Bittersweet Brooklyn: A Novel

by Thelma Adams

  The family had sat shivah and then Annie had gone out of her way to make it clear that she was now mistress of Montauk Avenue. Mama had bequeathed it to her surviving children: Abie, Thelma, and Annie. Her heirs. Abie had never once appeared over those seven nights when she and her sister had sat alongside Moe and Jesse with torn dresses and sheet-draped mirrors in honor of the dead, beside a table laden with delicatessen and sweet, yeasty babkas, and kosher pickle spears to stoke the living.

  Over the next month, Annie exploited her position as mourner in chief to consolidate her power within the house in Mama’s absence. Whenever Thelma got dressed to go out, Annie would say just as she was heading out the door, “I’m not taking care of that bed wetter of yours.”

  “Who died and made you czar?” Thelma asked. This house was a third hers, but she’d have to fight for every square inch. Occasionally she’d slip babysitting money to her twenty-two-year-old niece, Adele, with promises to cover for her on the nights she stayed out late.

  After a month, sick as hell of living under the hammer, she’d fled to dance cheek to cheek at the Arcadia Ballroom under the big crystal chandelier that scattered rainbows on the wooden floor. She’d met up with a friend of Abie’s there. He was no great beauty and had two left feet, but he led her down to the alley by way of the stage door, all those metal stairs in her high heels. He said he gave her what she wanted, but it was a long way to go for attention. He didn’t even lend her a handkerchief to wipe her hands afterward.

  It was after 1:00 a.m. when she left by herself, feeling heartsick, missing Phil and ashamed if he’d seen what she’d become without him. The subway trip that had once been so secure with her man beside her now seemed sinister when she was alone. She got as far as Williamsburg before a trench-coated stranger began circling her, moving from one side of the car to the other, sitting ever closer. When he stood up and unzipped his pants, she fled for the door at the next stop, her coat catching in the gap until she pulled it out with a streak of grease.

  All she’d wanted was a little joy, a little sweetness, a swoop in a strong man’s arms while the saxophone played. The words heaven, I’m in heaven stuck in her head. But, aloud, she whispered, “I’m in hell.”

  Frequently glancing over her shoulder, she hurried shadowy blocks in high heels, finally arriving outside Marcy Avenue. Heavy curtains covered the windows, but she could see a crack of light between the panels. She knocked. Nobody answered. She rested her ear against the door: muffled movement. She felt a sense of dread and a desperate need to fall into her brother’s arms, to be consoled. From her change purse, she fished out Abie’s key that she hadn’t used since Phil was alive. She hoped it still worked.

  It did.

  She crossed the empty living room and stepped behind the wooden bar that spanned the left wall. She poured three fingers of vodka in a jelly jar without spilling too much, leaving the martini glasses for the members of the Williamsburg Boys Club. After hanging her coat on a hook beside four others, she looked over at the bedroom and thought of Phil, and then that bruiser she’d followed into the alley behind the Arcadia, and felt repulsed. She’d known love, and she wasn’t good enough to keep it alive. Still, what was so wrong with wanting to rub up against a man from time to time? But she had her answer—if it was only rubbing and went no further, it just didn’t feel the same. Dancing wasn’t a pleasure with the wrong partner. But it was still dancing.

  Entering the bathroom to wash her hands, she stared at herself in the mirror—the gray circles beneath frightened green eyes, the fair skin with the mole beside her ordinary nose. She sucked in her cheekbones, replenished her scarlet lipstick, moved her hairpins around so she looked the right side of tousled. She reached for the towel, which was whitish with blue lettering—THE FRANCONIA—and filthy.

  She had a bad feeling about a night that was already circling the drain. All the songs in her head were out of tune. She couldn’t get a beat. She didn’t know how far she could push Annie, or what she’d have to do to earn a living and escape her with a kid in tow. Still, it was her house: Why should she leave? The answer was simple: her skin wasn’t thick enough. She didn’t think she could ever be happy under Annie’s thumb.

  When she reentered the living room and replenished her glass, she smelled fear: a salty, sour sweat swirled with sickening aftershave. She heard groans from behind the swinging door—and not the kind of noise overheard beyond a bedroom door that rose to a climax. She had plenty of time to run from Marcy Avenue. But she stayed, sitting down at a card table to play solitaire with her shoes off under the table until Abie entered, rolling down his sleeves.

  “What’s that, Abie?”

  “Believe me, you don’t want to know.”

  “Who’s in the kitchen?”

  “I’m opening a kosher deli.”

  “In the middle of the night?” she asked.

  “It was the only time the rabbi could come.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a blessing to me,” Thelma said with a strained laugh. Unsmiling, he clenched his jaw so tightly it was a miracle teeth didn’t come shooting out of his mouth. “What have you gotten yourself into now?”

  “Don’t ask. You gotta get out of here. Now! Grab your coat. Go!”

  “I’m not leaving until I know you’re safe.”

  “What: You plan on moving in? Why not bring Larry, too?” He sat down across from her. Abie was jittery. Not himself. He kept scratching his forearms, rubbing his nose. “I can take care of myself, Temmy. It’s you I’m worried about.”

  “If you’re so worried, tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

  “Go home to your kid.”

  “Thanks for the advice. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t down in the dumps.”

  “Your mood won’t improve if you stay.”

  She held on when she should have folded. Afraid of walking back to the train this late on the dark Williamsburg streets, she weighed whether it was more dangerous inside than outside. But here was Abie and there a stranger loitered beneath the onramp to the bridge. Rather than mentioning the man in the hat for fear of adding to the tsuris, she asked the first neutral question that popped into her head. “How am I supposed to find a cab this late?”

  Increasingly impatient, Abie said, “Maybe you should have thought of that before you came knocking.”

  “Since when is your own sister unwelcome? What: Are you Annie?”

  “She wouldn’t be so dim to come here this late.”

  “Kick a girl when she’s down.”

  “Get in line. Take a number.” Abie fumbled for a cigarette. “You gotta learn to pick yourself up, Temmy. This is my last warning: get out.”

  Thelma turned her head away from him but lacked the energy to rise and be alone on Marcy Avenue again, so he said, “It’s your funeral,” grabbed the cards, and riffled the deck on the felt. They came loose from his hands, and he gathered them again.

  “You’re shuffling like an old lady.”

  He looked at her now, full in the face, the whites of his eyes wide. She’d never seen him so terrified. But if it was meant to scare her away, it had the opposite impact. She wouldn’t leave. They belonged together. She’d be there for him. “What can I—”

  “Play cards.”

  “Deal,” she said.

  Abie dealt, and she collected her ten cards for gin rummy and sorted them into melds, aces to the left and deuces to the right. They played hand after hand, in the trance that comes from being inside a game with identifiable rules. Concentration was both a means of escape and a connection between players, a shared trance before the other shoe dropped (maybe a pogrom, maybe a shotgun wedding). He’d always been competitive, and she was good at counting cards. Before the shooting, he’d been cockier, but he’d changed, becoming increasingly cautious and secretive. They tended to kibitz while they played, but today they were quiet, sharing her glass. The cards slapped the table.

  “Gin,” he said.

  “Already? I can’t even kno
ck. You’re killing me.”

  He snorted, shuffled, and dealt a new hand. The swinging door opened. A stout stranger drenched in sweat poked his pockmarked forehead out, looked from brother to sister and said, “Bring me the girl.”

  “What’s he talking about, Abie?”

  “I told you to go. Now you’re here. I’m not calling the shots.”

  “But we’re in your place.”

  “Right, like I planned on being a kosher butcher. Mama would be so proud. Now, shut up and do what he tells you. You’ll be okay. I got your back.”

  “It’s my front I’m worried about.” She squeezed her blistered feet into her shoes, winced as she rose and smoothed her skirt. This was no occasion for a red party dress. She yanked up her neckline, but it wasn’t getting any higher.

  As she passed Abie, she squeezed his shoulder. It was pure steel. He flinched. “Stop looking at my cards,” he said.

  “I’ll be back and beat you blind.”

  “Keep dreaming.”

  She entered a kitchen ravaged by blood and gore. She’d never realized the floor was uneven until she saw the blood pool in front of the icebox. It was a random thought, the kind a person gets when they’re in shock and can’t register the carnage before them. She gagged. How could she have stayed with only a swinging door between herself—and this slaughterhouse? She could have left, but her need to be near Abie, someone who understood her and still loved her, was too great—and now she’d landed here. Abie had urged her to leave for her own good, and she hadn’t listened. What else was new?

  “Strip,” said a tall stranger with a commanding, even handsome, forehead above thin lips on a sardonic mouth. He was wearing tailored woolen suit pants with an undershirt, and his arms were the kind of muscular that came from constant use. When she hesitated, scanning the kitchen for a bloodless spot to land if she fainted, he growled, “You’re not my sister, sister. But I’m not going to touch you. Why should I have chopped liver out when I’ve got steak at home?”

  “Since you came late to the party,” said his partner, the pockmarked thug built like a fireplug, “take this bucket and mop and clean up.”

  She removed her dress and shoes. Even after the tall man’s insult, he eyeballed her every move so that her red-painted fingernails fumbled with her garters as she unsnapped her stockings.

  “You got a runner,” he said.

  “You don’t,” she said, casting her eyes at the leaky bundle wrapped in chenille, the head covered while two Florsheims splayed at odd angles. The well-made wing tips probably had another ten years to them. Not the owner.

  “You want the shoes?”

  “Thanks, no, thanks.”

  “Let’s shlep him out the back and into the trunk,” the tall man ordered the shvitser. They weren’t using names. Together, the killers manhandled the corpse out the alley door. Afraid of waiting until they returned, she tucked her slip hem up into her bra like she would if she were cleaning at home and knelt at the shore of the scarlet slime. The more she tried to swab it, the more the goop radiated over the linoleum. It was hopeless. She panicked. She wouldn’t be able to clean the mess and they’d slap her around—worse, add her body to the pile. She was no housekeeper, but she didn’t stop, pausing only to gag, to stand up and swig vodka from the bottle on the table beside the dead man’s glass. The liquor loosened her limbs and she scrubbed with a great yellow sponge she’d found under the sink, putting both shoulders into the work, until the red went pink and the pink cleared. Just when she thought she’d eliminated all traces, she eyed a blood clot beneath the icebox rim. And then she found some skin and viscera on the metal chair legs where the deed had been done. She wiped the vinyl down for good measure. It was brutal work, cleaning up after savage men, that made changing diapers or nursing a child with stomach flu seem like a dream.

  Afterward, when she’d sluiced herself with water in the bathroom and vomited in a toilet that hadn’t been scoured since the Great War, she perched on the edge of the tub and slowly put on her ruined stockings, hardly able to get them over her sticky feet but not wanting to start all over again. She stepped into her heels and the tight dress she’d once thought was so smart and now seemed Brooklyn chippie cheap. She’d never be able to wear it again without thinking about the dead man wrapped up in chenille. After rinsing her mouth, she stared in the mirror and saw holes where her eyes had been, long corridors to nothing and nowhere. She took a long time putting on her lipstick, because her hand was shaking and she now despised the color red.

  When she left the bathroom, Abie waited with her coat open and her purse over his wrist. “C’mon, we gotta go.”

  “Where?”

  “The Navy Yard.”

  “Gonna enlist?” She followed him out the door and tried to keep up while he hustled down the darkened street. He got behind the wheel of an unfamiliar late-model sedan. She climbed in beside him. “If you had a car, you could have driven me home.”

  “Sure, Pola Negri,” Abie said, agitated, scratching his scalp. “I could’ve left those gorillas to play chauffeur to my baby sister, saying, ‘Pardon me, gents, can I borrow the getaway car?’ That wasn’t in the plan.”

  “What was?”

  He snorted. They shared a cigarette until she noticed a Buick in the rearview mirror that flashed its headlights twice before slithering past them. Abie pulled out behind the green sedan. He ground the gears trying to put it in first and then lurched out behind the other car onto Marcy Avenue, crossing under the ramp to the Williamsburg Bridge.

  “Pretty suave, Abie. Let’s not attract attention.”

  “It’s too late for that, Temmy.”

  “Have you ever driven?”

  “Once—I got a lesson.”

  “Maybe you should have gotten two.”

  “Can you leave it? Jesus, Thelma, can’t you see I’m scared?”

  “What kind of man would you be if you weren’t?” She looked at him, shifting, shvitsing, checking the rearview maniacally. “What just happened? Did you know that guy?”

  “Pretty,” he said. “Pretty Amberg.”

  “Isn’t he a macher?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “RIP,” she said. An awkward silence fell, and she felt compelled to fill it. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Haven’t you done enough?” He let a lot of room slip between their car and the Buick. He had trouble shifting into second; it growled into third. He bit his left middle knuckle and then exhaled. “Why’d you show up tonight of all nights, Tem?”

  “I never had the best timing.” After that bloodbath, she wasn’t about to kvetch about her problems: the groping goon at the dance hall or the meat flasher on the train; how much she still ached for Phil. She had adult needs a widow was supposed to suppress. She’d skipped her period and was going to see Abie with her hand out for a fix just in case.

  And now, she’d followed him into an inescapable hell. Just when she thought she couldn’t fall any lower, her heroic Abie had guided her down to a desperate place. How long could she fool herself? Even killers had kid sisters—but she wasn’t a baby anymore. She had a boy of her own who needed her alive.

  Abie ground the gears down to second, turning right on Flushing Avenue. “You never show up like that, Tem. Who knew you still had a key?”

  “You can have it back.” She didn’t want to explain, to ask him for money, so she just said, “With Mama gone, it smelled like death at home and I couldn’t sit still. Trust me: I didn’t know how crappy death smelled until I cleaned up after Pretty.”

  “You didn’t meet him under the best circumstances, not that he was ever Mr. Popularity. I wish you hadn’t come, Temeleh, but now you’re here. I’m up shit creek, little sister, not some little tsuris like pissing off that bitch Annie. Tonight I crossed a line. I did something I didn’t want to do. I’m more the mind-my-own-business type, but there’s a change in the wind and I got squeezed.”

  “What change?”

  “Pretty was in�
�and then he got in the way. I fingered the guy just like that dame fingered me on Mermaid Avenue. And it feels lousy. The East New York crew said that if I wanted to play ball, if I was the real thing, I’d invite Amberg over to the Williamsburg Boys Club for a dope party—and he’d end up being the dope. They said they’d do the rest. They didn’t. They played with him. That was Pep Strauss, the tall gorilla.”

  “He’s a real stinker, that one.”

  “You don’t know the half. I’ve done bad things before but, Temmy, this guy is one sick meshugener. We sliced Amberg like pastrami. It took all night. I don’t know what they were waiting for, but we kept him alive well past the begging.” The car slipped through the darkened streets behind the Buick. Now he couldn’t stop talking. “I knew this schmuck, we’d shtupped the same broads, he wasn’t exactly a friend, but in this business, who is, right?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “I wish we’d kept it that way. I had a choice: be a shlepper or a doer—so I did. Am I happy? Could I make it clearer? This is not me, or who I was, but it is who I am tonight. I’m alive, not dead. Those were my choices. Do you want me to draw you a map?”

  She shook her head, observing Abie in her periphery. His protective mask had slipped. For a minute, she saw the brute Annie must have seen—and he repulsed her. He’d always been on her side, at her side—but when she looked at him behind the steering wheel following the corpse car, she couldn’t keep his different parts in focus. It was as if she viewed him simultaneously as a police photo, Little Yiddle with dead eyes and a sneer, and as her savior, who’d always rescued her from Annie like some screen swashbuckler. It shook her deeply. She felt her love for him begin to tear and, because that love had glued her together, she ripped, too.

  She fumbled a Lucky out of his pack on the dashboard, lit it, and puffed. Between shifting gears, he explained what the deal was, and she grunted occasionally in response. He said that his Williamsburg crew had aspired to be like the more established Brownsville Boys, Lepke and his pal Gurrah Shapiro, with their syndicate ties. What made that night different from all others was that, on Lepke’s orders, they were proving themselves by killing Amberg, a man they knew. The hit was the B card on the fight for Murder Inc., Jewish and Italian killers for hire. The main bout (the A card) had been Dutch Schultz’s shooting over in Newark earlier that night. On contract from the syndicate, Lepke’s inner circle meticulously planned and performed that hit on racketeer and bootlegger Schultz. In contrast, the Amberg slaying at the Williamsburg Boys Club was improvisational.