Bittersweet Brooklyn: A Novel

by Thelma Adams

  Trulia and Gabriela ranked the barrel-chested workers down below, choosing between them like ice cream flavors, trading them like baseball cards—but ducking down whenever the males looked up to discover the source of the giggling. In contrast, Thelma had given up on males, content to watch others play the game in hopes she would eventually learn the rules. She preferred being at the center of the girl storm, finding safety in the pack where she no longer stuck out.

  Freed from worry only blocks from Annie and Mama, she gazed up and out with new eyes, saw white clouds floating in crisp blue sky above; below, the food stands took shape and gained paint, garish yellow and red stripes, banners proclaiming “clams,” “pizza,” and “braciole.” Just to say that word felt good in her mouth—braciole—the way it rolled off her tongue as if she knew the whole language. She began to talk more with her hands, to shout and pinch, bargain and brag. Now she shimmied her hips when she walked, imitating Gabriela, the prettiest of the sisters, and yet no match for the beauty of Giorgio, the only son.

  When Mama Allegra wearied of them underfoot, she’d reach to the top shelf for a glass jar containing rubber bands and thumbtacks and her household money. She’d entrust change to Trulia so they’d disappear to the pizzeria. Located around the corner, the brick oven made the restaurant Hades hot. The owner’s broad-shouldered son with the girlish waist tied a red bandanna around his head like a pirate to catch his sweat and had the nervous habit of licking the twist of his wispy mustache with the tip of his tongue.

  Thelma, emboldened by the pack, would strike up a conversation with anybody, asking the youth at the oven if he was married. When he said no, she asked him why not—and offered him Trulia, cheap, just for a pizza.

  “I’ll take her for a pizza,” said an old man resting in the back, ice cubes tied with a rag around his forehead and water dripping down his long nose. “I’ll even give you two!”

  “You’re too generous,” Thelma said.

  “I’m not that hungry,” laughed Trulia.

  “What about you, bella bella?” Thelma asked an old widow in black who stood waiting for ices with three grandchildren tugging at her hem.

  “What about me, what?” asked the widow, pausing to request two rainbow and a lime.

  “Do you like this handsome man here with the runny nose?” Thelma raised her eyebrows. “He has some years on those tires yet.”

  “I’m off the market,” said the woman. And then she eyed the young man behind the counter and raised her eyebrows. “Or maybe not.”

  Thelma had begun to feel freer again, like a young girl, having found not only refuge but joy in Nina’s family. “Love is in the air.”

  Gabriela snorted. “No wonder it stinks in here.”

  Chapter 13

  Brooklyn, 1915

  That July, and the two that followed, the feast days in Nina’s neighborhood offered Thelma an escape from Hooper Street, which was only a ten-minute walk away. The annual Our Lady of Mount Carmel celebration transformed the neighborhood of narrow streets into an outdoor party, the air thick with the smell of sausage and peppers grilling, and the vinegary sweat of men standing shoulder to shoulder supporting the Giglio. This, Thelma discovered, was a monumental papier-mâché-and-wood tower, the centerpiece of a celebration with roots in Naples, Italy.

  The imposing seven-story structure included a platform a full twelve feet above street level that supported a twelve-piece band, a singer, and the parish priest. Underneath, a network of poles radiated out in four directions. The 112 paranza, or lifters, young and old and older, wearing white shirts with red sashes, shouldered the beams. And then, together, legs planted, they hefted the gigantic float with a universal grunt to encouraging shouts from their peers and admonishments by the year’s capo, a burly, tri-chinned man with a baton, clearly accustomed to yelling and being obeyed. That the task was challenging was visible in the furrowed brows and pulsing veins of the men as they raised the monument and briefly danced down the street before the audible squawks as they replaced it.

  Thelma vibrated with the tension of the crowd, caught between terror that the tower would topple, squashing the neighbors standing in such close proximity, and awe at the strength of the united community of men protecting them from possible disaster. She joined with the throng on North Eighth Street calling out “lift, lift” to the paranza, the muscled neighborhood men, who raised the tower on their shoulders while, above, the band began to play.

  The beat thrummed in Thelma’s stomach and she, too, began to dance, her feet shuffling in the small square of space below her, her fingers entwined on one side with Nina’s, while holding Giorgio’s wrist with the other. Trulia and Gabriela had disappeared with their boyfriends and left the younger children unattended, with many warnings about what would befall them if they misbehaved; all the while it was the older girls shirking their responsibility. Sweat pouring down their brows in the July heat, the trio shouted “lift, lift” in unison with those around them. Thelma envied a curly-headed little girl bouncing happily to the music atop her father’s shoulders while she ate a gelato that dribbled on the man’s straw hat.

  Right then, Thelma wanted to be Italian, speak Italian, and marry Italian. But she’d never admit that to Nina. She feared her friend would withdraw her affection. It was too much closeness for the thirteen-year-olds. This was that girl’s neighborhood, not Thelma’s. She didn’t want to poach—but she did desire to know the names of the men who bore the tower, to climb onstage with the singer in the white suit with the lily boutonniere. While he was the man they’d heard earlier chastising the band during rehearsal, now he was the proud focus of all attention, his black hair slicked back above a large forehead, confident as he crooned out over the audience. He planted his feet like a sailor on a ship at high seas and waved at the crowd before turning the backs of his hands out as if conjuring their excitement. He was a man she wouldn’t notice twice in the pizza parlor. But there, on the stage held aloft by over a hundred men, Thelma wanted to join the sweet-voiced stranger made suave by his sway over the crowd—and dance for him.

  Thelma hadn’t even noticed that Giorgio had threaded his arm around her waist until he recoiled when Nina pinched his hand, hard, and he cried out. “He’s fine,” Thelma said.

  “He’s a pest,” said Nina.

  Afterward, they took their pooled pennies and nickels, even a quarter that Thelma had mooched off Abie, and felt like royalty, buying more food than they could eat, Thelma sampling a clam and spitting it out on the ground as if she’d tasted mud, without regret over the penny it cost her. They played games of chance, throwing balls into water-filled jars to try to capture a goldfish that neither mother would let them keep and shooting air rifles at deer leaping in the air and hearing the ricochet of their misses.

  Thelma never wanted the day to stop—and then the greased-pole competition began. Jews didn’t do this: Tests of strength out in the open for everyone to see? What would they think of next, these Italians? They tied sausages to the top of a tall pole slathered with oil, and tan guys flexed their muscles climbing toward the meat. One by one they ascended, slipping and slithering and hugging on for dear life, their lips pouted sideways to avoid a mouthful of goo. Sometimes they tried as a team, with one man standing at the base, the next mounting his shoulders, and a third with his feet on the previous man’s head until yet another scrambled up his friends’ strong backs—inevitably tumbling back into the crowd. Neighbors screamed encouragement as time and again the seekers crept up, only to slide back down covered in filth, mocked by friends and enemies alike.

  Suddenly Giorgio broke away and rushed through the crowd. Nina elbowed Thelma and said, “Watch this! Tonight we eat the best sausage in Brooklyn!”

  Grabbing Thelma’s hand, Nina followed. When they got to the clearing, they found her little brother eyeing the pole. He pointed to the sausages and cried, “Who wants dinner?”

  The spectators roared. “Me! Me!”

  Leaping like a trapeze arti
st, Giorgio cupped the pole below him with the soles of his feet, his arms hugging the wood. Thelma smiled, feeling pride in the boy who inchwormed up as the crowd began to chant, “Giorgio! Giorgio!”

  When he lost his grip and slid down a man’s length, Thelma gasped with the crowd. Her stomach twisted as Giorgio climbed, hoping he would be spared the humiliation of tumbling, fearing grave injuries.

  Refusing to surrender to gravity, Giorgio rose again, bit by bit, toes grabbing. An arm’s length from his goal, he paused. The crowd roared, chanting his name. He reached one arm over the other and hoisted himself to the top.

  “Gigantiello,” he cried, slinging down sausages to the cheering, scrambling crowd. Afterward, he swooshed down in one motion to pose at the bottom, as triumphant as a prizefighter. “I am the winner,” he said, laughing, slathered with grease, grabbing the ten-pound sausage that was his reward. “I am the wiener.”

  Nina and Thelma jumped up and down, laughing and poking each other and crying, “Gigantiello!”

  Returning home, they let Giorgio swagger ahead of them. Despite his greasiness, Mama Allegra hugged him tight, saying, “You are the best boy in the neighborhood.” Then she turned and found the twine, cutting a length with a large and deadly pair of shears. She tied it to the sausage, hanging the trophy out the window overlooking North Eighth.

  By the next year, when Giorgio ascended the greased pole, his sisters were nowhere in sight. They had left the apartment as a pack—the dark-haired Gigantiello girls and their blond baby brother. But when they reached the sidewalk, Trulia and Gabriela scurried to meet their boyfriends, who were gambling in the church hall basement, while Nina met her Antonio. The son of a postman didn’t look like much. At least he was tall. Tonio walked beside Nina with pride as if her ample bosom were his, which in a way it was. Nobody would bother to look at his sallow features when he stood beside such a magnificent chest.

  Thelma begged Nina to stay beside them, but the couple had other arrangements. What a difference a year made, particularly with Giorgio. He now towered over Thelma, awkward in his unfamiliar body. Thelma hardly noticed that he’d become quiet around her, no longer teasing or tickling. She looped her arm through his so the horde couldn’t separate them. Together they watched the Giglio dance through the crush, the hoarse shriek as a man fainted beneath the platform and was trampled by his neighbor before being carried away on a stretcher.

  Afterward, they ate grilled corn, blackened on the outside, until the butter dripped down their chins and they wiped the slop off with the back of their hands. It was so sweet and fresh it could have been dessert. He paid with hoarded change from who knew where. The pair pitched pennies into jars without luck. They strolled to the air rifles, where the barker had a curled mustache that stretched from his nose hair to the tufts at his ears. When their turn came, Thelma flubbed it pathetically while Giorgio hit the moving target every time and won the girl beside him a kewpie doll with a hideous grin. That was when she first became aware that these weren’t younger-brother affections. The attention felt so good that she couldn’t reject it, pretending she was protecting his feelings. It was the Giglio, after all. Nothing that happened during those twelve days was real.

  The afternoon steamed. The sun hung high in the sky. Everywhere tired children cried, tugging away from their parents, falling in fits on the filthy ground. Heading for the greased pole, Thelma and Giorgio cut through the human snarl. Giorgio led, his hand extended back for Thelma’s. Her sweaty palm embarrassed her, but she surrendered it. After all, he was only Nina’s little brother, only Giorgio.

  As the pair entered the circle surrounding the beam, they heard a young man in free fall, yelling, “The sausage is mine,” as he tumbled. There was an unnerving crunch when the bricklayer’s son hit the street only a few feet away from them. His right arm bent up and back unnaturally. A white bone shard poked through his dark skin. Thelma turned her face away, holding tighter to Giorgio’s hand.

  The crowd surged forward, seemingly split between concern for the laborer’s son, who now might be unable to help his father, and the desire for some local hero to appear before anybody else got hurt. Seeing Giorgio, the crowd’s mood shifted. He dropped Thelma’s hand, nodded to the judge sweating in his summer suit, spit on each palm, rubbed them together, and confronted the pole.

  Filled with pride, Thelma retreated to the front row of spectators, where a shabby widow tugged her waistband for restricting her view and cursed her in Italian. The humidity suffocated. Ominous clouds bunched up above.

  Last year, Giorgio the boy had beaten the men, but now he, too, carried a man’s body. She wondered if he would be able to shinny up so quickly without falling like the bricklayer’s son. He began by climbing up the backs of the trio who had launched the previous climber. Ascending without haste, he made it seem easy. Crouching on the shoulders of the top man in the totem pole, he extended with all his body height, pushing off with his feet and advancing arm over arm, leg over leg. Just when he was about to hoist himself up to the top, his left foot slipped and then his right, splashing pitch gobs into the crowd. Disappointed, Thelma swallowed her breath. He’d come so close. And, then, exhaling, she shouted, “Giorgio! Giorgio!” and the old lady next to her picked up the cry in a shrill voice, and it rippled through the crowd so that even strangers from distant neighborhoods who had no idea who the boy was, or that he was last year’s champion, joined in.

  Frogging his knees up, Giorgio grabbed the pole with his thighs. He swayed backward to wipe away the sweat and then reached up with sinewy arms, revealing his hairy armpits, then scooching his legs behind him. He slid then recovered and lunged, taking the top, his face covered in pitch. He began to rain sausages down on the crowd, which now throbbed, “Giorgio! Giorgio!”

  As he slid down like a fireman racing to extinguish a blaze, Thelma skipped forward, hurdling the kids grappling for spoils. They were winners! When she reached Giorgio, pitch and blood streaked his right cheek. She went to dab the spot with her hankie as he leaned down. He kissed her pop on the mouth. She started, handkerchief still raised. This was Giorgio! But it wasn’t. She briefly tasted oil and salt before the judge separated the pair unceremoniously with a ten-pound sausage.

  As they returned to the Gigantiellos’, Giorgio’s arm encircled Thelma’s waist, but when they turned the corner and became visible from the upstairs windows, she shook him loose, afraid of what Mama Allegra, who missed nothing, might think.

  Chapter 14

  The feast created a temporary topsy-turvy world in the neighborhood but, afterward, the Madonna returned to her niche inside the church, the men warehoused the Giglio for repairs, and life returned to normal. The summer passed, and without Thelma’s encouragement, Giorgio kept to himself. When his sisters went out in a group, he often stayed away, joining neighbors in elaborate games of hide-and-seek among the narrow streets that lasted until their mothers called them in to dinner and continued immediately afterward until bedtime.

  That fall, Thelma attended her final school year. She was smart enough but had a mouth, she’d been told, that begged to be scoured with soap. She despised the fussy Mrs. Hammerstein, who saturated herself in sweet gardenia perfume and wore her hair with a ruler-straight middle part. The geography teacher made them spend class silently etching detailed maps with colored pencils and rewarding with gold stickers those who drew added doodads, ships, monuments, or dolphins. Thelma didn’t need to know Venezuela’s shape or its major exports—and she didn’t care who knew about it. That didn’t make her teacher’s pet.

  Instead, Thelma wanted to earn money, buy stockings, and cut loose. Most weeknights she ascended to Trulia’s insurance office over the pizza parlor for mechanical typewriter lessons. Typing was the only sport in which she excelled, reaching seventy-five words per minute over time. In contrast, Trulia didn’t like to rush or ruin her nails, so she’d save her daily correspondence and let Thelma complete it with fewer errors. That way Thelma could contribute while learnin
g a practical skill. She appreciated the concentration: when her fingers were moving, she stopped thinking about anything else, embracing the challenge of being swift without mistakes. While Trulia bribed her with bread and cheese and then plopped nearby reading a Photoplay, Thelma pounded the keys, feeling competent and modern.

  As Thanksgiving approached, Trulia casually dropped the fact that Nina was pregnant, as if it were a Photoplay spread, expecting Thelma to know already. She didn’t. Angry, she went the next day after school to confront Nina but stopped short when she noticed that the girl was pale and green and seemed to be swallowing back either tears or bile. Nina sat with a hot-water bottle tucked behind her lower back, solemn with double bags beneath her pleading brown eyes and a single braid down her back. Thelma teased her that she would go to any length to escape Mrs. Hammerstein. How could she survive without knowing the capital of Uruguay?

  “Montevideo,” the fourteen-year-old Nina sobbed, fleeing toward the back bedrooms, the rear of her dress damp, looking so much like the little girl Thelma had often chased and tagged on the playground. Nina didn’t have time to explain how she could let this happen before they’d finished school or the question that plagued Thelma: How come Nina didn’t tell her first? She could understand falling asleep beside Tonio, because no boy was duller—but how did this baby thing happen?

  Thelma encouraged Nina, who was hardly showing, to escape with her, but the girl rarely strayed from the apartment above the Knights of Columbus, which meant that Mama Allegra hovered nearby with aunts and grandmothers and widowed sages in the childbearing arts. This infant was to be the first grandchild, and the women circled around to protect the eldest of that new generation of cousins, praying for a boy. Nina sat in the middle of the flurry of knitting and crocheting, listening to one childbirth story after the next with what appeared to be a rising dread, disappearing into dullness as the baby slowly began to take shape. As a warning, the elders had told her the story of a young Italian woman crushed during a demonstration on the streets of Brooklyn, so Nina became deathly afraid of crowds. She hardly ventured outside.