Bittersweet Brooklyn: A Novel

by Thelma Adams

  She’d make them pay.

  Chapter 18

  1918

  After that March night, Abie no longer visited Hooper Street. Simultaneously, when Annie did the business accounts, she noticed that the newsstand’s take appeared to diminish, but she couldn’t tell whether it was demand slipping, competition rising, or her brother’s sticky fingers. Since she was no longer talking to Abie following their fight, Annie couldn’t confront him. Instead, she prodded Jesse to grill Abie, but although he agreed, he never accomplished his task. Some days he said he forgot. Or Abie didn’t show up. Or someone attempted to muscle in on their turf or the suppliers refused to deliver. The truth was that Jesse was the weakling that Annie needed to control, loving but unthreatening. She’d more or less made peace with the fact that while Jesse would never set the world on fire, he would also remain faithful to her until death parted them. She would have to remain the family’s backbone, as she had been since Papa passed. There would be no rest, but she’d sleep when she died, which she hoped was a long and increasingly prosperous way off. On evenings when Jesse returned home flushed and shaken but silent, Annie recognized that he’d witnessed risky activities but protected her pregnancy by keeping mum.

  Annie sat with her ledgers, furious but stymied, and yet as months passed her anger lessened. This pregnancy was a good one, infusing an unfamiliar sense of well-being that coated her raw nerves. Between their income from the newsstand, Moe’s goldsmith salary, and Thelma’s secretarial paycheck from the women’s shoe factory, the rent got paid and they didn’t have to run a tab at the kosher butcher. In the happy stage of her pregnancy, the newsstand receded in importance and Abie’s disrespect chafed her less. She was the only one with children and that apparently wasn’t going to change anytime soon.

  On March 25, Private Louis Lorber shipped out to France on the Corsican with the Thirty-Eighth Infantry, and Annie went from being a sister shamed by Little Yiddle to one who could brag of her soldier brother bolstering the war effort. That he was fighting with the French and English against the Germans and their people, the Austro-Hungarians, bothered Mama more than it did Annie, as the older woman often expressed her fears that Louis was battling their own relatives conscripted into compulsory military service.

  Ever striving to be an American in full, Annie put her faith in Woodrow Wilson, the reluctant wartime president, who had said, “Neutrality is a negative word. It does not express what America ought to feel. We are not trying to keep out of trouble; we are trying to preserve the foundations on which peace may be rebuilt.”

  Come April, as the baby expanded within, she felt a domestic peace she’d never known even as the world raged at war. She began to live entirely in the present, two hearts beating within one large and well-moisturized skin. She felt the quickening of this baby earlier than she had with the previous children born and unborn, watching an elbow cross her belly like a submarine, feeling a playful kick. Her attention turned inward, talking to the little life inside her, certain he would understand. She acquiesced to the cravings she ascribed to the infant: pickles, fresh grapefruit, barely seared liver. For once, she’d spent a little money at the beauty parlor and was blonder than ever, a regular movie star. She left the housework to Mama, who watched Adele while newsie Julius labored beside his father. She allowed herself the luxury of relaxing in the middle of the day with her feet up, a pile of movie magazines and an egg cream from the corner soda fountain with a double shot of Fox’s U-bet Original Chocolate Flavor Syrup.

  As April blended into May and then June and Annie became as mellow with child as she would ever be, Jesse and Julius returned daily from Manhattan with a pile of free newspapers. These included the New York Times, which covered the Great War like a tablecloth. Julius, now seven, a natural-born American, had become obsessed with the European war, in which the Yankees were expected to enter and save the day despite German dominance against the French and English allies. Correspondents attached to the troops revealed the condition of the millions of soldiers on foreign soil, and Annie’s neighbors on Hooper Street—Mrs. Dickman, Mrs. Famant, Mrs. Spiegelberg, and their children—would come downstairs to hear the latest news without having to buy a paper themselves.

  In the evening, when Thelma returned from the factory office with fingers stained black from typewriter ribbon, Julius would hand her the Times while Adele crawled into her lap. As Mama finished overcooking, Thelma would read the paper aloud. She used a clear voice that Annie found affected, as if her skinny sister were one of those loose suffragettes speechifying on a soapbox. Thelma encouraged Julius to sound out the words as he read along, Allies and Germans and the tricky artillery, which he especially liked because it had to do with big, bad armaments that went “boom-boom-boom.” Everything was toy soldiers for him that year: if he had a bar of soap, he’d make a pistol; a stick became a rifle; he begged for a slingshot but Annie refused.

  The family followed the frequent dispatches of reporter Edwin L. “Jimmy” James, since he was embedded with the Americans in France. His first-person accounts gave the sense that if the correspondent just looked left or right, he would see Louis and capture him in a paragraph. A private in the Thirty-Eighth Infantry led by Colonel Ulysses Grant McAlexander, their brother was armed and ready to change the balance of the war far from Abie, his constant companion since childhood. On May 17, Thelma read:

  The great task of the Allies is to block the plans of the Germans to make further advances now. This is a task for America, no less than for England and France, especially since the Kaiser hoped to win the war before our growing weight could be thrown in serious strength against him. Therefore, the chance for Americans to help fight the foe on his chosen battlefield at this time is nothing less than an opportunity to make our role the more glorious.

  While this notion of their uncle as “glorious” excited her children, Annie wasn’t buying. Although he was raised high on his paper pedestal, Annie questioned her little brother’s hero status. Having witnessed the new and improved army version of Louis meticulously cutting his meat, dabbing his mouth with a napkin, and behaving like a Gentile stranger in his own home, she was skeptical. His treatment of her and Mama had been polite yet distant—not how you handled family. Yet when he had a chance to take her side, he’d scampered away as fast as he could collect his gear, joining Abie and his two sluts without defending her. Louis always made his choice—and it was the wrong one.

  She considered Louis disloyal, doubting his commitment to the military, too. Annie expected him to appear on her doorstep one day, AWOL. For now, so convinced was she that Louis was damaged goods that, initially, she sniffed and said, “He always liked guns,” as if this unhealthy fascination paralleled Abie’s being “quick with a knife.”

  When a postcard from Private Lorber appeared in late May addressed to Thelma alone, Annie’s resentment increased. She anticipated there would be another sent to her and the family, but it never arrived. She explained to the neighbors that the mail wasn’t dependable, but inside she boiled that Louis preferred Thelma to herself. She resented both the snub and the way it emboldened her sister.

  The postcard bore a drawing of a soldier poised on a rock writing a note with a pencil upon his knee, the words Love to all at home printed on its face. On the reverse side it read:

  Grub good, girls friendly, and gun shoots straight. Learned a French word: merde! Love always, Lou.

  The next card for Thelma came in late June, with Louis describing enemy artillery: “Shells go screeching overhead like giant skyrockets. Oy vey! Made friends, brave-hearted boys, and will never let them down. We’ll keep the Huns from Paris. Our colonel says, ‘They may kill us, but they cannot whip us.’ Love always, Lou.” Annie tossed it in the garbage “by mistake,” but Thelma fished it out and placed it beside the earlier one on the mantel.

  All through the summer, Thelma continued to read to those gathered on Hooper Street. According to the New York Times, the green Americans hardly had time to tr
ain before joining their weary French and English allies to draw a line at the River Marne, a tributary of the Seine. The mission was to thwart the German offensive to capture Paris, only fifty miles away to the northwest. Even Annie began to warm to the notion of Louis as a valiant fighting man as the Dickmans, Famants, and Spiegelbergs regularly took over the living room for the nearly daily reports from their pal Jimmy of the Times.

  Come mid-July, Private Lorber, under McAlexander’s command, participated in a critical victory, the Second Battle of the Marne. Defending a long, bendy stretch of water that was all that stood between the enemy and the French capital, the inexperienced Americans—outmanned and outgunned by superior German troops—refused to allow the Huns a foothold on the western riverbank. And any time there was a mention of the Thirty-Eighth Infantry, the Brooklyn observers imagined one of their own armed with a Colt revolver and a bayonet, defending his country.

  Annie found it astonishing that Louis could be so distant that she couldn’t nag him about not writing to her, and yet the war was as near as newsprint. Despite her bias, Annie’s pride began to grow as Julius haltingly read aloud from James’s July 17 dispatch, with Thelma correcting him when he faltered, her finger tracing the words on the page.

  The story of how the American soldier, who had never before played a role in this world war, stood against the most savage rush of the German foeman and held fast at one of the most vital points of the allied lines will make a glorious page in American history.

  James could have been writing about Louis himself. The neighbors actually applauded and, from then on, brought victory cakes, vodka bottles, kosher salamis, and covered dishes of stuffed cabbage. The local candy store sent over Hershey bars. And at 1:00 p.m. each day, a shy boy in a white apron knocked on the door with a tall chocolate egg cream in a glass that he’d carried from the corner soda fountain. No one asked why all the postcards were only addressed to Thelma; they cheered on Mama and Annie, whose claims to have raised her younger brother right increased with each new report.

  Under the headline “Swift Success of Our Men” on July 18, James breathlessly chronicled the rise of the allied offensive, noting:

  I was present at the fighting this morning in the Château-Thierry region, where our boys had done so much to aid the allied cause already . . . Our troops swept down the hill north of the Bois de Belleau toward Torcy. Shouting as they went, the American soldiers advanced on Torcy, and at precisely 5:30 the commander reported that they had captured the town.

  “I bet Louis was right at the front,” said Julius.

  “I bet he was,” said Thelma, smiling as if on the verge of telling a story and then setting it aside. “They don’t come any braver than your uncle.”

  Annie didn’t bother contradicting her. Heading into her ninth month, she was feeling foggy. Everything around her was like distant gunfire, and she was slow to react, whether to slights or praise. Unlike some pregnant women, who grew angrier as the months passed, Annie’s rage seemed to recede. The child’s final development, the expanding of his lungs, his daily weight gain, his punching out for more space, stole away her thoughts and left her dull and uncommonly serene, the embodiment of motherhood. She, like Louis, was a winner—only on the Domestic rather than the Western Front.

  Meanwhile, the Second Battle of the Marne had put the Germans on the defensive. Now, the family cheered each Allied victory, big or small. Come August, Annie’s movements slowed further, although she remained in the chair in the middle of the living room—and beware anyone who took her favorite seat. With the afternoon heat, she claimed she was sweating for two. The soda fountain boy arrived with a tray carrying a pair of egg creams while the newspaper reported win after win, despite the continued might of the enemy’s artillery. On August 18, under the headline “American Snipers Busy in Fismette,” James described the danger of American sharpshooters confronting equally agile German riflemen in a small hamlet. Thelma, sucking on a lemon drop, read, “The American soldiers there have revived the old quip about there being in the place only the quick and the dead.”

  Annie said, “Quick! Quick!”

  “Pow! Pow!” cried Julius, playing rifle with a yardstick, slaying his sister.

  Adele fell dutifully on the floor, crying, “Dead! Dead!” as Thelma concluded the article.

  “France will never forget what America is doing.”

  “Quick, you dummies, the baby’s here!”

  “Mama!” Thelma shrilled, dropping the newspaper. She grabbed Annie under the armpits and hoisted her out of the amniotic fluid–soaked chair. Mama scurried in, buried in an armload of rags, her eyes wild. Ignoring Mama, their bossiest neighbor, Mrs. Spiegelberg, ordered an agitated Mrs. Dickman to escort the children upstairs, although the synagogue yenta lingered, apparently not wanting to be excluded from the front.

  “Must I get a broom and sweep you out?” asked the widow Spiegelberg, turning to the cellist Mrs. Famant. “Grab Jesse before he faints and I have two patients. Brew him tea upstairs or, better yet, schnapps.” Decisively removing and repositioning a hairpin, the widow Spiegelberg marched into the kitchen, announcing, “Boiling water.”

  Meanwhile, Thelma led Annie to bed. The pregnant woman collapsed and then crawled into a fetal position. She felt like a mule had kicked her lower back, paused to improve its aim, and slammed her again for spite. She’d been here twice before, but the pain was worse than she recalled. Between contractions, she felt oddly elated. “Thelma, bring me some chocolate.”

  “You ate the last one.”

  “What, now you’re counting? I stashed an emergency Hershey bar in the embroidered afikomen cover under the good tablecloth.”

  “I’ll find it,” Thelma said.

  “Don’t take any for yourself.”

  Thelma winced. “God forbid I steal the chocolate from your mouth!”

  “Are you calling me fat?”

  Thelma rolled her eyes. Her mouth worked as if trying to bite her tongue, but then she spat, “If the shoe fits, squeeze your foot into it.”

  “Get out!”

  “Door open or shut?”

  “Go already!” Annie couldn’t bother with her sister’s attitude. She was a bug. Squish. Crunch. “You don’t belong.”

  “Who carried you in here?”

  “I forget.”

  “Why don’t you stand up, Annie? That’s how cows give birth.”

  “Mama, get her out of here.”

  “I’m going.” Thelma slammed the door behind her. The formal wedding portrait of Annie and Jesse fell off the wall, glass shattering.

  “Pain in the neck,” Annie said.

  “Troublemaker,” Mama agreed as she rushed to collect the big shards with calloused fingers and sweep up the smaller.

  “Always with the last word,” said Annie as the angry mule kicked again, harder, to get her attention. In agony, she flopped around, trying to find a comfortable position. She didn’t know whether to stay reclined or rise—but then she weighed Thelma’s words and remained in bed.

  Stretching her legs, Annie pushed at her heels, curled her toes, and then balled up. She exhaled as the ache eased between spasms and realized she was clutching the sheets. She loosened her grip and actually smiled, poised to meet this beautiful baby who’d been swimming around inside her kishkes, a part of her, party to all her secrets. It was happening. No more waiting. No more strangers touching her belly as if she were a cow.

  Annie struggled to squelch Thelma’s comment. She turned her thoughts, instead, to pondering her hopes for a boy, to be named Elias after Jesse’s father. Before long, she’d cradle Eli, if the infant were a boy. She’d kiss his little fish lips, pinch his tuchus, and latch him on to her breast. It would be the first meeting of a lifetime of closeness. With each child, she was knitting her family tighter around her. She could tell by how heavy her chest already was that she’d have buckets of milk. Like a cow, she thought, and then said, “Stinker,” brooding about Thelma, the husband thief, the fly in
the ointment.

  But, no, her sister was a speck, a nothing with neither children nor husband nor dollars. She was the good daughter. Her third baby would be the child born in wartime in a household of peace and plenty, with a father and a mother, a sister and a brother and a grandmother, drowning in affection. She couldn’t wait to meet this child.

  Mama shuffled in with more rags, followed by Mrs. Spiegelberg carrying the boiling-water basin. “Out of my way!” the neighbor warned as if no one were more important.

  In the rear, Thelma padded in, removing the candy wrapper and dispensing a small corner. Stroking Annie’s shoulder by way of apology, she asked, “How can I help?”

  “Get the hell out,” Annie said, snatching the candy bar. Thelma flinched. That was the way Annie liked to see her: paralyzed with terror, stifled. “And shut the door behind you.”

  Annie didn’t want that bitch anywhere near her baby. It was bad enough observing her show off beside Julius teaching him to read or letting Adele crawl into that nasty lap of hers. This infant was coming out and so were the knives. Her serenity month was over. She’d switched to her delivery mood, no longer pliable. She broke off a larger chocolate chunk, sucking the sweetness. The mule kicked, and she ground her teeth. She placed a pillow between her thighs and hugged a second cushion that smelled like Jesse’s coal-tar shampoo. It was disgusting, but it was him.

  The pregnant mother began to mouth breathe deeply, wishing only that she’d stashed two chocolate bars in the afikomen cover. “Hey, Temmy,” she yelled through the door, “send Julie for more chocolate.”

  “Where’s your wallet?”

  “Take money from your purse.”

  “Will you pay me back?”

  Annie didn’t answer. Fearless, relief flooded over her. It was starting and she was ready, a true Eastern European: plow wheat in morning, have baby at night. At least that’s what Jesse said, although she was glad he was upstairs with Mrs. Famant, because his fussing infuriated her. Whatever he could do to help he’d contributed at conception. Hopefully the kid would have his father’s typically pliant temperament but not his knobby knees. And she’d ensure the infant knew the meaning of a spanking if he displayed his uncle’s sticky fingers. No, this kid would be righteous, lawful, and fair. He would excel in school and she would warrant that he had perfect attendance. Unlike his brother, Julius, he wouldn’t have to work. He would be as close to a Torah scholar as she could manage in America. He would toil with his mind and not his hands, a studier, not a laborer.