and Diane gets a laugh with how much her mother hates her, hates Diane’s father, hates the whole world? No joke, no fast words for Carol could ever capture the heavy silence of that apartment, where her mother sits at one end of the table and her father at the other behind a newspaper, never saying a word. Diane and Jimmy marooned in the middle, drowning in a sea of silence.
But who cares? School five days a week, choir and Young People’s on Sunday no matter how boring it gets, and out all day Saturday with Carol and the gang. Only home long enough to pick up new material for her routines, funny-funny Diane and her funny family.
The girls take the subway downtown, wedged in among crowds of Saturday shoppers. At Macy’s, they try on dresses and talk about the junior prom. They are sophomores, but hoping for prom invites from junior boys. Mickey Malone is a junior, if he stays in school for the rest of the year. Diane holds up a pink dress – New Look – and stares at her reflection in the mirror.
Carol holds up something she really can buy: a green scarf that shines like emeralds against her blond hair. Or like Diane imagines emeralds would shine, not having seen any in real life. The scarf looks expensive – it’s fifty cents – and Carol is going to buy it.
On the rack next to it is a red one with a gold thread running through it. It slips through Diane’s fingers like water. Wraps around her hand while she watches Carol try on the green scarf and take it to the checkout.
Outside, Diane is almost surprised to feel the red scarf still in her pocket. It weighs almost nothing there, does not seem to take up space. Instead, the weight is in her stomach, something cold about the size and shape of a potato. She imagines her mother, Ethel, saying sorrowfully, I’m so disappointed, Diane. I didn’t raise you to be this kind of a girl. Your brother Ralphie died for his country, what would he think of you now?
Diane stops in front of a store window on Fulton Street and pulls out the red scarf, winds it around her hair, rubies against her dark curls. Carol turns sharply. “Where’d you get that?”
“At Macy’s.”
“I didn’t see you buy it.” Carol frowns, suspicious.
“I got it at another checkout. While you were getting yours.” She can see Carol doesn’t believe her. “I had more money than I thought.”
She doesn’t, of course. With the subway fare back to Flatbush she has exactly enough left for the movie. But it’s worth it, to see the shock in Carol’s eyes and know, or imagine, that it’s half envy. And the money works out okay after all, because Davy Ryan and Mickey Malone and some other guys are hanging around outside the Loew’s Kings, and the girls go up and talk to them.
“So, you going in to see the movie?” Mickey growls, in that voice that makes Diane’s toes curl.
“I guess so, unless something better comes along,” she says.
Mickey gives a quick jerk of his head. “Come on,” he says, putting a hand on Diane’s arm, and steers her to the ticket booth, laying down enough money for both of them. Diane knows it’s important to have something to say, not too much but a few quick, light, funny words. She looks up at Mickey with his brown hair lit by faint gold streaks and his green eyes with the golden flecks in them. A few childish freckles are still caught on his nose, as if they haven’t noticed the rest of his face is a man’s face now. Diane feels cold in her stomach, hot in her throat, and in between, on her breast where Mickey is looking, the glowing imprint of his hand.
“Well let’s not stand here all day,” she says, to Mickey and the others. “I don’t wanna miss the feature.” And she steps a little ahead, to lead the way into the show.
ANNIE
ST. JOHN’S, OCTOBER 1947
THE MATTRESS ON BILL and Annie’s bed was an old one that sagged in the middle. It was Mom and Pop’s mattress and got passed down to Annie. She’d never noticed the sag in it when she slept alone, but now, with Bill in the bed, she found herself rolling into the middle, pressed uncomfortably against his warm back. When she tried to roll back to her own side of the bed it was like crawling uphill.
Maybe, Annie thought, forty was too old to start sleeping with someone else. Not like she’d always had a room to herself. When she was a girl she used to share the bed with Ro
se, then she had a few years on her own. Then for ages she slept on the front room couch while Pop was on the daybed, in case he’d wake at night and need anything. During the war, when Harold and Frances and all their crowd moved in, and afterwards when they rented out the front room, she shared the bed with her mother. These past couple of years she’d gone back to sleeping alone and loved it. No fighting over the bedclothes. No great lump of body in the bed with you, putting out heat like you were sleeping next to the furnace. No-one always trying to tuck in her feet when she liked them cool, sticking out from under the covers on all but the coldest nights. When they were children, she remembered, her mother would send them to bed in winter with a hot-water bottle and Rose would hug it all night like a lover. Annie only wanted to get as far from the thing as possible. That one thing, at least, Annie and Rose never fought over.
Bill snored, too. Pop used to snore. She’d hear the sound of it coming through the walls and wonder how Mom could sleep through it.
Taken all in all, Annie liked being married. But it took some getting used to, no denying that.
She was forty years old, and a good girl, though not as sheltered as her mother still seemed to think. She knew what men and women did together in bed, but there was a difference between knowing and – well, knowing. She had washed the bodies of little boys – Ralphie, she thought, and tried not to picture him bloody and dying on a battlefield far away – and of old men, Pop and her grandfather before him. She knew what a man’s body was like, but not how it felt to have one, alive and vigorous, on top of her. Nothing had prepared her for that.
It struck her as strange, sometimes, that all she would ever know of marital relations would be with a one-legged man, that she’d never know how it might have been with a man who had two good legs. Bill seemed apologetic about that, and she did not remind him that she had nothing to compare it to.
By the Rivers of Brooklyn Page 18