By the Rivers of Brooklyn (29 page)

Ethel's mouth was dry. She wasn't sure what the question was. Old Taylor, Young Taylor: what did it matter what she thought? She shrugged. “I don't know. What am I supposed to say?”

“It's a good opportunity, Ethel. More money. But if I don't take it, he'll bring in some other guy and I might be out on the street without a job.” Tick, tick, tick. This time when he looked at her he held her gaze and spoke very slowly. “He wants me to take over as manager. He wants us to move down there and live over the shop.”

She pulled out Jimmy's chair and sat down in front of the half-eaten dinner. “What does Jimmy think?” she said, as if, even though Jimmy wasn't here, they could still speak around and through him.

Now it was Jim who shrugged. The tine of the fork slid in and out of the hole in the tablecloth. She wanted to tell him to stop, he was ruining the tablecloth, but after four years of silence it seemed she should weigh her words more carefully.

“Jimmy thinks it's a good idea,” Jim said. “He thinks it'll be a long-term thing. Jimmy says there's gonna be a big boom in the business with this television thing, and we should take advantage. Stay with it. And if I don't take it, what else will I do?”

She nodded. Jim had made one big change, when he was thirty and couldn't work as an ironworker anymore. He learned something new: radios. Now he was over forty. It wasn't the time for learning another new trade.

“It's not as nice of an apartment,” he offered, apologetically.

Ethel unclenched her hands, moved Jimmy's plate aside, made herself lay the twisted dishtowel out on the table. She smoothed it and folded it, in half and then in thirds. “It's not easy, to start over in a new place,” she said. “But what choice have we got?”

She heard the rustle as Jim picked up the newspaper he had laid beside his plate. “That's it, then,” he said. “I'll tell young Taylor tomorrow.”

DIANE
 
BROOKLYN, DECEMBER 1949

D
IANE SITS BESIDE
M
ICKEY
at the soda fountain, her ankles twisted around the stool. She watches as his long slim hands stir his coffee, cradle the cup, lift it to his mouth. His mouth is full-lipped and kissable in his thin, strong-lined face. She lets her eyes slide down to his body, long and lean with a hard layer of muscle over his chest and upper arms, sharp as a knife under his white T-shirt. She reaches out to lay a hand on his arm, not for any reason but to touch him.

Mickey smiles, not at her but into his coffee. “Take it easy, Di,” he says. Then he looks at her sideways out of those green eyes she loves so much, and the long crease in his cheek, like an elongated dimple, folds into a deeper smile. “Everybody's gonna know you can't keep your hands offa me.”

He reaches up and puts his hand at the nape of her neck, under her hair, a gesture that makes her shiver. “It'll be nice when you get your own place,” he says, very quietly.

This is the plan. High school graduation is six months away. Diane now works part-time at Macy's in Brooklyn, but her plan is to get a job at Macy's in Manhattan after graduation. Carol is going to do the same thing and they're going to get their own apartment. And then Mickey can come over any time he wants, any night at all, and there won't need to be any more sneaking around and doing it in cars and stuff.

Diane and Mickey have been having sex for over a year now, since they started going steady at Christmas of her junior year. It should have been Mickey's senior year but he'd dropped out by then, to nobody's surprise, and was working at his uncle's garage. That made him seem older, more serious, than guys who were still in high school.

After the first time, Mickey always used a safe. He knew how to get them and he told her not to worry. Diane knows from Carol, who has done it with two different guys, that not all guys are willing to take the responsibility, to make it their business. It's one more reason to love Mickey, as if she didn't have enough, like his beautiful body or his incredible eyes or the way he kisses or the dark, lonely anger that sometimes drops down on him out of nowhere like a blanket.

“Anyway, first I gotta get out of my folks' place,” she says. “It's even worse now we're in the new place. We're tripping over each other all the time, and I never thought Ma could be in a worse mood than she usually is, but it turns out, yeah, she can.”

Mickey shrugs. “It's not such a bad place. Close to me.”

It's true, the apartment over the radio repair shop is only two blocks from the garage where Mickey works and, sometimes, sleeps. Diane senses that he likes her living there better than living in the apartment building where she grew up, perhaps for some of the same reasons her mother hated the move. It seems to have moved them down a notch in society; living in four rooms over a store someone else owns is a step down from living in four rooms in a rent-controlled building.
Down
is not a direction Diane's mother Ethel has ever planned to move in life. Neither has Diane herself, for that matter. She sees herself moving up, up, into Manhattan, into the stars, but she doesn't consider that the move over the radio shop really counts. It's her family that's moving, not really Diane herself. She does not feel her fate is tied to theirs.

But talk of families and living arrangements has turned Mickey's thoughts in another direction. “Ma's gotta get out of that place,” he says, as if picking up the thread of a conversation recently dropped. “Dad came home again the other night and beat the shit outta her. Someday I'm gonna get him by himself and he's not gonna know what hit him.”

“Were you there?” Diane says. She puts her hand on his arm again, but it's a different gesture this time, a desire to heal rather than just a desire, and what she feels from him is not heat but a cold deeper than she can imagine, an absolute zero colder even than the chill between her mother and her father.

“'Course I wasn't there! He never woulda done it if I'd been there. He's scared of me, and so he should be. No, I came in Sunday morning and saw her with the black eye and the fat lip. Like most every Sunday morning of my life. The only difference now is I'm not there on Saturday night when he comes home.”

“Good thing you're not,” she says, remembering Mickey's other stories, never told but only hinted at, Saturday nights when Gerry Malone would finish with his wife and start in on the kids. Mickey has scars: she's seen them, traced them with a fingertip across his back, the backs of his legs. The old man used a belt sometimes.

But Mickey shoots her a look of contempt. “What do you think, I'm still a kid? He couldn't beat me now. I should be there, to stand up for Ma. But I'm no better than Johnny or Frank. Stupid jerks, off with their cars and their girlfriends, never lifting a finger to help Ma. And now I'm just like ‘em.” He stares into his coffee cup, won't meet her eyes.

“That's not true, Mickey. You do lots for your mother. She counts on you, you know it.” Diane's hand makes little soothing circles on his arm, but he shakes her off.

“Yeah, do everything but what I should do: hang around and wait for Dad some night when he's coming home from O'Donnell's and strangle him with my bare hands.”

Diane searches for words. She knows words are no good, that anything she says will make Mickey angry. She's glad when Mickey says, “Come on, let's get outta here.”

In the alleyway next to the candy store he takes her hand like he's leading her into some fancy Manhattan hotel room. Draws her in behind him, slips his arms around her waist. She links her own arms around his neck and pulls him as close to her as she can get, opening her mouth to his, warm and generous. Their bodies are so close she can feel the tensed-up muscles in his chest and stomach, feel him slowly relax in the heat of their kiss. She feels his hands on her back and gives herself up to her own inner rush of pleasure, and also to that other pleasure, of knowing that she can heal him, can make him forget, can, for a moment, kiss and make it better.

ROSE
 
BROOKLYN, JANUARY 1950

R
OSE KNOWS THAT HER
brother Jim works at Taylor's Radio Repair at Flatbush and Beverley. She passes the store now and then and stands in front of the window, looking at the crowded display of radios and phonographs, the signs advertising the brand-new 45 RPM records, the huge console television with its $400 price tag. She wonders if anyone will ever buy it. One day she goes past and it's gone.
So, there are still rich people in the world,
Rose says to herself.

She never goes inside. Watches her favourite brother, the handsome one, the carefree laughing one, grow old and grey and grim.
That hard little bitch Ethel,
Rose thinks,
she ain't givin' him much of a life.

She is sure Jim would not know her: she doesn't know herself, most days. She, too, is greying, her hair spidery and frizzled under an old cloth hat. There was a time, Rose dimly recalls, when she cared about having the newest, the most fashionable of everything.

She leaves her boarding house early this chilly morning; it's a crowded tenement in Fort Greene where Rose sleeps on a mattress on the floor in a room no bigger than a closet, with a blanket across the door. The landlady, who is used to seeing the least of these washing up on her doorstep like driftwood, is getting nasty about the rent. Rose walks down Flatbush Avenue towards O'Donnell's Saloon where today, and for the past several days in fact, she has a job. Sometimes she doesn't. She has gone to charities and street missions for something to eat, a place to sleep. She doesn't remember pride. Like the polished cabinet of the TV set, pride has an impossible price tag.

There are many things Rose doesn't remember, and a few she recalls with startling clarity. She remembers Claire, the small solid weight in her arms. The brown eyes. Sometimes, for hours at a time, she doesn't remember what happened to Claire, and goes about with a vague sense that she's misplaced something. Then she recalls: Home. Claire is safe at home.

Paddy O'Donnell is already at work, washing up glasses, wiping down the bar. “Good day, Rosie,” he calls. Rose has worked for him before: he has a soft spot and they have a flexible arrangement which suits them both. He pours a drink for her and she picks it up when she comes back from the cupboard with her mop and bucket. She drinks it leaning against the counter like a customer, like a man, and feels that sense of pieces fitting together, of all-wellness that only the first drink of the day can produce. When she's done, she goes out back to fill the bucket.

She mops the dust and boot-marks and beer-spills on the floor, while O'Donnell washes glasses and brings up the beer from the cellar, and sings things like “My Wild Irish Rose” and “The Rose of Tralee” to see if he can get a rise out of her.

“Can ya stick a wild Irish sock in yer wild Irish gob?” she calls out after the third rendition of his favourite tune.

“Not in a fine mood this fine morning, are we, Rosie? Do you know what your problem is?”

This is such a huge question Rose is glad he allows a moment's silence for her to consider. She wrings out the mop, then gets down on her knees to scrub at a stubborn spot.

“My problem,” she says when she gets to her feet. “Yeah, I know what my problem is. My problem is, I was born ten years too early. I was too old for the war.”

“I thought it was only fellows who said they were too old to go overseas.”

“Not to go overseas, you old fool. To stay right here. I had a great time during the war. Rosie the Riveter. Remember her? Well, that was me. Rosie the Riveter.”

“Yeah? You worked at the Navy Yard?” O'Donnell sounds mildly interested. Surely he's heard this before.

“You betcher life I did. Great work, great pay, great bunch of gals. Those were my best years, Paddy, the best years of my life.” Rose goes to the back door to throw out the dirty water and refills her bucket. “Sure, I had some rough times before the war.” The Depression – well, both depressions really, her own and the country's, having and losing Claire. Her time in the hospital, that strange shadow-world of doctors and pills and the shock treatments that made her feel crazier than she did before. “But when 1941 rolled around and I got a job in the Navy Yards, that was a great time.”