by Thelma Adams
But love? She scrambled. Against what yardstick could she measure romantic feeling? Did you know it when you felt it? Fearing she was broken, she doubted her ability to experience serious Mama Allegra–worthy emotion. She wondered if it had been burned out of her, whether Moe had twisted it. She’d loved and trusted Moe, and that exploded.
“You don’t love him, Thelma, do you?”
“Please, let me think!”
“If you have to think about it, it’s not true love. You’ll break his heart.”
“No, I won’t.”
“Not on purpose, no, not you. But even so it will get broken. And I’ll have to glue together the pieces. Do you want to marry him?”
“I dunno.”
“He knows. With all his heart, he knows.”
“We’re so young, Mama.”
“Not too young to get into trouble.” Mama Allegra pulled the first braid tightly so that it pinched.
“Where’s Giorgio? Why can’t he tell me himself?”
“I sent him upstate to cool off.”
“Why punish him?”
“It’s not punishment. He’s harvesting corn at his uncle’s farm.”
“When’s he coming back?”
“When he’s back, you don’t need to know.”
“We haven’t done anything.”
“Not yet, then, but you’re not the type to turn away from free gelato. Look at Nina, as young as you and a mother now. A good girl, an obedient wife, but you aren’t her.”
“I make him happy. And, Mama, he makes me happy.”
“Happiness,” Mama Allegra laughed softly. “Happiness comes, it goes. You can’t sole a shoe with happiness. If you loved him as much as he loves you, we might talk differently. But now we know that’s false. And, even then, if you did love him, I would challenge you. He’s my only son, my golden baby.”
“I would never hurt him.”
“A marriage isn’t only between a man and a woman; it joins two families. You fled your home to live with us. A stepfather touches you, a mother shuns you, and a sister shoves you out the door, slamming it behind you. I’ve read your brother’s name in the papers—and not for rescuing a child from a burning building. That’s no recommendation.”
The truth crushed Thelma. She’d run to them, revealed her secrets. “I trusted you!” she said, her voice rising. “And now you’re using everything I told you against me. I’m better than my family. You know me. Can’t you see that?”
“Calm down, cara mia,” said Mama Allegra. “You’ve told me their worst—and I believe you. Isn’t that what you wanted, someone to have faith in you? We do. You’re a good girl, but where’s the joy in uniting our families? I love you, carina, but I have to protect my own. I don’t want to have anything to do with that flock of yours, and I won’t have them mistreating my baby boy.”
“Doesn’t Giorgio have a say?”
“What say? He loves you. He doesn’t see beyond that but, me, I see in decades. It doesn’t take a fortune-teller to foretell the future. I’m a mother, a grandmother, a daughter, a sister. I’m a Catholic. What would our Christmas be? Where would your children play? What if your brother Abraham who’s so quick with a knife offers Giorgio a job and he does it because he’s family, a brother like Louis? What happens then? Love doesn’t question—but a mother must.”
Mama Allegra smoothed Thelma’s stray hairs away from the back part and then tugged each braid as if to say, There, that’s done. Thelma twisted into the older woman, pushing her forehead into the crook of her neck and embracing her. She wanted to sob, to beg for asylum and never leave, but the tears resisted. After kissing the girl on the crown of her head, Mama Allegra pushed her aside, gathering Giorgio’s pajamas and retrieving the needle from the tomato-shaped pincushion.
Thelma waited, watching the even stitches appear side by side, neither tight nor loose, the older woman squinting slightly. She would need glasses soon. “Now I’ll braid your hair.”
Mama shook her bowed head no. Thelma thought she heard a sniff but couldn’t tell whether the woman was crying. She turned and rushed out the door, rumbling downstairs and breaking into the street, slapped by the summer heat. And yet, she couldn’t cry. The rejection hurt too much. She couldn’t swallow. Her skin burned. Was she hot because of the temperature or the shame? Her money was on the latter. She was alone again: not good enough, unwanted, shabby, repulsive. She was poison.
She walked down the sticky street smeared in gelato drips, beer, and vomit. She stepped across a broken red-white-and-blue pinwheel; when she looked up, a withered yellow balloon flapped from a fire escape. She sped southeast on North Eighth, turned left on Meeker, ashamed that everybody knew about her and Giorgio and considered her unworthy. She’d been so stupid, as if they could hide anything down four steps during the Giglio.
How could she explain her feelings to Giorgio? This love/not love she didn’t understand. She hadn’t even asked Mama Allegra for his address to write him a letter. He would think she didn’t want him, but that was false. She needed to talk to him. But that was a lie, too. She wanted to kiss him, to touch him, to bury herself in him so deep that she came out the other side, clean.
What was this if it wasn’t love? She didn’t know. She was too young to see her mistake. She set her back to the beautiful boy who had been a pest and then became so much more, leaving behind the Italian neighborhood, that foreign country she loved better than her own, her hair wrapped tightly in two braids that tugged at her scalp. Without thinking, she removed the ties and loosened the hair, pulling apart what Mama Allegra had made, no longer a sister to Nina, Trulia, and Gabriela.
Thelma’s feet entered Union Avenue of their own accord, nipping over on Grand Street and then veering onto Hooper, flagging only when she could see their building. Down the way, the knife grinder in his faded-green felt hat, rang his bell. She hesitated on the sidewalk, not wanting to enter. But she couldn’t retreat. She didn’t know where to run. She didn’t fit anywhere, not with the Gigantiellos, not with her own people.
Mama Allegra had been right. Their families could never unite. Annie would have chewed Giorgio up and spit him out with the seeds. She’d have called that sweet boy names: blondie, Adonis, Talaina, sheygets, Gentile. They would have told him about her and Moe in the crudest way and asked Giorgio if he was ready to be fitted with horns because Thelma couldn’t commit, was a slut. How could she ever bring someone she had feelings for home to a family like that?
And suddenly even her memory of Giorgio, of two friends melting together under the cover of night as the trumpet blared in the distance and the drums kept a beat, became tainted. If she could have scraped off her skin and become someone else, anyone else, she would have right then and there. The scrawny knife grinder in the felt hat stopped his cart to whistle at the magic leg. She turned. When he smiled, revealing black gums and a few straggly teeth, she spat at him.
Chapter 17
The summer passed, leaves crisped and fell, and the record-setting, frigid winter of 1917–18 surrendered to a timid March. While the war effort ramped up, men in uniform weren’t much on Annie’s mind as she spread on the padded bench before her vanity, absorbed in her reflection. The twenty-six-year-old removed with gentle strokes of her middle fingers the cold cream that tingled her pores, leaving her fair skin soft to the touch. She didn’t have a single blemish because she cared for her face morning and night, which required a heavier-duty lotion that worked wonders, even if she had to cover her pillow with a towel when she went to sleep. She had a thirteen-minute routine and she stuck to it however much the kids cried. She needed her beauty time and woe betide anybody, including Jesse, who interrupted her when she was seated at the mirrored set he’d bought her for their seventh anniversary. She’d trained her husband to behave the way she liked him to, and that included how to wrap the back sections of her hair that were hard for her to reach in curlers. (And how to clip her toenails, because he was better on his knees.)
That
’s who Annie was: diligent, reliable, and well maintained. She loved order the way a drill sergeant might, both for its results and its own sake. She could say that she primped for Jesse, but she was self-aware enough to know that her standards were higher than his—he always said he’d love her as much in shabby slippers and a housedress with her roots showing, but that was not who she was. She pinched her cheeks hard three times for rouge, leaned in to pluck three dark hairs from between her brows until her eyes stung.
With her pinkie, Annie prodded the beginning of a tiny wrinkle below her right eye and then realized it was nothing, an eyelash. She put the hair on the tip of her forefinger and blew, wishing for what she wanted most: her child’s safe arrival. She wiped her hands on a rag and felt herself up. Her breasts were sore. She was sure of it: pregnant. She had that feeling of well-being from the inside out that she wasn’t alone—and she wouldn’t let this baby go if she had to strap her legs together with a belt. This child would go far, she was sure of it. Maybe not president—that was for the grandchildren—but doctor or lawyer, maybe even a judge or a rabbi.
Smiling into the mirror, she removed a poppy seed from between the straight white teeth and unclipped her blonde curls. She was the good-looking one, the successful one, with her husband the news dealer earning regular money from the family business and handing it over without resistance. He didn’t know how to manage finances. She did.
As soon as Annie had discovered the newsstand bookmaking racket, even before her anger had subsided, she’d demanded the ledgers. (She now knew too much for Abie to rebuff her request.) With her bookkeeping skills, she’d taken over, ensuring the flow of cash that could be siphoned off safely into the household budget after making the proper payoffs to police and not-so-silent partners. She understood how to bury assets and inflate expenses on the ledger. In the name of Lazarus & Sons, she’d purchased life insurance on Jesse and Abie and Louis—after what happened to the Rothman kid on Fourteenth Street, she wasn’t taking any chances. In filling out the forms, she named herself as the sole beneficiary. Who else could be trusted to secure the family’s interests?
What she wanted now—more than anything except the infant’s safe arrival—was her own house with no strangers walking on her head or ramming a broomstick up her tuchus from the apartment below. She’d had enough of neighbors and landlords. She wanted to raise this child under her own roof and lift the family into respectability. Then she’d be content.
She smiled into the mirror, her bottom lip full and the upper curved. Looking among the lipsticks aligned like toy soldiers, she selected one, shook her head, exchanged it, and carefully applied a bright orangey red. She looked happily at her reflection: beautiful. Two short raps interrupted her pucker. She rose, calling, “Hey, Thelma, get the door already!”
Glancing outside where young trees bent in March winds, she plucked her cardigan from the chair back. Upon entering the living room, she saw a soldier in uniform and Thelma wrapped around him like the stripe on a barber’s pole. Louis looked different in his uniform, the fitted tunic, military jodhpurs: taller, more handsome, like a movie star. He had shoulders and a waist she envied.
“Why’d you knock, Louis? Like we should get up and answer the door for family? Look at you: a soldier already! Should I salute? What are those, short pants? Thelma, let him breathe, for God’s sake.”
“Hello, Annie,” he said in a voice deeper and more measured than she remembered but no warmer. With his arm circling Thelma’s shoulders, he turned to his older sister. If he were a stranger, he was the kind of young man you’d see on the street and think he treated his mother well. Following basic training, his face was thinner than it had been before he enlisted in December, his cheekbones more prominent, but his wide nose would always have the broken bend to the right with which he’d returned from the orphanage. His gray eyes held hers with an unfamiliar boldness, as an equal. She would see how long that lasted. He handed her a pink string-wrapped box that looked small in his hand. “Where’s Mama?”
“What, where’s my kiss, soldier boy?” she asked, extending her freshly cleansed and moisturized cheek toward the twenty-one-year-old and awaiting his approach.
He touched dry lips dutifully on the surface, asking, “What’s that smell?”
“Noxzema,” Annie said. “Soft, huh?” She detached his hand from her sixteen-year-old sister’s, leading him away from the door. “Wait until you see your niece and nephew. They’re so big! They’ve never met a soldier. Did you bring them something from the army? Mama,” she screamed over her shoulder, “your son the soldier’s home.”
As if on cue, Mama entered from the kitchen in her apron, her cheeks flushed from bending over the oven, wiping her fingers on a flour-sack towel. She hesitated, eyes widening, twisting the cloth in her hands, as she stared at the man in uniform. It was a look of horror, as if he’d come to take her away, not visit. “For this we left Drohobych, that you should fight another man’s war?”
“Ma, he’s an American,” Thelma said.
“Who asked you?” said Annie.
“Pardon me for living,” Thelma said.
“It’s my war, Ma. It’s our duty to join our allies and defeat the Huns.”
“What did they ever do for us?”
“Plenty,” said Louis. “Britain and France are all that’s between us and the Germans bombing Brooklyn.”
While Thelma started singing “You’re a Grand Old Flag” and doing a little kick–ball change, Mama began crying. She advanced toward Louis, planting her face into his chest. He awkwardly patted her head. She began to wail, “Don’t go!”
“Annie?” he asked, as if dealing with an unwanted family pet.
Annie approached, pulling his mother off him like lint, one piece at a time. A big wet spot remained on the chest pocket of his woolen uniform. She handed Mama the cake box, saying, “Can you put this on a plate?”
“Babka,” he said.
“Mama’s favorite,” said Annie. “Look at how short they cut your hair! When did your ears get so big?”
“You should talk about ears,” said Thelma.
“Who asked you?” Annie assumed her usual spot on the sofa, crossed her legs, and patted the cushion beside her. Instead, Louis pulled up a chair. Thelma dropped a pillow and sat on the floor beside him, one elbow on his thigh.
“You’re a dead ringer for a movie star,” Thelma said, looking up adoringly at her brother.
He struck a noble pose, propping up his chin with his fist and dropping his voice an octave. “Yeah, my regiment leaves at dawn.”
Thelma squeezed his leg. “Wow, muscles!”
He nodded. “Boot camp.”
“Those Mississippi girls near Camp Shelby must be throwing themselves at you.”
“I hurt myself picking them up,” he said, placing his hand on his lower back, “so I’ve had to go easy.”
“Meet any Jewish girls?” Annie asked.
“It’s Mississippi. Not a bagel in sight,” Louis answered. “Where’s Abie?”
“He’ll be here,” said Thelma.
“What did he tell you?” Annie asked.
“Like I said, he’ll be here. If he said he’ll come, he’ll come. What am I, his parole officer?”
But Abie didn’t arrive. Jesse returned from Manhattan with six-year-old Julius, who now worked the newsstand, too, learning his reading from the headlines and his sums from counting change. Moe followed, wearing a skullcap, the fringe of his prayer shawl visible below his woolen vest. Since he’d exited Mama’s bed, he’d become increasingly religious, a man of rules and limits. He rose early to join the minyan for prayers before hastening to the jewelry district, often returning to the synagogue after supper. It was either atonement for past sins of the flesh or a desperate urge to escape the company of his wife and her daughters.
Annie, who rarely took anything at face value, never considered Moe’s davening true faith as a desire to get nearer to G_d. She kept the milk and the meat separate acc
ording to kosher dietary laws, rested on the Sabbath, and honored the high holy days but wouldn’t expect thunderbolts to fall from the sky if someone ate a ham sandwich on the stoop. When four-year-old Adele awoke from her nap and padded to her mother, Annie opened her arms wide and gave the girl twenty pecks on the forehead below her crown of blonde curls before looking over at Louis. “Here’s my Baby Snookums,” Annie said. “Isn’t she a princess?”
“A princess,” he said, reaching his arm out to the grumpy child in the red-checked jumper. She recoiled, diving farther in her mother’s arms.
“More like a big fat baby,” said Julius, a dead ringer for his father. “Hey, can you teach me how to shoot, Uncle Louis?”
“Not indoors.”
“Have you killed anybody yet?” the boy asked.
“Julius,” warned his father.
“Not while I’ve been in uniform,” Louis replied.
“What do you got for me? Ma said you were going to bring me shoes from boot camp. Where are they?”
“I left them in my other pants,” said the uncle. “Want a shiny nickel?”
“I’d rather have a shiny dime,” said the boy, sticking his thumbs in his belt loops.
Louis doled out the change and, not to be left behind, Adele came over and snuggled her head on her uncle’s shoulder before slowly extending her palm. He gave her a dime, too, but she shouted, “No! I want a penny. They’re prettier. Mama says so.” He obliged.
And still they waited for Abie. Added to the shmaltzy, savory scent of Mama’s cooking was a new charred smell. Jesse offered Louis schnapps from the decanter in tiny glasses, but he declined. He ribbed him for not being a real fighting man, because a soldier would never refuse booze. And, because Louis wasn’t drinking, they couldn’t, either, not the good stuff that Annie reserved on the high shelf for special occasions.
“When’s dinner?” Jesse asked.
“I’m starving!” said Julius.
Annie sighed loudly. “Mama, get the chicken out of the oven before it’s as brown as a brisket. Thelma, give her a hand.”