By the Rivers of Brooklyn

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  “Yes. The frost, you know.”

  Claire filled her bowl with Cream of Wheat from the pot on the stove, poured herself a cup of tea, and sat down. “You want toast?” Annie said, cutting the bread.

  “Yes, please.” From where Annie stood in the pantry she could see the pink rose against Claire’s white cheek, both of them beautiful, perfect and untouched.

  ETHEL

  BROOKLYN, MAY 1955

  CLAIRE ARRIVED IN NEW York on a spring evening when the air was warm and the sky was blue and gold. Ethel heard the downstairs door open at six o’clock and she could hear girls’ voices, light feet on the stairs. Diane came in first, carrying a powder-blue train case, and behind her, lugging a large suitcase, was a fair-haired girl in a green-and-white striped suit. Jim folded the paper and got up at once to take the suitcase from her. “So, Claire,” he began. Then, as she straightened up, his voice dropped for a moment. “Glory be, you look just like your mother.”

  Ethel stepped forward, holding out her hands. Jim was right. Replace the haircut and dress with the styles of 1925 and Rose might have been standing before them: tall, fair-haired, pretty, except the girl’s eyes were brown instead of the Evans blue. But this girl did not have Rose’s brashness; she looked polite and eager to please. To cover Jim’s gaffe, Ethel said, “We’re so glad to have you, Claire. I’m your Aunt Ethel, of course. And how was your journey?”

  Claire looked around her at the tiny neat kitchen, the faded wallpaper, the well-scrubbed linoleum. “It was fine, thank you,” she said. Her voice had the slightest trace of a St. John’s accent, nothing heavy, but it warmed Ethel’s heart. All her friends had lost their accents; Brooklyn sounds overlaid the old rhythms of their speech. Claire sounded fresh, like something just unfolded and taken out of a drawer, clean and pressed.

  Through supper, the girls did most of the talking. They seemed to hit it off right away. Diane had suggested weeks ago that Claire should stay with her and Carol in their apartment in Manhattan, rather than with Jim and Ethel in Brooklyn, but Ethel had vetoed that. “I owe it to Annie to look after her properly,” she had told Diane.

  Diane’s lip curled. “So, if she was with me, she wouldn’t be looked after properly?”

  “She should live with a family,” Ethel said. “That’s all I’m saying. Your place is too small, anyway.”

  Ethel knew Diane and Carol lived a fast, immoral New York life, and she had accepted that there was nothing she could do about it. But Annie’s girl, little Claire, deserved something better. She was nearly a year older than Diane but would seem younger, Ethel was sure, having been raised at home. She would enjoy their sheltered, quiet family life. She would be company for Ethel.

  Now, listening to the girls talk, Ethel wondered if Claire wouldn’t prefer to live in Manhattan with Diane and Carol after all. Diane chattered about her new job at an advertising agency, which she loved. Claire talked about the course she was going to take so she could be a legal secretary, and whether it would be easy to get work in a law office once she was finished. They sounded so smart, the two of them. She couldn’t ever remember hearing girls talk that way when she was young. The only jobs she ever knew of for girls were working as a maid or working in a shop. She passed the salt and the butter and poured iced tea from a glass pitcher, thinking how this was as it should be: children were meant to rise above their parents, to go farther and higher.

  Ethel had laid aside any hopes of herself and Jim ever doing any better for themselves. This is my life now, she reminded herself, looking around the four tiny rooms above the shop. This is what I have. She had a daughter in Manhattan, a smart-mouthed career girl who knew everything and couldn’t stop criticizing her mother. She had a good son with a nice wife out on Long Island, where she was lucky to see them once a month, and no grandchildren yet. She had a husband who worked downstairs all day and climbed the steps at suppertime and hid behind his newspaper, who cared more about whether the Dodgers won or lost than about whether his wife was dead or alive. She had her church, which had continued to be a habit even after she and God had gone their separate ways. She had a few old friends from home; she had a photograph, a telegram, and a Gold Star to mark the place of her eldest son, dead on Okinawa. She had a pain she carried between her stomach and chest, dull but large and hard as a fist. After thirty years in New York, she didn’t ask much, Ethel told herself, but was it really fair she’d landed in an apartment as small and shabby as this one?

  After supper, Claire helped Ethel clear the dishes, bringing her up to date on news of Harold and Frances and their family, with whom she had stayed for a few days in Toronto on the way down. Diane sat at the table with her father and lit up a cigarette. Ethel hated it when Diane smoked in the apartment, which was probably why Diane always made a point of doing it.

  Ethel enjoyed having Claire to work with, liked the soothing rhythm of two women working together, something she had never enjoyed with Diane. It reminded her of years ago, clearing a table with Frances or with Jean, or with Annie, during that year they’d spent back home. Back when Claire and Diane were both babies, which meant it must have been more than twenty years ago.

  Over the next weeks, Ethel thought back to that summer often, remembered herself and Annie side by side at the washtub, soaping the hair of the two baby girls, rocking them together on the back step. She wondered if, somehow, amid water and soap bubbles, or in the crib where they slept head-to-toe at nights, baby Claire and baby Diane got switched, so that without knowing it, Ethel had left her own daughter for Annie to raise up at home, and accidentally brought Rose’s daughter back to Brooklyn with her. Despite physical likenesses – Claire was the spit of Rose, while Diane was small and dark-haired like Ethel herself – the girls’ personalities made her think this was possible. She had too often thought of brazen, brash Diane as another Rose, had said, “You watch out, you’re going to turn out exactly like your Aunt Rose.”

  Now she discovered the delightful other side to that coin: the girl birthed by Rose, raised by Annie, was in every way the daughter Ethel would have wanted for herself. Claire rode the subway into Manhattan every day to go to her course and came home to sit in the kitchen with Ethel and tell stories about her classmates and what she’d learned that day, the things she saw on the subway. She helped in the kitchen and pitched in with the housework. She was cheery and pleasant and soft-spoken, and did not try to shock Ethel.

  One Saturday afternoon in the fall, when Claire had been with them half a year, Ethel came out of her bedroom to see Claire standing in the living room with her cheek laid against the window glass, looking down onto Flatbush Avenue. Ethel said nothing, thinking how alone, how separate the girl looked, and she felt a pang of protective love she had not felt towards her own daughter since Diane was twelve.

  Claire looked up, her dark eyes clouded and distant. “Aunt Ethel?”

  “Yes, my love?”

  “Do you ever hear anything from my mother?”

  Ethel sat down, crossed her legs, pulled her skirt down over her knee. It was a measure of Claire’s reserve, her polite reticence, that this question had taken six months to emerge. Ethel thought back carefully, wanting to get this right.

  “Well now, Claire, the last time I can recall seeing your mother would be…I’m not sure now, it must be ten years ago now. During the war, or just after. You know, she had a job at the Navy Yards. She was quite the working girl, just like you are, I suppose.” She remembered Rose, her chin jutting, her eyes hard, perched on the edge of a chair in the Linden Boulevard apartment, looking pleased with herself. “Since then, we haven’t seen her. But she’s written you, hasn’t she?”

  Claire moved slowly to the sofa and sat there, her hands folded in her lap, still looking at the window. “Yes. She used to write me about every year or so. Sometimes it would be around my birthday, but other years it might be…oh, just anytime. I suppose the last time was about two years ago. She never said much about herself, but her letters always had
a New York postmark, and in the last one she said she was happy and doing fine, that the Lord was taking care of her. Aunt Annie said that was a surprise; she said my mother wasn’t ever the religious type. But I guess people can change, with time, can’t they?”

  Her brown eyes fixed on Ethel, who was also surprised that Rose would give the Lord credit for anything. She did not tell Claire that Jim had made several efforts to locate Rose, even putting a small ad in the Personals section of the Brooklyn Eagle. All she said to Claire was, “Yes, honey. A person can change.”

  Claire picked up a magazine from the coffee table and was silent so long Ethel thought the conversation was over, but then she said, without looking up, “Do you know anything about…about my father?”

  This question, too, Ethel had known must be in the girl’s head, but she hadn’t been sure either how it would come out, or how to answer it. There was no delicate way to tell a young girl you loved that her mother had been such a tramp her father could have been anybody, any man at all. Carefully, she said, “Even back in those days, before you were born, we didn’t see a lot of your mother. I don’t know who she went around with.” She cast back through memory for any information, something to give the girl a sense of roots. “Once we met an Italian boyfriend of hers, a fellow named…let me see, what was it? Martelli, I think? Something Martelli. I believe she said he was in the fruit and vegetable business. Before that, she was seeing a Navy man, but I don’t recall his name. Or was it a police officer?”

  Ethel made herself stop there, before the litany of vaguely remembered boyfriends made Rose sound like the loose woman she in fact was. She added, “All of those were a few years before you were born, honey. I really don’t know who she was keeping company with at the time.” She liked the sound of that phrase, keeping company. It covered a multitude of Rose’s sins.

  Claire stared out at the street, but said nothing.

  Next time, Ethel thought, I’ll be more careful what I say to her. Better for the girl to have a story, some story in her mind than to know nothing at all.

  She thought of a story: yes, there was a fellow Rose was really serious about. They were engaged, in fact. But he was – it would be best if he could have been killed. More respectable than leaving her, and it would forestall any chance the girl might want to find her father. Ethel decided she needed to polish the story up a little before presenting it to Claire. Also, she would have to take back some of what she had said about not knowing who Rose was seeing. I didn’t know if it was my place to tell you, she practiced. But I think you deserve to know.

  But all Ethel’s efforts at story-weaving and dissembling were wasted. Sometimes, on Saturday or Sunday afternoons, Claire went by herself for long walks, and Ethel wondered if she was looking then for either of her parents, trying to find clues to her past. She might be, or she might just enjoy the exercise. Ethel didn’t know. Claire never raised the subject of her mother – or her father – again.

  ROSE

  BROOKLYN, MARCH 1956

  ARE YOU WASHED(are you washed)

  In the blood (in the blood)

  In the soul-cleansing blood of the Lamb?

  Rose beats the tambourine vigorously. Her feet – which, like Noah Collins’, are not altogether saved – tap a steady rhythm on the floor beneath her. She stands in front of the altar, wearing the uniform, leading the other worshippers in song.

  “For yes, brothers and sisters, I am washed! Are you washed?” she shouts at the congregation as the hymn ends.

  “Praise the Lord!” the people chorus back at her, their voices like a mighty current carrying her above them.

  “Praise Jesus, you are washed! Redeemed, how we love to proclaim it! Redeemed by the blood of the Lamb!” The band strikes up the tune and Rose’s fine strong voice chimes out in the first notes. She loves hymns about the Blood. Redeemed by the Blood of the Lamb, washed in the Blood, power in the Blood. The soul-cleansing Blood. She pictures a great red tide of it, rising to swallow her up, ebbing away to reveal a new, cleaner Rose.

  Rose is a fixture at the Brooklyn Citadel now. She is a senior soldier: Welcome Sergeant Rose Evans, her voice frequently raised in testimony and song. She also serves soup and prays with people at the mission. Some of the other saved sinners there look at people just in off the street and shake their heads. “There but for the grace of God go I,” they say. “It seems so hard to believe just six months ago – a year, two years ago – I was just like them.”

  Not hard at all for Rose to believe, for though it’s been six years and she now wears a uniform and is washed in the Blood, she still feels like one of them. One of the sinners from the street. Most people come in, get saved, and then become respectable. The men shave, cut their hair, and get steady jobs; the women get married to good men. They live in better apartments than they did before they were saved, and sometimes they leave Brooklyn altogether and go live on Long Island. And this is a sign of success, Rose understands: failure and poverty are supposed to be washed away just like sin and guilt. One young fellow, only about twenty-one, came in off the street in terrible shape, not only a drunk but doing the heroin too, looking like he was at death’s door. And in a matter of months wasn’t he all shipshape, not only cleaned up and sober but headed off to officer’s training college. He came back once to visit, in uniform, with a pretty little wife and a baby. How pleased they all were to see him, to see what a nice job God had made of him.

  Rose’s life has not changed much. She lives in a rundown boarding house in Crown Heights. She cleans shops and offices, sporadically, for her rent and food money, though much of the time she eats at the mission. The hymns and prayers and testimonies are her lifeline. Throw out the lifeline, throw out the lifeline. Someone is sinking today. Rose was sinking, deep in sin, far from the peaceful shore, and now she has been saved. She’s not on the peaceful shore; she’s in deep water, miles of black ocean below her, but she’s clinging to a life preserver. She likes it this way. If she were on shore, she thinks, would the life preserver seem so dear, so necessary? Wouldn’t it be harder to see the other folks out in the water? Pull for the shore, sailor, pull for the shore, Rose advises others in song, but she herself is content where she is.

  “You’m finished them pots, Rose?” Marjorie says. They are in the kitchen, doing the washing up now that the evening service has finished.

  Rose is humming, Pull for the shore, sailor, pull for the shore. “Got a few more to do, Marjorie,” she says.

  “Well put them over on the counter when you’m done. I got h’eleven big knives ’ere where there should be twelve. Is there one over there?” Marjorie’s accent is pure Bonavista; she and her husband came to Brooklyn just after the war and she couldn’t be taken for anything but a Newfoundlander.

  Until Marjorie came, Rose steered clear of discussing her family back home with Newfoundlanders at the Citadel. “Now which Evans would you be?” they’d say, but she used to sidestep the question. It was Marjorie who finally pinned her down, because she saw the ad in the Eagle looking for Rose Evans. Jim must have put that in, Rose thinks. When Marjorie showed it to her they had a long chat which ended up with Rose finally telling which Evans she was and Marjorie saying that her husband knew Mom and Pop and Annie and all their crowd from his time in St. John’s.

  Rose asked Marjorie not to tell anyone; she says she’s not in touch with her family anymore and there’s bad feeling there. All the same she’s grateful for the bits of news Marjorie gives her; she likes being distantly attached to the Newfoundland grapevine, whose branches filter news of home through the streets and churches of Brooklyn. Still, Marjorie’s words this particular night catch her by surprise.

  “One of your nieces is moved down ’ere, is she? Will we ’ear tell of her coming to the Citadel, I wonder, or is she not in the Army?”

  “What niece would that be?” She hasn’t spoken to any of the family in…what is it? Ten years? More? It was like she had disappeared, and she liked it that way. The old Rose i
s gone, and the Evans family never really had any place for her anyway. What would they make of a whole new Rose? She lifts a heavy pot out of the water, wondering what niece – Harold’s girl, perhaps? – might be in Brooklyn now.

  “I don’t know her name, but my cousin Barbara said she was talking to Annie Winsor – that’s your sister, isn’t it? – and she said Annie was right lost, didn’t know what to make of herself, because her daughter was gone to New York. Now I don’t know Annie. How old would her daughter be? I thought Annie only married Bill Winsor after the war?”

  “Claire, that would be Claire,” Rose says, speaking the name aloud like a word in a hymn. Blessed. Holy. Claire. “She’s not…not Annie’s daughter by rights. Annie reared her up.”

  “Oh, make no wonder then. Well there’s no doubt, you can get just as fond of them you rears up as of your own. My own mother now, she died when I was only five, and me and my sister both was reared up by H’Aunt H’Agnes Mitchell, no relation now, but we called her H’Aunt H’Agnes, of course, and she was as good to me as any mother could have been,” Marjorie says, wiping her eyes with the edge of a dishtowel.

  Rose takes up another towel and begins drying the pots that lie on the drain board, slowly and methodically, her mind racing. Claire is in Brooklyn. Staying with Ethel and Jim no doubt. How old would she be now? 1931: Rose is not good with dates, but that one sticks. Claire would be twenty-five this winter coming. And Rose has never seen her, not so much as a picture even since Claire was about ten years old.

  That night she leaves the mission kitchen late and pulls on her worn grey raglan over her uniform, leaving on the bonnet. She takes a bus down Flatbush Avenue and stands, as she has not done for years, in front of the night-darkened radio shop above which her brother’s family lives and works. Up there, behind one of those windows, her daughter is sleeping. Or not yet sleeping, perhaps. A bluish glow flickers: the television light, which shines from more and more windows these evenings. The streets of Brooklyn always used to be crowded in the evenings, kids playing in the street, older people sitting and visiting on the stoops. Now she notices the streets seem quieter at night, more people inside behind closed doors, watching that blue light.