By the Rivers of Brooklyn (40 page)

She stopped to lean against a wall, looking down at the Cherry Esplanade below. Some young people had spread out a picnic on the grass; their laughter drifted up to her. Harold leaned beside her.

“Can't quite make it as far as I used to,” he said. “I remember when I lived here, I used to walk all over New York, blocks and blocks every day.”

Ethel nodded. “I remember pushing the little ones in the stroller, down Flatbush Avenue, for hours. Nowadays I can barely get across the kitchen without having to sit down.”

“You're pushing yourself too hard, Ethel. Day in, day out, in that apartment with Jim. Doing everything for him. It don't make sense.”

By the time they reached the Japanese garden, they were both ready to rest again, and the bench was empty, so they sat and looked out at the murky green water. The flowers all around the bench would have been lovely if the water didn't look so dirty, but even so it was a peaceful place to stop, and there was a bit of much-needed shade. Ethel wiped beads of sweat from her brow. A swan glided past, white and erect. Harold said, without looking at her, “Ethel girl, you got to give it up.”

“Give it up? What am I going to do, Harold, put him in a home?”

“No, no, no,” Harold said, as though the very thought made him nervous. He reached down and took her hand in his. “But it's terrible for the both of you, going on the way you are. I know you wrote us about it, but until I saw it myself – there in the apartment with the two of you – I never really magined, I suppose, how bad it was.”

Ethel had nothing to say to this. She was glad, actually. Happy that Harold, that somebody, had noticed how hard her life was. She wondered how much else Harold understood. Did he know that it wasn't only since the stroke that things had been hard? He'd always understood her so well. Surely he'd guessed how bleak her life with Jim had been for…oh, so many years now. She used to date it from the time Ralphie died, but that wasn't it, not really. Years and years before that. It had been wrong so long she wondered if it had ever been right. Jim's stroke was really just the straw on the camel's back, you might say.

“It's kind of you to come down here,” she said.

“Oh, I couldn't stay away,” Harold said. His hand, with its staring veins and brown age spots, tightened on hers, and Ethel felt its surprising warmth. “I mean, how could I? When you love someone so much, to see what they're going through. You have to be there, to do whatever you can to help.”

Something happened in Ethel's chest like a balloon bursting. At first she wondered if she was having a heart attack. But it wasn't pain, only a sudden openness, pinpricked by Harold's words, the words she had wanted, needed, for so long.
When you love someone so much.
A lifetime of propriety, of caution, of measured words suddenly slipped from her as she turned her face up to him.

“Harold, do you mean it? I'm so glad. I always thought, you and I, we would have been–”

“I mean, he was my hero when we were growing up, and to think of him there, struck down like that…” Harold went on, speaking at the same moment Ethel did, so their words twisted and tangled. Beneath the breathless rush of her own words she heard his, and understood. Prayed her first prayer in nearly thirty years:
Oh God, let him not have heard me, not have understood what
I said.

But God said No, as He always did. Harold's words stumbled to a halt; she saw the confusion in his eyes. In that moment Ethel understood that this love that had been plaguing her since, oh, 1928 or so, had never once, not once, crossed his mind. It had been all in her mind, her own mind. There was a moment of silence so long Ethel felt it contained years. Harold's hand still covered hers.

“That's right, girl, you know what I mean,” he said gently after a moment. “You and me, we always understood each other, didn't we? You were as much like a sister to me as Annie was, tell the truth…or more. I couldn't stand the thought of you here all alone, taking care of poor Jim, nor of him suffering like that, and I thought, b'y, if there's anything at all you can do for Ethel, for her that's always been so good to you, well you get yourself on that train and get down to New York, now. And Frances agreed with me, one hundred per cent.”

Ethel could hear her own heart beating, the shouting voices of two children on the path behind them, a faint breeze that moved the leaves above her head. She looked away from Harold, down at the pond where a girl of about thirteen knelt at the water's edge, holding out a piece of bread to a swan.

Harold still held Ethel's hand, patting it now. “Come on now, let's get up. If we sets here too long my knees are likely to lock and I'll never get up again,” Harold said, chuckling. He got slowly to his feet and offered her his arm as they walked on.

Ethel shuffled as she walked; her knees still ached and her right ankle felt like it might turn over at any moment. Yet she felt lighter, somehow. Maybe all that unspoken love she'd been carrying around was heavier than she realized.

“You're a kind man, Harold,” she said. “Always were. And you may be right.” She let a little pause grow and then said, “About Long Island. Maybe it is time for me to talk to Jimmy and Joyce about moving out there. I never wanted to be a burden on anybody, you know.”

“I know,” Harold said. “I think the same thing about my boys. I don't want to be a burden. But my time will come. Just like it has for poor Jim.”

“Like it will for all of us, I s'pose,” said Ethel.

DIANE
 
MANHATTAN, JUNE 1975

D
IANE STANDS IN FRONT
of the mirror in her hotel room, turning, touching up her lipstick, viewing herself from different angles. This morning she packed her daughters off to Henry's place before catching her plane from LAX to LaGuardia. Tomorrow she will get a train to Long Island, to her brother's tacky little suburban home, and see what kind of shape her parents are in. Tonight is an island in between, a space of time that's just Diane's. Tonight she's going to a dinner and dance in honour of her high school class's twenty-fifth reunion.

Diane turns once more in front of the mirror, admiring her tanned legs under the pink mini, her neat figure, slimmer than when she was in high school, her shoulder-length glossy dark hair. She wants people to say, “Diane
Evans
? Is that
you
? You're a knockout. I never would have recognized you!” And then she will talk about her work in public relations for a major Hollywood studio, and her home in L. A., and her beautiful teenage daughters. Her high school is famous for high achievers and success stories; Diane knows she will have to work hard to shine.

But she's used to that – working hard, and shining. She picks up her purse, goes downstairs and catches a cab to the hotel where the reunion is being held. Men and women who look only vaguely familiar arrive in couples and groups. For a moment Diane wishes she had kept in touch with someone from high school, someone she could have arranged to meet beforehand. Then she decides it's okay, maybe even better, to sweep in alone, head held high.

“My
gosh
! Diane
Evans
? Is that
you
? I'd have known you
anywhere
!!” The high-pitched blond woman with the accent that sounds cartoonishly New York to Diane now, after her years in California, bears down with her arms outstretched. Diane catches her name tag: Carol (Dobrowski) McLean.

“Carol! How fabulous! You look great!” Diane holds her former best friend at arm's length, and yes, she can see Carol at fifteen, at seventeen, at twenty-one, tucked inside this forty-two year old woman with the bouffant blond hair and the lime green pantsuit. “What are you doing now?”

“Well, I'm living in Jersey. We moved to Jersey, me and Clint, you know,” Carol says, putting her arm around Diane's waist and drawing her over to a table full of people, also all vaguely familiar.

“Clint, hi! Tina…oh gosh, yes, Frank Murphy, I would have known you anywhere. Anywhere.” Diane makes the rounds of the table, the rounds of her old friends. She has many opportunities to repeat the carefully rehearsed one-minute version of her life that she has prepared for the occasion.

“Well, I live in California, in L. A. actually. I'm in P.R. Kids? Yes, I have two daughters, two beautiful girls, Christine and Laurie. I did the housewife thing for a while there, you know, out in California, had my babies, raised them, and then one day just kind of thought, Is this
it
? Is this my
life
? The girls were in school by then, so I got a job. Kind of had to start from the bottom up, you know, since I'd been out of the work force for nearly ten years, but I love it now, it's such an interesting field. Henry and I split up, oh, about five years ago. No, nothing nasty, no hard feelings, just, you know, we'd outgrown each other. And hey, it's great to be back in New York!”

Everybody smiles and nods at her story, takes it at face value, which they should, because it's the truth, the varnished truth. And there are much weirder stories out there, both from people who made the reunion and about people who didn't. The graduates of 1950 were a little too old to be hippies and dropouts, but the sixties sidelined some of them anyway: Shirley was living in a commune in Vermont; Darrell was a folksinger. Many of the men, and more than a few of the women, had successful careers and a lot of money. And then there were women like Carol, who appeared to have missed the whole women's movement somehow. Carol was happy as a clam out in Jersey, ironing Clint's shirts – Clint was in real estate – and raising their four kids.

“Wow,” Carol says, wide-eyed, when Diane talks about her job. “You always were so smart, so ambitious.”

Dinner comes; Diane is wedged at the table with Carol and Clint and a small group of others she remembers vowing eternal friendship with twenty-five years ago. Nobody lives in Brooklyn anymore; it seems nobody's parents even live there anymore. They have moved to the suburbs or retired to Florida.

“You wouldn't know Brooklyn now, if you went out there,” Frank says.

“Oh, I know!” Carol adds, rolling her eyes. “You know, I went to see my mother, before she moved out with us, and driving down Flatbush Avenue, it was like being in another world. Not like you're in America at all.”

“It's totally changed,” Carol's husband Clint puts in. “The crime rate there is incredible.”

“Brooklyn's never been the same since the Dodgers left,” says Frank.

Tina gives him a look of something near disgust. “Brooklyn's never been the same since all the niggers and the spics moved in,” she says, not even bothering to lower her voice. Diane is a little shocked, not by the sentiment, which she has heard often, but by the words. Out in California, all her friends are liberals like herself, in favour of integration and equality. She doesn't hear words like “niggers” and “spics.” But she also lives in an all-white suburb, where her daughters have friends as fair-skinned and golden-haired as themselves. She looks away from Tina.

After dinner, there's dancing, with a live band playing hits from their high-school years. Diane dances with Clint, with Frank, with guys she liked in high school who have turned out balding and paunchy and boring. At one point, she sits alone at a table on the edge of the dance floor, cradling her drink, wondering when it will be okay to go home.

Hands rest on her shoulders; someone has come up from behind. “Well, well, Diane Evans,” says a voice that has not changed much at all in twenty-five years.

Diane twists to see him and is annoyed to notice that the bottom seems to be falling out of her stomach. Mickey Malone stands behind her, and she quickly gets to her feet to be on a level with him, while at the same time he pulls out a chair and sits down. They laugh, and Diane sits back down.

She hasn't seen him since the night in 1950 when he told her he was joining the army and she'd be better off without him. She heard news of him for awhile, of course, when she still lived in the area: she knew he went to Korea, and that he came back alive. But they've never talked, never had one of those casual adult conversations that is supposed to draw the sting from a high-school love. Now, she supposes, it's time to do that.

“Mickey Malone,” she says, smiling.

“Mostly I just go by Mike these days,” he says, also smiling. His face is a little heavier and more lined, but it creases the exact same way when he smiles. “I outgrew Mickey, I guess.”

“Yeah, you don't look much like a Mickey anymore.”

He is still handsome, his hair cut unfashionably short with a little grey at the temples, his body more solid, no longer as slim but still looking muscular and trim. When she imagined him– and of course she imagined bumping into him back here: how could she not imagine that? – she had seen him either as a carbon copy of his teenage self or, more realistically, old and fat and gone to seed, a paunchy old Irishman with a whiskey nose and bloodshot eyes. If she'd imagined him looking like this, she would have told herself she was dreaming, being unrealistic.