Bittersweet Brooklyn: A Novel

by Thelma Adams

  “A reflex,” said Louis. “If you show weakness, you might as well hand your enemy a hammer to hit you with.”

  “Take your fear and bend it into anger,” Abie said.

  “Anger I got,” said Thelma, trying to sound older than she was. She gazed up and back toward home, where the lights still shined in the second-floor apartment. Framed in the window, in curlers and cold cream, Annie scowled, touching the rollers to check if her hair was dry. Thelma didn’t ever want to go upstairs again. She dreaded seeing Moe at the table, turning his head away from her as if she were the shame, not him. She didn’t want to join Mama in bed in the place where her stepfather belonged. No one cared what she wanted, but it was this: sitting with her brothers, her family, on the stoop until the sky grew light and the pushcart men returned. She wanted to grow up fast so that nobody would ever tell her what to do again. Shifting her back to the window again, she said, “You don’t like anybody bossing you around, right, Abie?”

  “Not me. I like singing my own tune.” Abie scanned Hooper Street. In the apartment building next door, a clarinetist was slaughtering “It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary,” repeating the opening bars until they surrendered and swung into “By the Beautiful Sea.”

  Across the way, the mother stood and dusted off her shift, cuddling the now-sleeping infant and jiggling the sack of a child with her toe. They disappeared inside with the kid letting the heavy wooden door drop behind him. It banged and the baby started wailing.

  “Enough with the bedtime stories—maybe it’s time for you to go inside, Baby Snooks,” said Abie.

  “I’m in no rush. Let me stay a little longer, please?”

  “I got to see a guy about a thing.”

  “Just a few more minutes, please, please, please?”

  “Just don’t be a nudzh.”

  “Never,” Thelma said, stretching her legs out in front of her and sucking on a chocolate. A pipe-smoking stranger strolling past slowed and ogled Thelma’s calves. Her brothers laughed. “What did I do wrong now? Why’d he look at me funny?”

  “Not funny,” said Abie. “It’s just . . .”

  “Is there something wrong with my leg? Too skinny, right, like Annie says?”

  “As if that pug-ugly knows,” said Abie. “There’s nothing wrong with those gams, little sister. You got the magic leg. You step off a curb and shake it, and the Prince of Wales is going to stop his carriage.”

  “I’ve never heard of that,” Thelma said, but she liked the way it sounded. She had something special besides brothers who comforted her when she was low.

  “We each have a magic thing. Louis can find his way anywhere with his eyes closed. I got a magic tongue: I can talk a cop into letting me go. Hell, I can talk a nun out of her panties. But you, you got the magic leg.”

  They looked the same to Thelma—schoolgirl legs, scabby and pale and long, but she believed her brother. He would lie—but not to her. Just then, a wine-colored Packard with yellow spokes trolled down the street.

  Abie rose nonchalantly, as if new cars routinely picked him up curbside. He stretched his legs, smoothing the front of his new pants, and then strutted down two stairs. At the bottom he turned, light on his feet. “So why’d you really come to find me yesterday, Tem?”

  In answer, she crossed her legs and stuck out her tongue. Hugging her knees under her chin, Thelma surveyed the car, but her thoughts returned to their apartment—and Uncle Moe sitting at the table playing cards with the Mint like they did every night.

  “Uncle Moe and me . . . ,” she began, and then she stopped, and began again. “I . . .” She’d thought her story would spill out with her brothers. And yesterday, when she was running toward Abie, it might have, if nothing else had happened. But now, with all the mishegas, with all she’d seen, she couldn’t form the words. She worried that Abie might not love her the same way once he knew—or even worse, he might not believe her.

  What a knot. How could she untangle it? How to explain the catlike comfort of curling into Moe’s sea-salty neck at the end of a long day, the way he began to gather her up when the light under the crack of Annie’s door extinguished and the bedsprings squawked? She cringed at the memories, how he touched her chest where the buds were forming with his jeweler’s hands, her shame at not being entirely a woman yet, her apologies at her inability to please, her eagerness and her inexperience, the way their noses bumped and her arms became bent at awkward angles.

  It felt wrong, she knew that. She should have, could have shoved him away. She didn’t—so wasn’t she as much to blame as her stepfather? She certainly felt guilty. Uncle Moe and her: she loved him. Maybe from that first time she’d followed his lead as they box-stepped on her seventh birthday. The world had whirled around them and she couldn’t stop laughing for fear she’d misplace her feet, breathless. Maybe before that even. Moe saw her, not just the shabby shoes, the frizzy hair, and the spit-upon posture. He nurtured the softness underneath the crust. When he was in a room, she gravitated toward his side. He read to her from the paper, cut her an apple slice, clipped her nails. Moe was the attentive parent, waiting with open arms to cuddle, pinching her shoulder muscle until she squirmed and fell to the floor, slipping her hand in his. She kicked herself inside, aggravating an old bruise: she was so needy that she couldn’t turn away when it became too much.

  She saw Abie glance down the block and then return to the stoop beside her. Louis descended and parked himself on her other side, forming a brother sandwich. Their hatred of Annie united the trio.

  “That stuff on the couch?” Abie asked. “Jesse told us.”

  “Annie exploded,” said Louis, “and the poor schmuck vented to us like he always does.”

  “Who is he to tell you about my private stuff?”

  “Nothing that happens in that apartment stays private,” said Abie. “That’s a luxury for rich people.”

  “So why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I’m saying something now, aren’t I?”

  “Maybe,” she said, suspicious. “I thought I came first.”

  “I try to protect you, but I’m no prince. You know that. I wish I had, and so does Louis. Nobody loves you more than we do. But you gotta see I’ve been a little busy, what with the police and all.” Abie patted Thelma’s knee, simultaneously peering out of the corner of his eye. The circling Packard was heading their way again. He must have nodded, because they passed, crawled to the corner, and hung right.

  “I didn’t know, Abie. I didn’t know what we were doing was wrong. Or maybe I did.” Thelma shrugged. “He’s Uncle Moe. I trusted him.”

  “Sure you did,” said Louis.

  “You didn’t ask for this, baby. You’re a kid, just not anymore. You got the magic leg. That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to you,” Abie said, apparently distracted by the rising pressure to enter the approaching car. “It wasn’t your fault. Not at all. But maybe you didn’t realize that you’re not a little girl anymore, at least on the outside. Men are animals.”

  “Dogs,” said Louis.

  “And I know that personally.”

  “But you’re not like that, Abie.”

  “Right,” he said. “I just stabbed a kid; otherwise I’m a peach. I know you want answers, but I’m no expert on creepy old guys. I like my dolls taller than me, fully grown. Want my advice? Try not sitting on men’s laps. Maybe pick on somebody your own size—and stay away from Moe.”

  “Easier said than done, right, Tem?” said Louis, who extended his hand to escort her inside. “Ready to go up?”

  “I’d rather go to hell,” she said.

  “What’s the difference?” Abie asked, laughing.

  “You’re my family, not those putzes,” Thelma said. “Do I make you happy?”

  “Of course you do. You’re aces!” Abie leaned over to kiss her cheek with his mouth open so that when he pulled away, the suction popped. She wiped her wet face with the back of her hand while Abie stood and jazz stepped backward downstai
rs with all the vigor of a man used to starting his day job late at night. Thelma plucked her handkerchief from where he’d been seated, waved it in the air like a magician to shake off the grit, and then stuffed it in her pocket, sighing. Abie had a point. He was her big brother. She believed him, and she believed in him. Abie pivoted, crossed the sidewalk, and ascended the Packard. The shotgun door shut like applause.

  Chapter 11

  While her boys and the husband thief conspired on the stoop, Mama lay alone in her room like a widow. She’d never allow Moritz near her bed again, and she’d keep Thelma in her room to ensure he didn’t try. Enraged, she counted grudges instead of sheep and so was sleepless.

  She’d positioned a line of hairbrushes, bristles up, along the mattress’s center, marking the boundary Thelma couldn’t cross. Every once in a while, as she waited, she pushed it farther so that now she had two-thirds of the bed and that skinny little thing would have a sliver by the wall under the window. She was fortunate to share a bed with her mother and not an orphanage cot.

  The girl hadn’t yet come upstairs. Every few minutes Mama would extend her right leg to touch the floor and feel for her slipper with her toes, as if she would go and grab the child herself. Just the thought of the girl made the sting of Moritz’s rejection rise in her throat like bile. How dared he take her homely daughter in her place, that nothing without breasts? It was a shonda, an embarrassment that would ruin her if it reached the temple sisterhood. And now she had a killer son, too, a dybbuk who gave her money and took her soul. Who was she to tell Moritz how to behave when her own son ran wild in the newspapers for everyone to see? This would never have happened in the old country.

  Three short knocks struck the bedroom door. Silence, then three more raps, louder, quicker, followed by Moritz demanding, “Wife, let me in.”

  She said nothing. Having wept outside the bathroom on her hands and knees only to have him ignore her, she now rejected him.

  “I’m your husband,” he said. “Obey me.”

  She would have snorted, but instead she sucked her breath and hid beneath the comforter. A small satisfaction curled up inside her: now, he approached her. He’d feel how it was to break a marriage.

  “Let me in for my clean linen,” he said. “You can’t deny me that.”

  She could. Having always been duty bound, she perceived the freedom of slipping her chains. She had a briquette of power and let it smolder. She bit her tongue. Eventually he retreated. He wasn’t one to beg. She remembered how Moritz had entered into their marriage: politely, dutifully, carrying a paper sack of cherries and new linens tied with cloth ribbon. He was younger than she, sure, but only eight years, not a lifetime, with a head full of hair and still humming the melodies of her childhood. Energetic, he took the steps two at a time, but after having all those children, dead and alive, she felt like an old gray-haired crone beside a juicy youth.

  To her, Moritz meant a roof, a kitchen of her own, a full larder. Jonas had been her husband and she remained as mad at him for abandoning her as if it were yesterday, as if she hadn’t remarried a goldsmith with a steady job born in a village sixty miles distant from her own. In heaven, she would reunite with Jonas and give him a piece of her mind. She wondered if he would listen to her above the clouds as he’d refused to do on earth, or if he’d found someone else there among the spirits who didn’t get impatient being lectured about the Torah.

  Heartburn flared at the top of her belly, and pain crawled up her throat, releasing itself in painful wet burps that soured her mouth and made her gag. She pressed her hand against her breastbone and thought it wouldn’t be so long now before she joined Jonas. She was ready. Would she give him a piece of her mind! She collapsed back on her pillow, gasping while her foot retreated under the featherbed she’d stitched with her sisters before her wedding, now stained with man spots and menstrual blood.

  From behind, Mama could hear Annie and Jesse talking, since their headboard shared a wall with hers. This, too, was another source of annoyance, shpilkes.

  “They’re animals, Jesse,” Annie said in a loud whisper. “They’re outside laughing, eating my chocolates right in front of me.”

  “Anechka, you threw the box at Abie’s head.”

  “Don’t start,” she said. “Don’t you defend them!”

  “I’m not defending them. Give it a rest. I have to get up in a few hours.”

  “You can sleep after a day like this? I don’t know how, after you lied to me about the business. Do you think I’m too stupid to understand?”

  “Never, Anechka, not stupid—I didn’t want to upset you.”

  “Or were you too weak to hear the truth?”

  It was news to Mama, who wondered what else was happening under her nose of which she was ignorant. Her own mother would have had more control over her children’s lives. She, who had been such a dutiful daughter, would have been a disappointment. On the other side of the wall, Annie started in again: “Those chocolates are mine, and now they’re downstairs laughing like the criminals they are. They’re eating my candy and pissing in my soup and you don’t have the guts to stop them.”

  “We only had the one box of chocolates. Did you want me to throw something else? A chair, maybe, a table? A lamp? Go to sleep, Annie, enough already.”

  “You think I don’t know that they hate me. They wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for me. What did I ever to do them?”

  “You hate them, Anechka, so what do you expect?”

  “So now you’re blaming me? I’m not the one who knifed a kid.”

  “No, and you never will be. Knives aren’t your weapon. A box of chocolates, maybe.”

  “Stop!” she said, but her voice was huskier.

  “Now come to Papa for a cuddle.”

  Usually Mama was asleep by now, but tonight she was listening for the front door to open and Thelma to enter and find the hairbrushes. As the minutes clicked by, surrounded by darkness, the dead were more real to her than the living. She was acutely aware of the little ones who waited to hold her hands as she walked in her dreams, the souls of the children she’d miscarried, the first daughter she’d held to term who died at the lip of life. She’d felt her move, dance, leap inside her until that last night. What happened as the moon rose? Who’d sinned? She’d felt ill will, perhaps from Jonas’s first wife. Mama knew—no, she loved—that child. She’d felt the infant’s hand outside her body. Saw enough to know she’d looked like her little sister when she’d been born. If she’d survived, maybe they would have remained near her mother and sisters, but, no, they’d buried the child and then left.

  In New York, she’d had Annie, Moishe, her favorite, Abie. Feverish Moishe died quarantined, on the opposite side of the apartment, far from the comforts of his mother, because she’d had to protect Louis, who’d arrived as easy as breath but at such a high cost. Moishe—with the girlish curls, the chubby cheeks, the smiling sweetheart lips—had died in agony. After that, she’d miscarried, miscarried, and then came Thelma, and she buried Jonas. The children kept her awake: the ones who survived and the ones who cried out in the night from beyond. Jonas had found her belief in spirits ridiculous. She’d once told him about their children who surrounded her in her sleep. Disgusted, the rabbi’s son shooed her away, curling his lip at her superstitions. But these absent sons and daughters were real to Mama. She walked sadly in a graveyard of her own womb.

  Conspiring with the matchmaker and Annie, she’d tricked the guileless immigrant Moritz into thinking she could still have children. But Mama didn’t feel life there anymore. It had been so long since her body had experienced pleasure. She’d felt mortified when she viewed the revulsion in the young man’s eyes, the expression that this was the ultimate duty he had to perform in the match and that he might not be able to rise to the occasion. On their wedding night, she’d lain on her back like a martyr with her legs splayed, in a new nightgown buttoned to her throat, ashamed to display her flesh, the belly mountain, the veined breasts with
nipples sucked dry. He had been a good boy, small, shy, and he’d tried, and failed, to mount her. She was confident that she’d done her duty. Lay still and submissive, hardly crying.

  She overheard her children laughing outside, conspiratorially, and she felt no joy although merriment brightened their voices. What could possibly make that trio happy? Pleasure-seekers, they were corrupt, drek, garbage—strangers. They would get what was coming to them; she’d ensure that. She only hoped she’d live long enough to see their comeuppance and, on that day, she would show no mercy. Thelma was still young but, following her brothers, she’d already chosen the wrong path. She could skate into hell beside the boys.

  Convinced they mocked her with their sniggers and snorts, she felt the weight of their betrayal like a winter coat in summer. She was their mother. That should matter. That should command loyalty and respect, as she had honored her mother unquestionably, as Annie did. Who were they to judge her? If Jonas had survived, maybe things would have been different, but he’d been weak and homesick, not a husband to cling to in adversity. She’d drowned in a sea of troubles and he’d denied her a life vest, that selfish man who loved God and hated her. It remained a bitter pill, her feelings torn between love and hate. She was shipwrecked in America.

  Meanwhile, her children heed and hawed as, somewhere, Nathan Rothman twisted in pain from Abie’s wound and Mrs. Rothman sobbed. Mama grabbed her belly in sympathy; there wasn’t a pain in the world that didn’t manifest itself in her stomach lining and crawl up her gullet. Both mothers wept that they could not control their children’s actions when they roamed the streets of an endless city with dangers on every corner, where there was no stern neighbor to grab the children by their ears and drag them home to the punishment they deserved. Where was their shame?

  Jealousy gnawed at Mama. Once, she’d had that connection with her sisters, a magic circle that cost nothing, that cloaked the night in ease until sleep came. Mama longed to be a happy cow hidden among the herd of her sisters. But now it seemed like she would never reunite with her mishpokhe, her family. She’d left the village a young woman and was now a grandmother, unrecognizable, even if at night she dreamed herself young again. Her crepey skin repulsed her, the rolls of fat snuggled beneath other rolls.