By the Rivers of Brooklyn (19 page)

“Don't be so foolish, Bill, that baby's not due till October and 'tis only June. If it were born already it wouldn't be still alive. Besides, you can see from the size of Ethel she's still expecting. Hello! Over here! Jim! Ethel!”

Finally Jim saw them and waved before he led Ethel and the children into the customs shed. Annie and Bill waited in silence until they emerged a little while later, Jim carrying the littlest boy in his arms as the bigger boy struggled to get free from Ethel's hand. And Ethel – who was certainly still in the family way – was indeed carrying a baby.

“Annie! Bill! How wonderful to see you again!” Ethel and Annie sized each other up. Yes, Ethel's dress was more in style for all it was a maternity dress and hidden under her coat. The hat was smart, too. Ethel looked curiously at Bill; Annie realized that in her letters she had not talked about him much and Ethel wouldn't realize what a part of the family he'd become. Of course she'd conclude that– “And this is Ralphie, and that's Jimmy there with Jim,” Ethel said, and looked down at the bundle in her arms, as if she were momentarily at a loss for words. “And this is baby Claire,” she said at last.

“Claire? But she's not…I mean, you're not…” Annie stumbled over her words. The baby was big and bright-eyed, obviously not a newborn. Maybe six months old.

“No, she's not our baby. She's…” Ethel glanced from Jim to Annie to Bill and back to Annie. “She's Rose's baby. Rose turned up on the doorstep just a few days before we sailed. We hadn't seen hide nor hair of her in over a year and, well, the long and short of it is, this is her baby and she wanted us to bring it home to you and Mom and Pop.”

“Rose's baby.” Annie didn't even glance at Bill to see how he took the news. Her arms shifted automatically to take the burden from Ethel, to cradle the baby in her arms. She saw a small round face peeking out from a huddle of blankets: a wisp of Rose's fair hair paired with dark brown eyes unlike anyone in the family. “Claire. Hello, baby Claire,” she crooned softly.

Ethel was still gripping Ralphie and now had Jimmy holding her other hand while Jim and Bill went off to get the trunk. Their procession wound up from the wharf to Water Street, where Bill had parked the car in front of the Board of Trade building. The little boys darted away from their mother every chance they got, out into the street, looking into the storefronts. “It's all so different to them,” Ethel said. “So quiet, compared to Brooklyn.”

It was hard to imagine how anyone could find Water Street on a weekday afternoon quiet. Annie couldn't imagine what Brooklyn must be like.

At the house they all unloaded. Bill helped Jim in with the trunk while Ethel and the children performed the ritual of greetings and kisses and hugs. While they were gone to the boat, Ethel's widowed mother had arrived and was settled in the kitchen too, so that the children could meet all their grandparents at once. Annie stayed out on the back step for a minute, the baby still in her arms, trying to think how to explain the baby to her mother. It shouldn't really be her worry; she wasn't the one who was entrusted with the baby to deliver, yet she saw already that this baby was her problem, her burden to carry, and she was glad to have it so.

Bill Winsor stepped out of the house, his cap in hand.

“You're going to stay for dinner,” Annie said.

“Ah, you've got enough already. And it's all family.”

“You're family too. And it's only stew, it can stretch.”

Bill moved closer to Annie, moved the blanket that covered most of baby Claire's face. The baby opened her eyes and stared unblinking at him. She frowned and began to whimper. Bill touched her cheek with a fingertip. Annie looked at him; he gazed at the baby so intently that she was free to study his face without his even noticing. This was the man who had loved Rose and wanted to marry her for years, looking down at the baby Rose had had by another man and casually packaged off to whoever might look after it. When she said, “Do you want to hold her?” Bill took Claire, settled her in his arms with an ease that seemed natural, and the baby's whimpering settled down, till she seemed almost content again.

By eleven o'clock that night, when she fell exhausted into her bed, Annie had figured out a number of things. She realized that no amount of explanation would force her mother to acknowledge that Claire was, in fact, Rose's illegitimate child. The baby was there: the baby was a fact, but where she came from was never going to be talked about. Annie saw, too, that Jim and Ethel were shocked by Pop, how wasted and feeble he had become; they were not prepared to find him aged and invalid no matter what she put in her letters. She figured out that Ethel and Jim were not happy; they barely spoke to each other, avoided each other's eyes. Annie saw, too, that Jim, who Ethel had always said was such a good father, was indeed a wonderful father to little Jimmy but barely touched or spoke to Ralphie, who looked ready to turn himself inside out to make his father notice him. And she had figured out that Ethel and Jim were not back here to stay, whatever they might think themselves.

Annie figured out one more thing: that baby Claire was hers, her own baby, the one she had asked God for. Everyone took turns holding her, but they always handed her back to Annie. Ethel, who had cared for the baby all the way from New York, seemed to have no further interest in her once she was safely in Annie's arms. So tonight baby Claire slept in an ancient bassinette that Bill dug out of the attic, hastily lined with a spare soft blanket, pulled up next to the couch where Annie slept in the living room. All night Annie lay listening to the baby's snuffling breath and her father's shallow steady wheeze, and thought of the verse that said
In everything give thanks
.

The summer unravelled day by day, growing warm in late July and cooling down again after Regatta Day in the first week of August. Ethel and Jim had tense, low conversations up in the bedroom at night. Annie heard them as she helped her mother get ready for bed in the next room. She couldn't pick out the words but she knew they were talking about what they were going to do: stay or go back to New York.

“He has to make up his mind sometime soon,” Ethel said to Annie as they stood in the pantry washing dishes one night in mid-August. “If we're staying here, Ralphie will have to be put in school. And I'm due to have this baby in October and I'd like at least to know where I'm having it. I can't travel when I'm nine months along. I don't want my baby born on a boat.”

This was as forthcoming as she had been all summer about their plans. Annie found it harder to talk to Ethel than it used to be: they had been apart so long, and also Ethel, like all married women, now had secrets to guard. She did not tell Annie why she and Jim were so uneasy with each other, nor why Jim adored his younger son and ignored the older. She only made reference to this once, when the girls were sitting on the step watching Jim chase Jimmy around the yard while Ralphie, solitary, watched from a branch of the dogberry tree. “He wasn't always like this,” Ethel said then. “He used to be wonderful with Ralphie. It's only lately…” Her voice trailed off.

What happened?
Annie didn't ask. “It must be hard on Ralphie.”

“It's tearing him apart,” Ethel said. “He adores his father. It's better here than it was back home though. At least here Bill pays some attention to him, and there's you and Mom and Pop too, and my mother. He's got people all around him.”

There was so much here that Annie wanted to ask, wanted to pry open Ethel's shell and poke around inside. She had never thought of Ethel, her friend Ethel, as someone who carried a shell, but Ethel had grown a hard outer coating in New York.
She's been hurt bad,
Annie thought,
and I can't get close to her.

“If you do go back, what will you do about Claire? You don't mean to take her back with you?”

Ethel looked shocked. “No, no, Rose wanted her sent home, she was clear on that. And anyway, I couldn't cope with two babies, and the boys as well.” She paused, looking up at Ralphie still perched in the tree. “I don't know but Rose is right. Maybe this is a better place to raise a child. Ralphie couldn't do that, climb a tree, back home in Brooklyn.”

Home in Brooklyn. Annie met her sister-in-law's eyes. Ethel looked away and changed the subject.

Jim said something similar a few days later, watching the boys play in the yard. “There's nothing here for me, Annie,” he told her after another fruitless day looking for work. “Sure, even Bill is fed up with it, and he belongs here.”

“Bill's not thinking of moving away?” Annie said sharply. If Bill went to New York too…

“Not to the States, you'll never get Bill down there. But he's talking about moving out around the bay with his uncle. He says if he can't be in here working he might as well be out there fishing, where at least he can grow and catch and shoot what he needs. I don't know but he's right, but that's no life for me. I'd be better off back in New York, doing what I knows best.”

“So, will you go back before school starts?” Annie said. “Ethel's been wondering if she should sign Ralphie up for school here.”

“She can do what she likes about Ralphie,” snapped Jim. Then, in a lighter tone, he added, “I don't see us leaving here now before the baby is born. And as far as Ralphie goes, he's happy here. I don't know but this is the best place for him.”

Slowly, Annie saw what was unfolding around her. “They want to leave Ralphie behind when they go back,” she told Bill one Sunday night. He was walking her back from service: she was free to go more often now that Ethel and Jim were at the house.

“Ralphie? Why would they leave their own son behind?”

And Annie, of course, could not explain. “I don't think him and Jim get on very well,” she said lamely. “Jim is kind of hard on him, he favours little Jimmy. It's hard to say what's in their minds from one day to the next,” she added. “But then it's hard to say that about your mind either. Jim tells me you're thinking of moving out around the bay?” She tried to keep her voice light, but wasn't sure she had succeeded.

Bill looked at her sharply. “I'm sorry, Annie. I meant to say, but it was hard to bring up to you. I don't know what to do. My uncle's getting up there, he could use a hand around the house and in the boat. Fishermen aren't getting much for their catch these days, but at least you got the land under your feet, the fish in the sea, everything you need to survive. People are coming in from the bay to the city and only going on the dole. There's no work for me here and I'd be happy down in Bonavista. I knows I would, but I don't like to leave you.”

“I can get by, Bill. I've got a lot of worries I know, but I can always find someone else to help me. People from church will help out now and then, with Pop and all.”

“Come with me, Annie,” Bill said suddenly. He stopped walking there on the corner of Freshwater Road and Rocky Lane. “Come down to Bonavista with me.”

“Bill, that's foolishness. I can't do that. How could I haul Mom and Pop and the baby and Ralphie, if they leave him behind, all down to Bonavista?”

“Not the whole crew! Let someone else in the family take some responsibility, someone else look after them all. I know you couldn't leave the baby, but I'd be glad to have her along with you.”

“Along with me?” Annie echoed.

“I'm sorry, I'm doing this all wrong.” Bill took off his cap and tried to grin, but it was a little lopsided, like only half of him was smiling. “What I should have said first was, Annie, will you marry me?”

Annie turned, walked a few steps away. “Bill, this is…I didn't expect this. I can't think about all this now, not when I don't know what's going to happen. You have to give me time…time to work it out.”

He looked relieved, and put his cap back on. He drew her arm through his and they walked on. “You can have time if you needs it, Annie. I'm not going nowhere before winter, anyway.”

No-one, it seemed, was going anywhere before winter. Ralphie started Grade One. Jimmy learned to climb the fence to get out of the yard. Claire learned to crawl. Jim looked for work. Pop developed a flu and they all worried it could turn to pneumonia. And on the first of October, Ethel had a baby girl she named Diane.

After Diane was born Ethel and Annie worked side by side, bathing the babies, changing diapers, preparing bottles. Diane was a plump, contented baby, dark-haired and dark-eyed like Ethel's people, not like the Evanses. One morning shortly before Christmas, as they bathed the babies in the big metal washtub in front of the kitchen stove, Ethel said, “Jim's got his mind made up to go back to New York as soon as spring comes. Harold tells him things are picking up a bit there, he might be able to find work.”

“And what do you think about that?”

Ethel was silent, soaping Diane's abundant hair into a curl atop her head. “Annie,” she said at last, “there's things I haven't told you. But I can tell you this if you don't ask no more questions: Jim's got his mind made up Ralphie's staying here, not coming back to New York with us. And I can't stand the thought of leaving him, girl, it's tearing me apart. Jim told me last night that he's going back to New York, and he's not taking Ralphie back with us. As for me and the other two, he says, I can decide what I wants: stay here with Ralphie and all of you, or go back to Brooklyn with him, he doesn't care. But his mind's made up to those two things, and I don't know what to do.”

Annie nodded slowly, pouring a cup of warm water over Claire's head. She squealed and shut her eyes. “If Ralphie stays behind,” Annie said at last, “I'll take the best kind of care of him. I'd treat him like my own, Ethel. And he's good with Claire, he'd be like a big brother for her. If you can't change Jim's mind, Ethel, at least you can rest easy that Ralphie would be well taken care of.” She saw Ethel's slow nod, and knew what Ethel would decide. And it was right. A wife's place was with her husband, when all was said and done.