By the Rivers of Brooklyn (22 page)

“Where's Ralph?” Aunt Annie said, looking around sharply. “Gone out, I suppose.”

“Yes, he said he'd be back by…well, before ten anyway.”

“No more than he should do. I worry about that crowd he hangs around with, there's some hard tickets in that crowd. Those Sullivan boys…” Aunt Annie poked around in the range with her poker, nudging the ashes. With her back to Claire she added, “I don't worry about you, Claire. You're sensible. Sensible people don't get caught up in any old foolishness, any trouble.”

“I know,” Claire said, folding up her books and scribblers, zipping her pencil and eraser and sharpener away neatly in her case. It was a precise little case with flaps and folds for everything and she loved the orderly ritual of putting each thing back in its appointed spot. Valerie's pencil case was a disgrace, full of inkblots and folded notes and things shoved in any old way at all. Claire's was as tidy as Aunt Annie's pantry shelves. A place for everything, and everything in its place.

ETHEL
 
BROOKLYN, JUNE 1944

T
HE APARTMENT WAS QUIET
now, an hour before the children got home from school. Ethel immersed herself in these quiet hours like a bath. Jim worked from eight till six, practicing the trade he'd picked up from Harold – radio repair – at a small shop a few blocks down Flatbush. Diane and Jimmy spent all day at school, came home to change their clothes and then ran out again with their friends. Ethel was alone most of the day. It seemed such a short time since everyone had been underfoot, never giving her a minute's peace. She knew that soon the warm bathwater of peace and privacy would rise like a flood tide and close over her head, and that knowledge worried her. But other times she thought,
Let them go. I'm better on my own anyway.

Ethel's life was neat and ordered. Her son Jimmy was no trouble, a big hearty fourteen-year-old who liked nothing better than to play stickball all day with his friends in the lot at the end of the street. Diane was another story. She was only twelve but was starting to Develop Early. Also, the mouth on her – Ethel couldn't believe it sometimes, the things she said to her own mother. She would be trouble. Daughters were more trouble than sons.

Ethel creamed a block of butter with a firm hand, wishing daughters were as yielding and predictable. Today was Friday; tonight she and Jim were having three other couples over for cards. They had been doing this for years, though the guest list had changed. Jean and Robert were still the old standbys, like Ethel and Jim themselves. Once upon a time it used to be Harold and Frances, but they moved back to Newfoundland years ago, before the war. Dick and Eileen Mouland were gone too; Eileen had moved back home after Dick was killed overseas last year. So many women, even here in this building, had lost husbands and sons.

Ethel half-listened to a radio serial as she worked, calling it “foolishness” if any other woman mentioned it but following the stories all the same. She liked
The Guiding Light
and a few of the others, though she credited herself for not getting all caught up in it like some did. On today's story, Nora was arguing with her daughter Doreen, who she had only discovered was her daughter a few weeks ago, because she had given her up to be adopted at birth. Ethel shook her head. “Where do they come up with the stories at all?” she said to the radio, measuring out two cups of flour from the bin on the counter.

A sharp rap at the door startled her. Ethel wiped her hands on a towel, untied her apron, and went to the door.

The tall young man standing there was nobody she knew. Too old to be one of Jimmy's friends, and dressed in a badly cut, out-of-style wool coat, soaked in the pouring rain, dressed like someone from…could it be someone from home? And then, before he opened his mouth, she saw the ridiculous thin spray of flowers he had clutched in his fist, and knew. Of course she knew.

“Ah…Mother? Mom?” The boy spoke as though it were a new word in an unfamiliar language. Ethel said nothing and his eyes widened; she saw his panic. He stuck out the hand with the flowers, holding the drooping florist's carnations in front of him like a shield.

“Ralph,” she said at last, wondering why she couldn't put more feeling into her voice. When Nora on the radio found out Doreen was her daughter they fell into each other's arms sobbing. Here in real life, she stood like a porcelain doll in front of the son she had prayed for and cried over every night since she left him at home in 1933.

She took a step backwards, almost bumped into the doorknob. “Come in, come in.” Then, with relief, she recalled a cliché. “This is a surprise! What brings you to New York?”

Ralph was relieved too, she could see. His wide mouth relaxed into a smile. “I just made up my mind to come, you know, come see you and Dad. I told them at home not to write and let you know I was coming, I wanted to surprise you. I came on the boat yesterday, stayed at a boarding house last night; Uncle Harold gave me the name of the place. Walked around the streets for awhile on my way up here, trying to see if I could remember anything.”

“Did it…did anything look familiar to you? It's been so long.”

“The building kind of felt familiar. But nothing else. I was only…what? Six?”

“Six,” said Ethel.

They stood there, three feet apart, in the hallway of what had once been his home. He had been a child here, played here. Ethel found she couldn't think about that. Better to pretend this Ralph was someone new and different, someone who had never been here before. He might as well be, this young man with his strong St. John's accent and out-of-style clothes. Bad teeth, she noticed as he spoke, like everyone at home. His nose was crooked, not the nice straight nose she remembered. Of course – he broke it when he was ten. She remembered his letter, and Annie's. She had saved all the letters.

“Come in, sit down. Will you have a cup of tea?” She led him into the living room, an awkward two-step as she steered him around the furniture. When he was sitting on the sofa he remembered the flowers and passed them to her. He still had not taken off his outside jacket.

“How are they all at home?” she called, going into the kitchen for a vase and the teapot.

“All right. Grandmother's arthritis is bad, of course, like it always is. Aunt Annie is still goin' strong. You knew Bill Winsor was overseas, didn't you? And Uncle Harold is doin' the same kind of work as…as Dad, fixin' radios and stuff. The children are all growing like weeds, of course, Claire and Valerie and the boys.”

His voice made a pleasant background hum as the kettle started to hiss. Then the apartment door burst open and Ethel stepped out quickly as she heard Diane and Jimmy arguing in the hall.

“I have a surprise for you,” she said, blocking them at the living room door. “We had a visitor, a surprise visitor, someone from home. It's your brother! Ralph!” Her voice sounded as bright and unnatural as the women on the radio. Her smile stretched her lips back into her cheeks.

“Ralph?” Jimmy was the first one into the room. He grinned, opening his arms like Ethel was supposed to have done. All his life he had hero-worshipped Ralph from afar, the wonderful big brother who was never there to smack him or tell him to mind his own business. “Remember me? I know you don't remember Diane; she was only a baby when you left.”

They had grown up with stories of Ralph, his letters and a handful of pictures. Ethel had had to invent a story, of course, to explain why Ralph was back in Newfoundland and they were here in Brooklyn. For all Jim had set himself against Ralph – never read his letters or wanted to hear any news about him, never mentioned his name if he could help it – he wouldn't have it said out loud that Ralph was another man's son.

“Those were hard times,” she remembered telling the children. “It was the Depression and everyone was very poor. We all went home to St. John's – that was where you were born, Diane – but after awhile your father thought he'd have a better chance here in New York, so we came back. It wasn't an easy place or time to raise children, and in some ways I thought you'd all be better off at home. But you two were just babies, you couldn't do without me. Ralph was older, and his Aunt Annie took a real liking to him. I thought he'd have a better chance, a better childhood, growing up there than here. Of course we'll go back someday, or maybe he'll come to New York, and you'll have a chance to meet him.”

Someday was today. Ethel retreated to the kitchen again, pouring the cups of tea, laying out a plate of cookies for the youngsters. Well, for Ralph too; he was still a growing boy, wasn't he?

Her heart had not slowed since she saw him at the door. She wondered if it ever would; or would it just keep racing till she had a heart attack and dropped down dead? She had never stopped praying to see him again. Once she had thought that losing him, Jim turning his back on Ralph and making her leave him behind, was God's punishment and she would finally be even for the sin that had made him, so long ago. But then she began to think of it differently. She saw that this was a new sin, that leaving Ralph was the worst thing she had ever done. Perhaps this unexpected visit was God's way of telling her she had paid her debt. Her boy had come back to her, once and for all.

On that happy thought Ethel put the teacups and cookies on a tray and moved out of the kitchen. Jimmy was saying, “–the boys round here. Don't s'pose you remember any of them, but most of them are gone, joined up. Are you eighteen yet? You ain't joined up?”

The cold finger touched her heart at Jimmy's words, and Ethel looked at her older son, who was just getting to his feet and taking off his coat. She looked at him, knowing that he had kept the coat on to spare her a second shock on top of the first, knowing how Jimmy's and Diane's eyes would widen in admiration and the room would spin when they all saw that under it he was wearing a U.S. Army uniform, brand-spanking new.

“Wow!” Jimmy said.

“Nice,” said Diane.

“I signed up and did my basic training with the U.S. Army there at Fort Pepperrell,” Ralph was telling his younger brother. He went on, explaining where he was being posted now and how he had a couple of days' leave to come visit his parents in Brooklyn, but Ethel didn't hear his words. She laid the tray down with care but still slopped a little tea out of the cups. To stop her hands shaking she laid them one on each of Ralph's arms, holding him away as if to get a better look, touching him for the first time in eleven years.

She nodded slowly, not trusting herself for words, and Ralph smiled again, seeing the approval and pride he wanted to see. And Ethel saw what God had in store for her and knew she had not yet even begun to pay for her sins and would pay till the day she died.

ETHEL
 
BROOKLYN, APRIL 1945

“W
HERE DO YOU THINK
you're going, young lady?”

Ethel sighed and laid down her crochet. Behind her, Diane was trying to sneak from her bedroom to the door without being seen by her father. Jim sat in the armchair these evenings, behind his newspaper, and whenever Diane passed, he barked out a line that sounded like some old-fashioned father in a stage play. He had no idea how to handle a daughter who was turning into a young woman too fast, and seemed to have decided that sounding like his own grandfather was the best way to deal with a modern young girl. Ethel knew his crusade was doomed; they were all doomed where Diane was concerned. Ethel turned to see her thirteen-year-old daughter dressed in a bright red sweater stretched tight over her two aggressive little breasts, sharp and unmistakable as ice-cream cones. Her shoulders were padded, though her brassiere didn't need to be. The narrow black skirt was a hand-me-down of Ethel's, and below it Diane had carefully covered her legs with pancake make-up and pencilled pretend seams up the back of both legs.