Bittersweet Brooklyn: A Novel

by Thelma Adams

  When she was flush with Abie money, she spent it, vaguely aware that folks who can’t envision the future don’t save. She bought Larry new clothes and dressed him like a little man with a yellow tie and tweed short pants. His hair parted down the middle and slicked with Vaseline, they’d hit the soda fountain, splurging on grilled cheese and egg creams with Fox’s U-bet chocolate syrup. They’d sit side by side on red vinyl stools at the counter, with Larry wearing a paper hat that he’d schnorred from the soda jerk. He’d swivel back and forth and she’d let him, smoking a cigarette while they waited for their meal. He looked at her with such love, so grateful when she cut the crusts off his sandwich and wrapped them in a napkin to feed the birds at the park afterward—and she tried to mold a tender smile on lips that resisted. He was the same age she’d been when she’d hidden under the table with Schmulie’s lighter. She knew how much emotion—love and hate, curiosity and jealousy—came wrapped in that small package. They’d hold hands and walk to the park to feed the katchkas, the ducks, and she’d let him tire himself out chasing tail feathers while she created a small campfire of cigarette ash by her scuffed shoes. He’d run back and jump in her lap and she’d encourage him to lie down on the bench beside her, running her fingers through his hair, rubbing behind his ears, wiping the crust from his nose.

  But as he aged, days came when she hungered to revive her old life and rebelled against the constraints of single motherhood. Her magic leg was withering, and it tapped at the edge of the playground, calling out to her to go dancing. A Friday night arrived and she wanted to go to the Arcadia Ballroom, which wasn’t nearly as grand as the Roseland, but the dance floor was darker and she would find men to lean on all night long who wouldn’t care that she was over thirty. And so she went.

  When Larry was nearly five, he constantly asked where his father was. In the Philippines, she’d answer, or on a spy mission, or ice skating in Central Park with Sonja Henie. She’d tell the kid anything but on a lonely hill at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, surrounded by that snobby family of his. The truth hurt too much.

  Despite Phil’s assurances to the contrary, the guilt that she hadn’t saved him gnawed at her. She beat herself up, brooding if only she’d been different, stronger, less buffeted by Abie’s lawlessness, she might still have that beautiful slim man with the black hair and dark eyes, her dance partner and dear friend. Her hopes of creating a happy family in which she could be herself and radiate love, him leading her in a twirl, had evaporated before the music stopped.

  One Thursday, when Montauk Avenue seemed as cold and unforgiving as Annie, Thelma was leading Larry to the building on Sutter Avenue where the beggar/baby-minder Rivka squatted in a ground-floor room under the stairs. The five-year-old trailed behind Thelma, throwing pebbles in her direction, occasionally being bold enough to wing her.

  “Don’t run my stockings,” Thelma snapped, distracted and rushed, her hair curlers covered by a scarf. After dropping him off, she planned to return and finish dressing so that she could attend ladies’ night at the Arcadia Ballroom. Trudging behind her, Larry raged. She turned impatiently, just wanting to shimmy away the blues. He aimed another pebble, and her left hand struck out and snatched his throwing arm. She sensed she was overreacting, out of control. She unleashed her anger at the little man who didn’t deserve it, yet she couldn’t reel herself in once launched.

  Responding to the bruising grip on his arm as much as her gigantic anger, he cried out. The terrible sound cut through her. “I want my daddy,” he screamed.

  “Don’t we all, kid?” She stood, tapping her toe, confused: Turn around or continue? Pushed too far, she opened her mouth and spewed words she’d wanted to gift wrap with tenderness and empathy. “Wanna know where your father is? Dead and buried, just like mine. I’m all you’ve got.”

  “I have Annie,” he said, throwing a pebble at her nose with his left hand. It stung, but not as much as his words: “And I’ve got Eli and Adele and Julius and Uncle Moe. I love them. I don’t love you.”

  No object could have stung her like that phrase. She felt bathed in horror, shaking and furious, looking at that defenseless boy who only wanted affection and protection. He cut her a sour look, flashing hatred in eyes that mirrored hers. Snatching him by his curls, she hissed, “Stop it!”

  Larry’s body went slack on the sidewalk. Strangers hurried past, hurling sidelong glances. She felt shame mixed with anger, her head pounding. She squatted beside Larry and found herself begging him to get up, to come into her arms, but he shoved her away and she fell on her tailbone. She cursed herself that the love he wanted cost her nothing and yet was in such short supply. Trying to woo him back, she promised he could go to the Kinema and see Billy the Kid that Saturday. He brightened. She promised he could go, not that she would take him. She wasn’t even sure Billy the Kid was playing that Saturday. She recognized the beginning of mistrust in the squint of his eyes. Her heart cracked, but she didn’t change her plans. She was going dancing.

  Later that night in September 1935, when she returned from the Arcadia, her stockings ripped, a cigar hole in her camel-hair coat, she checked in on Mama before she went upstairs. The old woman lay on her back, her head raised on three pillows, her hands over the chenille as big as pot holders. Thelma sat down beside the bed, snapped open her garters, and unrolled the ruined stockings with a sigh. She stroked Mama’s scaly forehead, finally understanding how hard it was to nurture a child when you felt abandoned and couldn’t find anything to love about yourself.

  Chapter 29

  1935

  Mama lay in her nightdress, panting, when Thelma entered her bedroom beside the kitchen. She was so short of breath it was as if she’d just hung a load of sheets. But she hadn’t left the room in three days. It was Sunday afternoon, September 29, 1935, and for the past two years, since Dr. Pearlstine had begun to visit and diagnosed her with congestive heart failure, she’d been telling the family that she wasn’t going to live forever. Mama wasn’t going to sugarcoat that, but Annie’s response was always denial: “Ma, you’re going to live forever.”

  Live forever? As if Mama wanted to spend another day like this. Exhausted, she was a living lake, fluid around her heart, in her lungs, and pooling in ankles and feet bloated beyond recognition. If she remained still, her head propped on three pillows, a luxury of feathers, then it almost felt like the Sabbath, a day of rest without the responsibility of cooking, cleaning, the constant pointless drudgery, her shoulders always bent to the task as if she were carrying the dual-pailed yoke of her girlhood. She was still a little sister in her own eyes, in her dreams, barefoot and full breathed, capable of appreciating sunflowers and sharing warm breezes with the fields of wheat. But when she awoke and pinched the skin on the back of her hands, it didn’t snap back but remained raised and wrinkled—a crone’s skin.

  But at least she finally had her own kitchen under her own roof where no one would throw her out on the street or make her lie with a man she didn’t know. She thanked Annie for that, although that wasn’t who sat in the chair beside the bed. Thelma hummed while she read the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. She flapped the newsprint and looked over, saying, “Ah, you’re awake. Do you want me to read to you?”

  “If you want,” Mama said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Do you want some water?”

  “No more water. I’m drowning.”

  “All right, Mama Mia, here’s something: ‘Progress Is Pushing Pushcarts to Oblivion.’”

  “That’s progress?”

  “You want me to read it?”

  “Go ahead. What else do I have to do?”

  Thelma folded the paper and recited,

  Picturesque as they may be, the pushcarts must go. Perhaps not tomorrow or next year, but some day, it is now sure, the little carts will be swept away by the forces of progress into neat new stalls in large airy buildings. The pushcart people know this. They have known it for a long time and they wait with varied emotions for the day that is sur
e to come.

  “That would have made Jonas happy, right, Mama?”

  “I could be an ox—not him. He was too good for manual labor.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “What’s there to know? He’s dead. And I’ll be with him soon.”

  “Are you going to give him a piece of your mind?”

  Mama grunted, because it hurt to laugh. Thelma set aside the paper. Mama felt her daughter take her hand, rubbing her thumb on the gold band trapped in swollen flesh. Larry came in, and despite Thelma’s vigorously shaking her head no, he climbed onto the bed beside his grandmother, resting his cheek on her breast above her dying heart and casting his free arm around her belly. He squirmed and nuzzled her with his sticky nose, until his breathing became regular and he fell asleep. “Larncy,” she said. The last grandchild.

  She looked out the window while listening to the boy’s breath rather than her own. It was autumn light, bright, filtered through the canoe-shaped yellow leaves of the tree in the backyard. When had she had time just to look out at the sun, the sky? The leaves rustled in the breeze, golden yellow, backlit by the sun, so many colors that she couldn’t name in English. A goldfinch fluttered onto a leaf and paused, such brilliant beauty in such a tiny, perfect package. This was the gorgeousness of the world she was leaving, and only now she stopped to hold it in her heart. This was fall without winter, warm and nourishing, framed by the windowpane’s rectangle.

  Feeling the child heavy on her chest, but comforting, she took the hand her daughter offered and stroked it as she had stroked those of her sisters. There was a lullaby she knew, but the notes failed her. She felt the end as close to her as this child, but not yet there. Appreciating the luminous leaves, she drifted off and felt the hands of her unborn children reaching out for their long-awaited reunions, the hand of her beautiful young Moishe, who had waited so long for his mother. How come she’d taken so long? More than sixty years on this earth. She didn’t know what sisters awaited her—“Heaven, I’m in heaven”—or whether her mother was there. And then, it was as if she were in a crowd: unborn sisters and brothers she didn’t recognize, the throng of unborn and unnamed, Jonas and his other wife, their pale and sickly boys. There were so many hands grabbing for hers, reaching up her arms, encircling her legs.

  Opening her eyes, she couldn’t move her feet; liquid pooled everywhere. A pain radiated out of her stomach, and she felt the bile try to choke her despite the lift of her head on the pile of pillows. The room had gotten darker; the boy had disappeared. A candle dripped wax at her bedside and, still, there was the woman who’d been there before, who looked up and said, “You’re awake.”

  This was the girl she could have, should have, loved, but didn’t. It was such a hard thing, a heart turned to stone. She’d been weak then, and Annie had been strong. Mama had made a choice. This child was tall and thin like Jonas, but she had a spark they both lacked.

  She remembered how Thelma looked that day they visited the boys at the orphanage, the child’s hair shorn by Annie so that the girl should have been ashamed and ugly, runt of the litter. And yet Thelma sat on her brother’s knee as if it were a throne, radiating love, defiant. But had that been disobedience in the girl’s eyes—or need? The child had demonstrated her loyalty to her brothers despite the cost, because they shielded each other. They were a family unto themselves.

  And this was the part that now burned in Mama’s belly: the realization that what they’d needed protection from was her and Annie, that awful two-headed beast they became together, born out of Jonas’s death and her subsequent collapse. Maybe if Mama had just risen from her bed of pain and demonstrated kindness, a shred of love, her children wouldn’t have turned so hard against her. If she’d remained the mother and reined in Annie instead of acquiescing to her will, taking the path of least resistance. If she’d had the strength to defy her eldest and taken the boys home that day. She’d seen their cuts and bruises, the anger in Abie’s eyes and Louis’s fear, and done nothing. If, if, if . . .

  Cringing at the choice she’d made thirty years before, she couldn’t blame Jonas, her father, the matchmaker, or even her beloved Annie: this was on her. She remembered Thelma’s joy on her seventh birthday, learning the box step with Moritz, all attention on the pair—and how Mama couldn’t stand that about her, the showiness and the need for attention, already with the long legs and the promise of beauty, the dancing heart. The way the child threw back her head and laughed, breathless.

  She was just trying to be happy, and Mama had even begrudged her that small joy. She’d sneered and judged. She’d grabbed the strawberries meant for Thelma because she herself was so hungry and plain, so unloved, so out of place in America, so alone without her sisters and mother to guide her, to support her when her knees buckled. But if she’d reached out, collected the girl on her lap instead of letting her cling to Moritz, maybe that horrible thing wouldn’t have happened. If she’d held her close, she wouldn’t have sought comfort in that wolf in sheep’s clothes. She recalled kneeling outside the bathroom, pleading with Moritz to come out, her back to her crying daughter. The memory cut deep. This wasn’t who she was. This was who she had become.

  She couldn’t summon her anger to justify her past actions, as she had for so many years. The rancor had dissolved and left her empty. She fully saw the daughter seated beside her. She wondered why Thelma and not Annie, but she knew the answer. Until then, she’d only seen this girl through the veil of her blame, but now she recognized that she herself was at fault. She was flooded with an unaccustomed tenderness for this, her daughter-rival, the husband thief. How cruel, that name. It wasn’t this child’s fault. And yet, she’d never allowed herself to view her in full, to empathize, and in the candlelight, in the last moment, as she felt the dead grabbing at her wrists, her ankles, she saw this widow’s goodness and hardship. Mama realized the love Thelma gave her brothers would have easily been shared. She was a bighearted girl. She felt a sense of loss heavier than her abandonment by Jonas: it was too late to change course. She should have been generous enough to rescue an abandoned infant, to nurture the helpless: that, at least, she owed God, if not Jonas.

  Mama had fluid everywhere: her lungs, the sac around her heart, her ankles—but she couldn’t raise a tear for herself. She hadn’t protected the girl, and still she sat here by her side, vigilant.

  It was quiet in the room, although she could hear the sound of water boiling in the kitchen and a knife banging a chopping block. She pulled the girl’s hand closer, feeling each of her fingers, and said, “You were a beautiful little girl. Were you a dancer! You couldn’t stand still until you learned to dance.”

  Chapter 30

  Mama had died and Thelma had witnessed it, shutting her mother’s eyelids with her fingertips in a final act of intimacy. This woman who’d overshadowed so much of Thelma’s life was now no more animated than the stained featherbed she’d stitched with her sisters in Drohobych that covered her corpse. When it was new, she’d wrapped it in tissue paper and carried it to Jonas’s house across the village. Stuffed with local geese feathers, crafted from the finest cotton, produced when such a handmade featherbed was a prized possession and, blessed by the rabbi, intended to blanket a long and fertile marriage. In his prayer, the holy man had omitted happiness.

  Thelma straightened the comforter, reversing the roles of mother and daughter. Feeling strangely privileged, Thelma sensed magic in the air, as if she could hear the rush of the spirits that had swirled into the room before shuffling away with Mama. She wondered whether she’d been meant to be beside her and whether, after a lifetime of being at odds, they’d finally united. Had they made peace? Not in any mathematical way, no final reckoning on life’s abacus. While still confused, she reveled in an unexpected state of grace that eased the undertow of death.

  Her mother’s last words had been spoken to her. Thelma had been seen.

  She snuffed the candle that had witnessed their goodbye. She felt relieved of resentm
ent’s heavy burden. Outside the breeze whipped into a wind that shook down the tree’s last leaves.

  When she entered the kitchen, the water roiled, spreading the stink of cabbage. She said to her sister, “Mama’s dead.”

  “Why didn’t you get me?” Annie flew into a rage, throwing a pot lid at Thelma’s head. “I was right here.”

  “We didn’t want you there,” Thelma said, unclear whether that was true, but beyond caring. Let Annie grieve the way she wanted to grieve. She wasn’t her sister’s keeper.

  Tearing off her apron, Annie said, “You robbed me of our last moment together. You could have called me and you didn’t. You could have knocked on the wall. Do you think Mama loved you? That’s a laugh. You disgusted her. And if you think I don’t know you’re sneaking out at night, you’re sorely mistaken.”

  Thelma said nothing. She closed her eyes and swayed, trying to keep the calm she’d felt before she’d extinguished the candle. This was her grief. She wouldn’t have it dictated by Annie. She tried to gather her feelings, to honor them.

  Meanwhile, Annie took charge after twenty minutes of crying with Adele and Eli. She sent for Jesse and Julius, the doctor, the undertaker, the rabbi, and the neighbors. In front of Thelma, she fell to her hands and knees, reaching deep into the back of her mother’s underwear drawer for the jewelry made by Moe that her mother had stashed in the darkest corners, not wanting to wear the gold but knowing its value. She pocketed the items, claiming that they were promised to her.