By the Rivers of Brooklyn (9 page)

ROSE
 
BROOKLYN, SEPTEMBER 1928

A
RICH MAN
, R
OSE
thinks.
That's what I need next.

She spins in Tony's arms, the dance floor a blur of light and colour. Music saturates the air. The band is good; she lets herself drown in the mellow sound of horns and in Tony's brown eyes, fixed on her like she imagines sailors might gaze at a lighthouse as their ship runs toward the rocks. He is a beautiful dancer. Her steps match his perfectly, as neatly as if they were really in love, really made for each other.

She is sure now that Tony thinks he loves her. They have been going out nearly a year and a half, a long time for Rose to be with one man. Now autumn is coming again. She heard a song once that said that in spring a young man turns to thoughts of love. But her mother always said that back home, out around the bay where she came from, people got married in fall, when the hard work of summer was over, before long dark winter nights closed in. Maybe it's the same way in Sicily. Soon leaves will drop from the trees in Prospect Park, and Tony Martelli's thoughts are turning to love.

They are dancing at the Plaza Ballroom to “I'll Get By.” The words weave in and out of the music, in and out of Rose's thoughts as she dances in Tony's arms.

I'll get by as long as I have you…
Though I may be far away, it's true
Say, what care I dear,
I'll get by as long as I have you

A rich man
. Rose steers her thoughts back into line. The song ends; another song starts.

“That's a lovely dress,” Tony says.

“Thanks. I bought it at Loehmann's this week,” she says. It's the blue velvet and georgette dress she has been saving for and dreaming of, the one that's a cut above anything else she has ever owned. Only from Loehmann's could a factory girl get a dress like this. She remembers the clear bright moment of finding it, squeezed among the others on the rack, pulling it out and deftly stripping down to her underwear there on the floor, pulling the dress over her head, knowing her heart would be broken if it didn't fit.

But it fit. Rose was so happy that she dressed again and went to the counter with only the briefest of glances up the stairs, to the forbidden hallowed chambers, cool and quiet, where the rich women shopped for bargains and tried them on in private dressing rooms. Usually when she came to Loehmann's, she was eaten up with envy, with the desire to go upstairs, to be among the wealthy, to know what it was like on the other side.

“What are you thinking about?” Tony asks as the song ends and they sit down at a table.

“I'm thinking about being rich. How I'd like to be rich.”

Tony laughs, a big round laugh. “Yeah, me too! Old man Romano, he says to me, ‘You know, Tonio, you ain't gonna get rich pushing my cart down the street, you know.' And I could tell you the same thing, Rose. You ain't gonna get rich working in no boot factory. Specially when it pays less than the five and dime.” He frowns: he disapproves of her quitting her job and going to work in the factory. Rose can't explain why she did it. She knows it doesn't fit his image of her, a girl on the go, on the up-and-up, with ambition and plans.

It doesn't really fit Rose's idea of herself either, and she actually liked the shop better, but she got bored with it. She isn't really a girl on the go. She's the girl who's got to go, a girl who gets restless and itchy and bored and does dumb things like giving up a half-decent job and taking a much worse job for no good reason.

Tony leans across the table and takes her hand. “Rose, my beautiful Rose,” he says. “I love you, Rose. You know what? I've been doin' a lot of thinking. I want to get married. I want to settle down and have beautiful babies with you. I don't care if I ever get rich. Will you marry me, Rose?”

Rose does not stand up, scream or run. She feels something unaccustomed and soft in her chest, because after all this time she has begun to care about Tony, in a way. So she tries to make it easier, which is always a mistake.

“Tony, you don't know what you're saying,” she says. “Your family, your sister…they all want you to marry some nice Italian girl. Not someone like me. We don't have the same…background.”

She sees the darkness cover his eyes and knows she has scored a point. It wasn't just a stab in the dark. She knows this to be true. She can read it off Marcella, his sister, like she is the front page of the
Brooklyn Eagle
.

“Let's not talk about it right now, Tony. We're having fun. Let's just leave it at that.” The band swings into a livelier number. “Come on, dance with me, Tony.” Rose stands up, swaying her hips, holding out her hands. Tony frowns. But she gives him a little smile and he comes toward her, responding to her invitation even as she's pushing him away.

It's America, where every man can be a millionaire. And any girl can be a millionaire if she meets the right man. It happens all the time in the movies, in magazine stories. The poor but pretty young girl wins the rich man's heart, and next thing you know, she's shopping on the top floor of Loehmann's.
I can get there
, Rose figures. All she needs is to meet the guy, and get rid of Tony along the way. It shouldn't be hard.

She keeps Tony dancing till long past midnight, hoping he'll be too tired to propose to her again. He's a lot of fun, and she'd like to keep on dancing and having a good time with Tony till she meets her rich guy. It would be better if she didn't have to come out and say, “Tony, I'm not going to marry you ever, so get lost, okay?”

He doesn't mention it again. When the band finally plays their closing number – “Stardust” – he holds her close and whispers, “I love you,” in her ear, but nothing more. He helps her into her light spring coat and gives her his arm as they walk out onto the street.

As the crowd begins to thin and they wind their way in the general direction of Rose's boarding house, looking for a streetcar, Tony does something he's never done before. He starts to sing. Oh, she's heard him sing along with a band before or hum a snatch of tune while he's busy with something else, but Rose has never heard anything like this, from Tony or anyone else.

The words roll out of him, big strange Italian words she can't understand, huge waves of music much bigger than any tune she's ever heard in a dance hall or a club, great oceans of sound flooding from him. She looks to see if he's gone crazy and he's walking along, still with one arm out for her to hold onto, but the other arm is doing these grand wild gestures that match the song, and his eyes are half-closed – he'll smack into a wall if he doesn't watch out – and she has no idea what he's singing or why.

At first she's afraid people will hear and think he's a nutcase. Then she hopes people will hear, sure they couldn't help but clap or cheer. And for a moment in the middle of the music she sees that there is, after all, something bigger than her own dreams, something more important than finding a rich man to marry, something that might make her a better, truer Rose who could really fall in love with Tony and love him for all her life. She feels this thing coming over her, hovering like a cloud, and she has to bite her tongue to stop from saying,
I love you,
of course I'll marry you.
She fights that feeling off for all she's worth, and finally, sadly, mercifully, the song ends.

ETHEL
 
BROOKLYN, DECEMBER 1928

O
N CHRISTMAS
E
VE
, E
THEL
, Jim, and Harold put up their Christmas tree. It was the first Christmas tree Ethel had had since coming to New York, and she thought she'd cry to see it there in their living room, all done with popcorn strings and sugar cookies. Harold and Jim had come home early from work, dragging the tree and carrying a box with a red and silver tin star in it. Jim stuck his head in the door and told Ethel, who was in a frenzy of scrubbing and cleaning while trying to keep Ralphie out from underfoot, to come outside for a minute.

“I don't want Ralphie to see,” he said. “We got it from the guy selling them on the corner. Me and Harold figured we'd put it up tonight after Ralphie goes to bed.”

Ethel stood on the front step of the apartment building staring at the small evergreen and at Harold, who was holding it up. The tree was not quite as tall as Harold. She didn't know what to say. Having their own tree had never occurred to her. She pictured Ralphie's eyes glowing when he woke in the morning to see it.

“Where are you going to put it till tonight?” she said. “Somebody'll take it for sure if you leave it out there.”

“We'll find some place to stick it,” Harold said. “We got this star to put on top, but we'll need some other stuff to decorate it with.”

“I'll…we've got popcorn. I can make that, and string it, and maybe some cookies,” Ethel said, thinking of all the work she had to do already. They were having Jean and Robert and their youngsters for Christmas dinner, as well as Rose and her young man if they actually showed up. Why hadn't she or Jim thought of a tree? This was Harold, she knew without being told. Only Harold could make such a leap.

Harold brought laughter into the house. He told jokes, ones a lady didn't need to be ashamed to laugh at, and he played with Ralphie by the hour. Jim was good with Ralphie too of course. Both men liked to come home in the evenings and wrestle on the floor with Ralphie, tickle and chase him and play-fight. It sounded so lively and fun with the three of them out there in the living room while Ethel cooked supper, all those male voices, all that energy. And Harold was so kind and thoughtful too. The way Bert used to be. He would carry his own dishes in from the table to the kitchen, and sometimes even pick up a towel to dry for her while she was washing.

And while he dried the odd dish or stood in the kitchen, he talked to her. That was it, really. He talked to her. Jim would come home at the end of the day and give her a kiss on the cheek and say, “How was your day?” but she knew that if she said anything more than, “Fine, dear,” he would stop listening. He wanted peace and quiet at the end of a long day; he might play with Ralphie but he didn't want to be badgered with questions or news.

Harold, now, he would come into the kitchen after supper when she was washing up, and say, “You'll never guess what we saw coming home from work on the subway today, Ethel. You'd have laughed if you'd been there. There was a woman, dark-skinned, kind of a foreign-looking woman, and do you know what she had? She had a dog in her purse! In her purse! I said to Jim, didn't I, Jim, ‘My, I wish Ralphie was here, he'd get some laugh at seeing that.' Imagine, a dog so small it could fit in her purse. You ever see a dog that small, Ethel?”

And Ethel would say, “No, I never did. I saw a woman walking a dog the other day with a sweater on, though. Can you imagine the like, knitting a sweater for a dog? I wonder where you'd even get the pattern.” And Harold would laugh, and they'd share that moment, laughing at New York people and their foolish dogs and their strange ways.

It wasn't much, perhaps, but Harold made a great difference to the house. He'd been sleeping on their couch now for five months, and two or three times he'd made some noise about finding himself a boarding house, but Jim and Ethel both said, nonsense, they wouldn't hear of it. Of course they would have said the same to any relative. It would be a shame to have a member of the family off living in some boarding house when they had room to spare. But even Jim said that Harold was great to have around. It was like he made the apartment warmer, or brighter or something.

As Ethel finished stringing each long strand of popcorn she handed it to the boys, and they twisted it round and round the little tree. Harold had poked holes in the cookies – they were shaped like stars and Christmas trees – and stuck little bits of thread through them, which he was clumsily tying to make hangers. He and Jim got foolish again while they decorated, and started eating the bits of popcorn that fell off and then tossing them into each other's mouths, standing farther and farther back to see how far they could catch it from. And Ethel, who usually didn't have much patience with shenanigans, laughed right along with them.