By the Rivers of Brooklyn (11 page)

The night before he left he hugged her, in that casual brotherly way he often did. “Ethel, you're a saint, that's the God's truth, to put up with me on your couch for nearly a year. You're a saint, and you're a lovely woman, and I hope my brother Jim knows what a lucky fellow he is. You hear that, Jim?” There was a note in his voice at the end that was almost serious and Ethel clung to it, hoping Harold was trying to tell her something but not knowing what. And then he was gone.

He was gone, and they were into June. The day on the calendar when Ethel's period was supposed to come went by, and another day and another, and finally she realized that she'd been feeling tired and logy from more than just the sale and Harold's going. She waited two more weeks before she told Jean, and explained about her symptoms, and Jean said, yes, you couldn't miss that. Finally she told Jim the news, and he was thrilled, like she knew he'd be.

The night she told him, Ethel finally knew it was real and she could stop praying for a baby. She should pray a prayer of thanks instead, that she was going to have another child, her husband's child. Even if it hadn't always been Jim she was thinking of, it was Jim in the bed with her and that was what counted. Everything would be all right now.

ANNIE
 
ST. JOHN'S, MAY 1929

T
HE LIGHT IN THE
Stokes' front room was rosy, filtered through filmy pink curtains and reflected back from a dusty rose carpet. It was a warm afternoon for May and the pink light made the air seem warmer, almost heavy. Frances wore a soft pink dress and carried pink silk roses, so it wasn't sensible to feel, as Annie did, that there was a cloying rose-smell in the air. Annie felt herself sway a little as Major Barrett led Frances and Harold through the vows. She gripped her own bouquet a little more tightly and tried to pay attention.

Frances looked as neat and pretty as she always did. Her dark hair and dark brown eyes were set off sharply against the pale dress. Her small hands, gripping the bouquet, looked like the curled pink-and-white of seashells. She was a tiny little thing, barely five feet and not an ounce over ninety pounds. That was good though, since Harold wasn't a very big man. On the far side of Harold, his friend David Janes stood as best man. Annie was the bridesmaid; Frances had no sisters and she and Annie had been friends ever since they were little girls.

Frances' father, looking quite unlike himself in a suit, sat stern and upright on his chair. He had wanted Frances married in the Church of England, but Frances had put her little foot down and insisted on a Salvation Army officer. Annie remembered herself and Frances and Ethel coming home from Salvation Meeting on Sunday nights when they were all young girls, arms around each other's waists. Nobody ever said a word against Frances going to the Army with them but sometimes people thought differently when it came time to marry out of your faith – though it wasn't as if she were marrying a Catholic.

Mrs. Stokes, mother of the bride, sat on the small settee next to the mother of the groom, the two of them squashed together like two soft old pillows, beaming like angels but no doubt making up catty remarks to say to one another afterwards. They had been best friends for years and were never without an unkind word to say about someone in the neighbourhood.

Annie's own father sat a little stooped, leaning forward in his chair: his back bothered him these days. His eyes were fixed on Harold almost hungrily, and Annie could read his thoughts. One boy dead, another gone for good – and now Harold, too, would be back off to New York almost as soon as the wedding supper was eaten. The Evans name would be carried on among strangers in a strange land.

The rest of the room was filled with aunts and uncles and neighbours and church people, about twenty guests in all, crowded into the little front room, fanning themselves with their hands or with various papers from the table in the front room:
The Evening Telegram, The Ladies' Home Journal, The War Cry
, whatever came to hand. Annie caught Bill Winsor's eye across the room. She and Bill would be the only ones of their old crowd left, now, once Harold and Frances were gone.

The ceremony was done; everyone crowded around to congratulate the bride and groom. Annie folded Frances into her arms, feeling her friend's bird-fragile bones and her brittle strength. “I know you'll be happy, Franny,” she said. “Everything was beautiful…the dress came out lovely.” Annie had helped sew it.

Frances stepped back and looked down at herself mockingly. “You know what they say,” she said. “Married in blue, ever be true. Married in red, better off dead. Married in pink, certain to shrink!”

Annie laughed and turned to Harold, let herself be gathered into his hug. He was so much like Bert: she saw it more every year. So steady and responsible. Here he was, only twenty, with a wife and a good job back in New York, his whole life in front of him. She wouldn't mention to him how much like Bert he was. It wouldn't be fair.

She stepped back and watched her father come up, stiffly, to embrace his son and his new daughter-in-law. Annie smiled at him, radiantly, and took his arm as they went out into the dining room where her mother and Mrs. Stokes had lined off the table with every imaginable variety of tea buns, cookies, squares, sandwiches, and scones, with the wedding cake a magnificent white-topped centrepiece to the whole display. The wedding guests crowded around the table and two dozen neighbours, who had not been asked to the ceremony but had been hanging around the kitchen and the yard, edged in and began offering congratulations to the bride and groom as they moved carefully towards the table. Annie saw her mother catch Mrs. Stokes' eye when she saw old Tim Casey, who was not much better than a tramp, standing with a tea bun in one hand and a glass of ginger-beer in the other. But neither woman said anything: you wouldn't turn anybody away from a wedding.

Frances and Harold left an hour after the wedding, climbing into the car David Janes had borrowed for the occasion. Everyone else stayed a good two hours longer, reciting over every detail of the wedding and reminiscing about every wedding ever held in the neighbourhood, the family, and the church for the last two decades. Along about seven-thirty, when it started getting duckish, Annie began to circulate, picking up plates and teacups and glasses, moving them to the kitchen, filling the sink to wash them. She found it soothing to be alone in the dim kitchen, lit by only one smoky lamp on the table, plunging her hands into and out of the soapy water. She always liked this part of a party, cleaning up afterwards, clearing away the evidence, returning everything to normal. She hummed “O Promise Me” as she washed, stacking the dishes neatly in the drain board.

She had caught the bouquet, of course. Frances had made sure of that, turning to flick it directly at her just before getting in the car, so that Annie hadn't even had time to duck or dodge. Frances was sure Annie wouldn't have long to wait. “Don't be talking about being an old maid, sure, Annie,” she'd say. “You're only twenty-two, you got a long ways to go before you're over the hill yet. It won't be long before Bill comes to his senses and stops waiting around for Rose.” Annie said nothing; she paid no mind to that kind of talk, even from Frances.

It was getting dark by the time Annie and her parents walked across the road to home. Mrs. Evans kept up a steady commentary all the way up into their own yard: “My, I don't know what to think of this spending the night in a hotel… there's a bed in our own house good enough for them…must be New York ideas Harold's after picking up…he don't put on airs too much though, apart from that, though I must say he's quick enough to head back there, taking the boat tomorrow morning…I wonder if Frances will be seasick on the trip? Ethel said she was terrible seasick when she crossed…Frances did a good job on that dress, though I don't think pink suits her complexion…lavender would have been nice…never seen anyone married in lavender, have you, Annie?”

No, Annie had never seen anyone married in lavender. Just as well; nothing rhymed with lavender. Pop had gone on ahead of them to lift the latch and go into their own kitchen, which was a bit chilly now. He knelt to stir up the coals in the stove and said, “Needs a bit more coal.” He moved to the basement door and started down the stairs as Annie got her mother's spring coat off, settled her in her comfortable chair, hung up her coat and laid her good new hat on the shelf, and filled the kettle for a cup of tea.

Her mother was still talking: “…poor Catherine got herself wore out over this wedding…hasn't slept good in a week…still it's a fine thing to marry off your daughter…doesn't look like I'm going to have the pleasure, does it? You're in no hurry and I don't say we'll hear wedding bells from Rose anytime soon…”

A heavy solid thud sounded in the basement, much louder and more compact than a load of coal being shovelled into the bucket. Then silence. Annie went to the basement door and called, “Pop? Pop? Are you all right, Pop?” Her voice went up a little on each Pop, tighter and shriller each time he didn't reply.

She started down the dark steps, but she was less than halfway before she saw him lying at the bottom, sprawled facedown on the dirt floor, arms thrown above his head.
He's dead
, she thought.
He's taken a heart attack and died.

Then her father moved: she saw the patch of white as his face turned sideways, his eyes searching for her. “Fell…my leg gave out,” he said, but she had to come down three more steps to hear him.

She tried to pull him to a standing position, but he could not sit up on his own, much less stand, and he was far too big for Annie to push and pull around. From the top of the stairs her mother's voice drifted down: “What is it, Annie? What's the matter with your father? Is he all right?”

Annie knelt on the cold damp basement floor beside her father. “Pop, will you be all right here if I go get help? I need to get someone, a man, to help bring you up the stairs.”

“My leg…just gave out under me,” he said, dazed.

She hurried up the stairs, wishing she was wearing anything but the narrow-skirted bridesmaid's dress and the pointed-toed shoes. “It's all right, Mom,” she said, trying to staunch the flow of her mother's worries and questions. “Pop's all right, he's alive. He fell over the stairs.”

She was running through a mental list of her neighbours, thinking who would be at home and able-bodied enough to help, when there was a knock at the back door and there stood Bill Winsor. Annie didn't stop to question what Bill had come over for; his arrival was a godsend. He carried her father up over the stairs, settled him on the chesterfield in the kitchen, phoned for the doctor and waited with her till the doctor came and examined Pop.

“His hip is broken, Annie,” Dr. Mills said. “We'll have to take him to the Grace, probably put him in a body cast. Even after he comes home, he won't be the same man again.”

“Broken hip,” she said. This was what she'd been thinking ever since she saw him move, and it was as bad in its own way as if he had had a heart attack and fallen dead at the bottom of the stairs, worse in a way, because he would be confined to bed and need constant care, constant nursing, and he would never be up and walk and work and care for himself again.

“He's young for a broken hip, isn't he?” Bill said. “My grandfather had a broken hip but he was seventy-seven. Mr. Evans is, what, not sixty yet, is he, Annie?”

“No, he is young for it, but it's not unheard of,” the doctor said. “It's a terrible blow for a man like him, though, that's what it is. I'm just going to go out now and bring my car around so we can take him to the hospital. Annie, will you come with him?”

“I don't know…Mom…” Annie began, and looked at Bill.

“I'll see Mr. Evans down to the Grace with you, doctor,” Bill said, as the doctor went to the door.

Annie thought of Harold and Frances in their hotel room, enjoying their first night together. And tomorrow morning at first light, leaving on the boat. She said nothing aloud, but Bill said, “Do you want me to go down to the hotel and get Harold, tell him what's happened?”

“No. No, don't do that.” Harold and Frances had their plans made, their tickets bought, their lives ahead of them. “I'll write a letter after they're gone, tomorrow, and tell Ethel and Jim what's happened. Harold will get the news when he gets to New York. I don't want him feeling he has to stay back here on account of us. Though I'm sure I don't know what we're going to do,” she added, staring down at her hands lying on the yellow flowered oilcloth.

One of Bill's hands moved to cover hers. “Don't worry about it, girl. You don't have to solve all your problems today. We'll take one day at a time, that's all. You know I'm here to help you.”

ROSE
 
BROOKLYN, AUGUST 1930