By the Rivers of Brooklyn

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  But talk of families and living arrangements has turned Mickey’s thoughts in another direction. “Ma’s gotta get out of that place,” he says, as if picking up the thread of a conversation recently dropped. “Dad came home again the other night and beat the shit outta her. Someday I’m gonna get him by himself and he’s not gonna know what hit him.”

  “Were you there?” Diane says. She puts her hand on his arm again, but it’s a different gesture this time, a desire to heal rather than just a desire, and what she feels from him is not heat but a cold deeper than she can imagine, an absolute zero colder even than the chill between her mother and her father.

  “’Course I wasn’t there! He never woulda done it if I’d been there. He’s scared of me, and so he should be. No, I came in Sunday morning and saw her with the black eye and the fat lip. Like most every Sunday morning of my life. The only difference now is I’m not there on Saturday night when he comes home.”

  “Good thing you’re not,” she says, remembering Mickey’s other stories, never told but only hinted at, Saturday nights when Gerry Malone would finish with his wife and start in on the kids. Mickey has scars: she’s seen them, traced them with a fingertip across his back, the backs of his legs. The old man used a belt sometimes.

  But Mickey shoots her a look of contempt. “What do you think, I’m still a kid? He couldn’t beat me now. I should be there, to stand up for Ma. But I’m no better than Johnny or Frank. Stupid jerks, off with their cars and their girlfriends, never lifting a finger to help Ma. And now I’m just like ‘em.” He stares into his coffee cup, won’t meet her eyes.

  “That’s not true, Mickey. You do lots for your mother. She counts on you, you know it.” Diane’s hand makes little soothing circles on his arm, but he shakes her off.

  “Yeah, do everything but what I should do: hang around and wait for Dad some night when he’s coming home from O’Donnell’s and strangle him with my bare hands.”

  Diane searches for words. She knows words are no good, that anything she says will make Mickey angry. She’s glad when Mickey says, “Come on, let’s get outta here.”

  In the alleyway next to the candy store he takes her hand like he’s leading her into some fancy Manhattan hotel room. Draws her in behind him, slips his arms around her waist. She links her own arms around his neck and pulls him as close to her as she can get, opening her mouth to his, warm and generous. Their bodies are so close she can feel the tensed-up muscles in his chest and stomach, feel him slowly relax in the heat of their kiss. She feels his hands on her back and gives herself up to her own inner rush of pleasure, and also to that other pleasure, of knowing that she can heal him, can make him forget, can, for a moment, kiss and make it better.

  ROSE

  BROOKLYN, JANUARY 1950

  ROSE KNOWS THAT HER brother Jim works at Taylor’s Radio Repair at Flatbush and Beverley. She passes the store now and then and stands in front of the window, looking at the crowded display of radios and phonographs, the signs advertising the brand-new 45 RPM records, the huge console television with its $400 price tag. She wonders if anyone will ever buy it. One day she goes past and it’s gone. So, there are still rich people in the world, Rose says to herself.

  She never goes inside. Watches her favourite brother, the handsome one, the carefree laughing one, grow old and grey and grim. That hard little bitch Ethel, Rose thinks, she ain’t givin’ him much of a life.

  She is sure Jim would not know her: she doesn’t know herself, most days. She, too, is greying, her hair spidery and frizzled under an old cloth hat. There was a time, Rose dimly recalls, when she cared about having the newest, the most fashionable of everything.

  She leaves her boarding house early this chilly morning; it’s a crowded tenement in Fort Greene where Rose sleeps on a mattress on the floor in a room no bigger than a closet, with a blanket across the door. The landlady, who is used to seeing the least of these washing up on her doorstep like driftwood, is getting nasty about the rent. Rose walks down Flatbush Avenue towards O’Donnell’s Saloon where today, and for the past several days in fact, she has a job. Sometimes she doesn’t. She has gone to charities and street missions for something to eat, a place to sleep. She doesn’t remember pride. Like the polished cabinet of the TV set, pride has an impossible price tag.

  There are many things Rose doesn’t remember, and a few she recalls with startling clarity. She remembers Claire, the small solid weight in her arms. The brown eyes. Sometimes, for hours at a time, she doesn’t remember what happened to Claire, and goes about with a vague sense that she’s misplaced something. Then she recalls: Home. Claire is safe at home.

  Paddy O’Donnell is already at work, washing up glasses, wiping down the bar. “Good day, Rosie,” he calls. Rose has worked for him before: he has a soft spot and they have a flexible arrangement which suits them both. He pours a drink for her and she picks it up when she comes back from the cupboard with her mop and bucket. She drinks it leaning against the counter like a customer, like a man, and feels that sense of pieces fitting together, of all-wellness that only the first drink of the day can produce. When she’s done, she goes out back to fill the bucket.

  She mops the dust and boot-marks and beer-spills on the floor, while O’Donnell washes glasses and brings up the beer from the cellar, and sings things like “My Wild Irish Rose” and “The Rose of Tralee” to see if he can get a rise out of her.

  “Can ya stick a wild Irish sock in yer wild Irish gob?” she calls out after the third rendition of his favourite tune.

  “Not in a fine mood this fine morning, are we, Rosie? Do you know what your problem is?”

  This is such a huge question Rose is glad he allows a moment’s silence for her to consider. She wrings out the mop, then gets down on her knees to scrub at a stubborn spot.

  “My problem,” she says when she gets to her feet. “Yeah, I know what my problem is. My problem is, I was born ten years too early. I was too old for the war.”

  “I thought it was only fellows who said they were too old to go overseas.”

  “Not to go overseas, you old fool. To stay right here. I had a great time during the war. Rosie the Riveter. Remember her? Well, that was me. Rosie the Riveter.”

  “Yeah? You worked at the Navy Yard?” O’Donnell sounds mildly interested. Surely he’s heard this before.

  “You betcher life I did. Great work, great pay, great bunch of gals. Those were my best years, Paddy, the best years of my life.” Rose goes to the back door to throw out the dirty water and refills her bucket. “Sure, I had some rough times before the war.” The Depression – well, both depressions really, her own and the country’s, having and losing Claire. Her time in the hospital, that strange shadow-world of doctors and pills and the shock treatments that made her feel crazier than she did before. “But when 1941 rolled around and I got a job in the Navy Yards, that was a great time.”

  O’Donnell is silent, and she wonders if maybe he lost a son or something. The war, she reminds herself, wasn’t so hot for everyone. But Rose Evans had a good war. Working in the factory, feeling like part of a team, the friendship of the other women – it gave her back something she had lost.

  But she was over thirty then, ten years older than the girls she worked with. She was too old for the main point of the war: falling in love with a man in uniform. There were thousands of them on the streets of Brooklyn, but they were just boys. Sure, once or twice she had a date, even had the pleasure of showing a young fellow how it was done a few times, young farm boys just up from wherever, never been with a woman before.

  During the war, sleeping with a fellow didn’t make you a bad girl. It was just doing your patriotic duty for a boy who might not come home. Lots of those patriotic girls did their duty with one sailor after another, and still wound up with husbands after the war. If all those men in uniform, desperate in the face of death and hungry for love, had come rolling Rose’s way when she was nineteen or twenty-two, her life might have been entirely differen
t.

  “I was too old, by the time the war came along,” she repeats.

  O’Donnell doesn’t seem to need any more explanation, or perhaps he’s lost interest. He’s getting his bar ready for the day’s customers, washed-up old Irishmen who will come in as soon as the doors open to drink steadily all day, working men who’ll come in for a few on the way home when their workday is over. All welcome at O’Donnell’s, including the cleaner, Rose Evans.

  But then, as she’s getting ready to go a couple of hours later, taking one for the road, she says, “I need some cash, Paddy.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “I thought we had a deal, Rosie.”

  “You know I’m working more than I’m drinking.”

  “That’s how you see it.” He flicks a suddenly cold eye around the barroom. “I might say the opposite. Get on home now, before opening time.”

  “What home, Paddy? I don’t have anything you could call a home, and I won’t have even that if you don’t give me a few dollars to give to the old bat. She’s threatening me, Paddy.”

  He shrugs. “We got a deal, Rosie. I can’t be giving you handouts whenever you run short.”

  “How is it a handout if I clean the place for you?”

  “Drinks are not on the house, Rosie.”

  She sags against the bar, draws idle designs on the countertop with her finger, then meets his eye. He has to know what she’s thinking, to spare her the shame of having to say it. Rosie’s arrangement with O’Donnell, over the years she’s worked sporadically for him, has been flexible. There have been times when he’s been willing to provide extra cash in return for additional services. O’Donnell is a widower, and lonely.

  But he shakes his head before she can say anything. “No, Rosie, there’s nothing you can do for me and I got no extra money. Don’t go making a charity case of yourself, I’m not the Salvation Army.” She has a sudden mental picture of the paunchy old Irishman fitted out in an Army uniform, humping and pumping away in his narrow upstairs room to the accompaniment of the band and tambourines. She almost laughs, but then sees what he is saying. Don’t go making a charity case of yourself.

  Rose pushes her empty glass across the bar at him and goes out into the sunshine.

  She walks for a long time through the streets of Flatbush. She’s cold. She’s hungry. She has no desire to go back to her boarding house.

  There’s a Salvation Army mission downtown, near the Citadel. Rose tries not to go to the Army. When she’s cold or hungry or in need of a handout she prefers the Catholics, St. Vincent de Paul or some other crowd with no ties, no memories. She wonders if everyone feels this way when they’re down and out. Is the Salvation Army mission crowded with old Catholic bums who don’t want to see accusing pictures of the Blessed Virgin and the Sacred Heart staring down at them every time they get a bowl of soup? Mary and Jesus don’t bother Rose one bit, but the uniforms, the music, the haunting memories of testimony meetings and services back home – it’s like a net, reaching out across the miles and years, something she’s afraid will get tangled around her ankles. Yet her long walk today brings her to the door of the Salvation Army mission – because she’s tired, and it’s the nearest place, and she doesn’t have the strength to run away.

  Inside, she sits at a long table sparsely populated with a few other abandoned women. The men, far more numerous, eat at another table. The soup is good, and hot. It would be nice if she could have a drink. Now that would be a real mission of mercy. Why doesn’t someone start one of those? Missions where they hand out gin and rum for free to washed-up old rummies and whores. Why don’t the people who want to save humanity ever give humanity what it actually wants?

  Despite her doubts, Rose stays not just for the meal but for the service afterwards. It’s so cold outside, and so warm inside. As warm and familiar as being tucked into an old patchwork quilt, the kind your grandmother made out of your own discarded dresses, down by the woodstove in the kitchen on a winter night when you were cold and sick and tired. The meeting hall, shabby with its wooden chairs and peeling paint, is hot with the press of bodies: the bodies of the faithful and the bodies of the lost, distinguished by cleanliness and uniforms.

  From the voices around her Rose picks out several Newfoundland accents, some quite strong, as if the speakers or singers have lately arrived on the boat. Of course, the Salvation Army in Brooklyn is full of Newfoundlanders, especially the Citadel. She’s heard that before, though she hasn’t had opportunity to discover it herself. The lively bespectacled man leading the singing is a Newfoundlander: Sergeant-Major Noah Collins, he’s called. He dances up and down across the platform. “The Lord saved every part of me when I got saved,” he says, “except my feet! The Lord never saved my feet!” Rose joins in the answering chorus of laughter: those lively step-dancing feet certainly don’t look saved. It’s been many years since Rose has been in a room where someone can make a joke like that – in a voice that clearly labels him as someone from Bonavista Bay – and others can understand and laugh. Rose stops fighting the familiarity, relaxes into it.

  Feet stamp and hands clap in vigorous rhythm, raising the roof, raising the temperature even more. An old fellow with three days’ growth of stubble leans over to her. “I don’t know about this crowd,” he says, a hint of Irish mingled with the whisky on his breath. “They keep talkin’ about goin’ up to glory, but with all this stompin’ I think they’ve got the floor drove down and they’re six inches farther from heaven than when they started.”

  Rose laughs, under cover of music. It feels good to laugh, good to have this whole old world to wrap herself in and even to laugh at. She is relaxed, she’s happy, her stomach is full. When singing turns to preaching, she drifts off to sleep.

  She startles awake as the Captain’s voice peaks to emphasize a point. He’s preaching on the Prodigal Son, and as she dozes again she finds scenes from his sermon mingling with her dreams. She always pictures the far country that the boy went to as being like Brooklyn: busy, crowded, full of strange people. It seems to her now that she herself was a good girl back home and didn’t become a bad girl until she came to Brooklyn. Like the prodigal, she met her downfall in the far country.

  Captain White describes the father of the prodigal, walking day by day on the road in front of his house, waiting and watching. Rose sees the road looking like Freshwater Road at home, rutted and unpaved, grooved with cart tracks, dusty in summer. The house of the prodigal’s father is her parents’ yellow clapboard house. At the front gate she sees not a father or a mother but her sister Annie, who must be just home from Holiness Meeting, because she’s wearing the uniform, bonnet and all.

  “And the father of the prodigal runs toward him,” Captain White says. “Forgetting his age, his dignity, he picks up the skirts of his robe and runs! Runs with open arms toward the boy who has so disappointed him, has hurt him, has squandered his inheritance. Can you see it, brothers and sisters? Can you see the Father running towards you? Nothing can hold him back. If he sees you taking that first step on the road home, he’ll be there. Because he’s been waiting, waiting all this time. And now he’s running to welcome you home.”

  Rose is fully awake now. The piano comes in under the Captain’s words, and he shifts from speaking to singing as the melody builds.

  Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling

  Calling, O sinner, come home…

  One by one, people around her go up to the mercy seat. If she were really on Freshwater Road, if home, Annie, Claire, peace, forgiveness were just a few steps up the road, what would hold her back? Why wouldn’t she step forward, as she does now, and take those few simple steps up the road, and fall on her knees?

  One of the women officers kneels beside Rose, offering her a hanky and an arm to tuck around her. “God bless you, sister, God bless you,” she says. Rose feels something physical, something definite, happening to her heart. It feels as if it has been tied up with twine, the kind you use on brown-paper parcels, and now someone is cutt
ing the strands, one by one. She feels them snap free.

  The next day, Rose returns to the mission as soon as it opens. Over the days and weeks that follow, the place becomes her new home. She eats there, helps out in the kitchen, worships at the meetings. The officers and the volunteers give her hugs and gentle smiles. She is a success story, one of the saved. The unsaved eye her suspiciously, as if she has let down their side.

  One night during a testimony meeting, Sergeant-Major Noah Collins, the lively old fellow with the unsaved feet, tells how, as a young man, he went to the ice on a sealing ship and was stranded out there for three days. Men froze to death on their knees in prayer; the survivors walked around constantly, singing hymns like “Does Jesus Care?” Rose, hearing this testimony a few weeks ago, would have thought it was pretty friggin clear Jesus didn’t care, seeing as how over eighty of the men died. She hears it differently now. She imagines Jesus, wrapped in a wool coat stiff with ice, stumbling around the ice beside those men, peeling off his own frozen mitts to put on someone’s bare hands. He feels that close, right this minute. Buoyed up by the new joy inside her, Rose gets to her feet.

  “Yes, Sister Rose,” says the Captain. “What would you like to share with us, Sister Rose?”

  There is something of a formula to testimonies and Rose knows it well. She does not search or scramble for words, but lets familiar phrases carry her into this unknown territory. “My friends, my brother and sisters, I want to thank Jesus for taking away my sins, for rolling all my burdens away.” She feels a wave of energy, something that might come from God, but might also just come from the fact that people are listening, paying attention.

  “I led a life of sin before I came to this place,” she continues, mingling the known words with words of her own so that she does not know where memory leaves off and invention begins. “I was a slave to the bottle and a slave to the lusts of men. Yes, I sold both my body and my soul, time again, and what did I get in return for it?” She pauses, feels the power of that moment of silence. Around her she sees people shake their heads, mouthing the word: Nothing. “That’s right, brothers and sisters, I got nothing in return. Nothing! Nothing but a few hours’ pleasure and a bottle of cheap wine! Nothing to fill my soul, nothing to ease my burden, nothing to take my pain away.” As she says the word over, “Nothing…nothing,” and feels its driving force, she hears other words below the surface of her mind, Bible verses and hymns, the sediment of memory laid down when she was too young even to rebel against it. “And when I was weak and heavy laden, when I had need of rest, I came to this place, and do you know what I found here?” The pause again. This time they do not anticipate her answer: some of them shape the word Jesus, but she surprises them when she repeats, “Nothing! Yes, my friends, I found nothing…nothing…nothing but the blood of Jesus!”