By the Rivers of Brooklyn

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  It is as dizzying as the first altar call Rose knelt for at the Citadel, when she was saved. Now she is answering another call – not to be saved, but healed. They have prayed for her healing again and again at the Citadel, of course. But it was a polite request, something they’d like the Almighty to do if He could fit it into His plans. And if not, Thy will be done. After all, they bury their saints every year, as every church does; they have to hedge their bets. She has never heard them pray for healing as this Negro preacher prays, like it’s not a request but a demand, like he has the authority to call down God’s power from on high.

  She is kneeling at the front, but strong hands pull her to her feet and she stands before the minister. His black face seems huge and staring; she has never been this close to a Negro man. “And what is your burden, my sister? What do you need deliverance from?”

  “I…I have cancer,” she says. “I’ve had treatment but…I don’t think it’s really gone. I want to be healed.” He takes a breath as if gathering his energies, and she adds, “And I lost my daughter.”

  “Are you saved by the blood of Jesus?”

  “Yes. Yes, I am saved.”

  “Then be healed by the power of the Holy Spirit!” He leans back and brings his hand forward onto Rose’s head with enough force to knock her to the ground, but she feels no pain as she hits the floor. Instead, she is flooded with energy, with joy. Around her, she hears voices rising in words that are not words, a melodious babble of sound, and opens her mouth to find she is making the same sounds. Tears pour down her face. Black hands reach out and hold her, and she holds these unfamiliar bodies close.

  “Do you believe in healing?” Rose asks the Captain at the Citadel after Sunday evening service.

  “Yes, of course, we believe God can heal the sick. We believe He’s healing you, Rose.”

  “I don’t mean a bit at a time, with the surgery and the radiation. I mean all at once, like Jesus did. A miracle. When somebody lays their hands on you.”

  He nods, obviously trying to encourage her, but worried, she can see. He’d be even more worried if he knew she’d been to a place called The Miracle Healing Temple of the Precious Blood, but he probably guesses it’s something like that. After all, she’s not likely to have had hands laid on her by the Methodists or the Episcopalians, is she?

  But Rose’s inner certainty is unshakeable. She does not go back to the doctor or the hospital. No more radiation; she is free from the stink of vomit and fear. She does return to the Citadel, for awhile, to those kind friends who helped her and prayed for her. But her real life now is at The Miracle Healing Temple of the Precious Blood. Despite the garish name and the ugly storefront, despite the black faces and the unfamiliar hymns, Rose belongs there. She stands to testify there and the voices rise around her like waves. Amen, sister! Glory hallelujah! Preach it, preach!!

  And she does preach it. She lays aside the neat black Army uniform for a dazzling red and white robe. She stands at the front of the small shabby room beside the Reverend Vernon Peters, the kindly old man with the authority of an apostle who healed her. Here, Rose shines; she is incandescent. She can lay hands on someone and pray for their healing, and see in their eyes that God has touched them.

  Other things slip away. Not just the Citadel, not just cancer. She no longer feels like she wants a drink at the end of the day, a feeling she has battled for years. She no longer has to restrain herself from walking past Jim and Ethel’s place, looking for Claire. Her one glimpse of Claire was a gift from God, a message that her girl will be all right. All Rose has to do is keep serving Him. And she has found the place to do it.

  CLAIRE

  BROOKLYN, JULY 1956

  CLAIRE LIKED TO TAKE long walks on warm weekend afternoons. She looked in store windows, at the fronts of houses, trying to imagine her mother walking here thirty years earlier. She had asked Aunt Ethel about her parents only once. In her aunt’s vagueness and discomfort, Claire had all the answer she needed. Aunt Ethel obviously had no idea who Claire’s father was, and just as obviously she hadn’t thought much of Claire’s mother. She had hinted at numerous, nameless “men friends,” but come up with only one name: an Italian fruit-seller named Tony Martelli.

  It was foolishness, really – one name in a borough of two million people, one man among probably dozens her mother went out with. Claire knew it was foolish to pause at every fruit store she passed, to check the proprietors’ names on the signs. Foolishness was something for which she had little tolerance, in others or, especially, in herself.

  So when, after a year of long walks, she passed a fruit store in Williamsburg with the name “T. Martelli” over the door, she made herself walk past, not looking back. Claire told herself she had seen nothing important, nothing that mattered.

  The next day, Sunday, she went with Aunt Ethel to the Methodist church. Claire enjoyed the services there. There was none of the fervent emotional baggage that was attached to Army services at home. No testimonies, no shouts of “Hallelujah!” or “Praise the Lord!” It was quiet, dignified, decorous. A person could go to church there and not even have to think about whether she believed in God.

  After Sunday dinner she went back to the fruit store, which was closed. She told herself there was no need to come back here, yet the next Saturday she found herself walking down the same street. This time she saw a middle-aged man behind the counter. She went inside and bought a bag of peaches.

  The man behind the counter was burly, red-faced, with black hair turning to grey. He was loud and friendly with three neighbourhood children who each went away with an apple. Then he turned to her.

  “This is a good choice,” he told her as he rang up her purchase. “Redhaven peaches. You like Redhaven peaches?”

  “I suppose so,” said Claire. “Back home, the only peaches I ever saw came out of a tin. I thought they grew on the tree that way, tinned.”

  T. Martelli laughed, a big warm laugh. “Yeah, I can just see that. The canned-peach tree.” He looked up from the cash register, lowered his furry eyebrows. “Back home, eh? Where’s that, where’s back home, young lady?”

  “Um, in Canada, a place called Newfoundland,” Claire said.

  He laughed again and pointed at her. “You see, I was right! I knew you was from Newfoundland. I knew some Newfies, years ago. Well, I still know some, we got a few right in this neighbourhood.” Now she got the bushy-eyed stare again. “You never knew a lady name of Rose Evans, did you? Years ago, years ago. You ain’t related to any Evanses, are you?”

  It was that easy. Two million people, one year of long walks, one fruit store, one middle-aged Italian man, and Claire had found, at the very least, someone who once knew her mother. Maybe she had found more than that.

  “Rose Evans is my mother’s name,” she said. “I’m Claire…Claire Evans.”

  She tried to read his face, but all she saw was a broad grin. “Well, Claire, welcome to Brooklyn. You been here a long time? How’s your mama? How’s she doin’ these days?”

  “I’m sorry, I really don’t know.” Claire laid the bag of peaches on the counter. “She’s…I haven’t had much contact with her, these last few years. My Aunt Annie, back home, raised me, and now I’m living with my Aunt Ethel and Uncle Jim here in Brooklyn.”

  He frowned, searching his memory. “Ethel and Jim. Yeah, I remember them. He worked up on the high steel, didn’t he?”

  “A long time ago. Not anymore.”

  The man laughed again. “Well, it was all a long time ago, wasn’t it?”

  She wanted to say, I’m almost twenty-five years old. I was born in 1931. Does that mean anything to you? That would be impolite, of course. Not sensible. But she nudged as close as she could. “When did you…I mean, how long ago did you know my mother?”

  “Oh, ages ago. When I was young and foolish, right? Back in…oh, back in the twenties, I guess. Prettiest girl I ever went out with. What a dancer.”

  “You…you went out with her?”

&nb
sp; “Oh yeah, she was my girlfriend. My first big love. We all gotta have one of those, don’t we?” Mr. Martelli lowered his eyebrows and looked at her. It was impossible for him not to be thinking what she was thinking, wasn’t it? Had he even known Rose Evans had a baby in Brooklyn and sent her home to Newfoundland to be raised? If he knew, surely he must have wondered what became of her.

  “You look like her, like Rose, you know. Just like her,” he said. “That’s why I asked if you were related.”

  “People tell me that a lot,” said Claire.

  A plump, dark-haired woman came into the shop from the back door, the door connecting it to the apartment above. There was a door just like it in Uncle Jim’s shop. “Angelo!” she called back over her shoulder. “Get out here and give your father a hand unloading these boxes!”

  Mr. Martelli pulled the woman next to him, squeezing her against his side. “This is my Gina, my wife,” he said. “Gina, this girl is from Newfoundland. She’s Rose Evans’ daughter. You remember Rose, dontcha?”

  Claire wondered what memories Tony Martelli’s wife could have of the woman who was supposed to have been his first great love. Gina looked her up and down, then looked back at Tony. “I don’t remember no Rose,” she said.

  Through the open storefront three old women entered amid a swarm of small children. Gina’s smile grew wide and she moved to serve them. She shooed the children, not out of the shop but upstairs.

  “Some of them are mine,” Tony Martelli said. “The rest, who knows? The whole neighbourhood comes in and out. I don’t even keep track.” He leaned his elbows on the counter, smiling at Claire, in no hurry to ring in her peaches.

  Gina took over the cash, ringing in purchases for the old ladies. She invited them, too, up the stairs. The store was growing loud, noise cascading down the stairs from the kitchen above. Claire could smell something cooking.

  It wasn’t hard to imagine the scene upstairs. The Martellis’ kitchen, though foreign, would also be familiar. If she stood in the middle of that crowded room, it would remind her of Aunt Annie’s kitchen and dozens of other kitchens back home, where food was always cooking and being eaten, children played around the stove, old men and women sat to the table, telling stories about the places they came from and how they got here. Noisy, crowded kitchens full of life. Claire supposed that these Italian kitchens and Newfoundland kitchens were only part of a web that stretched world-wide, Brooklyn-wide too: Spanish kitchens and Jewish kitchens and Black kitchens, all full of voices and smells and faces. It was all very picturesque, but what Claire loved was Aunt Ethel’s kitchen, small and clean and sparkling with Formica and linoleum and chrome, where no-one ever went except to cook, eat, or clean up after a meal.

  Claire felt she had stayed too long, peering into Tony Martelli’s shop and apartment and life. She picked up the peaches. “I have to go now,” she said.

  “But you’ll come again, right? Come again, drop by any time,” he said, waving his hand like a king offering her half his kingdom.

  “Maybe. I…I don’t live around here. But it was nice meeting…someone who knew my mother.”

  Tony Martelli’s face looked sad for a moment. “I miss her, sweetheart. She was a great gal. The love of my life.”

  Without meaning to, Claire let her eyes flicker to the stairs, half-expecting Gina to come into the room again. Tony followed her glance. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said quickly. “My Gina, she’s a princess, she’s a queen. But your mother, Rose…well, that was love. Me and Gina…this is a marriage. It’s two different things. You don’t wanna get them mixed up.” He smiled at Claire again. “You take care of yourself, now, you hear? You tell your aunt and uncle Tony Martelli says hi.”

  Claire went home that night to the clean quiet of Aunt Ethel’s house, where she did not tell her aunt and uncle that Tony Martelli said hi. Instead, she went to the bathroom and looked at her own face in the bathroom mirror. Tony was right; everyone was right: she looked like Rose. Like pictures of Rose, like the Evans family. Fair hair, fair skin. Her brown eyes were the only thing that might seem remotely Italian, hardly enough to link her to Tony Martelli and his dark, lively tribe of children. She was left with that thought, and with the only piece of fatherly advice Tony would ever give her. “That was love. This is a marriage. It’s two different things. You don’t wanna get them mixed up.”

  ANNIE

  ST. JOHN’S, FEBRUARY 1957

  “ABIDE WITH ME, FAST falls the eventide, the darkness deepens, Lord with me abide,” Annie sang under her breath as Bill unlocked the door. “Funny thing, isn’t it, how Mom always hated that hymn, yet she said she wanted it at her funeral?”

  “She hated it because she said it was dreary and put her in mind of funerals,” Bill pointed out. “I s’pose she figured there was a time and place for it.”

  “She never liked dreary hymns, though,” Annie said. “She was always more for the lively ones, the ones you could clap your hands to.” Funny, she thought, since she didn’t think of her mother as a happy person. But she was a grand one to belt out a hymn.

  Harold had flown home for his mother’s funeral. He couldn’t have made it to be at her deathbed: there was no deathbed. She lay down one night as alive and cranky as ever, woke up calling for Annie at two in the morning, and was dead before Annie got into the bedroom. Her heart, of course. Eighty-five years old. A good long life, though very narrow these last years. And not a bad way to go, everyone said.

  Annie had phoned Jim with the news; he said he was sorry he couldn’t come. Only Harold and Annie, of her five children, to stand by her graveside. None of her grandchildren. All scattered, all so far away, one dead before her. But the house was full of friends and relatives, church people and neighbours, all reminiscing and catching up.

  Harold moved up beside Annie. “Jim would have liked to have been here,” he said.

  “It’s a shame he couldn’t come then.”

  “Don’t blame him, Annie. Things are harder for him and Ethel than they are for me and Frances. I’m my own boss, you know.”

  “You always said any man who had his own business had a slave driver for a boss,” Annie remembered suddenly.

  Harold laughed. “That’s what I said, and it’s true, too. But at least I can give myself a few days’ leave to go to my mother’s funeral, and scrape up the money to go. Like I said, ’tis not as easy for Jim and them.”

  “And all your crowd, how are they doing?” She hadn’t had a chance to talk with Harold yet: he arrived this morning, barely in time to get ready and go to the funeral. Bill had picked him up at Torbay airport.

  “Oh, not bad, not so bad, you know. The boys are doing well. You know Ken’s graduating from university in the spring. Says he’s going to be a teacher. Danny, now, he’s finishing up high school, but he’s not the university type.”

  “Will he come work for you?”

  “He might, he might for awhile. His real interest is in cars. And poor Valerie, well, she never changes.”

  “No signs of her getting married?”

  “No, and she don’t seem to have any interest even. But she’s not career-minded either, except for this writing she keeps on about. She’s not like Claire, now, or Jim’s Diane. Those are two smart young girls.”

  “How is Claire doing in New York?” asked Ethel’s sister Ruby, drifting over.

  “Oh, she’s doing marvellous by all accounts,” said Annie, warming with pride.

  “Not married, is she?”

  “Not yet, but she’s working hard. She’s secretary in a lawyer’s office.”

  “She’s smart, that one,” Bill said, moving up to join their small circle. “Could have been a lawyer herself, if she’d been a man.”

  “Does she mean to stay there, or come home?” Harold asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Annie. “She doesn’t say, in her letters. I s’pose sometime she’ll meet someone down there and get married, settle down in the States.” Across the room she saw Doug Par
sons, his head a little above the sea of women around him. “But she does say she’ll come home if I ever needs her, you know.”

  Annie looked around at the kitchen and imagined what it would look like when everyone was gone. It had been quiet these last two years, with Claire away. Now, without Mother in her chair knitting away and throwing in the odd comment, it would be quieter still. “I’ll hardly know what to do with myself when I’m not looking after someone.”

  Ruby laughed. “Well, you still got Bill to look after.”

  “Yes, but Bill looks after me too,” Annie said. “I know some husbands are not like that. Need to be waited on hand and foot.” Ruby, a spinster, nodded sagely. “But Bill does for me, and I do for him. Not like looking after children, or old people, where it’s all give and no take.”

  “So you’ll be looking forward to this, then, to having some peace and quiet and the place to yourselves.”

  “I’ve been looking forward to it a long time,” Annie said. It seemed for years now, she had been waiting for the day when she wouldn’t have to jump up to make anyone a cup of tea, when she’d have no-one but herself and Bill to think of. It was a sin to think of her mother’s death as a relief, but it was, in its way. And yet. She held herself tensed up inside, unable to relax, because of a secret she had been guarding these weeks now – something held inside her that would not allow her to enjoy the long-deserved rest.

  Finally they were all gone, except Harold of course. He was flying out tomorrow. He sat at the table with Bill, exchanging family news. They would like to come home for a holiday sometime, him and Frances. Maybe next summer.

  Maybe, maybe. Annie sat with her feet up and sipped her tea. Her free hand strayed to her side, just above the line of her bra, her fingers searching. But Bill glanced her way and she let her hand drop. She had said nothing to him, because she could not frame it into words. I found a lump. There’s a lump in my breast. She needed another woman to tell it to, but there was no other woman: no sister, no daughter, now, no mother. If it really was – anything bad – she couldn’t do it alone. Bill was the kindest man in the world, but he was still a man. She hated to put the thought even into words – hated the words even more than I have a lump – but the words she was thinking, and could not keep back, were: I need you, Claire. Please come home.