By the Rivers of Brooklyn (39 page)

“I don't know, Mrs. Evans. It happened so fast. Some guys came in, they had a gun, they started taking stuff. Me and Mr. Evans, we just shut up and stood here.” His toe nudged the broken glass. “They didn't need to break anything. One guy just kicked the glass out of the door as they were going out.”

“Just for badness,” Ethel said. “What happened to Jim?”

“He was fine, ma'am, just fine up till they went out the door, just standing there like I was, trying not to do anything that'd get them mad at us, and then…then he just went like that. I mean, he just kinda fell forward with his head on the counter like that. I was scared. I thought maybe he had a heart attack…”

Ethel's hands were still moving gently over Jim's head, his neck and back. “Get on the phone,” she ordered Martin. “Call the police and then an ambulance. You'll have to stay here and talk to the police, tell them what happened. I have to get my husband to the hospital.” As Martin moved to the phone on the counter nearby she wondered what they would do about locking up. Martin hadn't been trusted with the keys. That reminded her of something, and she said sharply, “Martin.”

“Ma'am?” He looked up, receiver in his hand, finger on the dial.

“These men…the men who broke in here. Did you know them?” He shook his head, but she pushed. “They weren't…friends of yours? Fellows you go around with?”

He frowned; his face closed. “Mrs. Evans, I never saw those men before in my life,” he said, and turned back to the phone. She could see the difference now in his face, in his attitude. Before, he'd thought he was on her side and Jim's, all of them victims of crime together. But she had pushed him back over a boundary, placed him on the same side as men who broke into stores and smashed windows and threatened old men with guns. Now, she knew, she could never give Martin the key.

What came to her, in the ambulance riding to the hospital, was how she had no-one nearby to call on. For years, it seemed, she had been part of a community. She had friends from home, family nearby. Church friends. Neighbours in the apartment building when they lived on Linden. Someone who could come with you to the hospital, or watch your shop for you, or just be there to help in time of need. Somehow, without her really noticing, all those people had disappeared: moved back home, moved out to New Jersey or even down to Florida. Her church had closed down, actually closed because there weren't enough white people to keep it going, and the nearby churches were full of coloured people, so of course she didn't go anymore.

It was a stroke, she learned at the hospital. A massive stroke, but he was going to live.

“You'll come stay with us, with Jimmy and me and the kids,” Joyce said, patting her hand as she sat with her beside Jim's hospital bed. Joyce was a gem, an angel, a pearl. She was here doing what Diane should be doing, while Diane was off living her fancy, high-priced California life.

Diane phoned long distance and asked if there was anything she could do.
Yes,
Ethel thought, y
ou can be here for me and your father, beside us, where your place
is
. “No, dear,” she said into the phone.

“No, dear,” she said to Joyce. “Not right now, at least. You don't have room anyway, and it would be so difficult, so confusing for the children.”

Jimmy carried his father up over the stairs the day they brought him home. And that was all they would need to worry about the stairs, Ethel figured, because Jim would never go down them again. He sat in the armchair in the living room, half his body slumped and immobile, his still-handsome face twisted, his eyes staring into a vague distance. She switched on the TV, and he focused on that.

Later, when Jimmy and Joyce had gone, Ethel brought him supper on a tray and sat beside him as she had done in the hospital, helping the fork find its way to his mouth. He tried to help capture the food, to chew and swallow as best he could, but did not acknowledge her, or her help, in any way. The doctors said they couldn't tell how damaged his brain was, how much he understood, whether he would get back some of his abilities, or none. Several times in the hospital he seemed to be fighting for words, trying to speak to the doctors or the nurses, or to Jimmy and Joyce. Once he was home alone with Ethel, he stopped trying to talk. They sat by the blue light of the television, in their accustomed silence.

One night as Ethel picked her way across the living room, around Jim's inert figure, she realized how many years she had spent secretly wishing Jim were gone, were not part of her life. She would never have wished him ill, never have wanted him dead – just wished for him not to be there. And now here he was – not dead, and yet not here. It was one more of God's little jokes. A reminder to be careful what you wished for.

In August, three months after Jim's stroke, she got a phone call from Harold. Harold and Frances were good about keeping in touch, as were Annie and Bill, Claire and Doug. But they were all so far away. “How are you managing, Ethel?” Harold asked, taking the phone after she'd had a long chat with Frances. The gentleness of his voice was like a warm arm around her shoulders.

She opened her mouth to say, “I'm doing fine,” like she said to everyone, but what came out was, “I don't know how I'm going to go on, Harold.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. “How about if I come down for a visit, Ethel?”

Harold and Frances came down almost every summer to spend a week. Usually the four of them went and rented rooms in Ocean City or Asbury Park; those were the only vacations Ethel and Jim had ever taken together. Harold had never come for a visit by himself, and Ethel wanted him to come so badly it felt like a sin.

Jimmy met Harold at Grand Central and brought him out to Brooklyn. “What you should be doing is helping her pack up,” he told Harold as they came into Ethel's kitchen. “She and Dad need to move out with Joyce and me. Out near us, anyway. I've been telling them for years. Even before this happened.”

Harold nodded and smiled at Jimmy but didn't say anything about Ethel moving out. He laid down his small bag – Jimmy had his big suitcase – and went straight over to the chair where Jim was slumped in front of the television. At first, Jim didn't look up, didn't seem aware that anyone was there. Harold stood in front of him, then slowly, painfully, squatted down so he was at eye level with Jim, and took one of Jim's hands between his own.

“Jim. James b'y, I'm here. Harold. I'm here now.”

Ethel saw Jim's vacant eyes focus on Harold's face, then Jim's other hand darted forward and gripped Harold's wrist so hard it had to hurt. His mouth worked frantically, but all that came out was a garbled, grating sound, and his eyes flashed with the terrible anger of the caged animal.

“You see what he's like,” Ethel said.

Harold showed no sign of shock. He patted Jim's hand steadily, saying in his low voice, “Frances sends her love, and Val and the boys…I've got a couple of grand boys, Jim, and you've got a grand young fellow there too, your Jimmy. He picked me up at the station. Had a good ride down on the train, not like it used to be though. Trains are more crowded, not the same comfort at all.” As his voice murmured on, Jim calmed a little; his lips still twitched and his hands jerked slightly, but he no longer looked angry or panicked.

Having Harold around made all the difference. The long silence of the apartment – deeper and darker since Jim's stroke, but stretching back long before that, back to when Jimmy and Diane moved out – was banished under a spell of laughter, of gentle words, of long conversations about old times. Harold liked to sit in the living room with them, the sound on the TV turned down low so only the flickering picture lit the room. Jim didn't seem to care that the sound was gone. He still looked at the screen, but his eyes sometimes darted back and forth from Harold to Ethel as they unravelled the skein of years, remembering the time they all went to Coney Island, the time Jimmy got lost when he was only a little fellow, the Friday night card games they used to enjoy.

They talked, too, about their children. It had been so many years since Ethel had had anyone to talk to, anyone to whom she could say, “Jimmy's the best kind, he really is. He's making a grand job of his shops, going right ahead. And Joyce is good. She's steady. And she's always been good to Jim and me. More like our own daughter than Diane is, really.” The only lamp on in the room was the knobby brass table lamp on the end table by Harold's chair, its yellow light highlighting the crinkly cellophane covering the lampshade. The TV flickered. The blinds were drawn against night-time on Flatbush Avenue, but sounds drifted up: shouting voices, curse words, a basketball bouncing on the pavement. A car horn blared, then a second on a different note.

“Diane's had a hard time, though,” Harold said, his voice as soothing as when he talked to Jim.

“Hard time? She left her husband, Harold. He wasn't a bad man, he wasn't cruel to her. She was just tired of him. Tired of him! Imagine, now, what kind of world it would be if everyone up and left when they got tired.”

“It's a different world now, though,” Harold said. “Dan and Joanne, now, they had a rough time there last year. Dan moved out for awhile. But he saw sense, in the end. Left off with the other one and went back to Joanne.”

Ethel nodded. “Well, I can't talk no sense into Diane. She never listened to me, more's the pity. Now what about Valerie, what is she doing these days?” It wasn't that she wanted to hurt Harold, but he sounded so satisfied about Dan's good sense, and she'd talked about her problem child, so it was only fair they both air out the closets, skeletons and all.

Harold sighed, took a long sip of tea, looked down into his cup. “Well, girl, 'tis hard to know what to make of Valerie. Frances is like you are with Diane. She's like to tear her hair out about Valerie, worrying about her, you know. There she is, forty-two years old, no hopes of getting married and nothing to do with herself. Valerie got the top floor of our house turned into her own apartment. She comes and goes as she pleases, but she don't seem to have no…” He groped for a word. “She went away down to the States somewhere for awhile there, a year or so back, some kind of course she was on, but nothing more came of it. She just came back home and went on writing. She's working on a book, it seems. Has been this ten year. The Great Canadian Novel, I s'pose.” Harold laughed, a short laugh without humour, and stared into his tea again. “Did I tell you Ken got moved up to principal? Principal of the biggest high school in the district,” he said, looking up.

One day, Joyce arranged to come and stay with Jim for the day. “You never get out, Mother,” Joyce said. “Now that Harold's here, he can take you out somewhere. You can have a nice little day to yourself.”

“Don't be so foolish, Joyce. Where would we go? Coney Island?”

Harold loved the idea of a day on the town. “We'll go to Prospect Park,” he announced. “The Botanical Gardens.”

Ethel looked at him as if he had grown another head. “Prospect Park,” she repeated. “Do you know what Prospect Park is like? It's full of rubbish and gangs and winos sleeping on the benches. Nobody goes to Prospect Park anymore.”

Harold crumpled; the lines in his face seemed heavier, and his eyes dull. “Hard to believe, Ethel girl.” He looked out the window. “What happened to Brooklyn? Toronto, you know…Toronto's a big city, but you can still walk the streets, go into the parks. It's a beautiful city.”

“Well, Brooklyn's not,” Ethel said. “There's nothing beautiful about Brooklyn, I assure you.”

“That's a sad thing,” he said, shaking his head. “What about the Botanical Gardens? Are they as bad as the park? Does anyone go there now?”

“I don't know. I don't think…I mean, it's behind a gate, not all open like the park. I still hear people talking about it on the television like it's a nice place to go. I couldn't tell you for certain. I haven't been there in twenty years.”

“Well, let's go there tomorrow,” Harold said. How quickly he perked up again, like the hard realities of life could never get him down for long. Ethel looked at Jim, hauled off in his chair, knowing no more than a two-year-old child, she thought. Let Harold have to look after Frances like this for a few years and see how cheerful he was. See if he was so anxious to head off to Prospect Park then.

They went on the bus, a thing Ethel hadn't done in years. The bus was terrifying. They were the only white people aboard, two old white people wearing sweaters in the August heat, targets for gang violence if anyone on earth was, Ethel thought. But the coloured people on the bus didn't seem particularly interested in them. They were busy talking to each other, in those heavy accents that didn't even sound like English. There were mothers with babies, men and women as old as herself and Harold, stout women in cotton dresses and hats who looked like they might be steady, sensible churchgoers, in their own kind of churches, of course. Then three teenage boys got on at the front of the bus. The boys were loud, shoving and pushing each other, sprawling over three double seats, not getting up when an older man with a stick got on and couldn't find a seat. The old man was white, but he was one of those Jews with the hat and the long sideburns, as foreign in his way as the coloured.

Stepping inside the gates of the Botanical Gardens was like taking a step outside of the real world of Brooklyn into a saner, simpler time – the time when they were all young, and it was safe to ride a bus or take a subway. Pale green trees formed an archway over the path, blocking out the worst of the sun's heat. Couples and families – white people, ordinary people – strolled past, some pushing babies in strollers. Ethel felt safe. Harold shuffled along, pausing every few feet to squint at the little markers stuck up in front of the flowers.