Bittersweet Brooklyn: A Novel

by Thelma Adams

  So was the outdoor shindig with the ladies’ auxiliary, the gang’s girlfriends and wives, that greeted them when Abie pulled up behind the Buick that held the body. In the distance, a bonfire blazed in the weeds beyond North Elliott Place near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. After Abie set the parking brake, he said, “Stay here.”

  As soon as he hopped away, she ignored his orders and opened the car door. She missed the running board and stumbled on the dirt, leaning over to heave, still stupid enough to worry about whether she’d get vomit on her coat. She stood up to take deep, smoky mouth breaths as Abie hustled toward Strauss, Lepke’s enforcer. The broad-shouldered gorilla peered down from beneath his mountainous forehead and bushy eyebrows and grasped Abie’s hand in solidarity.

  To Pep’s left stood a shellacked blonde in a kelly-green cardigan. Who wore cashmere and pearls to a bonfire? Clutching the arm of the party’s coldest killer, Pep’s date giggled as her man announced the plan in a loud voice. Whichever wife or girlfriend got the short straw would become Miss Murder Inc. and toss the honorary first match on Amberg.

  Willing or not, her brother had pulled Thelma into the center of the action like never before. Her nausea gave way to adrenaline as she watched the flames that rose from a nearby metal barrel. Approaching the green car in the middle of the field, she smelled gasoline. Wives and girlfriends surrounded her, laughing and nervous, their elaborate hairdos sprayed stiff. Some wore furs; others flashed cocktail rings. At least she was wearing her good coat, her dancing dress. But underneath, blood caked her slip.

  She gazed through the crowd toward her brother and Pep. She could see that Pep’s girlfriend won, because she flashed a toothy triumphant smile. She accepted the matchbox from Pep like it came from Tiffany’s wrapped in a bow, leaving his side to cheers of “Evelyn! Evelyn!” The dame picked her way toward Thelma, the matchbox in a gloved hand. Thelma recognized from her shopgirl days that they were fancy gloves, a paler shade of green than Evelyn’s shamrock-colored sweater, completely impractical.

  While Evelyn had left Pep’s side with bravado, she slowed down as she approached the Buick that held Amberg. She fumbled with her gloves as she tried to remove them, possibly realizing that this was what the jolly Jewish martini guys were doing while she was home polishing her nails—and she didn’t have the guts to get her hands dirty herself. When Evelyn caught Thelma’s eyes, seeking mercy, Abie’s sister reached out for the matches. As Evelyn withdrew, her rescuer glanced over to where Strauss stood beside her brother. She made eye contact with Pep and saw rage in his eyes. She realized too late that she’d put another wrench in his plan. It dawned on her that the point was to imprint the night on the lovely Evelyn, to make her remove her gloves and recognize the high cost of the pearls around her neck. In a flash, Thelma realized she was an extra who’d crossed into the star’s spotlight uninvited. Still, with all eyes on her, Thelma ignored Pep’s disapproval, pivoted, advancing toward the Buick. She’d already cleaned up after Pretty once—why not finish the job?

  Thelma faced the sedan. If she couldn’t create, then she had the power to destroy—to fly high and fall hard. Asserting herself, she seized the night, the fire starter. Look in. Light the match. With the gang’s attention on that flame between her fingers, she said, “He doesn’t look so pretty now, does he?”

  The match licked the fuel until Abie ran forward, yelling, “What are you, meshuge? Back away, Temeleh.”

  She heard a whoosh, which almost tore the tags from her life. But where would that leave her kid? What a miserable mother she was, dragging Larry along in her crazy wake. Maybe time remained to salvage the wreckage of her life, to protect her only son by putting him first.

  Chapter 31

  The next morning, the autumn sun was already high on Marcy Avenue when Thelma awoke with a hammering behind her left eye. Sharp memory shards—blood, flames—stimulated self-loathing. She panicked. She’d hoped to meet Annie’s daughter, Adele, and Larry at the el station to take him to Hebrew school—and she was going to be very late. She dressed hurriedly, rubbed tooth powder around her mouth, and leaped out of the empty apartment, but not before dropping the key on a card table.

  When she arrived at Saratoga Avenue, she peeked through the streaky window and spotted Larry beyond the station’s iron bars, waiting for her. He clung to the metal, a mischievous monkey in short pants, shirt untucked, and a hand-me-down corduroy jacket with sleeves that were too short and exposed bony wrists. He hopped from foot to foot as if he had to pee, all knees and elbows and a nose into which he hadn’t grown. His warm, open face beneath a flop of unkempt curls radiated hope, then registered disappointment, then hope again, as he scanned the train, squinting.

  She sank low on the seat and let the doors open and close, open and close. How could she save her son when she couldn’t save herself? She couldn’t meet him nauseous, bees buzzing in her brain, blood on her slip. He needed her, and she had nothing to give. So she flung Larry away, like snot, because she was falling, the floor below her crumbling. And she didn’t want to take him with her. She’d come back later. She’d make it up to him. They’d go to the Kinema.

  After the train left the station, she sat back up, clutching her pocketbook. When she got to the end of the line, at Coney Island, she wandered under an overcast sky toward the Wonder Wheel. She nodded at the gnarled Italian who ran the ride. When he belatedly rose to help her, he dropped the newspaper on his red-painted stool. She read, “Dutch Schultz Dying; Two Aides Slain.”

  Pretty hadn’t made the Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s headline. Then she noticed the name Amberg just below the boldface type, shuddered with fear, and glanced away to avoid suspicion. The old man raised his tufted eyebrows, more gray than black. “Wanna ride?” he asked. “I’ll make you a deal.”

  “No, grazie.” She spun around as soon as she recognized her own melancholy mirrored in his eyes, and his pity. Happy people didn’t ride the Wonder Wheel by themselves on a chilly Thursday in October.

  She was a material witness—more, an accomplice. She knew what that meant: bad on both sides, the cops and the cons. Abie had brought her into this, let it happen. He’d been a material witness once, the killing of Monk Eastman at the Blue Bird Café back in 1920, when he was still getting caught for stuff he did. He’d danced his way out of that somehow, telling the cops one thing, the fellas another. But she wasn’t that kind of dancer. Abie knew that. She knew that. No poker face. She couldn’t even meet Larry standing at the subway entrance, ready to scoot under the turnstile to greet her. Tokens were for sissies.

  Expendable: that’s what she was. That’s what she’d always been. Even the Wonder Wheel man could read it in her eyes, as plain as the Schultz headline or Mussolini’s push into Ethiopia. She had blood on her slip, burns on her hands, and moth holes in her heart. How had it happened, all the cumulative tears, the loss of a father before you had even felt his breath in your face, learned his laughter, caught his large hands meting out justice in caresses and slaps? Good girl, bad girl, no longer a girl at all. She was old enough now, a mother herself, with that itch to scratch between her legs and alone again. And yet she circled back and back: Why? Why couldn’t she escape? She knew the answer; she just couldn’t bring herself to say it.

  To be fatherless, to be rudderless, and to be left with those bitches, Mama and Annie: How had they lacked even a blood drop of compassion for the smallest child, the littlest girl? They tamped down everything that was her, every bit of fire, and still she sparked. She must have been her father’s daughter, only who knew? She was born as he departed, raised in an apartment with mirrors covered in sheets and a landlord knocking for the rent. Mama lost in her widow’s mourning. Her bereft sister played mother without the milk of human kindness, strong enough only to care for herself and Mama. Annie treated the baby like an unwanted obligation, when Thelma would have lapped up any teardrop of love and been grateful.

  How could they love each other so much and leave nothing for her? And then, how could she,
carrying their rejection around like a pocketbook of pain, turn around and bring a beautiful son into the world? She should have loved Larry the way he deserved to be loved. What had he done, this child? Nothing. But Philip crumbled, she saw it, as she held the baby, the two of them crying, Larry and Philip, because her husband knew—feared?—that he couldn’t rise and so began falling more than he ever had, into the mental hospital and the treatments that erased all that was Philip, all that was joy. Soiled pajamas and slippers: all that remained. Until they told her not to return. They told her to hold on to her boy, to give it the love of a mother and a father, and she awoke to the truth: that in her arms was another fatherless child and she couldn’t follow Philip into the hole, the smell of feet and fungus, the syringes, the terrifying electric treatments.

  Be a mother: But what did she know of mothering that she hadn’t learned from Mama or Annie? Had she become her mother, incapable of loving her own child? Had Annie won, with her three fat children, the doting grandmother dead and buried, the house on Montauk Avenue, the smugness of it all? Thelma fought. She laughed. She danced. She drank. But who could she turn to, now, the day after Pretty Amberg’s death? Seeking out Abie in her sadness had started it off, not being aware of her own surroundings, of the danger that the Williamsburg Boys Club was no club at all. They weren’t boys—they were fellas, mobsters. She knew that, and still she’d gone. Now to whom could she turn?

  With Luna Park and the Cyclone to her left and the Atlantic Ocean to her right, she stumbled along the boardwalk, shoulders jutting forward. It looked colder than it was, but the wind bit. She was never warm enough these days, except when she’d stood too close to the flames. If Abie hadn’t called out to her, she would have lost her eyebrows last night, her lashes. Pretty lost more than that. So many cuts on that body, so much blood, so little left to the fleshy face that earned him his nickname. Oddly sad, shredded and slit, the nose in pieces, two lips into six, ears fallen upside down.

  The memories came up like bile: Amberg’s fancy shoes poking out from under her brother’s familiar blanket that she used to play tent beneath, alone and temporarily safe from Annie; the blank stares of the strange men from another neighborhood, their matter-of-factness and her brother’s sweat, his odd servility. He was someone else with them than he was with her; she sensed how they treated him as something lesser. Or maybe it was just the nature of the beast, the nerves hidden or exposed by the violence. They were in the murder business now. Had she seen it coming? They didn’t joke that Abie was quick with a knife for nothing. But they’d been so slow last night. She had had plenty of time to run from Marcy Avenue. But she’d stayed.

  Now, in the aftermath, she was a lone refugee at the ass end of Brooklyn, prepared to throw herself into the sea and be done with it, meet Phil, dance below the surf. But she wasn’t made like Phil; she gasped, but she gasped for life. She wouldn’t even make it across the sand. It would ruin her shoes, her only semidecent pair.

  Wild hairs escaped from their pins, whipping around her cheeks. When she cleared the coarse strands from her lips, she smeared her lipstick. She was a mess. She felt despondent and then angry, a Cyclone of feelings, up, down, ferocious, floundering. She had tried, really, to pull herself up, to be strong for Larry, whatever that was, to be a wife, a widow, a sister—at least to Abie and Louis. She had smarts. She had skills; she could type. She knew how to love, but she kept being pushed out, onto the sidewalk, unprotected: black sheep or stray cat or loose end. All her defenses spent, she felt rubbed raw. This was where Annie wanted her to be: alone and vulnerable and begging to crawl back and submit. Stop rocking the boat—and it was Annie’s boat, her own mother sacrificing Thelma, and Abie, and Louis. The boys didn’t care—Abie, the orphan, had honed his hatred into a shiv. But her grudges weighed her down.

  She felt her own fat, slow tears betray her, like that child, alone under the table, clutching the lighter. It was wretched to know she would always want what she couldn’t have, that she couldn’t tame the love hunger. She couldn’t funnel it into violence against anybody but herself. Crying in public on the Coney Island boardwalk was so pathetic. She didn’t want bags to form under her eyes, gray circles. The immigrant scourge: rouged lips, sad eyes. She was already thirty-three. She would never find another man if she didn’t look gay, if she didn’t hold on to her waist, her ankles, her laughter. Wasn’t that really what it came down to? That she felt unworthy of love, not incapable of loving. That she didn’t have the strength to put herself aside and be a mother. Or was she selfish, sluttish, dissolute, or depraved? She had to force Annie’s and Mama’s voices out of her head; they were like bedbugs in the mattress of her brain.

  Stepping on chewing gum, she cursed. She stopped, scratching her right sole on the rough planking until it lost its stickiness. “Feh,” she said, as if the shoe damage was part of a string of disasters that included her stained slip, ditching Larry, and setting a gangster corpse alight. She felt waves of disgust and fear, her hands shaking as she reached into her pocketbook, detaching the wrinkled handkerchief from the mess inside.

  Was it possible to feel worse than she had scrubbing the floor the night before? Or was the shock wearing off and now came the pain—straight, no chaser? She needed more drink.

  Walking the relatively solid boardwalk, Thelma felt herself falling. It was as if the boards were shifting back and forth under her feet like a moving funhouse floor. She couldn’t regain her balance. Her knees hurt from last night on the linoleum, scrubbing away a man’s guts, the goo of it, the stringy membranes.

  She eyed the crappy little no-name bar that opened like one end of a shoebox between a corn-on-the-cob vendor and a midway, both shuttered for the season. She saw metal chairs clustered around rusty tables, no longer fought over by the summer throng, barely recognizable from her first date with Phil that summer of 1923.

  When Thelma entered the dive, she recoiled at the sour beer stench. She craved hooch to clear her head. Would the police find her? She’d brazenly set the car alight before who knew how many snitching bitches. She’d scoured the kitchen after Pretty Amberg’s killing. Was she a fugitive, an accessory after the fact? Or was her crime aiding and abetting? She laughed bitterly. Not even the police would have eyes for her: “Unwanted for Murder: Thelma Schwartz.”

  Damn Abie and the Williamsburg Boys for getting too big for the neighborhood. Damn Phil for giving her a taste for vodka and then leaving her with a kid and a pincushion heart. Damn Annie and Mama, as long as she was cursing, for offering barbed wire when she needed soft shoulders. Damn her stepfather for showering her with affection and curdling it with that pickle of his, providing her mother and sister more reasons to blame her for souring the milk. Was it wrong that she still felt more for him than her own mother? How screwed up was that? Twisted like licorice.

  Inside the bar, her shoes rustled the peanut shells that covered the cement floor. Once she became accustomed to the murk, she spied a row of rummies staring back at her with rheumy eyes. They were the sitting dead, drinking the slow poison. She felt herself floating toward them, the desire to just let go and die. But then she jerked herself back: she’d seen mashed Amberg in the Buick’s back seat. She wasn’t ready to join him. Larry depended on her, however undependable she was. She’d never thought she’d become so foul a mother. That added another weight to the chain she rattled.

  The wiry bartender turned his hostile gaze toward her. “Whatcha want?”

  She winced at the potato-shaped boil on his nose. “Vodka.”

  The Irishman circled his wet rag on the bar, looking her up, then down. “Double?”

  “Are you paying?”

  “Do I look like a Rockefeller?”

  “Make mine a single.” She fumbled for change in her pocketbook. “I’m taking it outside.”

  “Suit yourself.” He poured with a heavy hand then slid the glass across the bar. She sipped the drink’s surface to preserve every drop and swiveled away from the boozers, keenly aware rungs
existed farther down the ladder. She didn’t want to tumble any lower, but gravity pulled her down.

  Chapter 32

  Carting her cocktail, Thelma shuffled onto the boardwalk. A startled seagull flew up, screeching like a human child. She scraped a seat closer to a vacant table, setting the glass down and spreading her hankie on the chair to protect her coat. Once settled, she sipped and then dived into a big, oily gulp.

  She gazed across the boardwalk, over the deserted sand to the ocean’s sullen waves. Slap, slap, slap. An olive-skinned brunette in a mink strode past, alligator pumps clacking. There’d been a time when Thelma had hoped that would be her future, the marvelous Mrs. Schwartz, secure and loved, maybe even in furs like Pola Negri, no more clawing just to stay in place. What a laugh! She’d been sold a bill of goods. She’d dreamed of places to go and things to do, caring people awaiting her, scolding her affectionately for being late.

  Thelma’s empty stomach lurched at the alcohol, but she didn’t stop. She watched one wave smack the next. Pushing up her coat sleeves, she leaned her elbows on the gummy table, cradling her chin in her palms. Her drink was dry when she heard a familiar voice calling, “Temeleh.”

  Abie parked opposite Thelma, his back to the ocean. He huffed like an old man, traces of sweat dried on his forehead. He seemed coiled and nervous.