By the Rivers of Brooklyn Page 2

  Outside, it is dark. Time for Rose to go home.

  ETHEL

  BROOKLYN, APRIL 1925

  “ALL DONE, ETHEL? THAT’S a good girl,” said Mrs. Carey. “Put away the vacuum cleaner, now, and go see Mr. Carey, he’ll have your pay for you.”

  Ethel lovingly wrapped the cord around the vacuum and tucked it away in its closet. Half an hour, maximum, to run that marvellous little machine over the Careys’ rugs, and not much longer to wipe up and sweep the gleaming parquet floors. At home she would have spent the day scrubbing, waxing, beating the rugs. Washday would have been another whole day, but the Careys had a cylinder washing machine. The machines did all the work and Ethel got the pay, crisp American bills in a white envelope, handed over by smiling Mr. Carey. Then it was take off her apron, hang it on the hook in her own tiny, immaculate bedroom, change her shoes and she was free. Saturday afternoon in Brooklyn, and Ethel Moores waited on the street in front of the Careys’ brownstone for Bert Evans to take her walking in Prospect Park.

  She walked down the broad front steps of the brownstone, an imposing and solid-looking house in a row of others just as stately. Four storeys, it was shaded by a row of trees that ran along the street. Bert stood under one of those trees, in his shirtsleeves, smiling up at her. It was a sunny, warm day in April, which in itself was a good enough reason to love being in New York. At home, Annie’s letters told her, they were still locked into winter, barricaded behind snowbanks and sleet storms. And Ethel was strolling down 7th Avenue with only a cardigan on over her dress.

  She took his arm. “You’re off early today,” Bert said. “I’m sorry. I’d’ve been here sooner to meet you if I’d known. But I only just got off myself.”

  “That’s all right.” Ethel didn’t like to talk about Bert’s work, suspended between earth and heaven, riveting the high-steel girders on the skyscrapers of Manhattan. But Bert and Jim laughed and joked about it like there was no danger at all. Once, when he’d taken her to Manhattan, Bert had pointed out the buildings he’d worked on, and for many nights after that Ethel had woken from nightmares, heart racing.

  But it was good work, everyone agreed on that, and better pay than anything going back home. Both the boys used to work on the boats, but then they hooked up with Robert Doyle, who was married to Ethel’s cousin Jean. Robert was from Avondale and a lot of fellows from down that way worked in construction, so Jim and Bert gave that a try and they never looked back. Bert didn’t like boats.

  Ethel didn’t like boats either. She’d been so sick on the Nerissa, coming over, that Rose had lost all patience with her. Not that she cared what Rose thought. She’d never liked Bert’s hard-faced older sister. If only Annie, rather than Rose, had come to New York with her. But Annie said she no more wanted to leave St. John’s than she wanted to parade down Water Street in her underclothes.

  “Jim’s meeting us in the park,” said Bert. “He says he’s going to have a girl with him.”

  Ethel sniffed. “Surprise, surprise. Not Evelyn?”

  “No, I think Evelyn gave him the boot. This is a new one, I don’t know her name. He met her at a dance last week.”

  Thinking about Jim, Ethel reflected that the Evans boys were different from most brothers she knew. In most families, the eldest son was serious and responsible, while the younger one was a bit wild and played the fool. She had known the Evans brothers all her life and while they were both good for a laugh, it was Bert, the younger, who was careful and steady, never spending too much or doing anything he might regret the next day. Bert was a smart young fellow, her mother had always said. He’d go far.

  They crossed the busy streets at Grand Army Plaza. The huge arch with its metal soldiers and sailors lofted ominously in the sky above them. People flowed down Flatbush Avenue, a living river so thick and fast it made Ethel grip Bert’s arm a little tighter. Then Prospect Park opened before them, a lush green space amid the crowded streets of Brooklyn, the ideal spot for lovers to stroll arm in arm. On Didder Hill, where Newfoundlanders gathered, they saw Jim walking towards them, jacket thrown over his shoulder, a very small red-haired girl on his arm.

  “Bert, Ethel, this is Dorothy. Dorothy, I’d like you to meet my brother Bert and his girl, Ethel. They’re from home, from Newfoundland.”

  Even before Jim spoke the words, Ethel knew Dorothy was not a Newfoundlander. When she opened her mouth to say, “Pleased to meetcha,” Ethel could tell she was a New Yorker, a Brooklyn girl. Ethel wasn’t sure how to react, how to talk to her. They were used to the ever-changing parade of Jim’s girls, but they were always girls from home – Evelyn from St. John’s or Liza from Bonavista or Marina from Grand Bank. Girls who had been in New York six months or a year or three years, more stylish and made-up and loud-voiced the longer they had been here, but always Newfoundlanders, like all their friends, like everyone they danced with and went to movies with and ate Sunday dinner with.

  “Me and Dorothy are going to the show tonight,” said Jim. “You guys coming?”

  Bert looked at Ethel; she paused and then nodded. “We’d love to,” said Bert. Ethel had grown up believing that dances and movies and theatres were all sinful, places to be avoided. But here in New York even good churchgoing people seemed to do those things, and nobody talked about sin or going to hell at all. Uneasy at first, Ethel had adjusted. But Bert was so good. He always asked her first, always checked to see if it was all right with her.

  Ethel and Bert fell into step behind Dorothy and Jim as they walked along. Dorothy did most of the talking: she worked in a factory making artificial flowers. “It’s not bad pay,” she said, “the work is awful boring but I don’t mind that ‘cause I don’t have to pay any attention to it. I can carry on and have a few laughs with the other girls, you know?” She seemed so confident, so sure of herself and her place in the world. Her dress was sharper and more stylish than Ethel’s, even though she made less money – she had freely broadcast how much she was paid at the flower factory, which amazed Ethel, who thought talking about your pay almost akin to talking about your underwear.

  “Oh, I had a letter from Mother,” said Bert when there was a break in the monologue. He handed it to Ethel. “She says she’s knitting you a sweater. She don’t know you’ll have little use for a sweater in Brooklyn in summertime.”

  Ethel laughed as she unfolded Mrs. Evans’ letter. Bert had told her how hot it was in July and August but she couldn’t imagine it properly. She and Rose had arrived in October and before long a New York winter had been upon them. Jim and Bert had gone home over Christmas when construction work slowed down a little. Ethel had stayed in her little room at the Careys’, spent Christmas Day at her cousin Jean’s apartment in South Brooklyn, and longed for home.

  But now, with spring, she felt no urge to go home. Brooklyn was coming alive around her and she wanted to be there when the streets grew so hot that, Bert joked, you could not only fry an egg on the pavement but a couple of strips of bacon to go with it.

  “Mother says thanks for the handbag and shoes, and Annie likes her new hat. I told her you picked them out,” he added. Bert sent frequent gifts along with the money he mailed home out of every week’s pay. Ethel did the same with her pay, sending money to her widowed mother and her younger sister Ruby. Beyond that, both Bert and Ethel put a bit aside for the day when they would be able to get married. They had only a little left over for going to the movies and eating out on Saturdays.

  When they left the park they ate at a cafeteria on Flatbush. Ethel had never had dinner in a restaurant in her life before she came to New York, and now they ate sandwiches and drank egg creams at restaurants every Saturday. Then they went to see The Thief of Bagdad at the Paramount.

  “Oh I love Douglas Fairbanks,” Dorothy said as they spilled out of the theatre into the street. “Isn’t he gorgeous, Ethel? Do they have fellows that good-looking back in NewFOUNDland?”

  Ethel giggled, feeling lighter and sillier than usual under the influence of the movie. “Yo
u knows what kind of fellas we got in Newfoundland; sure, you can see them all over the streets in Brooklyn. See these two here now, you won’t find anything in New York finer than the Evans boys.”

  “I thought you liked Valentino,” Jim said to Dorothy. “I always figured I was more the Valentino type, anyway.” He whisked Dorothy into his arms, humming a tune they’d just heard in the theatre. The two of them danced in the streets, singing, whirling, moving into the streetlights’ glow like spotlights, while Bert and Ethel laughed at them, told them to be quiet, to stop that foolishness now.

  The two couples said goodbye at the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenue, Jim to walk Dorothy back to her boarding house and Bert to walk Ethel back to the Careys’. “I’ll come by for you tomorrow at ten,” he said as they came within sight of the house.

  “I’ll be waiting,” said Ethel. Bert was good about taking her to church every Sunday. They didn’t know any Army people here in Brooklyn so they went to the Congregational church nearest to where Ethel lived. Jim sometimes came and sometimes didn’t, depending on which girl he was walking out with. “I don’t suppose Jim will be bringing Dorothy to church,” she guessed.

  Bert laughed. “Not hardly. She’s Catholic, I’m pretty sure.”

  “Your mother would kill him if she knew,” Ethel said.

  Bert didn’t seem interested in talking about Jim’s new girl. He took Ethel in his arms, clinching her waist more tightly than usual. “Kiss me, Ethel,” he said, and kissed her hard before she had a chance to say anything. “You knows I loves you, Ethel, only you don’t know how much.” Ethel wondered if watching Douglas Fairbanks had gone to his head.

  Spring unfolded into summer that way, weeks of work punctuated by half-days off and dates with Bert and Sundays in church. July and August were every bit as hot as Bert had warned her they would be. Ethel sat in her cousin Jean’s kitchen one evening while Jean cooked a feed of roast beef, potatoes, carrots and cabbage on the coal stove in one-hundred-degree heat. Jean interspersed her cooking with complaints: “Ethel, when you goes to have a baby, make sure it’s not going to be born in September, because if it is you’ll go through the whole of July and August so big as the side of a barn, sizzling to death in the heat. I’m roasted alive, that’s what I am.”

  Jean’s baby was due in September. Ethel put a hand self-consciously on her own flat stomach as Jean kept talking. “Never mind, maid, you’ll have all that to worry about soon enough, once you gets married. I knows your mother’s happy you and Bert finally set a date; she always liked Bert, didn’t she? A Christmas wedding would be some nice. If you waited till spring I think that’d be too long.”

  “Yes,” said Ethel, who couldn’t have agreed more. “Sometimes I don’t know if I can even wait till Christmas,” she admitted in an unaccustomed burst of honesty. “It might even be sooner.”

  Jean frowned at the suggestion of eagerness and abruptly changed her tune. “You don’t want to rush into it now; you’ve got all your life to be married and believe me, maid, ’tis not all a bed of roses. There’s no hurry.”

  There was a knock on the door. Ethel moved across the kitchen to open it and felt suddenly that she was moving through water, slowed down, and everything around her became quite vivid and clear on the oddly long walk across the room: Jean’s wooden countertop, the black-and-white tile above it, her own reflection in a glass cupboard door. She didn’t realize till afterwards that it was a premonition: at the time she thought she was having another dizzy spell. Her hand closed on the brass knob of the door and she pulled it open. Jean’s husband Robert stood there, two hours before he should have been home, with Jim beside him.

  Before anyone spoke, Ethel knew everything, the whole story, and then she actually did have a dizzy spell. The kitchen tilted and turned, the linoleum lifted sharply as if she were on the deck of a ship, and Ethel fell into a pile on the floor.

  “I knew it, I knew it,” she sobbed half an hour later, sitting on the settee in the back room with Jean dabbing cold water on her face. All four of them were crying, the men as much as the women.

  Jim repeated over and over, “He was just over from me. Just a few feet away. I could have reached out and caught him. I tried – I’m sure I tried – but when I grabbed for him there was only thin air.”

  “He was a good ironworker,” Robert chanted, dazed. “The best. The best. How could he slip? How could he fall?”

  “I knew it, I hated for him to go up there. I knew something would happen,” Ethel keened.

  Jean went to the store to ring Mrs. Carey and tell her Ethel wouldn’t be back that night. Ethel slept on Jean and Robert’s daybed – or rather, she didn’t sleep. She played the silent movie over and over in her head: Bert standing, turning, losing balance, falling, falling through the blue air to the streets of Manhattan. Over and over, twisting in the sky.

  The night crawled on. Ethel felt so many layers of loss she could not grasp it all. Loss of Bert himself, of course: he was no longer in the world, his voice silent, his face gone forever. She would ask his mother to send some more photographs. Or would she go back home, herself? That was the second loss: loss of her own future, of any certainty about what she would do. And the third loss: unspoken and unspeakable. She laid a hand again on her stomach, cradled it.

  They got word to Rose in Bensonhurst and she came down the next day. She looked hard, Ethel thought, tough, like a real New York girl. Rose cried, though, for her brother Bert, next in age to her, her childhood playmate. Ethel wondered how much Rose really felt. First thing in the morning they sent a cable to the folks back home with the news, then Jean sat down to write a long letter that would follow the cable.

  Jim returned from sending the telegram, red-eyed and quiet. Ethel took his hand in sisterly sympathy and that was when the first germ of a plan, an idea, began to form in her head.

  She shook her head as if to clear it away. It was wrong – beyond wrong. It was evil. She had heard that word all her life and never really seen anything so bad it would qualify as evil, but if she did the thing she had just thought of, she, Ethel Moores, would be an evil woman. She could never do such a thing.

  Bert’s funeral was on Friday. The small chapel was full of Newfoundlanders: Bert’s co-workers and their wives and girlfriends, the other men from his boarding house, his landlady, old friends and shirttail relatives from home. Everyone cried and hugged Ethel. “Poor young fellow – he was such a good boy – what a shame. What a waste. What a terrible, terrible thing.”

  After the funeral, everyone drifted back to Jean and Robert’s house. There were cakes and hams that people brought with them, and endless cups of tea, and bottles of beer and rum for all but the strict teetotallers. For all people talked about Prohibition it didn’t seem to mean much at times like these. People always knew where to get bootleg liquor – especially Newfoundlanders, who had connections on the boats that came from St. Pierre.

  Ethel and Jim and Rose sat at Jean’s kitchen table, the centre of the storm of grief, accepting drinks and condolences, talking about Bert. Someone poured a glass of whisky and put it in front of Ethel and she sipped it as well as she could: it was the first drink of her life.

  “I remember when he was just a little fellow, couldn’t have been more than four or five, he wasn’t in school yet,” Jim was saying, “and he wanted to build a fort. Well, my son, he was some determined. The two of us hauled wood down from the woods up behind our house, and he got the nails and hammer from Pop’s shed, and he kept me at it all day, poor little fella. And finally Pop came home and saw what we were tryin’ to do, and he knelt right down there and started in helping. I went off then, and Pop and Bert stayed there till they had some kind of a fort finished.”

  “I wonder how Pop’s taking it?” Rose said. She refilled her glass and lit a cigarette, ignoring Jean’s look of disgust. “They’ll be broke up at home.”

  “Pop will be for sure. Bert was always his favourite,” said Jim, without apparent bitterness. />
  People drifted away. Jean and Robert went to bed. Only Ethel and Jim were left alone at the table. Jim was still drinking steadily, crying and telling stories, and Ethel listened, her hand on his arm.

  She went to bed that night, still trying to take it all in, to imagine her life without Bert. And again that same idea kept circling, evil though it was. A way out. A chance to escape the consequences of what she and Bert had done.

  Ethel stayed a week at Jean’s, and every night Jim came by. Every night they sat together after Jean and Robert and the children were in bed, and talked about Bert. Late one night she leaned across the table towards Jim and said, “He was the sweetest man in the world, Jim, I loved him so much.” She felt like an actress even though every word was the truth. “Now I’m all alone in the world, and I don’t know what to do. I swear to God I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m all alone in the world….”

  Jim moved to put his arm around her; she moved closer; they both cried. Then she turned her face up to his to say, “What are we going to do without him, Jim?” and he kissed her, as she’d known he would. And then he said, “Sorry, sorry girl, I never should have done that,” and she said, “No, it’s all right, Jim, only I’m so sad, and I feel so all alone…,” and he took her in his arms again. And then she said she should go to bed, on the daybed there in the kitchen, and she began to unbutton her blouse, and after that it was all very easy.

  When Jim left to go back to his boarding house that night, Ethel lay awake. She wondered if she would ever sleep again. Already Bert himself, the life and the plans they had shared, seemed a long way off. She got up, made a cup of tea and sat at the kitchen table drinking it, thinking that she had just committed the first real big sin of her life.

  Going with Bert those few times, in the bushes in the park on those hot July nights – that hadn’t been a real sin, not the way they loved each other and with them being engaged and all. And even what happened tonight, she thought, might not have been a real sin – turning for comfort to his brother, overwhelmed with grief, coming together for a brief moment of love in the face of death, sharing their sorrow. If it had really happened that way.