By the Rivers of Brooklyn (25 page)

T
HE BACK DOOR TO
the kitchen opened with a bang. “Hello, Aunt Annie!” Valerie called, as Claire slung her book bag down on the floor.

“I'm only stopping to change out of my uniform and drop off some of my books,” Claire announced. “We're going up to Val's house to work on an assignment.” She ran up the stairs.

Valerie sat down at the end of the table. “On Shakespeare,” Valerie said with a happy smile. “For literature.”

Annie shook her head as she kneaded bread dough. “Claire won't be pleased about that,” she said. Claire was always complaining about English Literature although her grades in it were just fine.

“No, that's why we're doing it together. She says she needs my help or she'll never get through it,” Valerie said, and Annie noted the light in her clear blue eyes, the lift in her voice. There was more rivalry between the girls than there used to be. Time was when they were almost like one person with two heads, always together, but now Claire was coming into her own, a natural leader who was popular with all the girls her age. Valerie, on the other hand, was beginning to seem a bit – well, odd. There was no other word for it. They were both good girls, mind, but different. As they should be. But Annie didn't truly mind that her own girl, her Claire, was turning out the best of the two.

“Come on, let's get going. We've only got a couple of hours for you to explain everything about Shakespeare to me,” Claire announced, sweeping back into the kitchen and scooping Valerie out the back door. “I'll be back before supper, Aunt Annie!” she called over her shoulder.

Annie's mother was asleep. She lay down for a nap on the daybed every afternoon now, like a child, and nothing woke her until half an hour before supper when she got up like someone rising from the tomb and demanded a cup of tea. Usually Annie watched Kenny and Danny after school but today Frances had the afternoon off work. Annie was alone in her kitchen.

A tap at the door. “Come in!” Annie called. She heard an odd step – a hesitation, a thump, another step – and Bill Winsor was in the kitchen.

She had heard on Friday that he was back. All through the weekend she'd refused to admit to herself that she was waiting for him to come to the door. Now he was here, not so changed she wouldn't have known him, but changed all the same. He had been thirty-six when he joined up and went overseas; now he was forty-one, but he had aged more than five years. She would have said he was closer to fifty, seeing this man on the street, his heavily lined face, his grey hair.

Her eyes lingered on his face, but when they held too long on his eyes, she shifted hers and could not help looking where she had been trying not to look: to his leg, the one pant leg hanging strangely over the artificial limb. His hand gripped a walking stick and she could see from the cords of muscle in his arm that he was leaning heavily on it.

“Sit down, Bill, do,” she said, bustling out from behind the table to pull out a chair for him. He almost tripped over her, trying to get to the chair, and she pulled back, blushing, wondering if she had done the wrong thing. A man pulled a chair out for a woman; you didn't usually do it the other way, unless the man was old or feeble.

But Bill was looking around the kitchen, a smile on his face. “Annie's kitchen,” he said. “By the jumpin's, Annie, it's good to be back here. Just like I remembered it too…only you got a different tablecloth on today: I was always thinking about the red and white one.”

“That's worn to rags. I threw that out,” Annie said. She stood uncertainly in the middle of the room, wondering what to do or say to make this meeting normal, comfortable. Then she remembered. “Cup of tea?” she offered.

“Yes, thanks,” Bill said. “A cup of tea in Annie's kitchen.” He took it from her and instead of drinking at once, cupped his hands around it as though he were chilled, though it wasn't that cold outside. “I can't tell you, Annie girl, how many times over there – over in England, but all the more once we got overseas – how I'd be lying frozen half to death in some bombed-out house, listening to gunfire off in the distance, trying to get some sleep, and I'd say to myself, ‘Now, Bill, just think yourself back in Annie's kitchen, sitting down to that red and white tablecloth, and Annie kneading bread or mixing up a cake at the other end of the table, drinking a cup of tea.' And I'd build it all up like a picture in my mind, not knowing if I'd ever be here again in real life.”

There was a small, warm, round silence after he finished speaking. “And here you are,” Annie said.

She pulled apart the leftover ends of the dough, making a few toutons to put on for supper. Bill drank his tea and looked around the kitchen as if he couldn't get enough of it. Whenever his eyes lit on Annie she looked back down at the smooth balls of dough she rolled in her hands. She liked pressing them flat between her palms.

“So now I got to think what to do next,” Bill said at last, and laid down his cup.

“Oh, no rush for that yet, is there? You wants time to…to get used to everything, you know?” Annie waved a hand vaguely; she had heard enough stories about men coming back, adjusting to life at home after all those years overseas. And Bill had his leg, too. Or rather, didn't have his leg. “Wince and Marge are glad to have you home. I'm sure you can wait till after the winter's done before you have to go making plans.”

“Never too soon to start making plans, Annie love, that's what I realized when I was over there,” Bill said. “Here I am now, a grown man, past forty, and there were all these younger fellows around me, fellows with wives and children and homes of their own back here. I thought, ‘You know, Bill, if one of those fellows were to die tomorrow' – and plenty of them did, girl, plenty of them did – ‘at least he's lived, you know? He's had a family, a life, people who love him.' And what did I have? Nothing and no-one, when you come right down to it.”

“Don't be so foolish, Bill. You got family, friends, there's plenty would have missed you if you hadn't come back. You know…sure, you got my letters, you know how I prayed for you every night, how I would have felt if you'd…if you hadn't come back.”

He nodded. “Oh, I know, Annie. I counted on those prayers. No, it's only–” He broke off, a long sigh interrupting his words. He looked down at his hands. “Hard to put into words,” he said, and didn't try anymore. Annie could hear the clock. She threw fatback into the cast-iron frying pan; its sizzle filled the empty air.

“Do you think you'll go back down to Bonavista?” she said at last.

Another deep breath, this one sucked in. “I gave it some thought,” he said. “Much like I thought about your kitchen when I was away, I thought about the house down Bonavista – so quiet, so peaceful, like. I'd love to be back there again.” Annie dropped touton dough into the spitting fat and waited for him to go on. “But what would I do down there? I can't fish now. Six months it's been since they gave me this leg, and I'm used to getting around. There's a lot I can do, but there's a lot more I can't do.”

Annie turned from the stove and at last met his eyes. This time it was Bill who looked away, once again at the yellow walls of her kitchen like it was the walls he was in love with, down at the teacup with a lover's tenderness. Annie moved over and started wiping flour off the table with long smooth strokes.

“You got a lot of responsibilities here, Annie, running this house, looking after your mother and Claire all on your own,” he said.

“Claire's a great help. She don't really like housework, but she's a grand hand to do it all the same.”

The back door slammed open again and Harold's boys bolted through it. “Aunt Annie, Mom says can we come down here for supper, us and Dad?” Kenny said. “She got to go to a meeting at church, six o'clock. She says she don't have time to give us supper.”

“Yes, fine. Mind you, I only got salt fish. You don't like that, Danny.”

“I do, I like it now. Can I turn on the radio?”

“Is there drawn butter?” Kenny asked.

“Are those toutons?” said Danny, turning from the radio to the stove.

“Annie! Annie! Come in and give me a hand to get up off this daybed.” Her mother's querulous voice drifted in from the living room.

Annie darted a look of apology at Bill, who sat with his teacup, an island in the torrent. He stood up and Kenny stared with open curiosity. “Is it true, Mr. Winsor, you got a wooden leg?”

“Hush, Kenny,” said Annie.

“Can we see it?” Danny asked eagerly.

“
Hush!
”

“I'll give you a hand with your mother, Annie,” Bill said. She glanced at his leg, at the walking stick, but having just told the boys to hush she could hardly say anything. He limped along behind her, into the front room. Mrs. Evans was sitting up on the side of the daybed. She blinked at Bill.

“Bill Winsor,” she said. “Back in one piece, then.”

“Nearly, Mrs. Evans,” he said. Annie caught his eye over her mother's head and they both smiled.

Bill settled the old woman in her big chair at the head of the table as Annie went back to the stove to turn over the toutons. She heard Bill's uneven step below the clatter of the radio, the boys, her mother's complaint that the tea was too strong.

He came over and put a hand on her waist, bent his head down close to her ear. “Will you marry me, Annie?”

Tears came to her eyes at once and she didn't dare look up, not here, in the kitchen, in the middle of everything. The door banged open again and the boys yelled, “Dad!” Harold was home from work, stamping his boots, hugging his sons.

Annie looked at the toutons and nodded. “Yes. Yes, I'll marry you, Bill, if that's what you want.” Fatback spat in the pan as she turned over the last touton.

DIANE
 
BROOKLYN, SEPTEMBER 1947

S
ATURDAY MORNING
, D
IANE AND
Carol are having breakfast at the A-1 Diner on the corner down from Diane's building. On Saturday Diane tries to leave home as early as she can, before her mother thinks up a chore for her to do. Today Carol has money because she babysat for the Goldmans last night. Diane thinks how the solid folded pad of money, two one-dollar bills, must feel against Carol's palm. Diane has fifty cents, which will be down to thirty-five when they finish breakfast.

“Wanna go to a show this afternoon?” Carol says. “I heard Davy say yesterday after school him and some guys were gonna go see the Charlie Chan movie today. You wanna catch that later on? My treat,” she adds, out of the richness of her bounty.

In the booth behind Diane are two women about her mother's age. Diane has seen them here before. One is dark and one is blond – like herself and Carol. Once she said to Carol, “They could be us, in twenty or thirty years.” They had giggled over that, over the idea that in thirty years they might still live on Linden Boulevard, still be best friends, still eat at the A-1 Diner.

The dark-haired woman dominates the conversation in a hard, shiny voice that matches the chrome edging of the tables and counter. “…and I told him, I said, George, it's not natural, is it?
Is
it?” Her voice points the question like a fork at her companion; Diane can almost see the gesture. Carol leans over for the ketchup and slops it all over her eggs. Now her plate matches the seats and the tabletops: red on yellow.

“Whaddya think?” Carol demands.

“A movie? Sure,” Diane says. She likes movies, and besides, if Davy Ryan is going, then so are Buster Kemp and Mickey Malone. Last Saturday at the movies, Mickey Malone put his hand on her breast. Just for a minute. She can still feel the handprint there, glowing under her white cardigan.

“No, it is
not
normal. And I mean, for a man, a man who's on the road, what…six days? Six days, and he comes home, and there I am, all ready.” The dark-haired woman still holds forth; her blond friend makes small sympathetic sounds. “I have the kids at Ma's place, I bought a new dress, I had my hair done, and George, what does George do? Comes in, kicks off his shoes, lays down on the couch and is asleep in ten minutes. What kind of a man, I ask you.”

“We could go down to Macy's on the subway,” says Carol. “I want a scarf to go with this blouse and Mom said I could buy what I wanted with my babysitting money.”

“If I had money, my mom would make me hand it over,” Diane grumbles, poking at her toast with her knife, trying to get the strawberry jam to spread. “She would make me give her every red cent, I swear. She doesn't want me to have anything, any life of my own.”

But Diane is only half-listening to her own conversation with Carol: the voices of the women behind them are so much more engrossing. “It wasn't always like this, you know,” says the dark-haired one, her words punctuated by the clink of her knife and fork on the plate.