Angel of Brooklyn
Authors: Janette Jenkins
Contents
All Those Things that You Miss When They’ve Gone
About the Book
It is January, 1914 and Jonathan Crane returns home from his travels with a new American bride, former Coney Island showgirl Beatrice. In the remote Lancashire village Beatrice is the focus of attention, the men captivated by her beauty, the women initially charmed by tales of her upbringing in Normal, Illinois with her father, an amateur taxidermist, and her brother, a preacher, although she will take the story of how she became the Angel of Brooklyn to her grave. But when the men head off to fight in the Great War the glamorous newcomer slowly becomes an object of suspicion and jealousy for the women who are left behind and as the years pass, and their resentment grows, Beatrice’s secret proves to be her undoing.
Beautifully observed, tragic, funny and so evocative that you can taste the candy floss at Coney Island and feel the chill of wartime England,
Angel of Brooklyn
is an extraordinary, heartbreaking story.
About the Author
Born in Bolton in 1965, Janette Jenkins studied acting before completing a degree in Literature and Philosophy and then doing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where she was in Malcolm Bradbury’s final class. She is the author of the novels
Columbus Day
and
Another Elvis Love Child
. Her short stories have appeared in newspapers and anthologies, including
Stand
Magazine, and have been broadcast on Radio 4. In 2003 she was awarded an Alumni Fellowship by the University of Bolton. She lives in the city of Durham.
Also by Janette Jenkins
Columbus Day
Another Elvis Love Child
For Simon
Be not forgetful
to entertain strangers:
for thereby some have
entertained angels unawares
.
Hebrews 13:2
Anglezarke, Lancashire, England
December, 1916
A week before they killed her, Beatrice told them about the dead birds, the guillemot, the glass-eyed buzzards, the sparrowhawks in clusters on the mantelpiece. They were knitting scarves and balaclavas for the boys. Lizzie Blackstock was crying. She dropped twenty stitches.
‘All those birds,’ said Madge. ‘I can’t imagine such a thing.’
‘Do you think it’s snowing in France?’ Lizzie asked. ‘I can’t remember. Does it snow a lot in France?’
Beatrice smiled, a thick grey scarf was trailing down her skirt. ‘For sure it does, it’s winter. But it’ll be warmer in France. It’s further south than here. It’s always warmer in the south.’
‘But they have mountains in France,’ said Ada. ‘They have the Pyrenees. People go skiing in the bloody Pyrenees.’
‘Language.’ Madge pretended to frown at her.
‘My Tom doesn’t like the cold,’ said Lizzie. ‘It goes straight to his bones.’
‘You’d better keep knitting then,’ said Ada. ‘That looks more like a dishcloth than anything.’
They were quiet for a moment. Outside, the snow was falling fast, and the women were mesmerised by the fat dancing flakes, and the slow shutting out of the light.
‘It muffles things,’ said Lizzie. ‘Have you ever noticed how it muffles things?’
‘It’s pretty all right, until it freezes over,’ said Madge. ‘And I’m cold enough without it.’
‘Aren’t we all?’ said Ada, rubbing at her fingers.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Beatrice. ‘I tried.’
It was a draughty room, but she’d managed to light something of a fire. The women had arrived an hour earlier, with their needles and loose balls of wool. They were thinking of giving themselves a name,
like
The Anglezarke Army, The Warrior Ladies, or The Rescuers, but nobody could decide on one.
‘We don’t need a name,’ Madge had said. ‘Why do we need a name? It’s just us, doing our bit for the boys.’
‘It doesn’t seem the same without Jonathan,’ said Ada. ‘This house. Does it feel too big without him?’
‘I’m used to it now, though it still feels empty in the mornings,’ Beatrice told them. ‘No hustle and bustle, and all that English tea.’
‘China,’ said Madge. ‘The tea comes from China.’
‘Or Ceylon,’ frowned Lizzie. ‘It sometimes comes from there.’
‘Don’t you drink tea in America?’ said Madge. ‘What do you drink if you don’t drink tea?’
‘I like coffee,’ said Beatrice. ‘Good, strong coffee.’
‘Well,’ said Ada, slowly shaking her head. ‘You might speak English and have the same coloured skin and everything, but it’s the little things that turn you into a foreigner.’
Beatrice shrugged and wound the gramophone. The music made them smile, until it made them feel worse.
‘Poor Butterfly,’ said Lizzie. ‘We used to dance to this.’
For a while, their fingers moved faster, the clock chimed the half-hour, and they listened to the fire, the way it popped and snapped inside the grate.
‘Keep the home fires burning?’ said Ada, rolling her scarf around the needles. ‘What do they know?’
It was almost dark when they left. The snow had stopped, but the air was heavy, and Anglezarke reservoir was shrouded in fog as the women made their way across the snowy lane, slowly, arm in arm, stopping now and then, taking long, hard looks at the sky. The water made a licking sound.
MIGRATION
Anglezarke, Lancashire, England
January, 1914
IN ANGLEZARKE AND
Rivington, birds with beating hearts dived from the trees, startling her, the way they swooped so close, brushing over her shoulder. Jonathan laughed. He was leaning against the wall, lighting a cigarette.
‘So what do you think? This is it. Anglezarke.’
She stood for a moment, her small gloved hands on the cold stone wall, watching the water as the breeze sent ripples through it. She shielded her eyes. In the distance, the trees were fine black bones.
‘Well?’
‘Yes,’ she turned. ‘I guess you were right, it is just like a picture, and so very, very quiet.’
‘That’s what you get for marrying an Englishman from the North,’ he grinned. ‘You get to live in that part of England where nothing ever happens.’
As they crossed into the lane, a horse and cart appeared around the bend, and the driver slowed down, clicking his tongue behind his teeth, pulling at the reins.
‘Back then?’
‘I told you I’d be back.’
‘So, what’s that place got that we haven’t?’ The man tutted as Beatrice went to pat the horse’s sweaty muzzle. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t be doing that, miss. He’s hungry. He’ll have all your fingers off.’
‘I’m used to horses. We have horses twice the size of him in New York.’
‘We have horses twice the size of him right here, but they eat too much for my liking.’
‘Jed, this is Beatrice, my wife.’
‘We’d heard you’d wed a foreigner,’ he said, flicking up the reins. ‘Brown, black, yellow, we didn’t know what to expect.’ And as the
horse
stepped away, Jed looked over his shoulder. ‘Well I never,’ he winked. ‘You’re some souvenir. All I ever bring home from Blackpool is a stick of peppermint rock.’
That night in bed, he turned his face towards her, leaned on one elbow, and said, ‘I think we should rehearse.’
‘Now? Really? But I’m beat.’
‘It’ll only take five minutes.’
‘All right, all right …’
He sat a little higher. ‘So, Mrs Crane,’ he smiled, ‘tell me about yourself.’
She yawned. ‘Once upon a time, my name was Beatrice Lyle.’
‘Make it sound natural.’
‘How’s this? I was born in Normal, Illinois. My mother died in childbirth.’
‘Having you?’
‘Having me.’
‘Go on.’
‘My father was a teacher and an amateur taxidermist. My brother Elijah went to Chicago, where he became a preacher. I haven’t seen him since.’
‘And …?’
‘And when my father was killed in a house fire, I moved to New York.’
‘Sounds terrible. How did it start?’
‘A lamp. They say it could have been a lamp. Either that, or there was something wrong with the chimney. It sometimes made a whooshing sound. In New York I worked for a man called Mr Cooper. He had a booth on Coney Island selling picture postcards. Of course, I had no real experience, but he could see that I was honest. And that’s where I met Jonathan. He was with Freddy, looking at the postcards. They were very popular cards.’
‘I think I brought some back. The Steeplechase. The Boardwalk. You could put them into a scrapbook?’
‘OK, I could do that.’
‘And then we fell in love?’
‘In Franny’s Oyster Bar.’
‘I couldn’t help myself.’
‘Neither could I. It was hopeless.’
They grinned at each other, pleased with the story, and lay back in the bed exhausted. Beatrice looked at Jonathan in the half-light; with his sweep of dark hair, his straight nose and teeth, he made her think of the man in the Arrow collar advertisements. She closed her eyes, resting her head on his shoulder. The bed had been made with fresh cotton sheets, and the dusky blue eiderdown smelled of English roses. She dreamed. After more than ten days at sea, she could feel the world tipping, but it was a comfortable kind of rocking, and the dreams were pleasant enough. Elijah was playing on the lawn whistling hymns through a fat blade of grass. The outhouse was there, with its pickling solutions and tubs of papier mâché. Her father was around, somewhere in the distance, waving his right arm, talking to a shadow. Then, just before she woke, she was back on the Island, laughing with Celina and Nancy, biting a chunk out of Marnie’s giant hot dog.
‘Grease!’ Nancy yelped. ‘You can’t be smelling of grease!’
‘Say, this whole place stinks of grease and onions.’
‘Not in here it don’t! Here, take this napkin, quick!’
The dream felt like real life, and when she opened her eyes, she put her fingers to her nose, but all she could smell was her sweaty morning skin, and the underlying hint of Pears’ soap.
The next morning, finding herself outside a closed blue door, Beatrice rested her hand on the small brass knocker before giving it a tap; the door shuddered. Nothing. She tapped it again a little louder, and again, until eventually she heard footsteps and the door was opened by a surprised-looking woman wiping her hands on a dirty white towel.
‘Yes?’
Beatrice swallowed nervously. ‘My husband tells me this house is the store.’
‘Store?’
‘Shop?’
‘What husband’s that then?’
‘Mr Crane.’
‘Jonathan? Really? I’d heard he was back from his travels. They said he’d gone and got himself married, but I didn’t believe them. He wouldn’t do that, I said, but now it looks like he has done. And you must be her? The foreigner?’
‘I’m Beatrice.’
‘Ada. Pleased to meet you. I won’t shake your hand, I’ve been gutting mackerel.’
Ada must have still been a young woman, but her scraped back mousy hair already had some grey in it; tall and angular, she had a long thin face and enormous pale green eyes.
‘You can come in the front way today,’ she said, ‘but usually, you’d have to knock round the back. This front part, you see, is our own private abode.’
Private abode?
Beatrice thought.
Did young Englishwomen really talk like that?
Dipping her head, she followed Ada inside. The room was fuggy and, although the curtains were open, the windows were so small that the light had to struggle against the glass and the tightly leaded diamonds; she could just make out the embers in the grate, and the outline of the furniture. Ada watched her taking it in.