Bittersweet Brooklyn: A Novel

by Thelma Adams

  In January, Solomon returned. The cycle of despair reset. From the outside, it was such a pretty redbrick house, so graceful in detail, a place to put down roots shaded by a mature tree.

  Later that year, the voters elected Herbert Hoover, and the younger Schwartzes had begun to find each other through the gloom. They didn’t go out as much as when they were single, but they always held hands and treated each other tenderly. They found simple kindnesses—a hot-water bottle brought before bedtime, breakfast on a tray with a bright daffodil in winter—to demonstrate that theirs was the true bond they’d always believed it to be. They went to the Kinema, but Phil never felt like leaving the neighborhood to go to the Roseland. Instead, he looted the household money to upgrade the family Gramophone. He began to collect jazz records. They loved George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter, “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and “Blue Skies.” Phil would shave in the evening so that Thelma would have a smooth place to rest her cheek, and, having pushed the heavy living room furniture aside, they would swing dance in the middle of the Persian carpet. They moved together effortlessly, two bodies as one, hip to hip, loose limbed, so whether they were in their living room or at the Roseland, they were in heaven. They were less showy and more fluid than in public. Even Minnie would lean in at the door and smile, strangling a kitchen cloth.

  The couple was scratching their way back toward happiness, one fox-trot at a time. They even began to discuss maybe, just maybe, having a kid, their little schmuck. They’d name him after her brother Louis, maybe calling him Lawrence or Leonard; Laura if she was a girl. Sometimes Phil would get a burst of energy and Thelma would grab on, pulling him out the door before his mother could piss on their adventures. The older woman warned that they’d catch their death—but they figured it was coming anyway and would find them inside or out.

  The couple loved exploring Brooklyn in the winter, seeing icicles dripping off Coney Island’s Cyclone, walking among the beautiful town houses of Brooklyn Heights, choosing which one they’d buy if they struck it rich, wishing for sanctuary up the elegant stoops, behind the leaded glass as the grainy snow swirled around them. They merged for warmth, sharing his coat, her scarf. If they heard their favorite tunes, they’d dance right on the street, misbehaving as the somber homes of the establishment stood in stony judgment.

  Phil introduced Thelma to Green-Wood Cemetery. For privacy, they entered at the bank on Fort Hamilton Parkway. Arms linked, they climbed the grounds’ sloping drive with its six-sided paving stones, the crypts to their right, minimansions of death surrounded by angels with raised, wind-bitten hands. He led her to the graves of the famous: composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Boss Tweed, and Horace Greeley. Civil War Union general Henry Wager Halleck rested near Confederate general Nathaniel Harrison Harris, who surrendered at Appomattox. There was even a horse somewhere and a handful of faithful dogs.

  It was luxuriously quiet in the enormous cemetery, built to be both park for the living and repository for the dead. In wintry January, the lawns were burned and crunchy. Overhead, crows gathered atop twisted trees, glaring down intruders. It was spooky and foreboding despite the spirits refusing to manifest themselves and howl. They ascended a gentle hill under Mr. Loftus Wood’s stern gaze, his statue presiding over the family mausoleum with one stone hand stuffed in his vest. They were beneath him, even in his loneliness.

  Leaving the path, Philip wandered over the graves into the Boggs family plot. Thelma followed, trying to avoid squashing someone’s skull beneath her toe. They read the stones together: patriarch William, born December 10, 1838, had died September 5, 1913. He’d had two wives named Sarah. The inscription on the gravestone of the first read, “Very pleasant hast thou been unto me. Thy love to me was wonderful.” She looked at Phil to smile, but he seemed lost in thought; should she pull him back from wherever he was or let him wander? She waited, daring to recline on Sarah E.’s grave, smelling the damp and wet earth while doves cooed in the shrubs. A dry leaf turned over nearby.

  The sky became gray and close, clouds huddling together for warmth. There would be snow later in the day. She felt her heart expand: at this moment they lived more fully in the present than anyone else they knew—except for Abie. They would be a couple from now until long after death. It was something wonderful and, yes, pleasant, especially here in the shared silence away from their families. She glanced down a long, gentle slope, deciding to roll to the bottom, spontaneous, doing something a married woman wasn’t supposed to do in a graveyard.

  “Hey, Phil,” she said, breaking the silence, “catch me.” She pushed off, rolling hip over hip on the dead grass, gathering speed.

  “Wait for me.” She heard Phil drop and roll behind her. Over her shoulder, she saw him stop between revolutions and push off again, until they heaped together at the bottom, tangling arms, legs, removing grass from his crow-black hair, her antic curls. Phil helped Thelma up and they climbed the hill again, Phil tugging her hand as he danced ahead of her. They rolled again, smelling the sweet, damp earth, observed by the critical birds. They tumbled together: Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz. He rolled. She rolled, seeing first sky, then earth, then sky.

  As they knitted back together, the times began to change. The ’20s had roared right into the Depression. On Black Thursday, October 24, the stock market began to plummet, crashing the following Tuesday. The events unfolded in newspaper headlines like that of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle: “Wall Street in Panic as Stocks Slide.” Suicides followed, although there was some questioning in the press as to whether the rate was actually increasing. That seemed academic when confronted with the images of the jumpers of ’29—rich one day, broke the next—who launched themselves out of skyscrapers and off bridges. Others turned on the gas or loaded their guns or put stones in their pockets and slid into the Hudson River. They couldn’t block the images: fallen bankers arms akimbo on the sidewalk, bodies on the crumpled roofs of automobiles. Nervous breakdowns spiked.

  As the economy tanked, so did Phil’s tenuous optimism. The following year, the Great Depression engulfed the country, a gaseous plague. During those months, Phil had good weeks and bad, joining Thelma in their bed and then retreating to his boyhood bedroom. He visited doctors for treatment and showed signs of improvement. One medical man took Thelma aside and suggested that if the couple had a baby, Phil would rise to the challenge of fatherhood and be cured.

  In late March, after walking through the cherry blossoms at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the couple conceived. She bloomed, but the pregnancy seemed to have the opposite effect on her husband. After early hopefulness, he began to have headaches and insomnia, which he medicated with vodka and gin, passing out facedown on his single bed and sleeping through the daylight hours. He stopped eating.

  Phil promised he loved Thelma but insisted she lacked the power to rescue him. “There’s nothing to save,” he told her late one night through a cigarette-smoke haze. “Let me go.”

  “Hold on, for me, for the baby.” She couldn’t coax him out from behind the mask of sadness that resembled him but lacked his animation. She saw what he’d look like old, with crumpled forehead and hollow eyes, but worried he’d die young. “Please, Phil, hold on.”

  “How can I explain that your love won’t rescue me? It’s not enough. That sounds like I’m blaming you, Temmy. I’m not. Nobody’s love can make me whole. We had our dance. It was grand. There’s no one else. But now it’s over, at least for me. Whatever the doctors promised about getting pregnant scaring me sane, those quacks were just trying to think of something to say. You demanded they tell you something, so they did.”

  After that, Phil stopped speaking for days at a time, then weeks, retreating into his books and cigarettes, never venturing farther than the stoop. Loneliness returned like smog. Nothing had ever hurt so hard. On a sunny September Sunday, she sat in their front bedroom, feeling the baby kick impatiently beneath her swollen fingers. On the bed, Phil lay sleeping in his drab pajamas, curled in a ball, oblivious and l
ost inside himself. She could hear Minnie crying in the kitchen, alone. It was an unbearable solitude that she tried to counter by sheltering the second heartbeat inside her body.

  At 2:00 a.m. on December 9, 1930, Thelma went into labor, the liquid splashing the floorboards between her legs. After mopping the spill, Pearl held Thelma’s hand. They dispatched the neighbor’s boy to get help and then collapsed into hysterical laughter. Neither knew the first thing about what came next. They shared the window seat while Thelma’s contractions increased. Hours passed, and they both turned serious as the city slumbered and Phil remained behind a locked door, refusing to come out despite his sister’s entreaties. Other than the midwife, the teenager was the only witness to the swirling hell that was Lawrence’s birth, the baby upside down and backward, a cord encircling his neck. The old woman put her arm up to the elbow in Thelma and made a worried click with her tongue, her ear resting like a dried peach on the ballooned belly. Thelma felt intense pain at the top of her womb as the old woman shoved the baby up to the roof of her insides to ease the umbilical.

  She wailed, “Save the child, take me instead!”

  She cried, “Philip!”

  Convinced that she and the baby were both disappearing from the earth, she believed they’d beat the father to the grave. She felt the darkness, the dirt hitting her coffin. But, miraculously, they survived, the ordeal ending for the new mother with an under-the-counter laudanum cocktail as Pearl held the boy who arrived with all his fingers and toes, his little schmuck encased in foreskin.

  Grandpa Solomon soon returned regularly on Friday nights to assume his place at the table’s head as if nothing had changed. He presided over the child’s bris and expected his grandson to be quiet during dinner. The birth did not improve his opinion of Thelma but, for a while, he tolerated her. He promised that, no matter what happened, he would always be responsible for the child’s Hebrew education. She didn’t understand the implied “and nothing else.” He hadn’t become rich by being generous.

  As the months passed, Solomon became increasingly angry and righteous. Phil didn’t magically rise to the demands of fatherhood and seek work. Solomon didn’t expect much: let him sell ties on Pitkin Avenue. He railed at his son for not pulling himself together. He wished he still had the body of a young man like Phil, and his book learning and command of English; if it were him, he’d take over the world.

  Around the high holy days, Solomon launched a virulent attack on Phil, who had made it to the table and contributed his voice—cracking and out of practice—to the prayers, blessing the apple slices dipped in honey. For Thelma, this return gave her hope for a future sweetness. They’d ridden out another attack and he’d improve, slowly, with tenderness and empathy. She’d done it before, letting the nervous attacks run their course, even if they’d lengthened. She found the patience she’d never had, the forbearance of a child bride in the old country unraveling a knotted skein of yarn to prove herself fit for marriage. And she got her small rewards: every once in a while, Phil had put on the Gramophone and played “You Were Meant for Me,” even if now they only did an awkward box step.

  During Rosh Hashanah, Solomon apparently decided to put his house in order. Perhaps he thought he was fixing a problem as he might have treated a tenant who refused to pay or negotiated a building’s sale. He threatened Phil, “Either you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, sonny boy, and get a job, or I call the doctors and commit you. Either you belong in the world or you don’t: choose! You’re a father now. You need to act like one, or I’ll throw you and your wife and baby out on your ears.”

  “No!” Minnie wailed.

  Phil stared at his mother, his face contorted. He’d become emaciated, his eye sockets protruding, his good suit baggy. He removed his napkin from his lap and set it by his plate of hardly eaten food. Thelma witnessed it. He was going under the wave. He’d just needed a final excuse to surrender. Thelma tried to catch his gaze, but he looked down. He said the kaddish, the prayer for the dead, closing his eyes and rocking. He thanked his mother, apologized to Thelma as if she were a stranger whose toes he’d clumsily stomped on the dance floor, and went upstairs. He’d sat down at the table as one survivor struggling forward, and he rose with an unstable manic lightness.

  Within an hour, a bang on the front door heralded two oversize men in white coats embossed with “Brooklyn State Hospital” who failed to wipe their steel-toed boots as they entered.

  “Take my son,” Solomon said, leading the burly strangers upstairs as Minnie began to scream Yiddish obscenities at her husband and Pearl cleaved to her mother. Thelma pursued, reaching the second floor, where her father-in-law bent over the lock on Phil’s bedroom door, using the passkey he kept for delinquent tenants. At the front of the house, Lawrence shrilled from his crib like an untended kettle. But she let him scream as she watched the door fall open, revealing Phil. He lay on his bed in his slippers, smoking a cigarette, his hand shaking. He glanced up from his book, surprised, his eyes wide in their protruding sockets. His mouth moved, but words failed him.

  Thelma rushed forward. One of the orderlies seized her elbow. Her body bent toward the pain point where he cinched her. It gave her a taste for the medicine awaiting Phil at the institution. The other man unfurled a straitjacket. Resigned, Phil seemed to have regained his composure, rising and extending his hands as if being measured by a tailor. She needed him to fight, to struggle, to lose his composure to regain his freedom. She wondered if Phil believed his father would relent once the elder Schwartz had imposed his will on his son completely. She realized before Phil did that this was no pantomime—she’d learned the lengths family could go when Mama and Annie had shunted her brothers to the orphanage.

  Once swaddled in the starched coat—his arms immobilized and cinched behind his back—panic consumed Phil. His wild eyes found Thelma’s, pleading, don’t let these monsters steal his identity. His autonomy was all he had left. Even if he still breathed and swallowed, he was dead without his will. She feared he’d never be the same if these cruel men took him away; terror twisted her features, not reassurance—and so his eyes filled with dread.

  Freed by the hospital worker, Thelma now had Pearl clinging to her waist while Minnie knelt at Solomon’s cuffs, begging her husband to relent, saying, “Solomon, he’s a good boy. We’ll take better care of him. We won’t cause you any trouble.”

  “He’s not a boy, Minnie—he’s a man. You spoiled him. Now I’ve taken care of the problem once and for all. He won’t cause any trouble to anybody outside the hospital. What’s done is done.”

  “You can’t do this to my husband, Solomon,” Thelma said.

  “Watch me,” he said. “If you can’t take care of this situation, I will. Either today will scare Philip sane, or the doctors will cure him.”

  “That’s not your decision to make.”

  “When you pay the rent, you make the rules,” Solomon said. He turned his back on Thelma, following the orderlies who manhandled Phil downstairs, lifting him when he struggled and kicked so that his feet didn’t touch the wood. Her father-in-law straightened a framed photo that had been knocked askew in the fray.

  Thelma heard Phil yelling all the way out into the street and felt helpless, split in two. She entered their bedroom overlooking Wyona Street and watched the orderlies stuffing her man into an automobile like sausage meat, as they joked to each other before driving away. It was the absence that cut more than anything that preceded it. She stood in their bedroom, thinking she’d failed that beautiful man. He’d warned her that she couldn’t save him, but she’d known better—until she didn’t.

  The baby’s wailing pulled her reluctantly back to the present. She turned toward the crib and picked him up, feeling the soaked diaper through her sleeve. Spreading a towel on the bed, she laid him out, his face spitting angry, as she wrestled with the unruly pins, removed the sour cotton, crying along with him.

  Afterward, Thelma settled Larry in the middle of her bed and climbed in
beside him, curling around the baby, comforting him as she wished she could comfort her husband. She assured him everything would be fine—she’d find a way, she’d break his father out, they’d be happy again, the three of them. She fell asleep fully dressed with Larry cuddled in her arms, her nose in the freshness of baby.

  At dawn, without knocking, Solomon entered carrying a suitcase. “Minnie wants you out,” he said. Thelma’s arguments had no more impact on her father-in-law than Phil’s had on the orderlies. Begging, pleading, or threatening: he was impervious. She sensed he wanted to escape the house as much as she wanted to remain near the bed she’d shared with Phil. He said, “I’m leaving now. Either you pack or you leave everything behind. It doesn’t matter to me.”

  He drove her to Montauk Avenue, dropped them off, and sped away. As she climbed the stoop, she anticipated the fight to come with Annie. Distraught, mother and son crying, she tried to open the door, only to find the locks changed. Her anger swelled up in her before she even saw Annie’s face. She craved tenderness and empathy and, for that, even as she rapped on the wood, she knew she was knocking on the wrong door. This was the last place she wanted to be—and she knew that her sister would exploit her homecoming to the hilt.

  Annie opened up a crack, her platinum hair newly shellacked from the beauty salon. “Well, if it isn’t the queen of Sheba,” she sneered, relishing the moment. “I was wondering when you’d come crawling back with that brat. Did those fancy-schmancy Schwartzes put you out with the trash?”

  “Just let us in and shut your trap,” Thelma snapped, crossing the threshold and heading toward her bedroom when Annie seized her upper arm.