Bittersweet Brooklyn: A Novel

by Thelma Adams

  She felt responsible for Phil’s mental breakdown. She’d killed the man she loved because she was broken and he’d cut himself on her jagged edge. She’d been true to Phil from the day they’d kissed at the Roseland. But she’d been born on the back foot, overpowered by the relentless Annie, a charity case for Abie. She drew out the humanity in her brother. She sparked the light in Phil. She wasn’t all bad. They’d walked taller together for a time. And when he was gone, when they’d all put stones on his grave in Mount Hebron Cemetery, she was left with a boy and a broken heart. They blamed her. Well, take a number, because she blamed herself first.

  Last night, she’d come to Abie for comfort, because he was the only one left who saw her worth and she needed to see that reflected back. That’s why she’d gone to Marcy Avenue. She missed Phil, and nobody wanted to hear it anymore. Find a new fella—that’s the cure. There’d never be a new fella.

  “I miss him, Abie. And now I’m slipping, too. I understand how he felt. I get how much he wanted to be there for me and how much it hurt all the time, the cuts on his arms, the fist holes in the wall.”

  “At least you loved each other. I’ve never found that woman for me.”

  “You’re like a kid in a candy store. You can’t choose just one. Ask Tillie.”

  “I got Tillie knocked up, but I could hardly watch a double feature with that cow.”

  “I’ll never know what you saw in her.”

  “Her tits,” he said.

  “She does have a pair.”

  “I just wanted to see if I could get her bra off. I wasn’t even thinking. Save me from nice Jewish girls! This ain’t going to come out right, but I envy you. You’re sad, you’re bloody tragic—a regular Pola Negri—but at least you had that love with Phil, the one in the pictures. It’s like that song from The Broadway Melody: ‘You Were Meant For Me.’ I never had that. I never will. I ain’t meant for nobody, and nobody’s meant for me. I just don’t feel that way, that fuzzy, warm shit they sell with sex and love in soap ads. I did things in that place where Ma dumped me, the Hebrew Orphan Asylum for the Criminally Unwanted, and bigger kids did stuff to me. I came out backward and raging and unfit for flowers and chocolates, first date and meet the parents. I’m just good for whoring around, which ain’t so bad to be when you’re in my business.”

  He’d never confessed this before. She knew not to question, to contradict him and bullshit, say that he’d find that one sweetheart who was meant for him. It was hard enough for him to crack open this far. She felt the hush of intimacy between them, and she let it hover for as long as it lasted. She reached over, took his hand, and squeezed. This wasn’t the image she’d had of him, the cocky king of the orphanage, protector of little Louis. He’d always seemed so tough, but he hadn’t had a choice. He’d been a child thrown into the lion’s den. They sat for a while, watching the clouds drop lower. Drinkers slunk past, entering the bar to avoid the coming rain.

  “I have another idea, Tem, but it’s got drawbacks.”

  “Mr. Fixer.”

  “I can get a place for you in Manhattan.”

  “Why didn’t you say so to start?”

  “No kids allowed.”

  “I can’t do it.”

  “You gotta do it. I don’t have any other cards up my sleeve. It’s Montauk Avenue with Larry or Manhattan without him. Take your pick. The apartment’s a single room with the bathroom down the hall, on Twentieth Street between Eighth and Ninth: a decent neighborhood, a crummy walk-up. I’ll arrange a union job. You can even go dancing at the Roseland. I just can’t protect you any longer.”

  Abie reached for Temmy’s hand and squeezed it. They studied the greasy Atlantic. “Tem, if I’m going to survive, I can’t be tied down. I love you, you know that, but I’m not ending up like Pretty. Not me. Sometimes you’re on top, sometimes the bottom. But if you push too hard, pretend to be higher than you are, someone will reach over and shove you just for grins.”

  “But if I’m in Manhattan in a single-room occupancy, what’ll I do with Larry? Annie won’t take the kid. They’d ruin me for him and him for me. She’d make sure he knew he wasn’t his cousin Eli, the Prince of Montauk Avenue.”

  “All hail the prince,” Abie said. “What about your girlfriends? The Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria? They have four or five kids each already—what’s another one?”

  “What kind of life is that? He’d be like a puppy on a pig. Sure there’s a teat, but who will he be? Will he still be my kid, or Phil’s?”

  “Can you leave him with Phil’s sister?”

  “They don’t want him on Wyona Street.”

  “You’re giving me no choice. What, you wanna put him in an orphanage?”

  “You know I wouldn’t do that to a kid of mine.” Abie blinked and got quiet in a scary way, as if he had something in his eye that could only come out with tears—and he’d do rage before tears. She asked, “Why does Annie have to be such a farbissiner, such a sour lemon? Larry has as much a right to that house as Eli.”

  “Possession is nine-tenths of the law, sweetheart. You’d have to sleep there.”

  “So we’re back where we started.”

  “What about old man Schwartz with the buildings?”

  “He’ll pay for Larry’s bar mitzvah—screw a roof over the kid’s head. He still blames me for Phil. He’d blame me for the Depression if he could.”

  “So: Will it be the Nina, the Pinta, or the Santa Maria?”

  “Maybe Nina’s mama until I find something permanent.” She sighed. “Larry wets the bed sometimes. Nina’s husband, Tonio, has to get up early and doesn’t have much patience for Larry’s tears.”

  “Ain’t that the way with husbands?”

  “Not Phil.” He’d loved her. He’d viewed her and, dammit, he’d seen that woman worth loving, that sparky, affectionate, dancing girl. The way they’d comforted each other, spooning through the night when Phil finally stopped talking and fell asleep with his nose buried in her wild hair, his arm’s comforting weight across her ribs. But it was difficult to sustain that self-confidence with him gone. When she studied herself in the mirror, she didn’t see the woman reflected in his eyes. She’d died with Phil; the bastards just hadn’t drizzled her with dirt, mumbled a prayer, and turned their backs.

  Thelma was lonely as a vacant lot, but she wasn’t alone. She had Larry, who shouldn’t have had to suffer for her choices. He was only as needy as she’d been. She knew he was only tugging at her as she’d reached out to her own mother: seeking warmth, understanding, and protection from strangers. As a little girl, Thelma had cringed at Mama’s every sour look and swat, taken every no as a rejection not just of the moment but of every moment returning to her birth. She’d been the needy, unnecessary infant that outlived her father—and she’d been trying to shed that stigma ever since. Only after Larry’s birth could Thelma relate to her mother’s distress. She lacked the maternal instinct while Annie, born in a different house at a different time, had a mama bear’s ferocity.

  Guilt and resentment colored Thelma’s feelings, but she finally understood that by the time she’d arrived, Mama was done. Mama was only a little sister herself who, at a time of crisis, regressed and reached out to Annie as if she were her mother. They traded roles in that bedroom on 106th Street the day Annie suggested the orphanage for Abie and Louis. Mama consented, giving her teenager power over her younger siblings because Mama herself was too weak to make the daily decisions that had fallen on her widowed shoulders. Annie had rescued Mama and thereafter they were stitched together, with the eldest daughter never afraid of reminding her mother of their exchange and never reverting to her daughter’s role.

  And so Thelma recognized what her son wanted when he snatched at the fingernails she had just painted Broadway Red, begged for her to take him to the movies instead of going dancing, cried in the night when she joined him in their cot. Even if she tried to reject how similar they were, all legs and arms and boundless affection, she knew the truth
: he was more her than Phil. His light-brown hair, hazel eyes, his antsiness: all hers. All those wants, simple and complex, that he had and that she couldn’t supply. Her failure made her shrink from him. She recoiled and he moved closer. He desired what she had wanted from her mother and sister. He craved comfort and security. He wished to be bathed with care and rubbed warm with a towel. Kiss my scratches. Forgive my mistakes. View me through eyes of love and welcome. He deserved to belong, like his cousins Eli, Adele, and Julius.

  The straggly, fatherless boy craved his mother’s company, however awful her cooking or short her temper, however much she cried like a child when he did, when she turned away from his attempts to cling to her in the night. She’d known that loneliness. Her son just wanted to be close, to be first in her eyes and protected in her arms. But without Phil, she lacked the strength to bury her mourning and make that sacrifice. She’d promised herself on 106th Street that if she ever had a child, she would treat the baby with every bit of her love. That broken commitment haunted her.

  A mensch, that’s what she aspired to be, to accept and treat herself gently and radiate out from a good heart. She struggled to swim back to her son, to crawl onto shore, to accept motherhood’s boredom. She loved his funny stories about the neighbors, when he repeated their arguments back to her in his singsong child’s voice as if reciting the ABCs. But she’d been too broken to glue them both together, to hustle the money, to cash out her girlfriends’ kindnesses, to set aside her jealous rage that Annie had a roof over her head and Abie had paid for that roof. She craved that stability her son would have had if Phil had survived. She kept trying to keep it together, and then the night would sing out to her and she had to run away toward the music, the men. She despised herself for her weakness. Larry saw that anger and turned it against himself. She didn’t hate him, but how was he to know, sensitive little man that he was, before his skin thickened like Abie’s?

  As she watched, her brother thumbed a few big bills from his bankroll and handed the rest to her. That’s where it had started: money. Beside the pervert on the train, she’d hustled to Marcy Avenue on her way home because she had a personal problem. Her period had been two months late. In a panic, she’d entered the hangout uninvited. Abie was always dropping in at Montauk Avenue unannounced. What was the big deal? And she was in such a bad way. Abie wouldn’t judge. He wouldn’t preach abstinence. Chastity was for suckers. The cash would solve one problem but couldn’t ease her fear of botched backroom abortions: coat hangers, curling irons, spoons. Sterilization. Infection. Bleeding out. At her girlfriends’ insistence, she’d already perched over a steaming pot of boiling water. That scalding home remedy didn’t, as the ads said, remove the “obstruction,” return her to “regularity.”

  Abortion was as old as Adam’s right rib, but it was a shonda. In her family, you had kids until your innards turned inside out—but only if you were married. That night, she hadn’t had the chance to broach her lady problems. When she’d heard Amberg groaning in the kitchen and Abie had entered rolling down his sleeves, her situation suddenly diminished in importance.

  Even now, Thelma still hadn’t mentioned her condition. She’d taken Abie’s bankroll. “Walk me to the subway?”

  “You first,” he said, raising his glass. “I got some beefs to settle.”

  She rested her hand on his. “You okay, Abie?”

  “Do I look okay?” He withdrew his fingers and rubbed his bristly chin.

  “Pass,” she said, rising unsteadily. She looped the purse strap over her forearm and tried to make eye contact. He stared away at the Atlantic. Whether he felt the same desolation, she couldn’t tell. He wouldn’t open up to her again. He’d chosen sides. He’d sacrificed the sister he loved.

  Feeling gut punched, she wheeled away. She’d done the unthinkable: gotten down on her hands and knees and cleaned up his violent mess. This was her reward. Abie knew more than anyone else her fear of abandonment—and abandoning Larry in turn. And here he was: shoving her out of the lifeboat. Sayonara, sucker. Sure, he had a fix, but there was no repair for cutting the cord between them.

  She stumbled back toward the Wonder Wheel. Praying Abie would change his mind, she dangled a free hand for him to hold. But it remained empty when she turned right and crossed the deserted amusement park. She fought tears, but they battled back, slowly slipping down her cheeks. If she could have looked away from herself with revulsion, she would have.

  Her swollen eyes throbbed. At some point the spinning had to stop, but not today. With Abie’s cash, she could buy an evening dress and hit Roseland. She wanted to shimmy away the blues. Strangers lacked Phil’s grace, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. In a dancer’s arms, she was never lost or lonely. She preferred fellas with broad shoulders but didn’t care if they were tall or short, wore a wedding band or had the kind of scars on their faces and throats that only came from knives.

  She could still inject shyness in her smile if that’s what the guy wanted, pretending she was a new dress on the rack. Moving to the rhythm, she became the clarinet’s wild scream, the piano’s pulse. She felt alive flying out and being caught in a man’s strong arms. Lately, she drank more, laughed louder, and afterward, leaned against alley walls with men whose aftershaves were more familiar than they were.

  Phil had hooked her on that Roseland high. She’d been one half of a great dance team. People still remembered that, as they knew he’d died too young. Since he passed, moving to the music was her only escape until the tunes stopped, the lights went up, and reality choked her again, like now when she sniffled beside the Cyclone roller coaster. She dredged her bag for a subway token, tucking the bankroll into the lining.

  All Abie’s dough flowed from the Williamsburg Boys Club. She didn’t need a diagram to tie this cash back to that beast Strauss. She glanced over her shoulder. Would that cutthroat pursue her despite her brother’s promise?

  Wherever it had all begun, this was where it had to end. She exited the amusement park on Surf Avenue, across the street from the shuttered carousel. Nearby, a newsie at the foot of the subway ramp waved a paper at her, shouting, “Murder in Brooklyn” and “Amberg Ambushed.”

  She slunk to where he stood, dropping three cents into the boy’s grubby palm. Folding the broadsheet, headline discreetly in, she ascended the concrete slope where she’d often strolled with Phil, full up with hot dogs and ready to dance. Today she dragged, as if she were walking the plank on shackled feet. She paused to catch her breath, inhaling a lungful of sewer and damp.

  As she passed through the entrance and crossed the dark hall to the turnstiles, she felt a stitch in her side. She recognized that cramp, followed by a dull uterine ache. Small mercies: her girlfriend was back. She dropped a token in the slot and paused in the minimal privacy of the gate, wiggling her privates to check if the bleeding had started, but no, not yet. She’d be needing rags soon. She smiled in relief, looking up toward the waiting train at the end of the line—and spotted Pep Strauss in her periphery.

  The killer stood on the platform in an expensive double-breasted gray tweed overcoat. Staring out from under a black beaver-felt hat, he caught her eye with a skewerlike gaze.

  Lepke’s enforcer didn’t move as passengers scurried around him. She feared death: a push, brakes squealing, and a ripping pain away. Pep tugged the cuffs of his black gloves. His lids drooped with menace, which some women confused with bedroom eyes. Not Thelma. Pep’s threat pulsed between them. Her nape hairs tingled. She couldn’t hold his stare. Glancing away, she eyed a beat cop and flushed with relief. She opened her mouth to scream but realized the futility. Wouldn’t the police gloat if she fingered Strauss and then had to explain where they’d met?

  She imagined his breath on her neck as she hurtled past him to the train, hopping the gap from the platform. Inside, as she careened from car to car, doors clacked behind her. She found a crowded spot, wiggled room for her rear end between two burly strangers, and when the subway jerked forward, she jumped anxious
ly.

  As the elevated train headed toward Brighton Beach, she hid her face in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle with its below-the-fold headline screaming, “Who Killed Pretty Amberg? Brooklyn.”

  No, she thought, it’s my brother and those monsters calling the shots, the Murder Inc. machers. She tried to accept that Abie was doing her a favor forcing her out of Brooklyn, but he’d killed any illusions she’d had that he was her hero, somehow different from Pep and Pretty.

  Louis had nailed it when he’d told Abie, “I survived France and you got plugged in Brooklyn.” Funny, Louis didn’t anticipate dying of influenza on the other side of the world—but none of them was a sideshow fortune-teller. When the el lurched left, rejecting the shore and curving across Brooklyn toward the skyscrapers of Manhattan, she watched dusk spread over the flatlands, the clouds peeling back, revealing a plum-colored sky. As lights switched on in bay-windowed brownstones and shabby shingled apartment buildings, she imagined a young couple dancing in the living room—her hand draped around his neck, his lips brushing her cheekbones—as if nothing and no one existed beyond the curtains.

  “You were meant for me.” The song lyrics washed over her. She loved Brooklyn, the brick and concrete, the characters, the Giglio, the fragrant and fragile cherry blossoms trapped in that walled garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the koi spooning each other in their nearby pond. That’s where she’d been with Phil the day they’d conceived Larry, when she still clung to the dream of a child to chase away the shadows. She had to forgive herself: she’d adored Phil, the curve of his back, the way he sent her out spinning onto the dance floor and somehow her feet balanced on the beat and she became weightless until she returned to his arms. “I was meant for you.”

  She couldn’t afford to be soft, a single mother stewed in heartache, Little Yiddle’s little sister. She wasn’t going to toss herself off the el. She’d mope. No question. But once that ran its course, ultimately she was a woman who picked up her own pieces when forced. She’d put Abie back together again, hadn’t she, for all the good it did.