By the Rivers of Brooklyn (4 page)

“I remember when he was just a little fellow, couldn't have been more than four or five, he wasn't in school yet,” Jim was saying, “and he wanted to build a fort. Well, my son, he was some determined. The two of us hauled wood down from the woods up behind our house, and he got the nails and hammer from Pop's shed, and he kept me at it all day, poor little fella. And finally Pop came home and saw what we were tryin' to do, and he knelt right down there and started in helping. I went off then, and Pop and Bert stayed there till they had some kind of a fort finished.”

“I wonder how Pop's taking it?” Rose said. She refilled her glass and lit a cigarette, ignoring Jean's look of disgust. “They'll be broke up at home.”

“Pop will be for sure. Bert was always his favourite,” said Jim, without apparent bitterness.

People drifted away. Jean and Robert went to bed. Only Ethel and Jim were left alone at the table. Jim was still drinking steadily, crying and telling stories, and Ethel listened, her hand on his arm.

She went to bed that night, still trying to take it all in, to imagine her life without Bert. And again that same idea kept circling, evil though it was. A way out. A chance to escape the consequences of what she and Bert had done.

Ethel stayed a week at Jean's, and every night Jim came by. Every night they sat together after Jean and Robert and the children were in bed, and talked about Bert. Late one night she leaned across the table towards Jim and said, “He was the sweetest man in the world, Jim, I loved him so much.” She felt like an actress even though every word was the truth. “Now I'm all alone in the world, and I don't know what to do. I swear to God I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm all alone in the world….”

Jim moved to put his arm around her; she moved closer; they both cried. Then she turned her face up to his to say, “What are we going to do without him, Jim?” and he kissed her, as she'd known he would. And then he said, “Sorry, sorry girl, I never should have done that,” and she said, “No, it's all right, Jim, only I'm so sad, and I feel so all alone…,” and he took her in his arms again. And then she said she should go to bed, on the daybed there in the kitchen, and she began to unbutton her blouse, and after that it was all very easy.

When Jim left to go back to his boarding house that night, Ethel lay awake. She wondered if she would ever sleep again. Already Bert himself, the life and the plans they had shared, seemed a long way off. She got up, made a cup of tea and sat at the kitchen table drinking it, thinking that she had just committed the first real big sin of her life.

Going with Bert those few times, in the bushes in the park on those hot July nights – that hadn't been a real sin, not the way they loved each other and with them being engaged and all. And even what happened tonight, she thought, might not have been a real sin – turning for comfort to his brother, overwhelmed with grief, coming together for a brief moment of love in the face of death, sharing their sorrow. If it had really happened that way.

But it hadn't. The sin was this: to do it as she had done it, cold, calculating, serving her own purpose. Planning every step, every move. Her definition of sin was far more elastic in New York than it had been back home, where it was a sin to dance or even to curl her hair too fancy, but by any standard, Ethel Moores had sinned tonight.

She only prayed it would all work out.

ETHEL
 
BROOKLYN, OCTOBER 1925

Dear Annie,

I hope you and all the folks at home are well. We are all as well as can be expected after the terrible shock we had.

I suppose the news in this letter will be a shock to all of you as well, but I hope you will understand that we did what we thought best and mean no disrespect to poor Bert or his memory.

Me and Jim got married two Saturdays ago in Jean's front room with the Methodist minister. I'm putting in a snap Jean's husband took of us after the ceremony. I hope you will not be too shocked or think it improper so soon after our tragedy, but ever since the funeral me and Jim have been together so much and taken what comfort we could from one anothers company and from our memories. I am sure we will be happy together...

E
THEL TOOK THE CORNER
of the paper, ready to tear it, almost a reflex after tearing up the first five copies. Then she paused and reread the letter. “I can't say it any better than that no matter how many times I writes it,” she said aloud.

Jim looked up from his chair at the other end of the kitchen table where he was drinking his cup of tea and reading the
Brooklyn Eagle
. “You worries too much, Ethel,” he said. “Mom and Pop never had a word to say against you, and Annie's your best friend in the world. No doubt they'll like you a lot better than any of the other girls I might have married.” It was no more to him than if a place had opened up on the job and a new fellow stepped into it. Doubtless some new fellow had filled in Bert's place on the worksite, and Jim had moved over to fill Bert's place in Ethel's life, Ethel's apartment, Ethel's bed.

It did seem that way sometimes, even to Ethel. She and Jim lived in an apartment just like the one she and Bert would have rented. She kept house just as she would have done for Bert, missing the lovely convenience of the Careys' vacuum cleaner and washing machine but happy to be sweeping her own floor, beating her own mats, trimming her own curtains with lace she had starched herself in sugar water. The pleasure of making a home was exactly the same as it would have been with Bert; for those purposes, it hardly mattered who the husband was.

Except – except that when Jim came home from work, he wanted to take her out for a hot dog or go out himself for a drink with his friends, not sit at their nice little table in the cheery kitchen and enjoy the good dinner she'd cooked, the way Bert would have done. They didn't have money to go out nearly as much as Jim would have liked, so most of the time they actually did sit down at their own table. Jim would say, “Good dinner, Ethel,” when it was all done, but she could tell he didn't take pleasure in it like Bert would have done.

Jim noticed how she looked, if she had a new dress or had her hair done differently; he liked her to look smart and pretty, but he never noticed things like the new trim on the curtains or the rug she'd just bought. He didn't care to hear about how she had gone to Woolworth's and picked out the whole set of china with the pink rose pattern, only she got the girl to knock a dollar off on account of there not being teacups, and how she rode the subway all by herself into Manhattan to another Woolworth's and found the teacups on sale there. She could imagine sharing such things, the little victories and details of her day, with Bert. Sometimes, to her embarrassment, she even pretended Bert was there, talking out loud to him in the empty apartment.

She pounded the stamp up in the corner of the envelope, above where she had written:

Miss Anne Evans
Freshwater Valley
St. John's, NewFoundland

She could picture Annie at her kitchen table, opening the letter on top of her bright red or yellow tablecloth, reading it. But she couldn't quite see the look on Annie's face.

ANNIE
 
ST. JOHN'S, FEBRUARY 1926

Dearest Annie,

I hope this letter finds you and all the folks at home very well. Has it got real cold there yet? It is cold here in Brooklyn and last week we had a big snowstorm. You should see how fast they shovel it off the streets here. There are so many motorcars that they have to keep the streets cleared.

Jim and I are doing well. Thank you and the folks for the kind gift of money you sent. We used it to buy a new clock for our kitchen wall and some blankets for the bed which are coming in handy now as the nights are so cold.

We have some exciting news and hope you will be very happy for us...

“T
HERE'S ANOTHER LETTER FROM
Ethel, Mom,” Annie said as her mother entered the kitchen, tapping her walking-stick ahead of her. As near as Annie could see there wasn't a thing in the world wrong with her mother's legs except maybe varicose veins. But Mrs. Evans had decided some years ago that she was now an old lady, with all the trappings of that position – like the cane – and all the rights and privileges that went along with it.

“Hmmph. I wonder what that one got to say for herself now.”

“Don't be hard on her, Mom, at least she writes a letter now and again, not like Rose.”

“Rose? Rose!” Louise Evans compressed twenty years of annoyance into the single syllable of her daughter's name. “Don't give me Rose. She's better off not writing letters. There's things I'd sooner not know. Come on now, what do Ethel have to say?” She heaved herself down into a chair, and Annie moved from the stove to the table, sat down, and unfolded Ethel's letter, which she had already read three times. She was just going to read it aloud and let Ethel speak for herself. Annie wasn't about to waste any more time trying to put things in the right words or prepare Mom for anything.

She watched though, over the edge of the letter, and saw her mother's fingers start to twitch as soon as she read,
“I am expecting a baby in late spring or
early summer.”
Counting, counting off the months.

When Annie finished reading her mother said, “Hmm! Well, they didn't waste their time, did they?” Her eyes went to the calendar on the wall and her fingers moved again.

That was all she would say to her eighteen-year-old unmarried daughter. She was obviously bursting with comments and speculations, but she needed another married woman to talk to. Annie knew quite well that babies took nine months to get born and that bad girls sometimes got them started before they got married. She could also count nine months in her head without using her fingers. She knew her mother suspected that Jim had gotten Ethel in the family way before they were even married. She couldn't picture Ethel doing such a thing, but she could well believe it of Jim, who was not always a gentleman, not like poor Bert.

Poor Ethel, Annie thought, how lonely she must have been up there all by herself, without Bert. I hope Jim is good to her.

Annie loved all three of her brothers, of course, but they were so different. She had always admired Jim. He was the oldest, the good-looking one, the hero behind whom they all trailed, amazed at his daring feats, unable to imitate him. Little Harold – not little now, of course, he was almost seventeen, but they were all used to thinking of him that way – was such an afterthought for Mom that Annie had fallen into the habit of looking after him, even though she was only two years older.

But Bert had been the one she was closest to. He always had a kind word for everyone. Better than words, he could walk into a house where everything was topsy-turvy, where something had gone terribly wrong, and Bert could find the one good useful thing to do, like bringing in an armload of wood for the fire or shovelling a path to the door. She had been so happy when he and Ethel had started walking out, because Ethel admired and loved Bert just as she did. Bert would take good care of her best friend, and all three of them could always stay close, not like if her favourite brother had married some stranger.

And now Bert was dead, and Ethel was married to Jim, and they were having a baby. Life was funny. Annie turned back to her pot of stew on the stove and pushed at one of the dumplings, letting it bob back to the surface, thinking of the warm solid weight of a baby in her arms. Ethel would have that, soon. A baby of her own.

“I think it's grand. I hope they'll be very happy,” she said.

“Hmm.” The stick tapped and the chair creaked as Mrs. Evans got up. “I'm just going over the road to Mrs. Stokes' for an hour. I'll be back before your father gets home. You have supper ready by five, you mind.”