By the Rivers of Brooklyn (23 page)

“Out, I'm just going out. Down to the candy store with Carol and Lorraine,” said Diane with the full-lipped pout Ethel thought she must practice in front of the mirror.

“Well, be back in by eight-thirty,” Ethel said.

“Carol's allowed to stay out till ten on weekends!”

“Am I Carol's mother?”

“No, but golly, I wish you were!” Diane shot back over her shoulder.

“Don't speak to your mother like that!” barked Jim on cue.

“You and Daddy are so old-fashioned, Mother. You know, I'm a
teenager
now, I'm not living back in ancient times like when you grew up in Newfoundland.”

Teenager
. Something new, that word, like the bitter sarcasm dripping from the word Newfoundland. Ethel really did feel ancient.

But she tried. She had a quick glimpse of time, life, her daughter, slipping through her fingers like water, and she closed her hand around what couldn't be grasped. She got up and touched Diane's shoulder, felt the warm flesh under the sweater turn hard as bone.

“Daddy and I aren't trying to be harsh with you, Diane. It's just…we just worry about you. You're still just a little girl…”

Wrong thing to say. Of course. Diane turned away and shut the door behind her without a word.

Ethel stood alone in the hall. She thought of Annie's and Frances' letters telling about the girls back home – how Claire and Valerie competed for the best marks in their class, Claire excelling in her math classes, Valerie writing the best English compositions. How Claire still came home muddy and scratched from playing football with the boys in the field; how Valerie curled up in a corner with a book and couldn't be roused from her dream world. How the two girls led Valerie's little brothers, Kenny and Danny, on a raid of the henhouse and then took the eggs and broke them all over the unfinished floor of the new house Bill Winsor's brother was building, and went skating on the slippery mess, and Annie was worried at how little the hens were laying until she discovered the truth. Claire and Valerie were growing up back home as normal, healthy young girls, and here was Diane growing up a New York girl, saucy as a crackie to her mother, with tight sweaters and made-up legs.

Back in the living room Ethel eased down in her chair and picked up her crocheting again. She was surprised when Jim laid down the paper a few minutes later. Often he'd sit behind it all evening until bedtime, only speaking to share aloud a news item that interested him. These days he did that less and less; there was no more war news from Europe since V-E Day and he knew Ethel hated to hear news of the Pacific theatre, though she would take the paper when he was at work and read the stories herself.

Jim folded the paper on his lap and she looked up at him. He was forty-five years old this year. His hair had gone mostly grey, and the lines on either side of his mouth were deeper and more permanent.

“I don't know what to be doing with that one,” he said, nodding at the door.

Ethel, who didn't know herself, said, “Don't worry. She's growing up, is all. We can't stop her.”

Jim was the one who let out a gusty sigh this time. “They're all growing up too fast,” he said.
All
, not both. The word hung between them; the acknowledgment that they had three children hovered in the silence. Fewer and fewer things, as the years went by, were safe to talk about.

“House is quiet with the youngsters out,” Jim went on. “I tell you what, Ethel, let's you and me go out. Let's go take in a movie.”

This was unexpected. Jim and Ethel went out to dinner and a movie three times a year, on their anniversary and on each of their birthdays. Every Friday night they had their card-party, rotating between their apartment and their friends' apartments in turn. The other three hundred or so nights of the year, Jim sat in one chair and read the paper while Ethel sat in the other and knitted or crocheted, and they turned out the lights and went to bed at ten-thirty.

“What's got into you tonight?” Ethel said.

Jim stood up, paced to the window and back. “Come on, Ethel girl, we don't have to sit here like two old fogies, do we? Our youngsters are out having a bit of fun, why shouldn't we go out too?”

Ethel understood a little of what he felt. As always when she caught a rare glimpse of Jim's inner life, she felt like she was standing at the edge of a foreign country, seeing only the borderlands, curious but not really wanting to cross.

Fifteen minutes later they were walking down Flatbush Avenue towards the Loew's Kings. Flatbush had changed in the twenty years they had lived here: more shops, more lights. And always the boys in uniform these days, young men with girls hanging off their arms, the girls Diane must want to be like, Ethel supposed. She looked at the young men, seeing Ralph in each one, wishing he could turn up safe and surprise her just as he did that day last year.

“They say in the paper it's going well on Okinawa,” Jim said. “Our boys expect to have the Jap army cleared out of there in another few weeks. The worst is over, they say.”

Ethel nodded. “Please God, he'll be out of there by June. Will it end the war, do you think?”

“How much more can the Japs take?” Jim said. “They can't hold out forever no matter how many of those bloody kamikazes they have. Queer thing, isn't it, a man who'd crash his own plane just to kill someone else?”

No queerer than anything else in wartime, Ethel thought: those boys going overseas, risking their lives and dying to straighten out foreign messes that had nothing to do with them. In spite of the men in uniform, the patriotic advertising slogans and songs and even movies – tonight it was
Blood on the Sun
with James Cagney, all about the Japs and how bad they were – the war still seemed a faraway, pointless adventure.

Since Ralph turned up in uniform Jim's thinking had changed. He had been awkward and restrained with the boy during his visit, but once Ralph was gone Jim put the picture of him in his uniform up on the living room wall and asked, for the first time ever, to read Ralph's letters to his mother. He added one-line messages to Ethel's letters:
Your father sends his love and hopes you are keeping safe
and well.
Safe and well. A strange message to send to a boy on a ship in the Pacific, strafed by kamikaze planes. Ethel had his letters, and a blue-star Son in Service flag to hang in the window that faced the courtyard.

The theatre was Saturday-night crowded: young kids Jimmy's age out in crowds, fellows in uniform out with their girls, a few old fogies like themselves. Jim had a bucket of popcorn on his lap and one arm draped over the back of Ethel's seat, just like they were on a date themselves. They laughed along with everyone else at the funny short that began the show, but then the newsreel came up. Ethel saw that it was called
Death on Okinawa
, and the rest of the theatre dropped away.

“I'm sorry,” Jim said. “I never knew…well, you know there's going to be something about the war but not…do you want to leave?”

Ethel said nothing, her eyes on the screen, on the black-and-white images of men, boys, running and shooting and falling. It was just what the title promised, Death on Okinawa, and not just dead Japs but American boys and men. She was a taut string ready to be plucked, sitting in the stillness watching the awful mayhem.

Then she saw him. A glimpse, only a few seconds. A bloodied body, one of hundreds, carried past on a stretcher. White face, uniform, gaping chest wound.

“Jim! Jim! I saw him, I saw Ralph.”

“What?”

Ethel stared at the screen. Would there be another glimpse? The man on that stretcher could not have been alive. And he could not have been Ralph. Except that he was. The camera closed for a split second on his face, and his mother knew.

“Ethel,” Jim said in her ear, “did you say you saw Ralph?”

She whispered back without turning away from the screen. “On a stretcher, he was being carried off. It was him, Jim, I know it was.”

“On a stretcher? No, no, couldn't have been. You must have imagined…”

Ethel was silent. The images flickered on but she saw nothing, only Ralph's face, the bleeding body. He was wounded, or worse. She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth, bit hard, felt nothing.

In the pause between the newsreel and the feature Jim leaned over again. “Ethel, don't drive yourself cracked now. You know that couldn't have been Ralph. Sure, these newsreels take awhile to make and send over here. If he was wounded or…if he was hurt we'd have had word by now.”

“It was him,” she said again.

“No, Ethel, some boy who looked a bit like him, is all. Some other poor sod, not our son.” His arm moved from the back of the seat to her shoulders.

The credits rolled, the feature started. As soon as she saw a Japanese face on the screen Ethel stood up, blundered to the end of the row, up the aisle to the bathroom. The bathrooms here were glorious temples of marble and chrome and mirror glass, monuments to cleanliness and comfort. She just made it to a toilet before vomit flooded her mouth.

She stayed there a long time, even after she'd thrown up, kneeling on the floor, shaking. When she came out, Jim was waiting in the lobby.

“I'll take you home,” he said. “You shouldn't get all worked up like this. It's nothing.”

She fell into step beside him. “I know what I saw.”

Out again through the red and gold lobby, under the marquee lights, into the crowded street. “It couldn't happen like that, Ethel. You couldn't see him dead – wounded – on a newsreel before we got a telegram. If we haven't heard from the War Office, then nothing's happened, see?”

It made sense; she knew it was true, but she also knew what she'd seen.

Back at the apartment Jimmy and Diane were home and fighting. “I don't know what you see in that guy Malone anyway, he's a creep,” Jimmy said, and Diane yelled, “Yeah, you're jealous because Malone and all his crowd think you and your friends are sooo square.”

“Square? Is that a fact? Well, I'll tell you one thing, little sister, I might not know what you see in Malone, but I sure know what he sees in you, and if I catch him laying a hand on you I'll knock him into the middle of next week, I swear.”

The fight was so loud they failed to hear their parents coming in through the hall. They fell silent as Jim and Ethel entered. Jimmy said, “Hi Dad, hi Mom, where were you guys?” But Ethel drifted past the whole disturbing scene as if it didn't exist, said nothing to her daughter or younger son, went straight to the bedroom.

Beyond the doors she heard Jim saying, “Your mom's had a bit of a shock. We went to the movies, and the newsreel was about Okinawa. Naturally it's got her thinking about Ralph, so don't be surprised if she's…” Ethel shut her eyes, which was useless since the image she wanted to block out was on the inside of her eyelids.

Jim came in and lay on the bed beside her. They were both fully clothed. “Tell you what I'll do,” he said at last. “Tomorrow morning I'll go down to the theatre and ask the guy to run the newsreel again so I can see it. I know it's not Ralph, but you'll feel easier if I've seen it and I can tell you it's not him, right? I'll do it while you're gone to church.”

In the morning, for the first time in twenty years, Ethel did not go to church. She got dressed for it, down to her gloves and hat and handbag, then stood on the front step after Jim had gone off to the theatre and Diane and Jimmy had gone out. She couldn't think of a reason to go to church. Her long business arrangement with God was at an end. He was defaulting on payments and she had nothing left to offer Him.

She watched the other women, the other families from the building, leave for church – most, like the Romanos and the Pokornowskis, to the Catholic church, a few to the Episcopalian or her own Methodist church. Only the Jewish women were left, sunning themselves in their chairs on the small square of pavement between the steps and the street, sitting by the sun, as they said.

Mrs. Liebowitz came out, nodded to Ethel, paused. “You're not gone to the church this morning?”

“Not today, no.” Ethel looked down at her dress, gloves, handbag, shoes. “I got dressed up to go, but…I had some bad news last night, kind of a shock, I guess, and I don't feel like going.”

Mrs. Liebowitz put a hand on Ethel's arm. “Your boy?”

Ethel nodded, then hurried to explain. “We never got a telegram, but I saw this newsreel, the boys on Okinawa. I'm sure I saw his face, him being carried off on a stretcher. Jim says it couldn't be him, but I know it was…”

Mrs. Liebowitz nodded slowly. “A mother knows these things.”

“That's it, I know it. I feel it right here.” Ethel put her fist just below her breastbone. She first felt the pain there last night when she saw Ralph, like a swift stab from the point of a knife. Since then it had widened to a pain the size of her hand, an irregular burning shape bordering her heart and her stomach. It felt as if a wound there had been bandaged and now the bandage was torn away and she was bleeding. She clutched Mrs. Liebowitz's hand, these two women who had never touched before today.

“You come inside,” said Mrs. Liebowitz.

Ethel followed her into the building, through the door across the hall from Ethel's own. There was a smell in the air, cooking odours Ethel couldn't identify. A thin woman stood at the gas stove stirring a pot. With a start, Ethel saw it was Rebecca Liebowitz, the little girl just Ralph's age, in a dark dress that reached her ankles, her hair covered under a headscarf. She wore it in braids down her back till the day she got married, at sixteen. Her young husband had been killed just after D-Day.

“Hello, Rebecca,” Ethel said. She had offered the girl her condolences, long ago, and could find nothing else to say now. The older Liebowitz girl, Sarah, came in with her two-year-old on her hip. Mrs. Liebowitz drew Ethel past the girls, out of the kitchen into the room that in Ethel's apartment was the living room. In the Liebowitz apartment this room had a long dining table with straight-backed wooden chairs all around it. Books and papers were piled on one end of the table. Mrs. Liebowitz guided Ethel to a chair and placed a cup in front of her. Ethel took a sip and almost spit: she was expecting tea but this was very strong dark coffee.