Bittersweet Brooklyn: A Novel

by Thelma Adams

  “You’re in the room at the top of the stairs.”

  “The broom closet?”

  “It has four walls, doesn’t it? It’s a room.”

  “Who’s sleeping in my bed?”

  “It’s not Goldilocks; it’s Eli. He needs light and air for his schoolwork—he’s going to be the first Lazarus to go to City University.”

  “I’d go to college, too, if it meant escaping you.”

  “He’s a good boy who loves his mother.”

  “I’m guessing he doesn’t know you weren’t wearing kid gloves when you raised me and my brothers. There’s something seriously wrong with you, lady, and Abie and I can bear witness. You sent our brothers to college, too—the school for violent criminals, that orphanage. Do you have any idea what happened to him and Louis there? I doubt it. What would he have been like if he was spoiled like your precious kids? You threw us under the train and took everything you could grab—the cash from the newsstand, this house, Mama. I’m happy to share those sweet family memories with my nephews and niece now that they’re old enough to understand who their mother really is.”

  “If I’m so rotten, turn around and you never have to see me again.”

  “This house is as much mine as yours.”

  “Not anymore, sweetheart. I live here. I take care of Mama while you’re off dancing and dropping your knickers. Do you pay the mortgage or the electric? You never even paid the milkman, you schnorrer.”

  “Me, a schnorrer? That’s rich, Annie. If it weren’t for Abie, you’d be living on Hooper Street taking in laundry. Abie made Lazarus & Sons, not your lapdog Jesse. You don’t buy a house selling newspapers. You did the books. You know the score.”

  “Abie’s a dirty goniff. They didn’t kill him last time, but he’s not going to be so lucky when it happens again. I’ve been telling you for years: don’t depend on him.”

  Thelma shook her head as the baby tried to wiggle loose. “Lay off, you fat bitch.”

  “Spoken by the round-heeled floozy that makes Popeye’s Olive Oyl look like a great beauty,” Annie shrilled. “Is that even Phil’s baby? I doubt it, with him sick in the head. He was the only man crazy enough to marry you when he could get the milk for free.”

  Thelma knew that kick in the chest. It was as familiar as breath. Her sister pushed every button until the little sister lashed out with something uglier, until she became so angry that it was her flaming rage that became the problem, not the evil that prompted it. She wouldn’t go back. She wouldn’t get sucked in. She considered her beautiful Phil and grasped his love, ending the conversation by saying, “I’m going upstairs to cry. And when I’m done, I’ll cry some more. Take Lawrence. He’s hungry.”

  The baby almost slipped through the sisters’ fingers as Annie tried to deflect the imposition, but Thelma insisted. “Just don’t burn him. I’ll be upstairs in my closet. Let me know if you need the dustpan.”

  During that time, Thelma returned to North Eighth Street to visit the Gigantiellos’ apartment in Our Lady of Mount Carmel parish above the Knights of Columbus. She brought the baby, ascending the familiar steps and then turning around, ashamed of her sadness and fearing she might be unwelcome. She descended halfway with Lawrence in her arms, then spun around and ran upstairs, the way a swimmer might leap into a cold ocean so that there was no retreat.

  A brown-eyed girl of ten or so answered the door with high seriousness, demanding to know who the stranger was and what she wanted. Thelma paused before the child that resembled Nina in everything except her shyness and said, “I’m Thelma and—”

  “Stuzzicadenti!” cried a woman’s voice from beyond the door that the child guarded with her slight body that was beginning to sprout but had not yet bloomed. “My stuzzicadenti! Entra!”

  Crossing the threshold, she encountered a swarm of children who crawled and skipped their way around Thelma as Mama Allegra, carrying her wooden spoon, exited the kitchen in her apron to welcome the guest. She plucked Larry from Thelma, burying her lips in his cheeks and then cradling him in her well-worn baby place of comfort. This was a woman who could cook a holiday meal for twenty with a child on her hip. After he stopped fussing, she lifted him up to get a good look. “A beauty . . . like his mama.”

  Thelma’s eyes moistened at a greeting that couldn’t have been more different from Annie’s reception. “I’m sorry it’s been so long,” she said, hanging her head.

  “You’ve been a little busy.” Mama Allegra shrugged. Her hair had gone silver so that the elaborate braid encircling her head seemed crownlike. “But here you are, bringing me a baby boy. What’s to apologize? What’s his name?”

  “Lawrence, after my brother Louis.”

  “May he rest in peace having known the hell of war.” Mama Allegra bounced the child, shifting him so that his head was over her shoulder, and he burped.

  The grandchildren laughed, and the girl who’d opened the door explained, “No burp can escape Nana.”

  Looking on proudly, Mama Allegra said to the girl, “Teresina, fetch your mama from her nap.”

  “I don’t want to wake her,” Thelma said, putting up her hands and rising as if it were already time to depart.

  “Sit! I haven’t fed you yet, and Nina won’t want to miss you!” said Mama Allegra. “Look at this baby! Bright eyes! Occhi vivaci!”

  Mama Allegra continued to cuddle and coddle the son, requesting a child to bring her a handkerchief before wiping Larry’s nose, patting his bottom, and asking, “A change soon, maybe?”

  “I forgot to bring . . . ,” Thelma began, embarrassed. Her visit had been spontaneous, a walk around the block becoming a train ride out of East New York to the old neighborhood.

  “No problem, Temmelina,” said Mama Allegra. “You think we don’t have diapers?”

  “We have plenty of diapers,” said Nina, who appeared in the doorway. Wan and tired, she carried an infant low in her belly. Looking at her school friend, she patted her stomach and said, “Octavia or Octavio: the eighth.”

  “Always with the math,” Thelma teased, rising to hug her friend, who fell into her arms.

  “I have a head for algebra,” said Nina, “and a body for childbirth.” She bent her knees and reached back to the sofa with one hand before lowering her tailbone onto the cushions. “My Tonio works day and night to support the family, but he won’t stop making babies.”

  “Nina is the envy of the neighborhood,” crowed Mama Allegra.

  “Right, Mama, I’m the regular Madonna of North Eighth Street.” Nina laughed.

  “Shh! If Our Lady of Mount Carmel hears you, she might teach you a lesson for your pride,” said Nina’s mother, raising her wooden spoon in warning.

  “Let her teach,” said Nina. “You just missed Giorgio.”

  “Giorgio,” said Mama Allegra, shaking her head sorrowfully, patting the behind of the now sleeping baby.

  “He’s happy, yes?” Thelma said, trying to navigate the shoals of conversation. She remembered the pair of them pushing against each other in the darkened stairwell, and blushed. It had been so long since she’d thought of him and what she remembered were his broad shoulders and how they felt under her hands. It wasn’t a memory she wanted to have while sitting across from his mother.

  “He’s happy not so much,” said Mama Allegra.

  “It’s the wife that’s unhappy,” said Nina. “She spent the day kneeling in front of Our Lady, praying for a healthy child.”

  “Doesn’t he have children?” asked Thelma.

  “They come,” said the grandmother. “They go.”

  Not knowing how to respond, Thelma said, “I’m sorry.”

  “We’re all sorry,” said Mama Allegra, “but this is life. Nina wants a moment of peace to read a book between children, and Giorgio would give his right arm for one healthy boy. And look at this: you arrive out of nowhere today with this beautiful boy, a blessing.”

  “A mitzvah,” said Thelma, shaking her head in agreement without looking eithe
r woman in the eyes.

  “Tell us about your husband,” Mama Allegra asked.

  “I love him.” Thelma looked away. “And he loves me.”

  “Then why the sad eyes?” Mama Allegra asked.

  “They took him away.” Thelma pointed to her head, because she couldn’t say the words out loud. “Brooklyn State Hospital.”

  “Here, Nina, take the baby,” said Mama Allegra. She looked at Thelma and said, “Come. I’ll braid your hair. Teresina, fetch the brush.”

  The older woman took the younger mother’s head into her lap and brushed the wild curls until they unsnarled and Thelma became relaxed and heavy. She felt a sharp tug and then another. “A gray,” Mama Allegra said. “My Giorgio was serious about you and I wouldn’t let him be. You were too young, but so was Nina. I thought life was a stew I had to mix. I gave my blessing to a neighborhood girl. He married into a good family—too good. They treat my golden boy like tar. Who knows where the road leads and, still, I pretend to stand at the fork and point as if I know the way.”

  After that reunion, Thelma often left the baby with the Gigantiellos when she went to visit Phil. Thelma knew in her gut that robbing Phil of agency would be the death of him. Still, she was unprepared for the man she found at the enormous Brooklyn State Hospital at the corner of Albany Avenue and Winthrop Street three miles west of Wyona Street. He showed no light of recognition when she entered the lounge, where he sat slumped over in institutional pajamas and worn slippers. He had drool in his stubble and his jaw was slack, revealing broken teeth on the bottom gums. He blinked as if cigar smoke stung his eyes. She sat with him for an hour, stroking his hand, sending out beams of love from her heart through her fingertips so that he’d know she was there, that she adored him. His left eye twitched. The sides of his head were shaved, and there were skin burns from the electrodes.

  When she began to talk about Lawrence, Phil became agitated, standing up and sitting down, standing up and sitting down, so that other inmates of the room began to repeat his motion, rising and falling, rising and falling, until a barrel-chested old man pointed an accusatory finger and said, “Guards, arrest him!” The white coats came and removed Phil like a boy who had sneaked under the tent and into the circus and must form a lesson to all the other sneaky boys.

  Thelma returned every day, but, after that first visit, she wasn’t welcome. Initially, she believed that it was the doctors who refused to let her pass, until a Dr. Nelson came to the nurses’ station and told her flatly that Philip didn’t want her there. He softened briefly and said, “Your husband doesn’t want you to see him like this.”

  “Will he get better?” she asked.

  “I’m a doctor, not a fortune-teller. Hope for the best; expect the worst.”

  “You’re not much of a greeting card, either, Doctor.”

  The weather turned bitter as October faded. November spat rain in her face. Every day she sat on an iron bench in front of the hospital, an imposing redbrick structure that reminded her of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, where they’d dumped Abie and Louis. And every time she thought of that, a lump blocked her throat. The image of Louis and Abie sitting back-to-back on the orphanage floor in short pants, slaying dragons passing themselves off as Jewish children, haunted her. She wanted to spring Phil, but she didn’t know how. She could barely take care of Lawrence alone, but the two of them? That would never fly.

  One day, when it was pouring rain and she was soaked to the skin, a nurse in a white cap tucked under an oilskin ran toward her through the puddles. “He’s inconsolable,” the hospital worker said.

  “Why?” she asked, but the answer washed away with the storm.

  The man in the loose, stained pajamas she encountered in the locked ward who cried “Temmy” over and over wasn’t her husband. He was a lost child, emaciated, burn marks on both sides of his head, his teeth cracked and broken. “I’m so tired, sweetheart,” he said. Wet as she was, she embraced him, laid his head in her lap, and stroked around the scalp scabs until he settled down, humming “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

  She would watch over him every day if only he survived—but deep inside she knew that wasn’t her sophisticated Phil in the shabby cotton sack of bones. She could have saved him. She knew it. If she’d had more time, if old man Schwartz had left it alone. The shock treatments had sapped her husband’s will but not soothed his mind. Once he fell asleep, the nurse led her back out through one locked door and then the next until she couldn’t have found her way back to Phil with a loaf of bread crumbs.

  That night, he escaped into the courtyard, swallowing buckets of rainwater, like a turkey that looks up at the clouds and drowns. The certificate put the cause of death as acute exhaustion and acute mental disease. She blamed old man Schwartz, sitting in his Manhattan apartment, pulling strings with money attached, and she became enraged. She was angry that her beautiful dancing man had been ripped from her, that her love hadn’t been enough. A partner’s suicide was the ultimate form of abandonment.

  Chapter 28

  1932

  After Phil passed, their baby seemed to be the absolute denial of Thelma’s present situation. Larry adored her with bright eyes, a fat-cheeked child whose curly crown was the envy of bald men everywhere. He was quick to grin, but Thelma struggled to smile back in a way that reached eyes gummy with sleep. She failed at common tasks: mistakenly stabbing his chubby thighs with the unwieldy diaper pin. It wasn’t the kid’s fault. No natural mother, Thelma was Vesuvius angry and impatient.

  When she left Montauk Avenue, she wept on the el and in the corner grocery. She wasn’t alone. Given the desperate economy, grown men could be seen sobbing as they loitered outside the bank seeking day work. Arguing politics, socialists and communists battled over dogma and voiced frustration that they’d struggled so hard to raise their heads above water and now they were drowning along with their families. She walked in the neighborhood’s collective gloom, the arrogant widow Schwartz, who’d exchanged flapper dresses for shapeless black shifts. When women stopped her to compliment the sunny child smiling back at them, snug in his battered pram, she snickered sarcastically, and the strangers hurried past.

  Her father-in-law still blamed her for his son’s death, having buried Phil in the family plot at Mount Hebron Cemetery. He’d told his daughter-in-law that there was no space for her beside her husband when the inevitable occurred. She didn’t want the old man’s dirt pit, but she could have used child support. She was now dependent on the kindness of something worse than strangers: Mama and Annie.

  Uncle Abie dropped in occasionally, kvelling over his growing nephew without acknowledging how many months it had been since he’d visited last. She couldn’t depend on her brother, resenting his freedom to come and go while she remained with Annie and Mama. Abie gave her a camel-hair coat that had fallen off the back of a truck, as stylish as anything on sale at Saks Fifth Avenue. She looked askance at him, asking, “Do I look like Joan Crawford?” When he got huffy, saying he’d return it if he could find the receipt, she clung to it. She needed the fur-trimmed garment, however impractical, too fine for Larry’s perpetually sticky fingers.

  Sometimes Abie slipped Thelma cash, but she couldn’t rely on irregular handouts to move out and pay rent. Although he hadn’t been arrested since the shooting, he had his own problems—worry aged his face. When Thelma complained about their sister taking over the house, he shrugged, saying, “I got bigger fish to fry. Handle it.”

  She tried. She’d hoped now that she had a child she’d never be lonely, but, with her rage and bitterness, her hatred of being under Annie’s thumb, she had trouble achieving a sense of maternal connection. As he aged, the kid still irritated her: his constant neediness, his cries when he wanted milk and bread and when the spiky teeth forced themselves through his gums. He was a good sleeper, but he awoke with the energy of three children, and Thelma, increasingly plagued by insomnia, couldn’t keep up. Every day he grew, every new change, reminded her of time’s passage and
Phil’s absence. He was another child growing up in a house of mourning. Although she wanted to protect the hazel-eyed boy who began talking even before he pulled himself up around his first birthday and slung his small body like a drunken sailor across the living room, she found that she was as dry as a crone’s breast.

  Thelma either ignored or spoiled the child. As time passed, they celebrated his second and third birthdays. She hoped that by the time he could form his own memories she would have shed her grief and her guilt for believing that if she had a child, her late husband would magically improve. The boy became his own little man: antic and angry, affectionate and physical, intensely competitive and demanding always to be the center of attention. He never saw another child’s toy that he didn’t grab for himself. At times the three-year-old got so angry he bit his own arm.

  Annie called him “bed wetter” and “nose picker” and felt no responsibility to help raise Thelma’s son. Annie’s own well-behaved children were a generation older, now fifteen and twenty and twenty-two, and while they tolerated their cousin and occasionally tended him for short periods, their mother’s disgust tarnished their affection for their aunt. The house was theirs, and they swaggered in it from top to bottom, ignorant of how it had entered the family’s possession, treating Thelma and her bawling brat like poor relations.

  After Larry turned three, doctors diagnosed Mama with a congestive heart condition. Her ankles swelled with fluid; she retired her apron. “Don’t worry about me,” she’d say. “Oy, gevalt! I’m going to meet my Jonas.” Thelma didn’t tell her mother that her husband was probably looking down from heaven with his beloved first wife, in no hurry to welcome the second—and, if there were servants above, she’d probably be charged with scrubbing her predecessor’s halo.

  To escape their toxic home, Thelma would shlep Larry to the movies. It was bitter cold outside when she took him to see one of her favorites, It Happened One Night, at the Kinema around the corner. He almost ruined it, chattering the entire way through, running up and down the aisles, his mouth only quieted by licorice Twizzlers. The sugar powered another energy burst that spun into a tantrum when she tried to drag him out, landing him flat on his stomach beneath the marquee in a fit bigger than Clark Gable’s name in lights. The disgusted moviegoers glared at them. She’d come a long way from the glamour of Rudolph Valentino and Pola Negri, but Phil would have liked the movie. She missed him, and if he’d been around, she’d have given him a good piece of her mind. She wasn’t single-mother material.