By the Rivers of Brooklyn (7 page)

The building on Linden Boulevard was only a few years old. It was a warm brown brick with a big paved space in front of it. Old women sat on the steps, most of them heavyset, clad in long black dresses, their hair covered with bandannas, talking in foreign tongues. It wasn't one of the buildings advertised in the
Eagle
with the words “Christian area.” Ethel didn't care about that. She didn't mind living around Jews; she really had no opinion of Jews at all, never having met any except in shops. And “Christian area” buildings were more expensive. On the other side of the paved court sat the old men, chewing on pipes or cigars, muttering rather than speaking aloud, casting occasional glances at the women. Jim and Ethel and Ralphie had to step around a clutch of little boys playing potsy right in front of the front steps.

Inside, there were marble floors in the vestibule where you went in and a tall staircase stretching up. But the apartment for rent was on the ground floor, which was the main reason Ethel was so eager for it. She was so tired of stairs, of lugging Ralphie up those long steps when he was asleep or tired. What would it be like when – if – they had a baby as well? If she was going to live out her days in a Brooklyn apartment building, Ethel wanted it to be on the ground floor.

When the landlord – a small man with a low forehead who came scuttling down the stairs as they entered – opened the door for them, they were standing in a short, dim hallway. Directly in front of them, on the long side of the hall, two doors stood ajar, leading into the kitchen and the living room. Closed doors at either end of the hall led to a bedroom and a bathroom. Their own bathroom! Ethel was so tired of sharing a toilet and bath with three other families. Their own bathroom would be reason enough to rent this place, if everything else was all right.

Ralphie barrelled straight through the living room door, and Jim followed him. But Ethel went into the kitchen, and the landlord hovered near her, knowing that the woman of the house would want to see the small, battered gas cooker, the clean white sink with its own running water, a few dark chips out of the porcelain, the space where she could fit her kitchen table and chairs, the place where an icebox could go if they had one. “Lots of cupboard space here,” he said helpfully, and he was right: the shelves and cupboards ranged above the white countertop to the ceiling, though she didn't see how she'd ever get at them, short of standing on a stool. She liked the cheerful yellow paint on the walls, which looked almost new.

When she was satisfied she'd seen the kitchen, Ethel went into the front room. Like the kitchen, this room was brightened by a large window that stretched almost floor to ceiling. Sunlight spilled in and made bright patches on the floor, which was covered in a green-and-brown linoleum. Ethel didn't like the wallpaper – a dark pattern that she knew would make the room look gloomy – but that could be changed. She knew just the pattern she'd pick.

Jim walked around the room with a small frown, as if calculating how much each square foot of space would take from his pay packet. He made $150 a month, and the apartment cost $40 a month; they were paying only $20 for their rooms now and it seemed they were counting every penny. Jim always found money for something foolish like going to the pictures or eating in a restaurant, but if Ethel wanted something for the house, something to make their lives a bit better, he muttered under his breath and counted the bills in his wallet. And she could see him counting now, in his head.

Ethel just stood there, trying to picture a couch, a chair, a little daybed for Ralphie in the corner. She imagined painting and papering, sewing curtains for the windows, making this apartment into a proper home.

Ralphie hung out the open window, looking onto the courtyard below. Ethel could hear, as well as see, that the dirty space was full of people – maybe a dozen kids ranging in age from Ralphie's size right on up to tall boys and girls of twelve or thirteen, all playing and laughing and shouting. Several wash lines crisscrossed the courtyard, though no-one had clothes hung out today, being Sunday. She saw women leaning in their doorways or windows, watching the children, talking to each other, and men sitting on steps and benches smoking and talking.

In the middle of the pavement a skipping rope whirled, marking a circle in the air inside which small girls with flying braids hopped on light feet, while the other children chanted:

She is handsome
She is pretty
She is the belle of New York City

Nearer to Ethel's window, a thin dark-haired woman sat on a step darning socks. The woman took up the skipping rhyme with different words and a more tuneful melody, singing as her needle darted in and out:

Let the wind and the rain and the hail blow high
And the snow come tumbling from the sky…

Irish, Ethel thought, because although dark, the woman did not look foreign; she sang in English and the song sounded like Irish songs, a bit like songs from back home. The woman glanced at Ethel and their eyes met. Embarrassed to be caught staring, Ethel looked away.

She thought of home with a pain in her chest that was as real as if she'd taken a bad heart. She saw her mother's dark blue house, square and simple in its design but standing by itself in its own yard on Merrymeeting Road, neighbours always nearby but separated by fences and decency. Her own line of washing stretching across her own yard; her children playing in the quiet streets where no motorcars rumbled and even carts and horses were few. She knew there were people in St. John's who lived crowded into row houses, poor people who lived in little better than shacks and hovels. But for her kind of people there was always a house of your own once you married and had a family: your own land, your own space. She knew from hearing people talk that America had places like that too, little towns where houses grew like flowers in their own neat gardens behind tidy white fences.

Ethel knew now she would never live in such a place. Her life in America was a New York life, a Brooklyn life; it was as bounded and hemmed in as this yard with the brown brick buildings on all sides. The knowledge made her heart fall with a little despair; then she buckled herself into courage as she might into a girdle, and looked out the window again and willed herself to see in the mix of faces, dark and pale, in the babble of voices, a place she could belong.

When she turned from the window toward Jim and the landlord, she gave Jim her brightest smile. Ralphie tugged at her skirt and she scooped him up in her arms and stood with him there, framed against the window with the lively, noisy yard behind them, so that Jim, who was talking money and contracts with the landlord, could not do anything but nod and say, “All right then. We'll take it.”

ANNIE
 
ST. JOHN'S, MARCH 1928

B
ILL
W
INSOR TOOK TO
walking home with Annie after the Sunday night Salvation Meeting. Annie and Harold used to always walk home together, but now Harold was going out with Frances Stokes. Frances' people were Church of England, but for years she had gone to the Army with the Evans girls. Now that she and Harold were sweet on each other, she went every Sunday, morning and night. Annie made excuses to hang back, to talk to someone after meeting, telling Frances and Harold to go on ahead so they'd have a few minutes alone. Then Bill started waiting for her, saying he didn't want to see her walk alone.

Annie walked home those nights still warm inside from the meeting, warm with the singing and prayers and testimonies, the glory. Sometimes she went down to the penitent form and knelt and prayed, because that week she had been angry and impatient with her mother, and jealous of Harold's and Frances' happiness, and envious when she got Ethel's letter about the new apartment and how Ralphie was talking now. On her knees at the mercy seat all her discontent and petty thoughts and meanness melted away and she felt good and whole again, filled with enough of the glory to make it through another long week.

“You're in a good mood tonight,” Bill said the third time he walked home with Annie alone. It was a cold clear night and their breath made white puffs in the air with every word as they climbed the steep slope of Barter's Hill. Slushy snow slopped around their gaiters.

“I'm always in a good mood after meeting.”

“Captain had a fine sermon tonight,” Bill said. “Some good testimonies, too.”

“Yes. I like to died, though, when Mrs. Pitcher got up, didn't you? The look on old Helen Abbey's face, did you see it?”

Annie shot a quick glance of quickened interest at Bill: she knew almost everyone else in meeting had been watching the subtle glances between the two women, but not everyone would have pointed it out. She was dying to talk about it, even if it was the sin of gossip. “I suppose so, when she must have known every word Mrs. Pitcher was going to say. And when she said, ‘Praise the Lord for giving me the courage and fortitude to bear up under the affliction of this troublesome neighbour, this false friend–'” Annie imitated the pitch of Mrs. Pitcher's voice perfectly; she was a good mimic, though she seldom had a chance to show off her skills.

“I know! I saw Miss Abbey's lips start to twitch; I thought, She's going to sing her down for sure. I figured next thing we'd hear was ‘Throw out the lifeline! Throw out the lifeline!'” Bill's imitation didn't quite catch the timbre of Helen Abbey's reedy voice, but he knew her favourite hymn.

Annie laughed. “Have you ever really heard anyone sung down in meeting? Not just for going on too long, I mean, but because someone didn't like what they had to say?”

“Once, years ago. I was at a meeting around the bay where Uncle David Abbott started to testify about overcoming the sins of the flesh, and there was people there didn't think he should go into as much detail as what he did, so my grandmother, Sadie Bartlett, started in with ‘I am under the good old Army flag…'” Bill had a powerful voice once he got going; Annie joined him on the next line. They turned off Prince of Wales Street and walked down Rocky Lane singing.

Bill laughed a nervous little laugh as the hymn finished. “Look at us, making a holy show of ourselves,” he said. A wagon rumbled past on the road; the driver lifted his hat and nodded.

“Sure, nobody would mind someone singing a hymn on the way home from meeting,” Annie said. “There's no harm in that.”

“I s'pose not,” Bill said.

She looked up at him sideways, seeing what she had always seen: his fine fair hair, his blue eyes, his strong jaw, but seeing him as if he were a stranger. She felt suddenly distant from him and at the same time quite close, and that strange double vision made her say, “Mom had a letter from Rose this week.”

It made her heart fall, to see how quickly the light leapt to his eyes, how quickly their little moment of laughter and music faded compared to a half-dozen words if Rose's name was among them. “Is there any news, then?”

Annie shrugged. “Rose never has much in the way of news. She's still as foolish as the odd sock, writes about going to movies and dancing, just because she knows it will drive Mom to her knees in prayer. She's left off the last job she was at, the laundry, and she's working in a shop.”

“And she's…is she…I mean…”

Annie took pity, although she was sorely tempted to let him flounder like a cod on the wharf. “Ah, no, she never talks about her fellows, so I suppose that means there's no-one serious. Although Rose is so close with her news, she could turn up on our doorstep married with four children one day, and never a word said.” She glanced at Bill again before going on. “But Ethel now, she writes regular. She says that Rose has been going out with some fellow, some Italian man, for awhile now, but Ethel don't know how serious it is.”

They walked along for awhile in silence out Freshwater Road, past the farms and open fields, falling into step together without trying to. “I suppose Rose got to live her own life,” Bill said at last, in a voice like you'd hear at a wake.

Annie nodded. “All of us at home figured that out a long time ago, Bill. It's…it's time you did too. You can't go on through your whole life waiting and hoping, you know.”

But am I any different?
she asked herself later that night, leaning close to the watery green mirror, one foot square, that hung over her dresser. Her face hung in the greenish gloom like a sickly phantom. She thought again of Bill, of his quiet humour and quick eye.
No,
she told herself very firmly.
No, Annie.
Don't waste your time waiting and hoping for Bill Winsor, who is in love with your
sister and always has been.
She turned away from the mirror, then turned back for one last savage glance.

You don't want Rose's leavings anyway, do you?

ETHEL
 
BROOKLYN, JULY 1928