By the Rivers of Brooklyn (17 page)

Months had passed since then, and still there was no steady work. Jim sat in his chair and read the newspaper most of the afternoon. After supper, when she'd put the boys to bed, he turned to her and said, “We got to figure something out, Ethel. I don't know what's going to happen to the boys if things don't get better.”

Ethel pulled her chair out to the kitchen table and sat down across from Jim. “Rent's due in four days, Ethel, and I haven't got the money to pay it,” he said, staring down at his hands, not meeting her eyes.

Ethel felt a little swell of excitement and pride. For nearly seven years Jim had been working to support her and their children. Now it was her time, her moment. She stood up and crossed the room, dragging her chair with her, climbing up to stand tip-toe on it and reach up to the top of the cupboard over the counter, reaching way in back for the biscuit tin.

She had been putting money into the biscuit tin ever since they got married, always keeping it a secret from Jim and even, in a way, from herself, for no matter how badly she wanted to she had never opened it up and counted the money inside. It was mostly coins but quite a few bills too, especially from the first years when Jim's pay was steady. “For a rainy day,” her mother had told her. “You puts aside a little, whenever you can.” Ethel had gloried in her ability to save a few cents here, a few cents there, out of the housekeeping, to deny herself some tiny luxury and put aside a little more. She pictured the rainy day, raindrops pattering merrily on the tin lid of the biscuit box, the rainy day when she would open it up and reveal her secret.

The effect on Jim was everything she could have hoped. Ethel had been a better saver than even she'd realized. The tin was heavy with coins and stuffed with loose dollar bills.

“Where'd you get this?” Jim said, as if she'd robbed a bank and asked for it all in small change.

“I've been saving it,” Ethel said. “Ever since we were married. Saving it for a rainy day.”

She had seldom enjoyed a moment in her life when a dream came true, exactly as she'd pictured it, but this was one. Jim's eyes came back to life as he smoothed out the bills, turning them all the right way and counting them, while she piled up the coppers and nickels and dimes and quarters into neat little towers. Ten minutes later, Jim looked up from counting and said, “Ethel, you're a wonder. Do you know there's over a hundred dollars in here? This'll be the savin' of us, girl.”

She smiled, letting her smile glow with pride. “Is it really enough to help, Jim?” She knew it was; she just wanted to hear him say it.

“Enough? Sure, even if I never got another day's work this would pay the rent for two or three months. If I can get a bit of work, it'll keep us in rent and food for that long at least, maybe longer.”

She let a handful of the shinier pennies trickle through her fingers, thinking of fairy tales about gold pieces, and Jim riffled the pile of dollar bills like a pack of cards. But it wasn't gold, was it? In a moment's silence they both grew sober, and Ethel guessed Jim was thinking the same thing she was: what if he never got another day's work? Everyone said the Depression was going to get worse before it got better. Two months' rent, no money for food, and no more miracles waiting in biscuit tins. And a new baby in five months' time.

“Or,” said Ethel, and stopped there.

“Or what?” said Jim.

“Or, there's enough here to buy us all passage home, with some left over.” Now it was her turn to look down at the table.

“Home?” echoed Jim, as if the word had lost its meaning. They said it almost every day: “There's a letter from home,” “What's the news from home?” They said it, but it was as if they no longer believed it, that a place called home was still there for them.

“Home,” she said again. “Back to St. John's. Maybe that's the best place for us, Jim.”

Jim shook his head slowly. “You read Annie's letters. Things are as bad there as they are here, maybe worse – men out of jobs, families on the dole. How is that any better than what we got here?”

“Better? Maybe it's no better, but if there's no work and we're going to starve, shouldn't we do it in our own place and with our own people?” As she said the words Ethel knew that once she was home, once she had a child born in Newfoundland, she would never want to leave again. The roots she thought she had put down in seven years in Brooklyn were as shallow as buttercup roots, something you could rip up with one quick tug and never think twice about it. She imagined Ralphie and Jimmy running out Freshwater Road, from her mother's house out to Jim's parents' house in the Valley and into the field behind it.

“It's worth thinking about, Ethel,” Jim said. She couldn't recall that he'd ever taken anything she'd said that seriously, really listening to her and saying it was a good idea instead of digging in his heels and complaining. It was like the biscuit tin had given her a kind of power, the power to sit down across the table and make decisions with him.

The idea rolled like a snowball. Jim didn't want to give up their Linden Boulevard apartment, because it was rent-controlled and if they ever did come back to New York they'd never get a place as cheap again. But Harold and Frances lived in a place that wasn't rent-controlled, and the landlord had just raised their rent. Since they wanted to stay in Brooklyn for now, it was decided that they would move into Linden Boulevard when Ethel and Jim moved out.

They would go in June, once Ralphie was out of school. Ethel could see Jim's spirits lift as the day grew closer. She busied herself packing clothes for all four of them, plus the baby things she'd already knitted, in their one big trunk. The rest of their stuff would be there for Harold and Frances to look after, for now anyway.

“It's so wonderful that it's all working out this way,” Frances said one day when she came to bring some of her things over to the apartment.

“I know,” Ethel said. “It feels right, like this is what's meant to be.” She paused a moment, stacking her own dinner plates to put away on the top shelf. “It feels like a new start for us…going back home, having a new baby. Maybe even…a new start for me and Jim, you know? Put the past behind us.”

She and Frances had never talked about Jim's little fling. Frances had gotten close to the subject once or twice and Ethel had steered her off it. But she had said enough, now, that Frances was able to say, “It's good to hear you say that, Ethel. I often wonders, you know, how you and Jim are getting on. I mean, it's all water under the bridge and all that, but some things aren't so easy to forget.”

“No, they're not.” Ethel lifted down her big mixing bowls. “Will you want these left down, or do you want to use your own?”

“Leave them down if you don't mind, I don't have any as big as that.”

“All right. No girl, it's not easy to forget something like what happened between me and Jim. I never have forgotten it, I guess, even though I've tried.”

“But it's…I mean, there's never been any trouble again, has there?”

“Oh no, no nothing like that.” Ethel turned away, back to the cupboards. She wouldn't share her worries, her suspicions, with Frances. Saying them aloud would make them real. Jim said he was out looking for work again today, but was he?

Frances left; Jim didn't come home for supper. Ethel put the boys down to bed and sat looking out the window till nine o'clock. Then she went out into the hall and across the lobby and tapped on Mrs. Liebowitz's door. Mrs. Liebowitz came and stood in the doorway smiling. Ethel had still never been over her threshold. Now she said, “Mrs. Liebowitz, could your Sarah step over to my apartment just for an hour or so? My boys are sleeping, my husband is out and I have to go out. I wondered if Sarah could just sit in our apartment in case one of the boys wakes up?”

“She will be glad to do so,” Mrs. Liebowitz said, a little formally. “Sarah!” she called over her shoulder. “Mrs. Evans wants you to step across and mind her boys. They are sleeping. Bring your book with you, you can study your homework over there.”

Ethel stepped out onto the street and stopped for a moment just to feel the warm night air. She'd still never gotten quite used to that – how it could be so warm in the evening, even early in the spring. Going back home, they'd have to get accustomed to cooler days, colder evenings, a later spring or no spring at all, really, till summer sprang on them unexpectedly in July. So different from New York.

She walked towards O'Grady's store at the corner of Linden and Flatbush Avenue, just as if she really did have a message to do, then turned south onto Flatbush, past the store, walking almost blindly, looking up as groups of people passed. She glanced into lighted restaurants and soda fountains, moving steadily towards brighter lights. Men weren't very imaginative. Maybe Jim would go to one of the same places he liked to go with Ethel on their rare nights out.

Fifteen minutes later Ethel found herself standing in front of the Loew's Kings, looking at the marquee to see what was playing, and wondering what she thought she was going to do. Go up and down the aisles looking for her husband? She turned back towards home, past the chop suey place, past the dance hall. She turned a corner, onto Church. She should be sensible and go home. She would arrive to find Jim home in his armchair, frowning and wondering what she had been doing out. She needed to think of an excuse, a story. Maybe pick up something in a shop to justify going out.

Then, in the window of a diner, she saw them. Jim and a girl, sitting over half-eaten plates of food, leaning forward, holding hands. She remembered the kicked-in-the-stomach feeling she'd had when she first found out Jim was having…an affair. This was too big for the word “fling” anymore. Jim was unfaithful to her. It wasn't a little thing, something Harold had brushed off with a few words. This was a big thing, a thing that had swollen to the size of her whole world, Jim and this woman he was snatching a few last minutes with even while they were packing up to go back home.

She moved away, breathing heavily, so they wouldn't glance out and see her. She sucked in air like she was drowning. Spots swam before her eyes but she put her head down and pulled herself together. Then she pushed the door open, hesitated on the threshold, and stepped into the harsh light. Nobody noticed her, not even the waitress, so she made herself keep walking, right down to the table.

Jim saw her when she was two paces away. His eyes widened: she saw shock and something like panic. That was to be expected. It was what she'd seen before he noticed her that hurt. She'd seen the laughter in his eyes and around his mouth, the warm, relaxed, light-hearted Jim she glimpsed only rarely now when he played with his boys. His boys. He was cheating on the mother of his sons.

The girl was very young. Ethel herself, though she felt forty-five at times, was in fact twenty-six. This girl looked about nineteen. She wore the kind of bright make-up Ethel hated, and her fair hair was very fluffy and poufy. She put a tiny hand to her rosebud mouth.

“Good evening,” Ethel said, laying her handbag in the middle of the table. She put out her hand. “I'm Ethel Evans. Mrs. Jim Evans. We haven't met.”

The girl, well trained, took her hand from her mouth and laid it in Ethel's. “Cecilia Fines,” she said.

“Ethel, I don't know what you're thinking, but it's not what you're thinking,” Jim said. “It's not – we're not – Cecilia is just a good friend…”

Ethel turned to look at him again. “Is that so? And she's been a good friend, has she, all this time? A year and a half – or more – ever since Harold told me you were seeing someone? He told me he'd talked you out of it, too, that you wouldn't make that mistake again. But I guess Harold was wrong, wasn't he?”

“A year and a half!” squealed Cecilia Fines, who seemed completely transfixed by the drama she found herself playing a part in. “Oh no, Mrs. Evans, I've only met Jim here about three weeks ago.” She turned to Jim. “A year and a half!” she repeated. “You told me you never…that I was the first girl you ever–”

“Now, now, honey,” Jim said in a vague general way, as if that might placate both women at once. Ethel glanced around and realized that everyone in the restaurant, including the waitress, was looking at them. Usually there was nothing Ethel hated more than to be stared at in public. She not only hated scenes, she despised the kind of people who made them. Yet here she was, in a public place, making the very first scene of her life and almost enjoying it.

Jim stood up. “Ethel, I think we should go home.” He turned to the girl. “Cecy, I'm sorry about all this.” He took two dollars from his pocket and laid them on the table. “Use this to pay for the bill and…ah, buy yourself some little thing with the change, okay?” His voice sounded different talking to Cecilia than it did when he talked to Ethel – less New foundland, more New York. She hadn't known he had another voice.

She turned to face him as soon as they were outside. He put both hands on her upper arms, holding her firmly in place. “Now look, I can explain,” he began.

“Can you? Can you explain?” Ethel said. She often felt stuck for words but suddenly she had more words than she'd ever known, all waiting to roll out and sweep over Jim. “Can you explain to me who you were with last year, if it wasn't this little…this little tramp? And if you gave that one up when Harold told you off, if you had enough sense to listen when he told you what a fool you were, if you listened to your brother who is ten times the man you'll ever be – then why were you fool enough to go do it again? And again and again. Because this isn't just one girl, or two girls, is it?” She saw it all now. “This is one girl after another, over and over again, a few weeks at a time till the excitement wears off. Just like it used to be before we got married. And just like it has been ever since, I'll bet. What a fool I've been.” She stalked away, leaving Jim to run after her.