By the Rivers of Brooklyn (13 page)

Rose is twenty-five. Last year she started lying about her age, which she can get away with. Still, she won't be young and pretty forever. Something needs to happen, she has to make a choice or take a chance. That look is in her eyes, that same bored tired look that's in Amy Jolly's eyes, only this isn't a movie and no-one is coming along to save her. She will have to save herself.

The movie is almost over. Rose can feel Danny's fingers pressing against her hot skin, reaching farther, under the edge of her brassiere to her breast. His other hand is on her thigh. Amy Jolly has just found Gary Cooper and let him slip away again. Then she stands there watching the soldiers march off across the desert, and the poor peasant women with their goats and donkeys and packs on their backs who trail along behind the men, and suddenly, unexpectedly, Amy Jolly kisses the millionaire goodbye, kicks off her lovely shoes, and starts off in her beautiful white suit, barefoot across the desert, disappearing into the sand.

Will she survive the trip? Will her feet get burned so bad she can't go on? Will she catch up to the men and will Gary Cooper really desert and run away with her like he said he would? Rose can't wait for the next scene and is horrified when the words “The End” come up on the screen. She sits frozen in her seat, seeing this beautiful woman walking barefoot across the sand because her perfectly sealed heart has been cracked open like an eggshell. To her horror, Rose realizes she has tears starting down her cheeks, and quickly wipes them away.

“Well, that was a funny ending,” Danny says as they stand up to go. “You don't even see what happens. I don't like that, do you? I like a happy ending. Let's go for a soda or something. Or we could go to a speakeasy. I know where there's one not far from here.”

“Sure, let's do that,” says Rose, who could use a real drink. They pass through the red-and-gold pillared splendour of the lobby and out into the hot crowded night. On the street they look idly into store windows.

Danny stops at a jewellery store window where a sparkling necklace and earring set is on display. “Something like that would look pretty on you, Rose,” he says.

“Yeah, I'd like that.” The diamonds probably aren't real, but even so, it's more than she could afford. And anyway, a girl doesn't buy a thing like that for herself.

“Maybe you'll get it for a present, if you're a good girl,” Danny says, squeezing her waist and grinning. He leads her past the jewellery store to a candy store where, in the back, you can go down a few steps and find yourself in another, dimmer place, and order a gin and tonic.

All the while they're sitting and drinking Danny is talking happily away but Rose doesn't say more than “Uh-huh,” and “Is that so?” and “Really?” which is all it takes to keep him going. She is back in the movie, trying to puzzle out Amy Jolly's choices and her own. She watches Danny's mouth move as he talks. He's good-looking, probably about as good-looking as Tony, though neither of them is Gary Cooper, not by a long shot. But the main thing, she thinks, is that he's nothing special; he's not complicated. There's not too much of him there. He's like an empty glass she can fill up. Not like Tony, full of dreams and sorrows and joy and music and a kind of simple goodness that terrifies Rose. Tony loves her and wants to be loved. Danny operates on a more straightforward basis. A fair exchange, she thinks, remembering the necklace and earrings. Like Amy Jolly's millionaire, on a small scale. A first step, she thinks.

Across the room she sees a dark-haired girl who looks like she could be related to Tony, chatting up some guy who's hardly paying attention to her.
There
is a Foreign Legion of women, too,
Rose thinks in that low husky voice, thinking of herself, of all the girls here in New York so far from home, hoping to find some dream come true. She tries on Marlene Dietrich's voice again in her head.
There
is a Foreign Legion of women, too. But we have no uniforms, no flags – and no medals
when we are brave.

Out into the street again. Danny draws her into an alley and starts kissing her. Rose closes her eyes so it's easy to imagine he's Gary Cooper. This hot Brooklyn street could be Morocco.

Her back rubs against the rough brick of the wall as this man, who could be any man, presses her into it. She feels him hiking her skirt up around her waist, his hands travelling up her thighs. She's gone this far before, and farther. After this there are supposed to be protests and apologies. Not tonight. “I got a safe,” he mumbles, and Rose nods without saying anything.
What am I keeping this
for?
Toss it away casually. What is she losing, except the silly dream that someday she'll meet someone worth walking barefoot across the desert for?

The man she's with doesn't question his good luck. He pulls her lacy underwear down to her ankles and gets to work. Rose keeps her eyes closed. He can be anyone she wants him to be. Until the sharp moment of pain, when he enters her and her eyes fly open long enough for her to think,
Is this what I want?
She sees the bricks on the other wall of the alley, a few feet away, and a narrow strip of sky above and, worst of all, his face, handsome and bland and common, locked in a horrible grimace. She sees the sparkle of a cheap imitation-diamond necklace. She closes her eyes, wills herself back to Morocco, back to the land of loss and dreams.

ETHEL
 
BROOKLYN, OCTOBER 1930

E
THEL STOOD IN THE
courtyard, her mouth full of clothespins. Jimmy pulled himself up to stand by hauling on her leg. Thrown off balance, she dropped the blouse she was hanging. She bent down to pick it up and saw it had fallen into a puddle and the sleeve was dirty. With a sigh she threw it back in the basket and picked up one of Jim's work shirts.

“Mommy! Mommy!” This was not Jimmy, who as yet could only say “Ma-ma,” but Ralphie, who was running around with a small pack of other four-year-olds in frantic imitation of a group of bigger boys playing stickball in the centre of the courtyard. “Mommy, get my ball!”

“Get it yourself!” Ethel yelled back. She shifted her weight as she called out. Jimmy lost his grip on her leg and fell back on his bum, howling with pain and hurt pride. Ethel sighed. Something as simple as hanging out the wash seemed to take forever. It didn't used to be this hard when Ralphie was a baby, did it? Having two was more than twice as hard, although at least there was a decent space between Ralphie and Jimmy, not bang-bang right next to each other like Jean's three. Women who had their babies close together like that must go off their heads, Ethel thought.

“Ah look, he is standing up!What a big boy!” Mrs. Liebowitz was down with her basket of wash too, standing at her line just next to Ethel's, pinning up her clothes and beaming at little Jimmy.

“Yes, he's growing like the weed,” Ethel said. “Where's your little one this morning?” She could never remember the name of Mrs. Liebowitz's two-year-old boy, though the four-year-old girl, Rebecca, was one of Ralphie's regular playmates. Rebecca was a pretty easy name to remember, though Mrs. Liebowitz said it with an odd foreign pronunciation.

Jimmy fell and started to cry again; Ethel picked him up and attempted to finish hanging out the wash while cradling him on her hip.

“Oh, my Sarah, she's taken little Levi out, out in the carriage. She walks him up and down the street as soon as she gets home from school. Her and her friends love to take the little ones out. You should let her take your Jimmy, she'd love to, it's a big carriage. She could put him in together with Levi.” Levi – that was the baby's name. And Sarah was the eight-year-old. There would be another little Liebowitz within the year, Ethel could see, though Mrs. Liebowitz never said she was expecting and Ethel didn't ask. They were not friends; they were neighbours. Mrs. Liebowitz was friendly, but she and Ethel did not trespass on each other's territory: they talked in the courtyard or on the front step but would not invite one another into their kitchens for a cup of tea. Ethel wasn't sure if foreigners even drank tea.

Ethel was uncomfortable with the other woman's foreignness, her strangeness. She looked dark and severe and older, with the long plain dark dresses and her hair all tucked up under a scarf. Her laundry, caught by the crisp October breeze, danced on the line: more of the long shapeless dresses puffed out like they were alive, the same dresses in miniature for her girls, Mr. Liebowitz's white shirts, even strange underwear. Funny about neighbours, how you saw their underwear and nightdresses and stuff, and yet you might never see inside their kitchens.

Ralphie spun out of the circle of whirling children back to her side, crying and snivelling: the whole happy wheel of children had exploded into separate sobbing bundles, each running to a mother. Ethel looked enviously at the bigger boys who were now heading off to play in the nearby vacant lot. Someday, she thought, Ralphie would be old enough to play like this, old enough to go off with his friends and not need his mother so close by. She bent down awkwardly, Jimmy still in her arms, to hug Ralphie, and was overcome at once by a rush of love and annoyance.

Back in the apartment, Jimmy and Ralphie played quietly for a little while and Ethel worked as quickly as she could to take advantage of the minutes. Her meatloaf was already made up and ready to go in the oven. Like most of the meatloaves she made these days it was more and more breadcrumbs and onion, less and less meat. She had become skilled at finding bargains, making do, dressing up cheap cuts to look and taste better than they were. Two years ago, when they got this apartment, she daydreamed about getting ahead, moving up in the world. Now she stretched meatloaf to try to save a penny here and a penny there, because even when Jim had steady pay coming in she knew the bad times could strike again, any minute.

It was all because of the Crash. When Ethel first heard about the Crash on Wall Street, last fall, she didn't understand. She thought it was an actual building on Wall Street that had crashed, the Stock Market. She knew Wall Street was an important street in New York. Jim had even taken her there and she'd seen some of the big buildings that he'd worked on. When the men talked about the Crash, she'd pictured one of those big skyscrapers collapsing somehow, bricks and mortar and rubble crashing to the ground like the walls of Jericho.

It was Harold who had taken the time to really explain it to her, carefully and simply, and at the end she felt much better, like he really took an interest. She still couldn't have really said in her own words what the Crash meant, but she knew no buildings had fallen down. Only that rich men who had a lot of money had lost most of it or all of it. Not a thing you'd think would matter to people like them, but Harold explained to her how the rich men were the ones who owned the big companies and built the big buildings. If the rich men were poor now, they wouldn't be able to hire anyone to put up new buildings, which meant a lot less work for steelworkers. Which meant meatloaf made with more breadcrumbs than beef. The Crash was everywhere, even in Ethel's kitchen.

After the Crash, construction stopped on the building Jim was working on and there were five months, cold months of winter, when he had to pick up jobs wherever he could, a few days here, a week there. The pay was far less than he had been making and it took all Ethel's know-how to make those few dollars cover the housekeeping. But she did it. Then, back in March, Jim and Harold got the news they'd been hoping for: that big new skyscraper, supposed to be the tallest in the world, was going ahead on the spot where the old Waldorf-Astoria hotel burned down, going ahead in spite of the Crash and the hard times. Jim and Harold were among the 3000 men who got jobs.

Most of the Newfoundlanders they used to work with wouldn't go to work on the new building because it wasn't a union job. They'd been told if they worked on it, they'd never find jobs with the union again. Some of the men had a lot of loyalty to the union. Jean's husband Robert was one of those: there was tension between Robert and Jim for awhile after Jim chose to betray the union. When anyone got talking about the brotherhood Jim just shrugged. “If the union's gonna put food on our table, good for them. But if not, I'll take whatever work I can get.” And Harold, a little less sure about stepping out of line with the union brethren, allowed himself to be convinced.

So the new skyscraper was rising in Manhattan, and here on Linden Boulevard steady pay was coming in again. But Ethel no longer trusted good fortune. She kept on shopping and cooking exactly the way she had when they were almost penniless, and put the money she saved in a biscuit tin for a rainy day.

“Did Harold say anything about what time they're coming over tonight?” she asked Jim over supper. Jim was still eating and Ralphie dawdled over his plate, dipping his bread into the mashed potatoes, making little patterns but not eating much of either bread or potato. “Eat your potatoes, Ralphie,” she said, cutting a sliver of meatloaf for herself.