By the Rivers of Brooklyn (8 page)

“D
ID YOU PACK ANY
more of Mom's cake? We got to give Rose some of that cake!” Jim called from the bedroom, where he was looking for his old bathing suit to loan to Harold. Ever since Jim and Rose had cooked up this scheme to take their brother Harold out to Coney Island to celebrate his arrival in New York, Jim had been giddy, like Ralphie with a new toy, insisting on new bathing suits, new hats, the best of everything.

Ethel cut another big slice off Mom Evans' cake, wrapped it in a napkin and stuck it in the basket. Harold had brought the cake with him on the boat, on top of his trunk, and the first night he arrived he and Ethel and Jim had sat down around the table with a cup of tea and sliced into the cake and it was just like being home.

“Am I supposed to go out in public in this, Jim, my son?” Harold's voice came booming out of the bedroom. He had a big voice for a small fellow. “Sure, I'd be stoned to death if I went down Water Street dressed like that! Things must be some different in Brooklyn!”

“Only at Coney Island, b'y, they're all dressed like that out on the beach there. You takes it out and changes once you gets down there.” Ethel squeezed out a smile at that, Jim playing the big New Yorker for his little brother. Jim hadn't been to Coney Island since, oh, maybe 1922, back when he first came. Long before they were married. Ethel had never wanted to go there, maybe because Rose said she went three or four times every summer and loved it. It sounded cheap, crowded and tawdry, not the kind of place Ethel would like to bring Ralphie.

Ralphie was staying home today with Jean and her youngsters. Jean and Robert had promised to take the children to the zoo in Prospect Park. All the same, Ethel and Jim had had a fight about leaving Ralphie behind.

“I just don't see the point, to take a whole day and spend all that money to go to the seaside and not take our own child!” Ethel had said. “We don't have that many outings and it seems mean not to take him.”

“And how many outings do we get, just me and you, no kid?” Jim countered.

“There's no need for that! We're adults now, we have a child.”

“Yes, but we're going with Rose and her boyfriend, with Harold – young single people. It's not fair to tow a kid along. It'd be no fun for Ralphie and no fun for the rest of us.”

She could see his point. You had a different kind of fun going somewhere with a small child, or with another family who had children, as they sometimes did with Jean and Robert. She could see, too, Jim's longing for that other kind of fun, going on dates, going around with other couples, going to the pictures and to amusement parks. Rose's kind of life.

“It just don't seem right,” she said again.

“Fine then, we'll take him with us.” Jim had shrugged.

“I am
not
taking Ralphie to Coney Island with your sister and her Italian boyfriend!” Ethel had said. “He can stay with Robert and Jean for the day, and that's final!” She raised her voice to cover the feeling that she'd been tricked into backing down.

So here they were, eight o'clock on a Sunday morning, all packed to go and still no sign of Rose and the Italian. Ethel felt a little uneasy about missing Sunday School and church, but Rose and Jim had insisted Coney Island was an all-day trip. Ethel's foot, pinched tight in the pointed toe of her new white summer shoes, drummed a staccato rhythm on the linoleum.

They finally came at nearly eight-thirty, by which time Ethel had Jim and Harold out waiting on the sidewalk with the lunch basket and all their bags. Rose came sashaying up the street in a bright pink dress that showed her knees and a little pink hat so small it was ridiculous. Beside Rose walked a dark-haired young man in a straw hat with his jacket slung over one shoulder, a young man with a wide smile and a swinging, swaggering step. Jim stepped forward and swept Rose into a hug, swirling her away from the Italian, happy to see her as he always was when she crossed their doorstep every two or three months. Jim and Rose were two of a kind, Ethel thought, just like Bert and Annie. She didn't know Harold well enough yet to know which kind of Evans he was.

Harold stepped forward now, letting Jim lead him towards the sister he hadn't seen in five years. Ethel could see him taking in the changes in Rose: the cherry lipstick, the rouge, the hard shiny voice that sounded more Brooklyn than St. John's, which Ethel knew was put on.

“Everybody, this is Tony Martelli,” Rose said. “Tony, my big brother Jim, my little brother Harold, and my sister-in-law Ethel.” Rose's eyes slid quickly over Ethel's outfit, back up to her face and away.

Tony Martelli shook hands with the boys and took Ethel's fingertips lightly, lifting them, grazing them with his lips. Ethel pulled her hand back and giggled to cover the rudeness, both hers and his. Then she collected herself and said, “Pleased to meet you, I'm sure, Mr. Martelli. Rose has told us so much about you.”

The Italian smiled. “Tony, please. Yes, Rose speaks so well of you all.” He and Ethel smiled at each other, acknowledging the polite lies.

Jim broke the silence. “Come on, we better get a move on, let's catch the subway.”

Ethel never liked travelling on the subway; she preferred trolleys. The dark tunnels and the hot crowded cars bothered her: it was impossible not to think of the cars and horses and people and houses all piled on top of her, ready to collapse. Jim strode onto the car behind Rose and Tony. Harold gave Ethel his arm to help her on. She shot him a look of gratitude. A kindly man, like Bert.

Harold was short, with bright blue eyes and sandy, crinkly hair. “Well, this is something, ain't it?” he said as he squeezed onto the seat next to Jim and Ethel.

“Sit back, kid. You ain't seen nothin' yet,” Rose said. She turned to Tony. “I hope you got big bucks today, Tony Martelli, cause we are going to show my baby brother a good time at Coney Island. We're gonna eat a Feltman's hot dog and go for a ride on the Cyclone, right?”

Ethel glanced up at Jim. They had two dollars to entertain themselves and Harold, and fifteen cents was already gone on the subway fare. But Jim didn't look worried.

Finally the car lurched to a stop where the doors opened and people poured out in a living flood. “This is it,” Rose said. Ethel scrambled on the floor, feeling for the lunch basket, the bags, her purse. Rose, a tiny handbag slung over one shoulder, stood up empty-handed without glancing down, leaving Tony to carry her bags while she led them out into the glaring sunlight.

Ethel hated Coney Island at first glance. Between the steady flow of people on all sides she caught glimpses of garish signs, heard barkers' voices luring them in to games of chance, smelled food in the air. She felt hot, faint, and queasy. But the others charged ahead, eager to get to the boardwalk. Ethel felt Jim's hand on her elbow and let him propel her along.

Her first glimpse of the beach was a shock too. Already, only ten in the morning, the sand was black with people, swarming like ants down off the boardwalk and onto the seashore. The ocean looked very far away, a narrow line of dark blue at the edge of a seething mass of humanity.

“Look, there's a bathhouse down there. Let's go change,” Jim said.

Rose ruffled her brother's hair. “Don't go playing the big-shot New Yorker with me, Jimmy. You might impress Harry and the little woman there, but you don't know from nothin'. See the line-up outside that bathhouse? You wanna wait two hours and throw fifty cents each for a private locker? You follow me.”

She led them off the Boardwalk and up onto a sidewalk where they joined a line-up outside a small, dilapidated house. “Ten cents apiece,” Rose told them.

Ethel breathed a sigh of relief: thirty cents for her, Jim and Harold instead of a dollar fifty, just for a place to change your clothes. Maybe Rose's street sense had its place. But when she found herself and Rose crowded into a room with twenty other women shiggling out of their clothes and into their bathing costumes, Ethel could have cursed Rose to eternal damnation, never mind the money saved. She had never in all her life stripped full naked in front of another person in broad daylight, not even Jim. Nobody seemed to be looking but she flushed like a boiled lobster as she peeled off her stockings, dress and slip. Nearby, hugely fat women undressed, jiggling breasts and bottoms almost bumping each other. Skinny young girls stripped like snakes shedding their skins, and Rose, caught in the corner of Ethel's eye, undressed like a dancer, swaying her hips as she shimmied into her bathing suit. Ethel looked down at the dirty floor.

By the time they found the boys, walked back down to the Boardwalk, and fought their way to a narrow strip of sand where they could lay out their towels, it was time to unpack the lunches. Tony bought a couple of bottles of Coca-Cola from a beach peddler. Like the ten-cent changing houses, he explained, beach peddlers were illegal, “but how else are poor people gonna enjoy a day at the beach?” He spread his hands and grinned his big grin.

The Coke was warm but not as warm as the lemonade that had made the subway journey with them. Some of it had spilled in the picnic basket, making the sandwiches and cake sticky. Ethel offered some of Mrs. Evans' cake from home to Rose, who shook her head, and to Tony, who smiled and tried it and said it was lovely.

After lunch the boys went down to the water for a dip, weaving through the forest of bodies, quickly lost to view. Ethel was left alone with Rose. Silence descended.

“So, is Harold gonna work on the high steel with Jim?” Rose said at last.

“Yeah, Jim's already got him a job.”

“He's not scared?”

“I don't know. I guess he's not. What does Tony do?”

“Works in a store…a fruit store. Says he's gonna own one someday.” Rose was not looking at Ethel; she stared straight into the crowd as if gazing at the invisible sea.

That was all they had to say. After awhile Rose pulled a magazine out of her bag, lay down on her stomach and started to flip through it. Ethel wondered how the boys would ever find their way back through the crowd to this exact spot. What if she was stranded here with Rose forever?

The boys, however, came back, swearing they had been for a swim although in the noonday heat their skin and hair and suits were already dry.

By two o'clock they were all broiling, drowsy, dizzy from the sun and ready to pack up and leave the beach. After another horrible interlude in the changing house, they let themselves be propelled with the crowd up to the Bowery, Coney Island's main street.

Every imaginable human experience beckoned to them, but conscious of their few coins they were content mostly to stroll and watch, not feeling the need to go inside and see Bonita and Her Fighting Lions or Laurello, the Man with the Revolving Head. Tony, Jim and Harold each wasted a nickel on two wallops at the high striker, a chance to show off their muscles and impress the girls. Jim wanted to try the shooting galleries, but Ethel patted her purse and shook her head.

Then they drew near the amusement parks, where the roller coasters towered, and Rose said, “This is it. We all gotta ride the Cyclone.”

Ethel looked up at the towering, rickety-looking contraption with the cars plunging to earth. It looked like certain death at twenty-five cents apiece. She shook her head again, but all the boys were as eager as Rose was. It wasn't their insistence, their teasing and urging that got her into the line-up and made her hand over the money: it was the dread of being stuck on the ground alone, abandoned in the crowd.

At the crest of the first big climb Ethel saw what a fool she'd been, how much better it would have been to have stayed on the ground, no matter how alone and afraid. She sat wedged between Jim and Harold, with Rose and Tony in the seat ahead, as the car teetered at the top and then plummeted down with a rush of wind, a roar of screaming voices, and the clatter and rattle of the wooden tracks. Fragile as matchsticks, she thought, and as likely to shatter. Screaming, she buried her head on Jim's shoulder and was briefly comforted to feel his arm tighten around her. Then he gave her shoulders a little shake and pried her head up. “Look, isn't it great?”

Oddly, things got better after the ride, as if the worst had been faced. They walked the length of the Bowery again, and everyone wanted hot dogs. Tony showed them the way to Nathan's, where the hot dogs were five cents instead of the usual ten. Ethel felt strange, walking and eating right out on the street, but everyone around her was doing it, so she did.

Then they turned into Paddy Shea's on Surf Avenue, which, Rose said, used to be an Irish bar before Prohibition. Now it was still Irish but it sold only sarsaparillas and lemon sodas. They squeezed around a table and drank their huge sarsaparillas in the slanting late-afternoon light and listened to the tinkle of the player piano. Ethel put her hand in her purse to check: three nickels, exactly enough for the fare back.

A family near them packed up their things and the father shouldered a sleepy, cranky child, just about Ralphie's size. It was a good thing they hadn't brought Ralphie, Ethel thought, looking at the child's flushed unhappy face. She had never spent a whole day apart from Ralphie before. She felt curiously light, as if she might float away, no longer anchored to earth by Ralphie's familiar weight.

The piano began to play “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” and Rose put her head on Tony Martelli's shoulder. Jim reached out and put his hand over Ethel's and she smiled up at him. Her nose and shoulders were burned and she felt tired in a giddy, sunwashed kind of way. She was almost happy, except for the thought of the subway ride back.

But Harold broke the silence to say, “Now ye been treating me all day and it's time for me to treat back. I'm paying the fare for our ride back, and we're going to take that elevated train, not the subway, so you can all show me the sights on the way back. That'll be all right, won't it Ethel?”