By the Rivers of Brooklyn

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  In August, three months after Jim’s stroke, she got a phone call from Harold. Harold and Frances were good about keeping in touch, as were Annie and Bill, Claire and Doug. But they were all so far away. “How are you managing, Ethel?” Harold asked, taking the phone after she’d had a long chat with Frances. The gentleness of his voice was like a warm arm around her shoulders.

  She opened her mouth to say, “I’m doing fine,” like she said to everyone, but what came out was, “I don’t know how I’m going to go on, Harold.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “How about if I come down for a visit, Ethel?”

  Harold and Frances came down almost every summer to spend a week. Usually the four of them went and rented rooms in Ocean City or Asbury Park; those were the only vacations Ethel and Jim had ever taken together. Harold had never come for a visit by himself, and Ethel wanted him to come so badly it felt like a sin.

  Jimmy met Harold at Grand Central and brought him out to Brooklyn. “What you should be doing is helping her pack up,” he told Harold as they came into Ethel’s kitchen. “She and Dad need to move out with Joyce and me. Out near us, anyway. I’ve been telling them for years. Even before this happened.”

  Harold nodded and smiled at Jimmy but didn’t say anything about Ethel moving out. He laid down his small bag – Jimmy had his big suitcase – and went straight over to the chair where Jim was slumped in front of the television. At first, Jim didn’t look up, didn’t seem aware that anyone was there. Harold stood in front of him, then slowly, painfully, squatted down so he was at eye level with Jim, and took one of Jim’s hands between his own.

  “Jim. James b’y, I’m here. Harold. I’m here now.”

  Ethel saw Jim’s vacant eyes focus on Harold’s face, then Jim’s other hand darted forward and gripped Harold’s wrist so hard it had to hurt. His mouth worked frantically, but all that came out was a garbled, grating sound, and his eyes flashed with the terrible anger of the caged animal.

  “You see what he’s like,” Ethel said.

  Harold showed no sign of shock. He patted Jim’s hand steadily, saying in his low voice, “Frances sends her love, and Val and the boys…I’ve got a couple of grand boys, Jim, and you’ve got a grand young fellow there too, your Jimmy. He picked me up at the station. Had a good ride down on the train, not like it used to be though. Trains are more crowded, not the same comfort at all.” As his voice murmured on, Jim calmed a little; his lips still twitched and his hands jerked slightly, but he no longer looked angry or panicked.

  Having Harold around made all the difference. The long silence of the apartment – deeper and darker since Jim’s stroke, but stretching back long before that, back to when Jimmy and Diane moved out – was banished under a spell of laughter, of gentle words, of long conversations about old times. Harold liked to sit in the living room with them, the sound on the TV turned down low so only the flickering picture lit the room. Jim didn’t seem to care that the sound was gone. He still looked at the screen, but his eyes sometimes darted back and forth from Harold to Ethel as they unravelled the skein of years, remembering the time they all went to Coney Island, the time Jimmy got lost when he was only a little fellow, the Friday night card games they used to enjoy.

  They talked, too, about their children. It had been so many years since Ethel had had anyone to talk to, anyone to whom she could say, “Jimmy’s the best kind, he really is. He’s making a grand job of his shops, going right ahead. And Joyce is good. She’s steady. And she’s always been good to Jim and me. More like our own daughter than Diane is, really.” The only lamp on in the room was the knobby brass table lamp on the end table by Harold’s chair, its yellow light highlighting the crinkly cellophane covering the lampshade. The TV flickered. The blinds were drawn against night-time on Flatbush Avenue, but sounds drifted up: shouting voices, curse words, a basketball bouncing on the pavement. A car horn blared, then a second on a different note.

  “Diane’s had a hard time, though,” Harold said, his voice as soothing as when he talked to Jim.

  “Hard time? She left her husband, Harold. He wasn’t a bad man, he wasn’t cruel to her. She was just tired of him. Tired of him! Imagine, now, what kind of world it would be if everyone up and left when they got tired.”

  “It’s a different world now, though,” Harold said. “Dan and Joanne, now, they had a rough time there last year. Dan moved out for awhile. But he saw sense, in the end. Left off with the other one and went back to Joanne.”

  Ethel nodded. “Well, I can’t talk no sense into Diane. She never listened to me, more’s the pity. Now what about Valerie, what is she doing these days?” It wasn’t that she wanted to hurt Harold, but he sounded so satisfied about Dan’s good sense, and she’d talked about her problem child, so it was only fair they both air out the closets, skeletons and all.

  Harold sighed, took a long sip of tea, looked down into his cup. “Well, girl, ’tis hard to know what to make of Valerie. Frances is like you are with Diane. She’s like to tear her hair out about Valerie, worrying about her, you know. There she is, forty-two years old, no hopes of getting married and nothing to do with herself. Valerie got the top floor of our house turned into her own apartment. She comes and goes as she pleases, but she don’t seem to have no…” He groped for a word. “She went away down to the States somewhere for awhile there, a year or so back, some kind of course she was on, but nothing more came of it. She just came back home and went on writing. She’s working on a book, it seems. Has been this ten year. The Great Canadian Novel, I s’pose.” Harold laughed, a short laugh without humour, and stared into his tea again. “Did I tell you Ken got moved up to principal? Principal of the biggest high school in the district,” he said, looking up.

  One day, Joyce arranged to come and stay with Jim for the day. “You never get out, Mother,” Joyce said. “Now that Harold’s here, he can take you out somewhere. You can have a nice little day to yourself.”

  “Don’t be so foolish, Joyce. Where would we go? Coney Island?”

  Harold loved the idea of a day on the town. “We’ll go to Prospect Park,” he announced. “The Botanical Gardens.”

  Ethel looked at him as if he had grown another head. “Prospect Park,” she repeated. “Do you know what Prospect Park is like? It’s full of rubbish and gangs and winos sleeping on the benches. Nobody goes to Prospect Park anymore.”

  Harold crumpled; the lines in his face seemed heavier, and his eyes dull. “Hard to believe, Ethel girl.” He looked out the window. “What happened to Brooklyn? Toronto, you know…Toronto’s a big city, but you can still walk the streets, go into the parks. It’s a beautiful city.”

  “Well, Brooklyn’s not,” Ethel said. “There’s nothing beautiful about Brooklyn, I assure you.”

  “That’s a sad thing,” he said, shaking his head. “What about the Botanical Gardens? Are they as bad as the park? Does anyone go there now?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think…I mean, it’s behind a gate, not all open like the park. I still hear people talking about it on the television like it’s a nice place to go. I couldn’t tell you for certain. I haven’t been there in twenty years.”

  “Well, let’s go there tomorrow,” Harold said. How quickly he perked up again, like the hard realities of life could never get him down for long. Ethel looked at Jim, hauled off in his chair, knowing no more than a two-year-old child, she thought. Let Harold have to look after Frances like this for a few years and see how cheerful he was. See if he was so anxious to head off to Prospect Park then.

  They went on the bus, a thing Ethel hadn’t done in years. The bus was terrifying. They were the only white people aboard, two old white people wearing sweaters in the August heat, targets for gang violence if anyone on earth was, Ethel thought. But the coloured people on the bus didn’t seem particularly interested in them. They were busy talking to each other, in those heavy accents that didn’t even sound like English. There were mothers with babies, men and women as old as
herself and Harold, stout women in cotton dresses and hats who looked like they might be steady, sensible churchgoers, in their own kind of churches, of course. Then three teenage boys got on at the front of the bus. The boys were loud, shoving and pushing each other, sprawling over three double seats, not getting up when an older man with a stick got on and couldn’t find a seat. The old man was white, but he was one of those Jews with the hat and the long sideburns, as foreign in his way as the coloured.

  Stepping inside the gates of the Botanical Gardens was like taking a step outside of the real world of Brooklyn into a saner, simpler time – the time when they were all young, and it was safe to ride a bus or take a subway. Pale green trees formed an archway over the path, blocking out the worst of the sun’s heat. Couples and families – white people, ordinary people – strolled past, some pushing babies in strollers. Ethel felt safe. Harold shuffled along, pausing every few feet to squint at the little markers stuck up in front of the flowers.

  She stopped to lean against a wall, looking down at the Cherry Esplanade below. Some young people had spread out a picnic on the grass; their laughter drifted up to her. Harold leaned beside her.

  “Can’t quite make it as far as I used to,” he said. “I remember when I lived here, I used to walk all over New York, blocks and blocks every day.”

  Ethel nodded. “I remember pushing the little ones in the stroller, down Flatbush Avenue, for hours. Nowadays I can barely get across the kitchen without having to sit down.”

  “You’re pushing yourself too hard, Ethel. Day in, day out, in that apartment with Jim. Doing everything for him. It don’t make sense.”

  By the time they reached the Japanese garden, they were both ready to rest again, and the bench was empty, so they sat and looked out at the murky green water. The flowers all around the bench would have been lovely if the water didn’t look so dirty, but even so it was a peaceful place to stop, and there was a bit of much-needed shade. Ethel wiped beads of sweat from her brow. A swan glided past, white and erect. Harold said, without looking at her, “Ethel girl, you got to give it up.”

  “Give it up? What am I going to do, Harold, put him in a home?”

  “No, no, no,” Harold said, as though the very thought made him nervous. He reached down and took her hand in his. “But it’s terrible for the both of you, going on the way you are. I know you wrote us about it, but until I saw it myself – there in the apartment with the two of you – I never really magined, I suppose, how bad it was.”

  Ethel had nothing to say to this. She was glad, actually. Happy that Harold, that somebody, had noticed how hard her life was. She wondered how much else Harold understood. Did he know that it wasn’t only since the stroke that things had been hard? He’d always understood her so well. Surely he’d guessed how bleak her life with Jim had been for…oh, so many years now. She used to date it from the time Ralphie died, but that wasn’t it, not really. Years and years before that. It had been wrong so long she wondered if it had ever been right. Jim’s stroke was really just the straw on the camel’s back, you might say.

  “It’s kind of you to come down here,” she said.

  “Oh, I couldn’t stay away,” Harold said. His hand, with its staring veins and brown age spots, tightened on hers, and Ethel felt its surprising warmth. “I mean, how could I? When you love someone so much, to see what they’re going through. You have to be there, to do whatever you can to help.”

  Something happened in Ethel’s chest like a balloon bursting. At first she wondered if she was having a heart attack. But it wasn’t pain, only a sudden openness, pinpricked by Harold’s words, the words she had wanted, needed, for so long. When you love someone so much. A lifetime of propriety, of caution, of measured words suddenly slipped from her as she turned her face up to him.

  “Harold, do you mean it? I’m so glad. I always thought, you and I, we would have been–”

  “I mean, he was my hero when we were growing up, and to think of him there, struck down like that…” Harold went on, speaking at the same moment Ethel did, so their words twisted and tangled. Beneath the breathless rush of her own words she heard his, and understood. Prayed her first prayer in nearly thirty years: Oh God, let him not have heard me, not have understood what I said.

  But God said No, as He always did. Harold’s words stumbled to a halt; she saw the confusion in his eyes. In that moment Ethel understood that this love that had been plaguing her since, oh, 1928 or so, had never once, not once, crossed his mind. It had been all in her mind, her own mind. There was a moment of silence so long Ethel felt it contained years. Harold’s hand still covered hers.

  “That’s right, girl, you know what I mean,” he said gently after a moment. “You and me, we always understood each other, didn’t we? You were as much like a sister to me as Annie was, tell the truth…or more. I couldn’t stand the thought of you here all alone, taking care of poor Jim, nor of him suffering like that, and I thought, b’y, if there’s anything at all you can do for Ethel, for her that’s always been so good to you, well you get yourself on that train and get down to New York, now. And Frances agreed with me, one hundred per cent.”

  Ethel could hear her own heart beating, the shouting voices of two children on the path behind them, a faint breeze that moved the leaves above her head. She looked away from Harold, down at the pond where a girl of about thirteen knelt at the water’s edge, holding out a piece of bread to a swan.

  Harold still held Ethel’s hand, patting it now. “Come on now, let’s get up. If we sets here too long my knees are likely to lock and I’ll never get up again,” Harold said, chuckling. He got slowly to his feet and offered her his arm as they walked on.

  Ethel shuffled as she walked; her knees still ached and her right ankle felt like it might turn over at any moment. Yet she felt lighter, somehow. Maybe all that unspoken love she’d been carrying around was heavier than she realized.

  “You’re a kind man, Harold,” she said. “Always were. And you may be right.” She let a little pause grow and then said, “About Long Island. Maybe it is time for me to talk to Jimmy and Joyce about moving out there. I never wanted to be a burden on anybody, you know.”

  “I know,” Harold said. “I think the same thing about my boys. I don’t want to be a burden. But my time will come. Just like it has for poor Jim.”

  “Like it will for all of us, I s’pose,” said Ethel.

  DIANE

  MANHATTAN, JUNE 1975

  DIANE STANDS IN FRONT of the mirror in her hotel room, turning, touching up her lipstick, viewing herself from different angles. This morning she packed her daughters off to Henry’s place before catching her plane from LAX to LaGuardia. Tomorrow she will get a train to Long Island, to her brother’s tacky little suburban home, and see what kind of shape her parents are in. Tonight is an island in between, a space of time that’s just Diane’s. Tonight she’s going to a dinner and dance in honour of her high school class’s twenty-fifth reunion.

  Diane turns once more in front of the mirror, admiring her tanned legs under the pink mini, her neat figure, slimmer than when she was in high school, her shoulder-length glossy dark hair. She wants people to say, “Diane Evans? Is that you? You’re a knockout. I never would have recognized you!” And then she will talk about her work in public relations for a major Hollywood studio, and her home in L. A., and her beautiful teenage daughters. Her high school is famous for high achievers and success stories; Diane knows she will have to work hard to shine.

  But she’s used to that – working hard, and shining. She picks up her purse, goes downstairs and catches a cab to the hotel where the reunion is being held. Men and women who look only vaguely familiar arrive in couples and groups. For a moment Diane wishes she had kept in touch with someone from high school, someone she could have arranged to meet beforehand. Then she decides it’s okay, maybe even better, to sweep in alone, head held high.

  “My gosh! Diane Evans? Is that you? I’d have known you anywhere!!” The high-pi
tched blond woman with the accent that sounds cartoonishly New York to Diane now, after her years in California, bears down with her arms outstretched. Diane catches her name tag: Carol (Dobrowski) McLean.

  “Carol! How fabulous! You look great!” Diane holds her former best friend at arm’s length, and yes, she can see Carol at fifteen, at seventeen, at twenty-one, tucked inside this forty-two year old woman with the bouffant blond hair and the lime green pantsuit. “What are you doing now?”

  “Well, I’m living in Jersey. We moved to Jersey, me and Clint, you know,” Carol says, putting her arm around Diane’s waist and drawing her over to a table full of people, also all vaguely familiar.

  “Clint, hi! Tina…oh gosh, yes, Frank Murphy, I would have known you anywhere. Anywhere.” Diane makes the rounds of the table, the rounds of her old friends. She has many opportunities to repeat the carefully rehearsed one-minute version of her life that she has prepared for the occasion.

  “Well, I live in California, in L. A. actually. I’m in P.R. Kids? Yes, I have two daughters, two beautiful girls, Christine and Laurie. I did the housewife thing for a while there, you know, out in California, had my babies, raised them, and then one day just kind of thought, Is this it? Is this my life? The girls were in school by then, so I got a job. Kind of had to start from the bottom up, you know, since I’d been out of the work force for nearly ten years, but I love it now, it’s such an interesting field. Henry and I split up, oh, about five years ago. No, nothing nasty, no hard feelings, just, you know, we’d outgrown each other. And hey, it’s great to be back in New York!”