By the Rivers of Brooklyn (37 page)

“Rose Evans is my mother's name,” she said. “I'm Claire…Claire Evans.”

She tried to read his face, but all she saw was a broad grin. “Well, Claire, welcome to Brooklyn. You been here a long time? How's your mama? How's she doin' these days?”

“I'm sorry, I really don't know.” Claire laid the bag of peaches on the counter. “She's…I haven't had much contact with her, these last few years. My Aunt Annie, back home, raised me, and now I'm living with my Aunt Ethel and Uncle Jim here in Brooklyn.”

He frowned, searching his memory. “Ethel and Jim. Yeah, I remember them. He worked up on the high steel, didn't he?”

“A long time ago. Not anymore.”

The man laughed again. “Well, it was all a long time ago, wasn't it?”

She wanted to say,
I'm almost twenty-five years old. I was born in 1931. Does
that mean anything to you?
That would be impolite, of course. Not sensible. But she nudged as close as she could. “When did you…I mean, how long ago did you know my mother?”

“Oh, ages ago. When I was young and foolish, right? Back in…oh, back in the twenties, I guess. Prettiest girl I ever went out with. What a dancer.”

“You…you went out with her?”

“Oh yeah, she was my girlfriend. My first big love. We all gotta have one of those, don't we?” Mr. Martelli lowered his eyebrows and looked at her. It was impossible for him not to be thinking what she was thinking, wasn't it? Had he even known Rose Evans had a baby in Brooklyn and sent her home to Newfoundland to be raised? If he knew, surely he must have wondered what became of her.

“You look like her, like Rose, you know. Just like her,” he said. “That's why I asked if you were related.”

“People tell me that a lot,” said Claire.

A plump, dark-haired woman came into the shop from the back door, the door connecting it to the apartment above. There was a door just like it in Uncle Jim's shop. “Angelo!” she called back over her shoulder. “Get out here and give your father a hand unloading these boxes!”

Mr. Martelli pulled the woman next to him, squeezing her against his side. “This is my Gina, my wife,” he said. “Gina, this girl is from Newfoundland. She's Rose Evans' daughter. You remember Rose, dontcha?”

Claire wondered what memories Tony Martelli's wife could have of the woman who was supposed to have been his first great love. Gina looked her up and down, then looked back at Tony. “I don't remember no Rose,” she said.

Through the open storefront three old women entered amid a swarm of small children. Gina's smile grew wide and she moved to serve them. She shooed the children, not out of the shop but upstairs.

“Some of them are mine,” Tony Martelli said. “The rest, who knows? The whole neighbourhood comes in and out. I don't even keep track.” He leaned his elbows on the counter, smiling at Claire, in no hurry to ring in her peaches.

Gina took over the cash, ringing in purchases for the old ladies. She invited them, too, up the stairs. The store was growing loud, noise cascading down the stairs from the kitchen above. Claire could smell something cooking.

It wasn't hard to imagine the scene upstairs. The Martellis' kitchen, though foreign, would also be familiar. If she stood in the middle of that crowded room, it would remind her of Aunt Annie's kitchen and dozens of other kitchens back home, where food was always cooking and being eaten, children played around the stove, old men and women sat to the table, telling stories about the places they came from and how they got here. Noisy, crowded kitchens full of life. Claire supposed that these Italian kitchens and Newfoundland kitchens were only part of a web that stretched world-wide, Brooklyn-wide too: Spanish kitchens and Jewish kitchens and Black kitchens, all full of voices and smells and faces. It was all very picturesque, but what Claire loved was Aunt Ethel's kitchen, small and clean and sparkling with Formica and linoleum and chrome, where no-one ever went except to cook, eat, or clean up after a meal.

Claire felt she had stayed too long, peering into Tony Martelli's shop and apartment and life. She picked up the peaches. “I have to go now,” she said.

“But you'll come again, right? Come again, drop by any time,” he said, waving his hand like a king offering her half his kingdom.

“Maybe. I…I don't live around here. But it was nice meeting…someone who knew my mother.”

Tony Martelli's face looked sad for a moment. “I miss her, sweetheart. She was a great gal. The love of my life.”

Without meaning to, Claire let her eyes flicker to the stairs, half-expecting Gina to come into the room again. Tony followed her glance. “Don't get me wrong,” he said quickly. “My Gina, she's a princess, she's a queen. But your mother, Rose…well, that was love. Me and Gina…this is a marriage. It's two different things. You don't wanna get them mixed up.” He smiled at Claire again. “You take care of yourself, now, you hear? You tell your aunt and uncle Tony Martelli says hi.”

Claire went home that night to the clean quiet of Aunt Ethel's house, where she did not tell her aunt and uncle that Tony Martelli said hi. Instead, she went to the bathroom and looked at her own face in the bathroom mirror. Tony was right; everyone was right: she looked like Rose. Like pictures of Rose, like the Evans family. Fair hair, fair skin. Her brown eyes were the only thing that might seem remotely Italian, hardly enough to link her to Tony Martelli and his dark, lively tribe of children. She was left with that thought, and with the only piece of fatherly advice Tony would ever give her. “That was love. This is a marriage. It's two different things. You don't wanna get them mixed up.”

ANNIE
 
ST. JOHN'S, FEBRUARY 1957

“A
BIDE WITH ME, FAST
falls the eventide, the darkness deepens, Lord with me abide,” Annie sang under her breath as Bill unlocked the door. “Funny thing, isn't it, how Mom always hated that hymn, yet she said she wanted it at her funeral?”

“She hated it because she said it was dreary and put her in mind of funerals,” Bill pointed out. “I s'pose she figured there was a time and place for it.”

“She never liked dreary hymns, though,” Annie said. “She was always more for the lively ones, the ones you could clap your hands to.” Funny, she thought, since she didn't think of her mother as a happy person. But she was a grand one to belt out a hymn.

Harold had flown home for his mother's funeral. He couldn't have made it to be at her deathbed: there was no deathbed. She lay down one night as alive and cranky as ever, woke up calling for Annie at two in the morning, and was dead before Annie got into the bedroom. Her heart, of course. Eighty-five years old. A good long life, though very narrow these last years. And not a bad way to go, everyone said.

Annie had phoned Jim with the news; he said he was sorry he couldn't come. Only Harold and Annie, of her five children, to stand by her graveside. None of her grandchildren. All scattered, all so far away, one dead before her. But the house was full of friends and relatives, church people and neighbours, all reminiscing and catching up.

Harold moved up beside Annie. “Jim would have liked to have been here,” he said.

“It's a shame he couldn't come then.”

“Don't blame him, Annie. Things are harder for him and Ethel than they are for me and Frances. I'm my own boss, you know.”

“You always said any man who had his own business had a slave driver for a boss,” Annie remembered suddenly.

Harold laughed. “That's what I said, and it's true, too. But at least I can give myself a few days' leave to go to my mother's funeral, and scrape up the money to go. Like I said, 'tis not as easy for Jim and them.”

“And all your crowd, how are they doing?” She hadn't had a chance to talk with Harold yet: he arrived this morning, barely in time to get ready and go to the funeral. Bill had picked him up at Torbay airport.

“Oh, not bad, not so bad, you know. The boys are doing well. You know Ken's graduating from university in the spring. Says he's going to be a teacher. Danny, now, he's finishing up high school, but he's not the university type.”

“Will he come work for you?”

“He might, he might for awhile. His real interest is in cars. And poor Valerie, well, she never changes.”

“No signs of her getting married?”

“No, and she don't seem to have any interest even. But she's not career-minded either, except for this writing she keeps on about. She's not like Claire, now, or Jim's Diane. Those are two smart young girls.”

“How is Claire doing in New York?” asked Ethel's sister Ruby, drifting over.

“Oh, she's doing marvellous by all accounts,” said Annie, warming with pride.

“Not married, is she?”

“Not yet, but she's working hard. She's secretary in a lawyer's office.”

“She's smart, that one,” Bill said, moving up to join their small circle. “Could have been a lawyer herself, if she'd been a man.”

“Does she mean to stay there, or come home?” Harold asked.

“Oh, I don't know,” said Annie. “She doesn't say, in her letters. I s'pose sometime she'll meet someone down there and get married, settle down in the States.” Across the room she saw Doug Parsons, his head a little above the sea of women around him. “But she does say she'll come home if I ever needs her, you know.”

Annie looked around at the kitchen and imagined what it would look like when everyone was gone. It had been quiet these last two years, with Claire away. Now, without Mother in her chair knitting away and throwing in the odd comment, it would be quieter still. “I'll hardly know what to do with myself when I'm not looking after someone.”

Ruby laughed. “Well, you still got Bill to look after.”

“Yes, but Bill looks after me too,” Annie said. “I know some husbands are not like that. Need to be waited on hand and foot.” Ruby, a spinster, nodded sagely. “But Bill does for me, and I do for him. Not like looking after children, or old people, where it's all give and no take.”

“So you'll be looking forward to this, then, to having some peace and quiet and the place to yourselves.”

“I've been looking forward to it a long time,” Annie said. It seemed for years now, she had been waiting for the day when she wouldn't have to jump up to make anyone a cup of tea, when she'd have no-one but herself and Bill to think of. It was a sin to think of her mother's death as a relief, but it was, in its way. And yet. She held herself tensed up inside, unable to relax, because of a secret she had been guarding these weeks now – something held inside her that would not allow her to enjoy the long-deserved rest.

Finally they were all gone, except Harold of course. He was flying out tomorrow. He sat at the table with Bill, exchanging family news. They would like to come home for a holiday sometime, him and Frances. Maybe next summer.

Maybe, maybe. Annie sat with her feet up and sipped her tea. Her free hand strayed to her side, just above the line of her bra, her fingers searching. But Bill glanced her way and she let her hand drop. She had said nothing to him, because she could not frame it into words.
I found a lump. There's a lump in my
breast.
She needed another woman to tell it to, but there was no other woman: no sister, no daughter, now, no mother. If it really was – anything bad – she couldn't do it alone. Bill was the kindest man in the world, but he was still a man. She hated to put the thought even into words – hated the words even more than
I have a lump
– but the words she was thinking, and could not keep back, were:
I need you, Claire. Please come home.

PART THREE
 
1974 - 1989

ANNE
 
ST. JOHN'S, APRIL 1974