by Thelma Adams
He’d found a local sweetheart. Louis deserved a honey, a thousand honeys. But she knew he was the kind of man who, unlike Abie, only wanted one, not one and change. He claimed he’d worked his Brooklyn charm on a doll named Lucille—a Gentile. It was Arkansas, after all. And maybe he was getting serious but he didn’t want her anywhere near their older sister. Lucille wouldn’t understand, and he liked the girl too much to have her suffer the Annie treatment. Thelma comprehended the way Annie’s ridicule held them hostage, chased away happiness. He’d earned respect in the Thirty-Eighth Infantry, and he didn’t want anybody he loved to see that disgust in Annie’s eyes when she looked at him. That was the problem with having a sister as an enemy: all the fighting was dirty and he couldn’t use the proper weapons in his arsenal. He was brave but he wasn’t stupid—that’s how he’d survived France. A frontal assault would never work with Annie; better to know who she was and withdraw to higher ground.
Abie took Louis’s absence hard at first, bellyaching to Thelma—and then never mentioning it again. He adjusted. He always had. The brothers had been a team. They were only two years apart and Abie lacked memories from before his brother was born. Louis had been his conscience and compass. Too reckless to protect himself, Abie guarded his younger brother. But he didn’t brood after Louis reenlisted. He smothered whatever feelings remained in booze and girls, throwing himself off cliff after cliff to see if he’d always land on his feet. Have knife, will travel. He had his grudges but never against Louis. He explained to Thelma on one of the many nights they shared the stoop on Montauk Avenue—never taking the chairs on the narrow porch—that it wouldn’t have been a snap for a decorated war vet on the streets where rules of combat didn’t exist. And he didn’t want to pull Louis down, since, as he told Thelma, “I’m having a run of bad luck and I have no one to blame but me.”
Mistakes were the cost of doing business: a person was high, then low, but rarely in the safe middle. He confessed actions he shouldn’t have, like that Rothman stabbing, saying that when he’d poked that stranger because another man asked him to, he’d crossed a line. He hadn’t been angry, or vengeful. He didn’t cry. He called the kid’s bet, that’s all. He explained that not many people had this ability, which had been both a good and a bad thing. He did it and then he forgot it.
Remorse was for suckers, Abie explained to Thelma. “I know guys like that. I just wasn’t one of them. I didn’t want to get caught. If I didn’t do it, somebody else would’ve.” He was just the blade, and someone bigger and meaner wielded the handle. He reminded Thelma that a person had to enjoy the here and now because there wasn’t any heaven later. His pleasures weren’t fancy: not cuff links and champagne but bagels and broads, the taller the better. And she recognized she was more like Abie than Annie. She wanted pleasure in this life, not scraping for a secure future that might never arrive.
He made the papers again in early 1921, terrifying the nineteen-year-old Thelma and inspiring a heaping helping of vitriol from Annie. The police arrested him as a material witness to the murder of gangster Edward “Monk” Eastman, onetime head of the Eastman gang and veteran of both the US Army and Sing Sing. He’d made the war hero and gang boss mix work—but not for very long. The shooting had happened the day after Christmas at 4:00 a.m. outside the Blue Bird Café on Fourteenth Street and Fourth Avenue—three blocks from the family newsstand. Nothing transpired on Fourteenth Street that Abie didn’t know about—including the killing, which he explained was a fight about money that got out of hand. The bloodshed, which inspired Thelma to fear for her brother’s life, recalled the Rothman stabbing that had climaxed in a bloody pool in the same vicinity.
While the Eastman hit wasn’t a victimless crime, it could be viewed as gang warfare that didn’t imperil honest civilians. Abie coolly assured his sister that he’d just stumbled past the scene on the way to the newsstand. Despite the papers and the police interest, he’d assured Thelma he’d had nothing to do with the crime. She wanted to believe him, so she did; she refused to see him as the stock villain Annie claimed him to be. Since he didn’t snitch, ultimately the coppers stopped bothering him and he appeared justified in his protestations of innocence. As Abie explained, exit Eastman, enter another mobster to pay bribes and settle scores. He’d had a long run—and then he’d run out. In Abie’s opinion, there was no reason to pity the Monk, because he knew he wasn’t in the longevity business—and if he’d wanted a long life, he’d have been thankful to have survived the Great War and lived quietly on his pension.
Abie was more bothered on the night he slunk home wearing a wedding ring. Thelma had thought the gold band was a prop for some kind of scam, and in a way it was. He’d gotten a Jewish girl from the Bronx pregnant. Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Chersonsky, insisted he marry Tillie, who was a mere year older than Thelma. He rescued her from embarrassment, but Abie told his sister that was the last time he’d let anybody tell him what to do without a weapon to his head—and a baby was no shiv. He twisted the dull gold band on his finger as if it were a noose that only tightened more as he squirmed. At first, it hurt Thelma that she hadn’t been invited to her own brother’s wedding, and then he explained: it hadn’t been by choice, a mitzvah. He’d had more fun at his arrest—and he had no intention of inviting his sister to his hanging, either. Thelma knew he was kidding, but only just.
Thelma ended up comforting Abie, because he was so uncharacteristically pathetic, lamenting, “I married Tillie like I was supposed to, but she doesn’t take to me being who I am. I might as well have married my own mother, or Annie.” They both winced at the thought. That settled it: Thelma knew that her brother would never welcome another woman like their sister into his life by choice. “I’ll pay. It was my putz, after all. I don’t begrudge a dime. But I’m not sticking around and praying.”
The following September, Abie made the Standard Union, which boasted that it had the largest circulation of any Brooklyn newspaper. Only days before Tillie delivered on September 14, Detectives Dowling and Miller arrested “Little Yiddle” at the corner of Broadway and Chambers for assault and robbery. He’d ambushed a jewelry salesman, Isidor Lipsky, in the foyer of his South Second Street apartment in their old neighborhood beneath the Williamsburg Bridge. Abie had snatched $2,127—a fortune—in cash and jewels. And he’d added his signature: the participation of two women who had preceded the theft, approaching the salesman in the hallway to inquire where the Rosenbergs lived. While the ladies distracted Lipsky, Abie pounced. He said it served the dumb schmuck right for carrying that kind of change in an immigrant neighborhood without a bodyguard.
Upon his arrest, the police captain, his lieutenants, the beat cops, the bail bondsman, and the judge all got their share of the take, and Abie was back out on the streets without a day served. It wasn’t so easy slipping the baby, who stuck around and grew, as these things do. He’d named the boy Julius, like Annie’s firstborn, after their father. Jonas had had the sense to escape Annie and Mama by any means necessary, leading Abie to refer to him as the lucky stiff. Annie made a bigger fuss out of the arrest than the arrival of her first nephew, but Abie didn’t think either of them was such a big deal. Julius was Tillie’s burden—she’d had, he confessed, wonderful tits. He’d only wanted to cop a feel, not feel as though he married a copper. If only she’d kept her drawers on like the good girl she’d claimed to be. All that moaning and sighing was not for him. He missed the contortionist, but she wouldn’t bend over for a married man.
During that time, Abie got Thelma a job as a shopgirl at Gertz’s Glove Sales and Repairs. It was on Pitkin Avenue, which was beginning to boom with the IRT elevated train to New Lots Avenue ushering in new residents and increased foot traffic. Mr. Gertz was a husky Orthodox Jew with teddy-bear ears and shifty dark eyes too small for his giant brisket of a head. He was furtive and secretive by nature, no natural salesman, particularly because he appeared to recoil at the sight of women’s hands. While Thelma worked for him, he remained in a state of consta
nt fearful agitation, which kept his sweat glands working overtime. Women would enter the shop, setting off the tolling of the bell, take a sniff, and retreat.
The narrow store fronted Pitkin Avenue. Disembodied hands covered in cloth and leather crammed the single display window, elegantly pointing toward a heaven that must exist. It was best not to peer too closely, as hell was a graveyard of flies that, having thrown themselves once too often against the glass, fell dead of exhaustion, their gossamer wings collecting dust, buzzing no more. Stacks of cardboard boxes of dove gray and mustard lined shelves on three sides of the store. They contained every model and size imaginable and some unimaginable things. Mr. Gertz kept tight track of inventory, occasionally looking over one monstrous shoulder and then the other before fingering a box from the middle of a column, clutching it to the ledge above his belly and moving surprisingly lightly to the rear, which held a small windowless office backing onto the alley.
In that airless back room, the real business occurred, which provided the reason for Thelma’s ease of employment. The bachelor Gertz had two primary problems: he’d never met a pair of dice he didn’t want to throw until his luck ran out, and he had a mother who believed the sun rose and set on his broad back. He was, in his mama’s opinion, a giant among men, the repository of all her affection and shmaltz after his father passed and bequeathed the business to his only son. She called him Ketzele, or little kitten, which was what Abie and the boys now called him. Sometimes they would just meow as if they were in heat, a raucous chorus of men who had no love for cats. These shadow businessmen were the sweat that dampened Gertz’s armpit hair and raised the physical stink that arose from fear that they would tell his mother he’d been a very bad boy. The lads, Abie included, had no interest in gloves, although they weren’t above grabbing a few boxes for their girlfriends; what they liked was that it was largely a cash business with a legitimate delivery operation, which they used to move money around Brooklyn like a personal courier system.
Despite being forced upon Gertz, Thelma enjoyed working for the mama’s boy. He was, if not happy for the help, then at least polite. He seemed to sense that she meant him no harm. She was a punctual worker and could sell kid gloves to the biggest pinchpenny while kibitzing with anyone who entered, never forgetting the quirks of a finger, the size of a hand, and airing out the salesroom when the owner’s stench became toxic. She went so far as to make a deal with Spritzer’s Perfumerie de France down the block to exchange gloves for scent, posting a little card on the counter with a 10 percent discount coupon. Spritzer the younger, still a bachelor at forty-eight, flooded her with samples, tiny vials, and doll-size flasks—and once even slipped a tiny bottle of racy Chanel No. 5 into her pocketbook.
As an added bonus, she had a hand model’s slender long digits and could now afford the blue-red polish that made her shapely nail beds movie-star glamorous. While at work, she typically covered up with the prim white gloves called shorties that bore pearly wrist buttons so small they were almost impossible to fit into their holes. On slow days, or when men entered purchasing items for their wives or mistresses, she modeled the exotics: black lace gauntlets or, her favorite, buttercup suede opera gloves that rose over her elbows and made her feel so much more elegant than Pitkin Avenue deserved.
Most of the time it was boring the way it was for most clerks, a lot of time on her feet, chewing gum then swallowing it when the doorbell tolled. Because Gertz got flustered at such close quarters, brushing against a woman with beautiful hands, he often disappeared, leaving the shop to her. On the rare afternoons when Abie and his friends took over the back, Thelma did as instructed and ignored them in the spirit of ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. The gang tended to work the night shift, leaving detailed instructions for Gertz in a locked drawer for the next morning.
This setup granted Thelma hours of unmolested quiet, allowing her to flip through Photoplay between customers. Jutting her hips against the counter, she joined the rest of American womanhood mesmerized by Rudolph Valentino’s eyes. She’d even gone so far as buying a cheap aluminum frame and clipping a magazine portrait, placing it beside her bed as if he were her sultry sweetheart. In 1922, Blood and Sand and The Young Rajah premiered. She’d become hooked the previous year with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Sheik, occasionally dragging her Italian girlfriends to the Rialto in Manhattan if she could lure them away from their kids with the promise of Valentino. As much as she loved her schoolmates, she knew how overwhelmed they were and was in no rush for the obligations of pregnancy and marriage. Her time would come, but in the meantime, that left her available for the movie star if he ever made his way to Brooklyn.
In the pages of Photoplay, she learned Valentino had been born Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla a year after Abie. Unable to find work in his native Italy, Valentino sailed to Manhattan via Ellis Island and would have been welcome among the Williamsburg immigrants she knew so well. The movie star was dark, not fair like Giorgio. Tall and slim, he slicked his hair back with Vaseline (leading to the nickname Rhubarb Vaselino, a character Stan Laurel played in the spoof Mud and Sand), exposing smoldering eyes that always seemed to be looking deeply into her own and mining her soul.
Sure, there was the first marriage that ended abruptly on his wedding night and was swiftly annulled. The gossip columns exploded with it, along with the bigamy charges when he remarried less than a year later, the legal limit, in May 1922 in Mexicali, Mexico. Earlier, he’d testified in a lady friend’s divorce case that her husband had strayed and, not much later, the wife had shot and killed her ex. Life was messy for Valentino, but Thelma was no one to judge. He was complicated. She wasn’t seeking a saltine. And although American men tended to question his masculinity, preferring the swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks, they hadn’t a clue about the power of Rudy’s smolder on the opposite sex, the broody mystery behind his eyes that led to his appeal. She’d take him up to her room anytime, even if that meant passing the gauntlet of Annie and Mama. Wouldn’t that shock the old shrews?
After she’d been working for about a year, a young stranger crossed the threshold as if she’d wished him into being with her dreams of Valentino. The bell tolled. Tall, black haired, and handsome, although pale skinned where her matinee idol was tan, he first entered the shop the week before the high holy days. Harried, she glanced up and caught his eye and smiled, as she would for any customer, her practiced salesgirl welcome that expressed “I’ll be with you shortly.” His dark eyes slid shyly to the left, as if her gesture were more freighted.
Female customers taking their time making a serious wardrobe choice with the few pennies they had to spend packed the small sales floor. He patiently waited his turn, fedora in hand, as first one bubbe and then the next tried to stuff their swollen hands into white gloves the size they’d worn at their weddings. By the time the man’s turn arrived, he’d found his smile. He stood at the counter surrounded by a pack of wives and mothers clucking and shifting their paper-wrapped purchases from a day shopping on Pitkin Avenue.
The stranger addressed Thelma leisurely, as if they were the only people in the crowded shop and he had all the time in the world. “Can you show me some gloves?”
“You’ve come to the right place,” she said. “Are they for you?”
“For my mother,” he said.
“What size?”
“She has tiny hands. Do you have size five?”
“We do, but are you sure?”
“Positive.” She began with the less expensive models, but he examined the material carefully, turning them over in his attractive square hands, rolling them between his thumb and forefinger and then rejecting them with a shake of his head. She noticed his fingertips trembling slightly but didn’t comment. After she laid out the items of better and best quality, he chose the most luxurious yet conservative styles, two pairs of white fabric with pearl buttons. He paused, smiling to himself, and, as if having a l
ast-minute inspiration, sent Thelma back to the stock boxes for soft leather longs in jet-black, which made him smile again when she placed their best pair before him. The sale would thrill Gertz, because they rarely sold that quality, particularly in a size five, and they were dear.
Around the gentleman, the other shoppers were growing restless but, having waited his turn, he took his time and Thelma didn’t rush him. He paid in new bills, and she noticed his wallet was pebbled brown leather and full, embossed with the gilded initials P. S. It screamed that he was too fancy for her. She wrapped his purchases carefully, despite the teeth sucking of the impatient matron in line behind him. And when she handed him his parcel, he tipped his hat to her, replaced it on his head, and didn’t smile. Instead, he looked her deeply in the eyes, no longer shy, and she could have sworn he’d stolen that soulful smolder from her Valentino.
Thelma’s knees might have buckled but she had to snap immediately to attention when Mrs. Hirscheimer clucked forward, squinting her eyes in disapproval. The kosher butcher’s wife demanded to see those same black-leather longs in a size eight, admiring them, tugging them on, pulling them off, setting them aside and picking them up again before buying a more humble fabric pair. She spread out an assortment of change down to the last penny owed and hawkishly watched Thelma count them.
After the high holy days, Thelma often saw the young man who’d bought the store’s priciest gloves strolling past Pitkin Avenue. It was a busy thoroughfare and she assumed he lived nearby. If she was looking up, he’d tip his hat and smile enigmatically. Sometimes he’d stand outside the window and imitate the plaster display models, raising a hand and posing his graceful fingers. She began to nurse that kind of crush one developed for a stranger, feeling the charge when she saw him through the window, unconsciously seeking him out as she crossed Pitkin Avenue toward Montauk. One chilly day, she felt a warmth on her cheek and looked up to see him looking at her, only to have him tip his hat and walk away. It was a game of catch—he saw her, she saw him—an impossible flirtation. She wondered what it would be like to talk to him outside the store, just the two of them, but she didn’t know what to say. How long could they talk about whether his mother liked her gloves?