By the Rivers of Brooklyn (30 page)

O'Donnell is silent, and she wonders if maybe he lost a son or something. The war, she reminds herself, wasn't so hot for everyone. But Rose Evans had a good war. Working in the factory, feeling like part of a team, the friendship of the other women – it gave her back something she had lost.

But she was over thirty then, ten years older than the girls she worked with. She was too old for the main point of the war: falling in love with a man in uniform. There were thousands of them on the streets of Brooklyn, but they were just boys. Sure, once or twice she had a date, even had the pleasure of showing a young fellow how it was done a few times, young farm boys just up from wherever, never been with a woman before.

During the war, sleeping with a fellow didn't make you a bad girl. It was just doing your patriotic duty for a boy who might not come home. Lots of those patriotic girls did their duty with one sailor after another, and still wound up with husbands after the war. If all those men in uniform, desperate in the face of death and hungry for love, had come rolling Rose's way when she was nineteen or twenty-two, her life might have been entirely different.

“I was too old, by the time the war came along,” she repeats.

O'Donnell doesn't seem to need any more explanation, or perhaps he's lost interest. He's getting his bar ready for the day's customers, washed-up old Irishmen who will come in as soon as the doors open to drink steadily all day, working men who'll come in for a few on the way home when their workday is over. All welcome at O'Donnell's, including the cleaner, Rose Evans.

But then, as she's getting ready to go a couple of hours later, taking one for the road, she says, “I need some cash, Paddy.”

He raises his eyebrows. “I thought we had a deal, Rosie.”

“You know I'm working more than I'm drinking.”

“That's how you see it.” He flicks a suddenly cold eye around the barroom. “I might say the opposite. Get on home now, before opening time.”

“What home, Paddy? I don't have anything you could call a home, and I won't have even that if you don't give me a few dollars to give to the old bat. She's threatening me, Paddy.”

He shrugs. “We got a deal, Rosie. I can't be giving you handouts whenever you run short.”

“How is it a handout if I clean the place for you?”

“Drinks are not on the house, Rosie.”

She sags against the bar, draws idle designs on the countertop with her finger, then meets his eye. He has to know what she's thinking, to spare her the shame of having to say it. Rosie's arrangement with O'Donnell, over the years she's worked sporadically for him, has been flexible. There have been times when he's been willing to provide extra cash in return for additional services. O'Donnell is a widower, and lonely.

But he shakes his head before she can say anything. “No, Rosie, there's nothing you can do for me and I got no extra money. Don't go making a charity case of yourself, I'm not the Salvation Army.” She has a sudden mental picture of the paunchy old Irishman fitted out in an Army uniform, humping and pumping away in his narrow upstairs room to the accompaniment of the band and tambourines. She almost laughs, but then sees what he is saying.
Don't go making
a charity case of yourself.

Rose pushes her empty glass across the bar at him and goes out into the sunshine.

She walks for a long time through the streets of Flatbush. She's cold. She's hungry. She has no desire to go back to her boarding house.

There's a Salvation Army mission downtown, near the Citadel. Rose tries not to go to the Army. When she's cold or hungry or in need of a handout she prefers the Catholics, St. Vincent de Paul or some other crowd with no ties, no memories. She wonders if everyone feels this way when they're down and out. Is the Salvation Army mission crowded with old Catholic bums who don't want to see accusing pictures of the Blessed Virgin and the Sacred Heart staring down at them every time they get a bowl of soup? Mary and Jesus don't bother Rose one bit, but the uniforms, the music, the haunting memories of testimony meetings and services back home – it's like a net, reaching out across the miles and years, something she's afraid will get tangled around her ankles. Yet her long walk today brings her to the door of the Salvation Army mission – because she's tired, and it's the nearest place, and she doesn't have the strength to run away.

Inside, she sits at a long table sparsely populated with a few other abandoned women. The men, far more numerous, eat at another table. The soup is good, and hot. It would be nice if she could have a drink. Now that would be a real mission of mercy. Why doesn't someone start one of those? Missions where they hand out gin and rum for free to washed-up old rummies and whores. Why don't the people who want to save humanity ever give humanity what it actually wants?

Despite her doubts, Rose stays not just for the meal but for the service afterwards. It's so cold outside, and so warm inside. As warm and familiar as being tucked into an old patchwork quilt, the kind your grandmother made out of your own discarded dresses, down by the woodstove in the kitchen on a winter night when you were cold and sick and tired. The meeting hall, shabby with its wooden chairs and peeling paint, is hot with the press of bodies: the bodies of the faithful and the bodies of the lost, distinguished by cleanliness and uniforms.

From the voices around her Rose picks out several Newfoundland accents, some quite strong, as if the speakers or singers have lately arrived on the boat. Of course, the Salvation Army in Brooklyn is full of Newfoundlanders, especially the Citadel. She's heard that before, though she hasn't had opportunity to discover it herself. The lively bespectacled man leading the singing is a Newfoundlander: Sergeant-Major Noah Collins, he's called. He dances up and down across the platform. “The Lord saved every part of me when I got saved,” he says, “except my feet! The Lord never saved my feet!” Rose joins in the answering chorus of laughter: those lively step-dancing feet certainly don't look saved. It's been many years since Rose has been in a room where someone can make a joke like that – in a voice that clearly labels him as someone from Bonavista Bay – and others can understand and laugh. Rose stops fighting the familiarity, relaxes into it.

Feet stamp and hands clap in vigorous rhythm, raising the roof, raising the temperature even more. An old fellow with three days' growth of stubble leans over to her. “I don't know about this crowd,” he says, a hint of Irish mingled with the whisky on his breath. “They keep talkin' about goin' up to glory, but with all this stompin' I think they've got the floor drove down and they're six inches farther from heaven than when they started.”

Rose laughs, under cover of music. It feels good to laugh, good to have this whole old world to wrap herself in and even to laugh at. She is relaxed, she's happy, her stomach is full. When singing turns to preaching, she drifts off to sleep.

She startles awake as the Captain's voice peaks to emphasize a point. He's preaching on the Prodigal Son, and as she dozes again she finds scenes from his sermon mingling with her dreams. She always pictures the far country that the boy went to as being like Brooklyn: busy, crowded, full of strange people. It seems to her now that she herself was a good girl back home and didn't become a bad girl until she came to Brooklyn. Like the prodigal, she met her downfall in the far country.

Captain White describes the father of the prodigal, walking day by day on the road in front of his house, waiting and watching. Rose sees the road looking like Freshwater Road at home, rutted and unpaved, grooved with cart tracks, dusty in summer. The house of the prodigal's father is her parents' yellow clapboard house. At the front gate she sees not a father or a mother but her sister Annie, who must be just home from Holiness Meeting, because she's wearing the uniform, bonnet and all.

“And the father of the prodigal runs toward him,” Captain White says. “Forgetting his age, his dignity, he picks up the skirts of his robe and runs! Runs with open arms toward the boy who has so disappointed him, has hurt him, has squandered his inheritance. Can you see it, brothers and sisters? Can you see the Father running towards you? Nothing can hold him back. If he sees you taking that first step on the road home, he'll be there. Because he's been waiting, waiting all this time. And now he's running to welcome you home.”

Rose is fully awake now. The piano comes in under the Captain's words, and he shifts from speaking to singing as the melody builds.

Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling
Calling, O sinner, come home…

One by one, people around her go up to the mercy seat. If she were really on Freshwater Road, if home, Annie, Claire, peace, forgiveness were just a few steps up the road, what would hold her back? Why wouldn't she step forward, as she does now, and take those few simple steps up the road, and fall on her knees?

One of the women officers kneels beside Rose, offering her a hanky and an arm to tuck around her. “God bless you, sister, God bless you,” she says. Rose feels something physical, something definite, happening to her heart. It feels as if it has been tied up with twine, the kind you use on brown-paper parcels, and now someone is cutting the strands, one by one. She feels them snap free.

The next day, Rose returns to the mission as soon as it opens. Over the days and weeks that follow, the place becomes her new home. She eats there, helps out in the kitchen, worships at the meetings. The officers and the volunteers give her hugs and gentle smiles. She is a success story, one of the saved. The unsaved eye her suspiciously, as if she has let down their side.

One night during a testimony meeting, Sergeant-Major Noah Collins, the lively old fellow with the unsaved feet, tells how, as a young man, he went to the ice on a sealing ship and was stranded out there for three days. Men froze to death on their knees in prayer; the survivors walked around constantly, singing hymns like “Does Jesus Care?” Rose, hearing this testimony a few weeks ago, would have thought it was pretty friggin clear Jesus didn't care, seeing as how over eighty of the men died. She hears it differently now. She imagines Jesus, wrapped in a wool coat stiff with ice, stumbling around the ice beside those men, peeling off his own frozen mitts to put on someone's bare hands. He feels that close, right this minute. Buoyed up by the new joy inside her, Rose gets to her feet.

“Yes, Sister Rose,” says the Captain. “What would you like to share with us, Sister Rose?”

There is something of a formula to testimonies and Rose knows it well. She does not search or scramble for words, but lets familiar phrases carry her into this unknown territory. “My friends, my brother and sisters, I want to thank Jesus for taking away my sins, for rolling all my burdens away.” She feels a wave of energy, something that might come from God, but might also just come from the fact that people are listening, paying attention.

“I led a life of sin before I came to this place,” she continues, mingling the known words with words of her own so that she does not know where memory leaves off and invention begins. “I was a slave to the bottle and a slave to the lusts of men. Yes, I sold both my body and my soul, time again, and what did I get in return for it?” She pauses, feels the power of that moment of silence. Around her she sees people shake their heads, mouthing the word:
Nothing.
“That's right, brothers and sisters, I got nothing in return. Nothing! Nothing but a few hours' pleasure and a bottle of cheap wine! Nothing to fill my soul, nothing to ease my burden, nothing to take my pain away.” As she says the word over, “Nothing…nothing,” and feels its driving force, she hears other words below the surface of her mind, Bible verses and hymns, the sediment of memory laid down when she was too young even to rebel against it. “And when I was weak and heavy laden, when I had need of rest, I came to this place, and do you know what I found here?” The pause again. This time they do not anticipate her answer: some of them shape the word
Jesus,
but she surprises them when she repeats, “Nothing! Yes, my friends, I found nothing…nothing…nothing but the blood of Jesus!”

“Amen! Hallelujah!! Praise the LORD!!” The voices rise around her, hands reach out to clasp hers, she sits down. The pianist, who is quick, strikes up the tune and Rose catches her breath and joins the others, perhaps even leads them.

No other fount I know
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

DIANE
 
BROOKLYN, OCTOBER 1950

“M
OM, YOU GOTTA DO
something. We're not going to just ignore it, pretend it's nothing.”

“I can ignore it if I want to,” Ethel says, pushing her mop over the linoleum with dogged determination. “I hate the way the dust gets in here,” she adds. It's one of her ongoing complaints about the new apartment. Right on the street, it seems to eat up dust and grime from Flatbush Avenue. Ethel wages a constant war against dirt.