By the Rivers of Brooklyn (15 page)

“Frances told me she talked to you about…you know,” he said.

“About Jim,” Ethel whispered.

“Yeah. About that. I just wanted to say…look, I talked to him the other day. We had it out. I think I made him see sense…I mean, that's all over now. He swears it is and I'm sure that's true. I mean, I don't think he'd do anything so foolish again.”

Ethel nodded, the knot in her throat too big for her to speak right away.

“I'm sorry for butting in, but you know, he's my brother and I don't like to see him make a fool of himself. Jim don't know how lucky he is.”

Ethel nodded again. She wanted Harold to put his arms around her, to hold her and keep her safe. She wanted Jim and Frances both to melt away like they'd never existed so it would be just her and Harold here in the kitchen, their kitchen.

“Thank you, Harold,” she said. “If you're right and it's all over…don't worry, I won't say a word to Jim about it. But it was a nice thing for you to do.” She turned away, back to the sink where she rinsed a plate under the tap. “We'll just pretend it never happened.”

Harold's hand tightened on her shoulder a minute, he gave her an awkward pat, and then he was gone back to the party.

ROSE
 
BROOKLYN, MARCH 1931

R
OSE SITS ALONE IN
her tiny room at Mrs. Borkowski's boarding house. Mrs. Borkowski is famous for not being too picky over her boarders, or too nosy about their private lives. In some boarding houses where Rose has lived, there are rules about young girls coming in by a certain hour of night and not entertaining gentlemen callers in their rooms. Mrs. Borkowski, by contrast, has only one rule: rent is due on first and third Fridays. Beyond that, she cares little about what her boarders do or when they come and go.

Rose has gentlemen callers, on occasion. She finds the narrow lumpy bed a better place to make love – if you can call it that – than back alleys and laneways. Something snapped in her the night Danny Ricks did it to her in the laneway after the movie. Or maybe it was the next day when he gave her the necklace and earrings. It was just like the books and Sunday School teachers said after all, just like
The Story of a Rose
. Once a girl's virtue was tarnished there was nothing left but for her to sink further and further into sin.

So far, Rose doesn't mind being sunk in sin. She gets taken out for dinner and movies, sometimes all the way to Manhattan. Rose knows this is because some of the fellows have girlfriends in their own neighbourhoods and they don't want those girlfriends to see them with Rose. She gets presents, too – more cheap jewellery, dresses, things like that. Fellows know what to expect at the end of the evening and Rose obliges.

It took a few weeks before the talk got round to Tony and he asked her straight out if it was true. Actually what he said was, “This isn't true, Rose. This fellow, I punched his face in for the things he said about you. I didn't mind. I was happy to do this. Only tell me I didn't make a fool of myself, you didn't make a fool of me.”

“I can't tell you that, Tony. It's true. I went with all those guys and probably a couple more you don't know about.”

“Rose, this isn't true! Rose, why? Why would you do this to me?” To her surprise he didn't look angry, didn't raise a hand to her. He looked, instead, as if
she
had slapped him. “Why would you do this to yourself?”

“I…I don't know, Tony. I just felt like it, that's all.” She couldn't explain the darkness she felt at the centre, the sure and certain belief that there was nothing to save herself for. She couldn't explain why she had to throw away some silly idea of purity and virtue. And she certainly couldn't explain that she preferred a man who saw sex as a straightforward exchange of goods and services. Tony would think she wanted him to start buying her stuff, and that wasn't what she wanted at all.

“You didn't need to do this, Rose. You're a good girl, a beautiful woman. I was gonna marry you, Rose. You know I wanted to marry you, right?”

“But not now, right? You wouldn't want to marry me now, would you, Tony?”

He looked down, still clenching his fist, now grinding it into his palm. But shook his head. “No. Not now. I still love you – I'll always love you – but I couldn't marry you now. Not after you do these things.”

Not long after that, she takes the room at Mrs. Borkowski's. She gets a new job, too, at the soda fountain of a candy store. She meets a lot of fellows there, and some of them wait for her after work and come back to Mrs. Borkowski's with her. Gentlemen callers, to use the term loosely.

Rose stops making even the few infrequent visits she used to make to Harold and Jim. There's no point in seeing her family, now. The folks back home thought she was an abandoned woman even before, when she was respectably going around with Tony. Why let them see what her life is like now? She has tried hard to cut all ties to her past, to avoid anyone with a Newfoundland name or a Newfoundland accent. She is cut loose, floating free.

And she is free, and all alone, on this rainy March evening in her room, putting her feet up after standing all day at work, reading
Life
magazine and having a smoke. This is all she has the energy for most days. Apart from working and going out with fellows, she mostly lies on her bed, asleep or only half-awake. In fact she's starting to drift off when a tap comes on her door. She doesn't encourage fellows to come to her place looking for her; she'd rather make a date and meet them somewhere first, but it's only to be expected that someone will take liberties sooner or later. It could be a girlfriend, of course, but Rose has few girlfriends left.

“All right, hold your horses,” she calls. She gets up, pulls on a housecoat over the underwear she's lounging in, and opens the door.

Tony Martelli stands there, his shirt soaked almost transparent, his wet hair plastered to his skull. She hasn't laid eyes on him since – when was it? – September. Six months.

“I gotta talk to you, Rose,” he says.

She opens the door, stands aside. He sits down on the bed, shivering with cold from the rain outside. “Take your shirt off,” she says. He strips off the wet fabric and she sees again what a lovely body he has, the clean lines of his well-muscled chest and arms and shoulders. Not one of the fellows she's been with has been as good-looking as Tony, not really. She hands him a towel and he rubs his head vigorously and then wraps the towel around his shoulders. “It's pouring out there,” he says.

“You're still shaking. Here, have a drink.” She opens the drawer where she keeps a flask of whiskey and hands it to him. As he drinks she sits down beside him, one leg cocked up on the bed so her housecoat falls open and her bare legs and the frilly edges of her underwear are showing.

Tony looks up, and she sees something in his eyes that echoes the bleak emptiness in her own. She's never seen that before. Tony is full, not empty, full of life and hope and plans. He's still shaking, and she sees that it's more than the rain that's making him shiver.

“What happened?”

“We just got news today. My mama, she's dead.”

“Your mama. Over in Italy.” It seems so far away. Rose tries to imagine what she'd feel if she heard her mother died back in St. John's. All she can imagine is the echo of an echo of a feeling: sadness, but nothing that would make her shake and go walking blindly in the rain.

“You don't understand, Rose, I never told you about me and my mama. I was always her favourite, always the boy who could do no wrong. The youngest, her baby, her last little boy. I helped her in the house, in the garden, I slept in her bed. She'd say, ‘My Tonio, my wonderful boy.'”

Rose nodded. She has not heard it in these words before, but she knows Tony was his mother's favourite. He must have told her, or else it was something Marcella said.

“But you don't know, Rose, what this means to her. To my mama, she has to give one son to God, one son to be a priest. And who better to give than her favourite son, especially when he's so good, such a kind and helpful boy. So from all my childhood days, all she tells me is, ‘Tonio, you are given to God. You are my gift to God, you will be my priest.'”

“Really?” Rose can't imagine this, wrapping up one of your children like a package to give to God. Especially when Catholic priests can't even marry, so it's like you're telling him from the day he's born he'll never grow up to love a woman or have a son of his own. She shudders. “That's not fair of her, Tony. You musta known that, since you're not a priest, right, honey?”

“When I was fifteen, sixteen, I knew. I told my mama I was going to America and I wasn't being no priest.”

“And what did she say?”

“She cursed me, Rose. No, I don't mean she just said a curse word at me. That wasn't her way. She was a very holy woman. She just said that I was going against God's will, and making her break her vow to God, and God would damn my soul to hell forever, and a curse would follow me to America and ruin everything I did.”

“Tony! You don't believe that stuff, do you?”

He looks up at her with a smile that isn't a smile. “Believe it? I don't know. So far, the curse don't hurt me much. I was doing pretty well here, till I lost you. Maybe that's the start of it. But in the next life? She could be right. She made a vow and I broke it. Maybe I am going to hell.”

Rose shivers, because she was raised to believe in a hell too, maybe not the Italian Catholic hell but the Newfoundland Salvation Army hell, just a few doors down from it. And from everything she knows, she's going there for sure. She can't quite believe in it, but she can't quite stop believing either. But she says bravely, “Your mama's curse can't hurt you, Tony. That's just old woman's foolishness, something she said to make you feel bad.”

“But Rose, those are the last words she said to me. I wrote her letters and she never answered them. She never spoke my name again, like I was dead to her. I loved my mama, and the last thing she ever said to me was a curse.”

Rose takes him in her arms and lets him press his face against her chest, where her housecoat falls open and it's just her bra there. He's crying, his shoulders shaking, using her to cry into, but then he's kissing too, kissing and touching in a way none of the other fellows ever did, a way that makes it seem like both of them are in this together, not just him doing it to her. This makes her feel excited, as if she were with someone new for the first time, only better, and that in its turn makes her feel even more like she's going to hell. Her and Tony, going to hell together.

The night seems to go on forever, though morning finds them both asleep. “Rose, sorry, I gotta get to work,” Tony says, sitting up in the dawn light, feeling for his clothes. She didn't bother to hang up his shirt last night and it's in a heap on the floor, still damp. “I gotta hurry, get home and change. Listen, tonight…will you meet me for dinner tonight?”

Dinner. Just like before. Tony has changed the rules, and the ground shifts under Rose. But she says, “No, not dinner. You come here, later on in the evening. Just come back here, okay?”

Tony looks disappointed. But he's there that night, and they talk for a few minutes only and then make love again, and sleep together again. Rose is amazed. She is hungry for Tony, for what his hands and body can do for her, and yet she fears him more than ever. Rose feels like a girl in a movie at last – not that girls in movies ever do this. She is the princess in the enchanted castle, living under a spell. It will end, but for now she just wants to be bewitched.

Every night for a week he comes over. She doesn't make any other dates, any other plans, just waits in her small bare room for him to arrive.

One night, the seventh night, he brings something. It's a single pink rose. Not a red one, her favourite kind, but at least it's a rose, and she knows what it means. Rose would like to think of something sweet and romantic but what really pops into her head is that silly poem. She's not a great one for poetry by any means but there was this one poem her friend Nelly read in a magazine years ago, and the two of them used to recite it and laugh to kill themselves, all about the fellow who sends the girl one perfect rose to show his love, and she says,

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it's always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.

Just my luck, she thinks, but manages not to laugh or anything. She looks around for what to do with the rose and finally sticks it in her water glass on the night table because there's no vase or anything to put it in. Then she looks around again and sees her room so shabby and tacky-looking, and thinks that not only is she not going to get one perfect limousine, she's damn lucky to be getting even a rose from a fellow as sweet as Tony.