By the Rivers of Brooklyn (2 page)

Now she realizes that secret passages are firmly in the world of make-believe – for her, anyway. But anyone can keep a diary or save old letters. Anne herself keeps a diary and has since she was nine. And she is never, never going to throw it away, so someday her daughter or her granddaughter can find it. One day she asks her mother if she has ever kept a diary, knowing already what the answer will be.

“No, I'm afraid not,” Claire says. “I was never into introspection. That would have been more Valerie's kind of thing.”

“Well, did Valerie keep a diary?” Anne persists. Her mother's cousin Valerie moved to Toronto years ago, but perhaps she left the diary behind.

Claire looks both surprised and annoyed. “No, not that I know of. I only meant she would have been the type to.”

“Well if she was the type, maybe she did? Maybe it's around Aunt Annie's house somewhere?”

“I doubt it,” Claire says. “Anything any of us ever kept would have been thrown out long ago. Your Aunt Annie's not the kind for hanging onto old clutter.”

This is certainly true. The spartan neatness of Aunt Annie's house has already discouraged Anne in her search. The anti-clutter gene was passed on in an even more virulent form to Claire who is, as they have this conversation, opening her mail over the garbage can, slicing open envelopes with her neat little letter-opener and dropping flyers, sweepstakes notifications, and Amazing Offers into the trash without a second glance. The small pile of true mail salvaged from this refining process is swept at once into her office to be sorted into the appropriate file folders. Anne can see that a diary would not have survived long, even if her mother had ever been inclined to keep one.

She tries Aunt Annie anyway. “Did you ever write in a diary, when you were younger?”

Annie, folding laundry, laughs. “A diary? Sure, when I was a girl nobody had time for foolishness like that. We were all too busy working.”

Anne knows for a fact this is not true. Aunt Annie was born in 1907, around the same time as Emily of New Moon, and Emily kept a diary. So did lots of girls in those old books. Yes, they were busy milking the cows and scrubbing the floors by hand with no vacuum cleaners, but they found time to write in their diaries. Some of them did. Not Aunt Annie, apparently.

Anne pokes through whatever old boxes and cupboards she can find, just in case. Maybe no-one has bothered with a Trunk; perhaps she will open an old family Bible or a musty encyclopedia one day and find old love letters pressed and forgotten between the pages. All she finds are rows of Rubbermaid file boxes in her parents' basement, with their income tax forms going back to 1967, and a few old photo albums in Aunt Annie's closet. Not surprisingly, she chooses the photo albums, hauling them with their heavy burden of dust into the living room, to her great-aunt's dismay.

The pages are black instead of white, the photos black-and-white instead of colour, held in place by little triangles at each corner rather than clingy sheets of cellophane lying on top. Aunt Annie, compelled against her nature, sits down on the chesterfield beside Anne and begins to interpret the lost language of old pictures.

“That's me, with your Aunt Frances, Frances Stokes she was then, that was before she married your Uncle Harold. And that's Jim and Poor Bert, up in the field behind our old house. That was when we lived out in the country. Look, there's Jim and Ethel on their wedding day, that wasn't here, that was in New York. There they are with Little Jimmy and Diane, look at the lovely head of curls on Diane, she was such a pretty baby. There's your Uncle Harold with–”

“Wait, who's that one?”

“What? I can't see.”

“There. Isn't that you, and…who's that other girl?”

“I don't know…oh, I think that's Rose, me and Rose. Your grandmother.” Quickly, the page is turned.

Anne sits alone with the album later, turns back to that page, to Rose-your-grandmother. Rose and Annie, sisters, somewhere in St. John's, sometime in the 1920s. Teenagers, though maybe they didn't use that word back then. Annie: short and sturdy, plain, wholesome looking, then as now. Rose: taller, with fluffy fair hair, pretty in the alien way people from another era look attractive despite the funny clothes and hairstyles. Something about her is brighter, sharper, more vivid than Annie. Or does Anne only imagine that?

There are not many pictures in the album. Little money was wasted on photographs. But there are enough for Anne to piece together the early lives of Aunt Ethel and Uncle Jim, Poor Bert, Aunt Frances and Uncle Harold, Aunt Annie and Uncle Bill, and all the various offspring. And in all those pages, only two pictures of Rose – that one snapshot with Annie, and an even earlier sepiatoned family group.

The photo album contents Anne for a while, but she never really stops looking for more clues, more evidence that the past exists. She has ceased to believe in The Trunk; the Evans family, she concludes, are not Trunk-keepers. But she continues to hope for old letters, old diaries, even old schoolbooks with names scribbled in the margins.

By the time she is thirteen, Anne's search has turned up little, but it has not stopped. It has narrowed, too. Once she wanted evidence of anyone's past life, anything that would transport her back to another era. Cousin Valerie's diary, if it existed, would have been almost as good as her mother's. Aunt Annie's or Aunt Frances' old letters would give her some flavour of the past. But now Anne knows she is searching for something, someone, in particular. Through diaries never written, letters never opened or read, a past never sorted and saved, she is searching for Rose.

PART ONE
 
1924 - 1932

ROSE
 
ST. JOHN'S, SEPTEMBER 1924

“Y
OU STAY AWAY FROM
that one Ida Morris,” Rose's mother tells her as she gets ready to go out. “I've heard about her. She goes with the Portuguese and Spaniards.”

Tonight Ida has promised Rose and May that they, too, can go with the Portuguese. They meet the boys – young fishermen named Manuel, Luis, Jorge – on Water Street. Rose is paired with Luis, short but handsomer than the other two. He is about her own age, smiling, sweet in his broken English. She lets him put an arm around her. They go to Ida's house, where her invalid mother is forever in bed, in her own twilight world, and knows nothing of who comes in or goes out. Rose lets Luis slip an arm around her waist, closes her eyes when he kisses her.

Rose is nineteen. In the one long mirror in her parents' house, a dusty green oval, she sees an image of herself as faded and discoloured as a flower petal pressed in a Bible. But she knows her hair is blond and curly, that the brown dress with the yellow print is a good fit. In New York, Jim told her when he was home, on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, the girls wear skirts to their knees, bobbed hair, lipstick and high heels. They smoke cigarettes out in the sight of everyone.

Rose's parents, strict Methodists turned stricter Salvationists, would be shocked at the thought of their daughter among the loose women of Flatbush Avenue. But Rose has been sneaking out to dances, kissing boys, even getting drunk, ever since she left school. Bill Winsor, her first boyfriend, has asked her twice to marry him. She strings him along with promises:
later, someday,
perhaps
.

Her family cannot understand why she doesn't marry Bill. “He's so sweet, sure, he'd do anything for you,” her sister Annie says. “And he's not bad-looking.”

“He's a nice young fellow,” says her mother, looking Rose up and down as if searching for the hidden flaw. “You could do worse. Given time, you probably
will
do worse.”

Her older brothers, Jim and Bert, are Bill's friends. Bert, the more serious of the two, tells her when he comes home to visit, “You're cracked if you don't take Bill, Rose. He won't wait forever.”

Bill won't wait forever, and neither will Rose. She is waiting, waiting for her life to begin. Perhaps she will not have to wait much longer, she thinks as she dances with Luis to the hissing scratch of Ida's gramophone. A girl she knows, Ethel Moores, is going to New York. Rose has never liked Ethel. Round and pale and bland as a custard, proper and churchgoing, Ethel is Annie's best friend, Bert's long-time sweetheart. Now, with both Bert and Jim away working most of the year in New York, Ethel plans to go too. She has a cousin who will find a job for her. Rose cannot stand the thought that Ethel will walk on Flatbush Avenue before she, Rose, gets there. As Luis whispers to her in Portuguese, she maps out her battle plan. She may have to pretend to be friends with Ethel. Ethel is so slow, she may not notice the difference between a real friend and a false one. When Ethel steps on board the
Nerissa
to go to New York, Rose will be at her side.

Luis, who has had too much to drink, has begun to cry. In his torrent of broken English and weeping Portuguese, Rose hears a name again and again:
Maria, Maria
. His girlfriend back in Oporto, sweet and faithful and unsuspecting Maria, waiting at home as patiently as Ethel waits for Bert on his long trips to New York. For Maria in Oporto, it is the evil women of St. John's, Newfoundland, who threaten her patient Portuguese happiness.

“She is angel…angel to me,” sobs Luis, burying his face between Rose's breasts. Rose pulls away. Tonight, lucky Maria will not be cheated on. Rose is skating along the edge of bad-girl, not venturing onto the thin ice. She will not be tricked into having a baby. Bill Winsor's baby or a Portuguese sailor's baby: either would anchor her in St. John's till she died.

Outside, it is dark. Time for Rose to go home.

ETHEL
 
BROOKLYN, APRIL 1925

“A
LL DONE,
E
THEL?
T
HAT'S
a good girl,” said Mrs. Carey. “Put away the vacuum cleaner, now, and go see Mr. Carey, he'll have your pay for you.”

Ethel lovingly wrapped the cord around the vacuum and tucked it away in its closet. Half an hour, maximum, to run that marvellous little machine over the Careys' rugs, and not much longer to wipe up and sweep the gleaming parquet floors. At home she would have spent the day scrubbing, waxing, beating the rugs. Washday would have been another whole day, but the Careys had a cylinder washing machine. The machines did all the work and Ethel got the pay, crisp American bills in a white envelope, handed over by smiling Mr. Carey. Then it was take off her apron, hang it on the hook in her own tiny, immaculate bedroom, change her shoes and she was free. Saturday afternoon in Brooklyn, and Ethel Moores waited on the street in front of the Careys' brownstone for Bert Evans to take her walking in Prospect Park.

She walked down the broad front steps of the brownstone, an imposing and solid-looking house in a row of others just as stately. Four storeys, it was shaded by a row of trees that ran along the street. Bert stood under one of those trees, in his shirtsleeves, smiling up at her. It was a sunny, warm day in April, which in itself was a good enough reason to love being in New York. At home, Annie's letters told her, they were still locked into winter, barricaded behind snowbanks and sleet storms. And Ethel was strolling down 7th Avenue with only a cardigan on over her dress.