By the Rivers of Brooklyn

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  In the squatty, shared bathroom in her boarding house that night, Rose strips off her uniform blouse and brassiere to wash herself. She remembers standing in front of mirrors as a girl, admiring herself. Vanity, vanity, as the preacher says. Her breasts lie almost flat now, hanging down on her chest like flags at half-mast. Her skin is wrinkled and spotted. She thinks of Claire again, wondering what the girl would think if she could see her mother. The threadbare pink washcloth, rubbed with an unyielding bar of old Lifebuoy and soaked with chilly water, traces the outlines of her thin body, lingers a moment at the base of one slack breast.

  Rose feels it then, but convinces herself she has not; it is her imagination. She’s overwrought by the late hour and the news of Claire. But later, lying in her bed listening to the sounds of traffic and the obscene yells of coloured boys outside, she lets her hand creep up under her nightdress, to that spot again. Now, when she presses it, it feels tender. And there is definitely a lump. Not as big as a marble but bigger than a pea.

  She lives in an uneasy balance until Sunday, thoughts of Claire and of the lump jostling in her mind, pushing out everything else, even Jesus. She must do, should do, something about one or both of them, but taking any definite action seems impossible.

  On Sunday morning she comes down to the penitent form for prayer. Just as she is, without one plea. With two pleas, it turns out. She kneels amid the crowd of her brothers and sisters, her true family, most of them Sunday-washed and polished, but a few still with the telltale smell of their own bodies, of the street, clinging to them. Words and music wash over her. All to Thee, my blessed Saviour, I surrender all. But she is not ready to surrender, not her life, it turns out. A new fire fills Rose, starting in the warm spot under her breast and spreading through her whole body. For the first time she wonders if contentment might not be the only sign of God’s presence. Perhaps that old, driving need for something else, something more – perhaps God was in that, too.

  Rose prays, Dear Jesus, heal me. I’ll go to the doctor or the hospital or whatever You want. Or You could heal me with just a touch, just the hem of Your garment, like the woman in the story. But I want to live. And if You give me back my life, I’ll do something great for You, Lord, I promise. Give me a little more time.

  CLAIRE

  MANHATTAN, MAY 1956

  YOU SHOULD MOVE IN with me. You’d love it,” Diane told Claire over lunch at Chock Full O’Nuts. It was a Saturday and Claire had come in to Manhattan, as she often did, to do some shopping and meet her cousin for lunch. Diane’s roommate Carol was getting married and she was looking for someone to share the Greenwich Village apartment.

  “I don’t know,” Claire said. She was cautious of Diane, though she liked her. “It’s working out okay for me with your folks. And it’s cheap. I don’t know if I want to move.”

  “You’re crazy. I don’t know how you can put up with my mother.” Diane wrapped her perfectly moulded, lipsticked mouth around a sandwich.

  “Because she’s not my mother, I guess,” Claire said.

  “She loves you. She thinks you’re the cat’s pyjamas.”

  Claire sipped her coffee. “Anyway, I know what would happen. I’d move in with you, and next thing you’d get married to Handsome Henry and I’d be the one stuck with an apartment I couldn’t afford. Don’t say it’s not going to happen, because it is.”

  Diane shook her head but her smile was pleased: she liked Claire’s assurance that this would someday happen. “Henry’s worried about getting married too quickly. He thinks he’ll get a promotion this summer, though, and if he does, I’d say that’s when he’ll propose. If he ever does.”

  “He’ll propose. You wait and see. And where would I be then?” Claire made a face and Diane laughed. Diane wiped her mouth with a napkin, then took out her lipstick and compact mirror to touch up.

  Claire thought Diane really was movie-star gorgeous, with her dark glossy curls, her long black eyelashes, her wide painted mouth framing white teeth. She was five foot three, which seemed perfect to Claire, who was five foot eight. And she was curvy, with a generous bosom and full hips. Diane worried about her skin, which was not quite perfect, and her weight, which she constantly feared would get out of control. She told blond, slender Claire that she looked like a china doll, or an angel. But Claire knew china doll angels were not in vogue. Diane looked like Jane Russell, or like a dark-haired Marilyn Monroe.

  “You lead such a boring life,” Diane said now. “I feel it’s my mission to bring some excitement into your life.”

  “My life’s not so boring,” Claire said, although she secretly agreed. She got up every morning, caught the subway at Church Avenue, rode into Manhattan, got off at Times Square, went to work, and did the same thing in reverse every evening. “I suppose I don’t see much, outside of home and work,” she conceded. “I haven’t even really seen that much of Brooklyn, and I’ve been living there for half a year now.” The only thing she did in Brooklyn was go to church with Aunt Ethel, and go for walks.

  Diane made a gesture like brushing away a fly. “You’re fine there. There’s nothing to see in Brooklyn. But you need to see more of Manhattan than just the subway and your office.”

  “I went to Macy’s this morning. I’m eating at Chock Full O’Nuts,” Claire said.

  Diane gathered up her purse, her own shopping. “Come with me,” she said. “I’ll be your tour guide. What’s the most tourist-y thing you could ever do in New York City? Something you’d never do on your own. Something I’d never do if I didn’t have an out-of-town cousin to drag along.”

  That was an easy one. “Go up the Empire State Building,” Claire said. “I’ve always wanted to.”

  Diane rolled her eyes. “Well, now I really do feel like the country cousins are up from Hicksville for the weekend. But sure, we’ll go. I’ve never been up either, you know, and I oughta, because my dad helped build it, as he tells me at least once a year.”

  “Really? I didn’t know that,” Claire said, following Diane out of the restaurant.

  Up on the 86th floor, the winds blew briskly and the walls were lined with people staring down at the buildings and streets below. Diane leaned against a wall and pointed things out to Claire: the Chrysler Building, the Queensboro Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge. Brooklyn was distant and hazy, unreal and insubstantial. “Maybe I should move to Manhattan,” Claire said aloud.

  “Sure you should. This is where everything happens,” Diane said.

  “I’m glad this fence is here,” Claire said, putting her hand against the ropes of steel that caged her in. “I think I’d be scared if I were just leaning over the edge.”

  “Well, you would have been, if you’d come a few years ago,” Diane said. “Henry told me it used to be all open here, but so many people jumped off and killed themselves, they had to build the fence.”

  “I wonder what makes a person do that,” Claire said so quietly that Diane asked, “Beg pardon?”

  “Oh, just what would make a person do that…jump, I mean.”

  “It’d take a lot of guts,” Diane said, almost with admiration.

  “If you felt that bad, it might take more guts to stay alive,” Claire said. She imagined it again: the free-fall, the floating. She felt that way herself sometimes, like she was attached to nothing, suspended between the past and future: no father, a disappearing mother, no sure sense of who she was or would become. But jumping off a building? No, it wasn’t something she could imagine. Stupid, really.

  “They say a lot of rich people did it in the Depression, after they lost all their money in the stock market,” Diane said, leaning back against the wall so the city was behind her. “But I bet a lot of people did it for love, too. Broken hearts.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Claire said. “That’s only in movies. In real life, nobody would be that foolish, to kill themselves over a fellow.” She remembered the summer Eddie Tanner came to St. John’s, the giddy feeling she thought might be love, the sharp pain when he
told her he was going back home, for no reason at all that she could see. Never, in a million years, would she have jumped off a building for that.

  Diane half-closed her eyes and looked at Claire sideways. “You think you know so much about real life? I think you’re wrong. There was a time I woulda done it.”

  Claire looked at Diane sharply. Such things ought not to be put into words. It was like a bad-luck charm. Don’t say that, she wanted to say, but bit it back, knowing she’d sound like Ethel and that would irritate Diane. Instead she said, “Serious? Who was it?”

  “Oh, a guy I used to know in high school. Just nobody,” Diane said, cranking up the tough-girl voice a couple of notches. “He dumped me, and I thought I was gonna die. I wanted to, actually, for a long time. I really had it bad.”

  “But you didn’t,” Claire said.

  “No, I did. I really had it bad, head over heels, you name it. Couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. I wouldn’t chase after him ’cause I was too proud for that, but I used to lie awake on the daybed in Mom’s living room and cry my eyes out.”

  “No,” Claire amended. “I mean, you didn’t kill yourself. You went on living.”

  Diane pulled a cigarette from her purse and lit up. “Yeah, I guess so. I did, didn’t I?” She sounded pleased, as though it had not occurred to her before what an accomplishment this was. “And I’m gonna go on living. I’m gonna make a great life for myself, and forget all about him. He was no good for me anyway. That was why he left – ’cause he said he was no good for me – and now I know it’s true. If a fella tells you he’s bad news, believe him.” She took a long drag on the cigarette.

  Claire wondered if she would be able to make a great life for herself. At work she felt a combination of fascination and envy for the junior partners; she sometimes wished she had been a boy, and rich, so she could have gone to law school and been like them. Not just for the money – though that would have been great – but for the work itself.

  “So what about you?” Diane asked, and as Claire, still thinking about work, was about to explain, she added, “You haven’t gone out with anybody since you landed here. Aren’t you ever going to find Mr. Right?”

  “Oh…that,” Claire said, looking across the river where the ships drifted lazily up and down on its green surface. “There’s someone back home. Sort of.”

  “Sort of? Gosh, you’re such a romantic.”

  Claire pulled her light raglan around her, tied the belt. The wind up here really was cool, even though the sun shafted through the clouds and lit the skyscrapers, turning all their windows to silver, making it look like the Promised Land.

  ROSE

  BROOKLYN, JULY 1956

  ROSE STEPS THROUGH THE doors of the hospital, clutching her bag. Outside, cars shoot past, blurring against the brightness of the summer day. She feels unsteady, as if the world is spinning. She walks half a block or so to a bench by a bus stop where she has to sit down.

  When the bus comes, Rose gets on, even though it’s not her bus. She can always get a transfer. A bus feels like a safe place, surrounded by other people, a driver in charge. For awhile, she doesn’t have to think or make any decisions.

  Marjorie and Frank would have picked her up from the hospital. In fact, Marjorie probably would have brought her in this morning and waited for her while she had the treatment. They’ve been so good. Everyone has been so good. Ever since the doctor told her it was cancer and her breast would have to come off, her family at the Citadel has encircled her like a warm pair of arms, not only praying for her loudly and regularly, but raising money for her surgery and treatment, bringing food and flowers, visiting faithfully while she was in the hospital.

  Marjorie and Frank made the greatest offer of all: they asked Rose to come stay with them, in their small but tidy spare bedroom, in their neat little apartment on President Street. They are twenty years younger than she is, hardworking people with two small children. And they are willing to take an old woman of fifty into their house for no better reason than that she’s a child of God and she comes from home.

  She said no. Told Marjorie she was better off on her own, though she can’t articulate in what way her cramped dark room with its single bare light bulb, its peeling wallpaper and worn linoleum, makes her “better off.” Perhaps it’s just the fact that there’s no-one here but her and God. Back in that room after an hour and a half of bus rides and transfers, she makes herself kneel on the hard floor beside the bed, feels the floorboards bite into her knees. The surgery was, in its way, successful, and the radiation, though horrible, is supposed to “make sure” they had got it all. But she can still feel cancer like a dark suspicious man following her home through the night: you don’t want to turn and look it in the eye but you always know it’s there.

  She pictures Jesus, tall as the Williamsburg Savings and Loan building, walking down the streets of Brooklyn in his long white robe, looking into the upstairs windows of houses, passing a hand through the walls to touch this one and that one. The way things are these days, he might skip Crown Heights altogether, she thinks, what with all the fighting and the Negro gangs and all. Or maybe he wouldn’t. It’s hard to tell, with him. But she sees him very clearly, coming down her street, this wretched little line of sagging boarding houses. His sandaled feet carry him past; perhaps there’s a coloured child with a praying mother sick in the house at the end of the street. Or some old saint on her deathbed. It would be so easy for him to miss Rose Evans, with her room on the back of the house and all. While on others Thou art calling, do not pass me by!

  Before she can finish her prayer she feels the familiar tingling in her neck and below her chin, the faint sour taste in her mouth, and knows she’s going to vomit. She presses a hand against her mouth and looks around for the tin basin. She grabs it from the nightstand and holds it on her lap with one hand, using the other to hold back her hair as she heaves and retches into the basin. There’s little to bring up because she hasn’t eaten all day, and she can feel her stomach clenching with the dry heaves as she chokes up a few pitiful mouthfuls of bile. She lays the basin on the floor. It reeks, but she can’t find the strength to get up and take it to the bathroom. Instead, she takes a sip of the glass of water that’s been on her table since morning; it’s warm now but it tastes as sweet as wine in her mouth. She lies down on the bed, drawing the threadbare chenille bedspread up over her, feeling not just exhausted and empty but clean, drained of doubts and fears.

  On Flatbush Avenue, two weeks later, Rose sees her. Rose hasn’t come here to lurk or snoop around on purpose: she’s trying to give that up. No, she came down here because a woman from church invited her for a visit, a good meal, and it’s been awhile since Rose has had a good meal. Then, walking back up towards her bus stop, she sees Ethel Evans and a young woman. The girl is fair-haired, tall, wearing a pink suit with a matching hat. Ethel and the girl look into store windows and talk together, their heads close. Ethel puts a hand on the girl’s arm.

  Rose passes so close behind them she could touch them. She is sure she will stop, will say something. But she has no idea what to say. She pauses just past them, pretends to bend down to pick up something she has dropped. Long enough to hear Ethel say, “Now that would look lovely on you, Claire.”

  “Oh, do you think so? I think that would be more Diane’s style. I could see her in that.”

  Hearing Claire’s voice, Rose is riveted to the sidewalk. She turns back and eyes the girl again, hungrier than she was this evening when they put a good hot meal in front of her. She can’t get enough of looking at the girl, listening to her. Rose feels like the world has stopped turning, like when Joshua made the Lord stop the sun in the sky. She can stand here forever, watching the daughter she has never known while a pain that has nothing to do with radiation treatments twists inside her stomach.

  Rose continues walking, because she has no excuse to stand there any longer, and they’re walking away in the opposite direction. She looks back, just once. The tall fai
r girl, the small dark woman. Well matched, all the same. Claire’s aunts have done well by her, anyway, even if her mother hasn’t.

  Rose wanders blindly, past groups of people on the sidewalk, till she hears singing that, although it’s no hymn she knows, she recognizes at once as a holy sound.

  Inside a storefront, a crowd of people is gathered, singing, hands raised over their heads. Nobody passing by seems to give them a second glance. Their song flows out into the street and swirls around Rose.

  Glory glory, hallelujah,

  Since I laid my burden down…

  Rose pushes the door open and slips in under cover of the music. Once inside, she sees that nearly all the people there are coloured, with only a few white faces among the crowd. It doesn’t surprise her: the music has a dark and vibrant sound that she doesn’t associate with people of her own kind, lively though the crowd at the Citadel is. This is like a whole other kind of music, stripped of the blare of trumpets and the pounding of the piano and the clanging tambourine – an earthy, strong sound carried only by human voices rising up and plunging down the scale.

  An old coloured man stands up at the front, wearing a red and white robe. His hands are raised; his hair is white. The music does not exactly stop; it lowers to a hum, a murmur, that continues to twist and writhe beneath his words.

  “Oh, my brothers and sisters, is there anyone today who has come here for healing? Is there anyone here bound by Satan, caught in chains of alcohol or drugs? Snared in the trap of cancer or tuberculosis? Ravaged by disease, wrecked by despair? Come down, come on down, my brother, come down, my sister, kneel and receive healing, healing, through the precious blood of Jesus. Come now! Come now!”