By the Rivers of Brooklyn

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  Aunt Annie had supper in the oven and tea buns on the table. She stood at the table chopping an onion for gravy, barely even looking up as she said, “Come in, girls, come in. Some cold outside, isn’t it? The radio said it was supposed to be mild today but I don’t call this mild. Do either of you want a cup of cocoa? Claire, will you get the kettle?” Aunt Annie’s words and fingers moved quickly and efficiently. She was a small woman, about the age of Val’s mother but with no children of her own. Her light-brown hair was sausage-rolled and neatly pinned; she wore a red-and-white checked dress with a yellow apron and seemed to match her kitchen.

  “Come on, let’s go up in your room,” Valerie said, taking her cocoa and a tea bun. Claire followed her cousin up to her own small room at the end of the upstairs hall, underneath the slope of the roof so it was more like three-quarters of a room than a whole room. She understood Valerie’s need to get away from her younger brothers, but Claire was in no hurry to leave the warmth of the kitchen for the chilly upstairs room with the iron bedstead, the heavy dark-brown dresser, the green-fern wallpaper. Nor was she eager to get back to the project she knew Valerie would haul out again as soon as they were settled comfortably upstairs with the quilt tucked over their legs.

  “I’ve got to get at my geography,” Claire said. It was only lately she’d had the room to herself, since Valerie’s family had built their own house and moved out. For years she had shared with Valerie, and Val sometimes acted as if the room were still half hers. Claire enjoyed the luxury of having a room of her own. Since Pop Evans died, Aunt Annie slept in the back bedroom with Grandmother. The front bedroom had been rented, after Valerie’s parents moved out, to a Canadian Air Force officer and his wife, who mostly kept to themselves. Even a tiny room like Claire’s, with the ceiling sloping down to make a little cave over the bed, was precious space.

  “Let’s work on the story first,” Valerie suggested, trying to sound as if this had just popped into her head. Valerie possessed all the creative flights of fancy needed to finish the story, but because it was really Claire’s story, she couldn’t honourably go on ahead with it alone, which left Claire with the upper hand.

  Only,Claire reflected as Valerie began digging through the papers in Claire’s bedside drawer, having the upper hand with Valerie was really useless. Claire knew herself to be more strong-willed than Valerie, more forceful, and smarter too, in every subject except English literature. But she could not stand up to Valerie and never had been able to. She didn’t fully understand why. At school she was clearly the stronger of the two, a leader in their group of girls, but at home she felt younger, weaker, less powerful. It had something to do with Valerie having parents and Claire having none.

  “Now, where did we leave off?” Valerie said, thumbing through pages of the exercise book.

  “I don’t remember,” Claire lied.

  She remembered every detail of the story, despite trying to act bored every time Valerie mentioned it. At night sometimes she lay awake and scenes from the story played over in her head. Beautiful Rose and the handsome young pilot – Valerie had made him an RAF pilot after first toying with several other branches of the forces – kissing goodbye on the wharf after their secret wedding. In Claire’s mind the pilot looked just like Ralph, who in spite of being her cousin was the handsomest boy she knew, with his light wavy hair and clear blue eyes and the little cleft in his chin. The last scene Valerie had written involved Rose leaving the doctor’s office, elated at the news that she was having a baby.

  “But little did she know,” Val said aloud, her pencil scratching steadily at the lined scribbler pages, “what fate held in store. At home on the floor beneath her front door, next to the mail slot…No, that’s no good, it sounds too fussy. How should I explain about the telegram, Claire? Because the telegram is already there when she gets home from the doctor, see?” She glanced up at Claire, as if remembering that she was supposed to consult her cousin in this fanciful reconstruction of Claire’s own personal history.

  “I don’t know,” Claire said. Drawn into it despite herself, she added, “I suppose you could say–”

  “Oh, oh, this is good!” Valerie interrupted, and her pencil began to fly across the ruled lines. Claire watched in amazement; she had never understood how Valerie could write so fast when she was spinning pure moonshine, all out of her own head. “On her way down Merrymeeting Road she passed a telegram delivery boy on his bicycle. As she waved a cheery hello she didn’t guess – she little guessed – that just a few moments before he had delivered to her house – her door – a telegram that would change her life forever.” Valerie read out what she’d written, paused, and started again. “And shatter forever the beautiful castle of dreams she and Paul had built.”

  “I still don’t like the name Paul,” Claire said.

  “But it suits him! He’s a Paul, can’t you see it, Claire?”

  Claire shrugged. She tugged the quilt up over her knees. It was one of Grandmother’s crazy quilts, no pattern or design, just strips and bits and scraps of old clothes that couldn’t be mended or let out or handed down any more. She traced a square of the blue dress she wore in Grade Five, and next to it a triangle of Valerie’s old purple plaid skirt. An arrow of brilliant green shot down above the two: a dress Aunt Ethel had sent home from New York for Aunt Annie. Aunt Annie hadn’t liked it and had worn it only a few times, so the green silk was brighter and less worn than the patches of fabric around it.

  “You’re always criticizing,” said Valerie, mildly. She didn’t really mind Claire’s criticism: she was so supremely confident in her story that she didn’t need anyone else’s approval.

  “It’s just that so much of it is wrong! ” Claire burst out. She cut off Valerie’s usual protest. “No, I know it’s just a story and it can’t be wrong, but it is! Things didn’t happen that way. We know they couldn’t have! Rose wasn’t even living here in St. John’s when I was born. She was living in Brooklyn. And my father couldn’t have been an RAF pilot because the war hadn’t even started then!” It seemed to both of them that the war had been going on forever. Claire couldn’t remember what sort of headlines had been on the newspapers before there was war news, or what it had been like when there were no Americans in uniform on the streets of St. John’s, but she knew the facts: the war had started in 1939, when she and Valerie were both seven years old.

  “But it’s a story,” Valerie began again, and her eyes filled quickly with tears. Watery, light-blue eyes, edged with unromantic short lashes – not the kind of eyes Valerie wanted at all. Val wanted to be pretty and wasn’t: the pale eyes and the dull-brown, hard-to-manage hair spoiled it for her. She should have had Claire’s shining blond hair, which didn’t match at all with Claire’s dark brown eyes and strong dark eyebrows.

  Downstairs, a door slammed and one of the little boys shouted. Claire jumped off the bed. “Ralph’s home,” she said. “Let’s go down in the kitchen. We could get some more cocoa and find out what he’s been up to. Or do you want me to bring some up for you?” she added, seeing that Valerie looked unwilling to move.

  “Yes…no, wait, I’ll come down,” Valerie said, uncurling herself from under the quilt.

  They spent the rest of the afternoon down in the kitchen, drafted into helping with supper, listening to Ralph talk about working down on the base. He had left school after Grade Nine and got a job as a janitor working for the Americans at Fort Pepperrell. Ralph would turn eighteen in two months and was counting the minutes till he could join up. Claire saw that Aunt Annie turned her face away whenever she heard Ralph talk about the war or signing up. She was praying, Claire guessed, that the war would be over before Ralph got a chance to go. And Ralph was praying just the opposite – although, could he? Could anyone really pray that the war would go on and on, and thousands of people go on dying? Maybe Ralph wasn’t praying exactly that. Claire went back to peeling potatoes, watching with satisfaction the long smooth spirals of peel curling into the sink.

&nbs
p; Ralph was putting on an American accent now, imitating one of the fellows down on the base, boys just a few months older than himself but who, with their crisp uniforms and ready cash, seemed to come from another world. Janet Cross, the girl Ralph had liked in school, was going with an American soldier now. But it hadn’t made Ralph hate the Americans: if anything he admired them and copied them more than ever.

  Claire remembered an evening back in the fall, when it was still mild enough to be outside at night, sitting on the front step and watching a pair of soldiers with their girls going in Freshwater Road.

  “We could have been like them,” Claire had said to Ralph then.

  “Like who?”

  “The Americans. We were both born in America, in Brooklyn.” Valerie had been born there too, but now that Uncle Harold and Aunt Frances had moved their whole family back to St. John’s they seemed to belong here, a complete unit. Claire felt her American roots as a bond shared with Ralph more than with Valerie: she and Ralph both had parents, and a possible unlived life, back in that far-off land. “If our parents had left us there, we would have grown up Americans.”

  “There’s no point thinking about that,” was all he’d said. “No point in all that, at all.” He talked and looked like a Newfoundlander, just like she did, but as a U.S. citizen he was eligible to join the American army when he reached eighteen. Claire couldn’t understand why he wasn’t interested in reflecting on what might have been, if their parents had kept them in New York.

  Today, of course, as Ralph handed the little boys the sticks of gum he’d gotten from the servicemen, she would not, could not, say anything like that. Nothing about the past could be mentioned in front of Aunt Annie or her grandmother. All Annie had ever told Claire was that her mother’s name was Rose, that she had lived in New York when Claire was born, that Rose couldn’t handle a baby on her own so she sent Claire home. “And we are your family,” Aunt Annie had concluded this brief, awkward talk, “and you’re a very lucky little girl.”

  The door blew open again, whirling in wind and slush and Aunt Frances, Valerie’s mother, coming to collect her children. With very little effort Aunt Annie persuaded her to stay for supper. Aunt Frances worked in the office at Ayre and Sons downtown; lots of women had jobs like that now that so many men were overseas. Uncle Harold wasn’t overseas; he worked repairing radios, but Aunt Frances said that with three children every extra penny was a help. She gave Aunt Annie money for looking after Danny all day and Kenny and Valerie after school. Many times, like tonight, the whole family ended up eating supper in Aunt Annie’s kitchen.

  After supper, when everyone had gone home, Claire laid out her homework on the kitchen table, writing her civics essay in the small circle of yellow light cast by the bare bulb that hung over the red and yellow tablecloth. Grandmother and Aunt Annie knitted in their chairs, one on either side of the stove, and Ralph looked at a comic book. It was quiet and companionable: Aunt Annie turned on the radio at seven-thirty, but that didn’t bother Claire because she was used to tuning it out. At nine, Grandmother went upstairs to bed, helped by Aunt Annie, and Ralph took advantage of their absence to say he was going out for a little while and would be back in an hour or so. Claire watched him go, envying his ticket to the world of boys who came and went as they pleased, who stood around on street corners and smoked and looked forward to being old enough to go overseas.

  She was back into her essay, just finishing it up, when Aunt Annie came downstairs. Instead of going back to her usual chair Aunt Annie sat at the table across from Claire and said, “Claire, I want to talk to you.”

  Claire looked up, mildly curious, until she saw Aunt Annie was holding a blue Caribou scribbler. Claire felt sick; her stomach turned and the skin on the upper part of her cheeks got cold and prickly.

  “I found this on your bed.” Aunt Annie pushed it across the table to her, the scribbler open to the last pages of Val’s story.

  “That’s private! What were you doing in my room?”

  “I went in to turn down your bed and put a hot-water bottle in it for you,” said Aunt Annie, an answer that completely deflated Claire. “I found this, and I picked it up thinking you might need it for your schoolwork. I opened it to see what it was before I brought it down to you. And then I read…this.”

  Claire said nothing, looking at the pencilled words blurring on the page.

  “This…foolishness.” It was Aunt Annie’s strongest epithet, the word from which there was no appeal.

  “Valerie wrote that, not me.”

  “I know Valerie wrote it. But it was in your bedroom. You had some say in it. You two girls have been cooking up these stories, these…these foolish tales. And the truth is–”

  “Yes?” Claire said, catching an indrawn breath.

  “The truth is nothing like this.” The word “truth” lay on the table between them like something that almost happened, like the last baby Aunt Frances had: born dead. Aunt Annie snapped the scribbler shut and took it over to the stove, lifting a cover off the stovetop. “I’ve got a good mind to burn this, Claire, because there’s no place in this house, no place in your life, for this kind of foolishness. For making up stories about…about the way you wish things were.” She dangled the scribbler over the stove, and Claire saw that Aunt Annie wouldn’t really do it: she just wasn’t the kind to burn someone else’s scribbler, no matter how angry she was.

  “Go ahead, burn it. I don’t care,” Claire said. Aunt Annie’s hand hesitated; Claire nodded once. Aunt Annie dropped the scribbler into the fire and Claire heard it crackle and hiss. She felt like an iron band around her chest had snapped. She had known all along that what Valerie was doing was wrong, but she had not known it was possible just to lift the lid of the stove and burn it away, burn away all the past and all what-might-have-been, all romantic fantasies and Feelings.

  “Where’s Ralph?” Aunt Annie said, looking around sharply. “Gone out, I suppose.”

  “Yes, he said he’d be back by…well, before ten anyway.”

  “No more than he should do. I worry about that crowd he hangs around with, there’s some hard tickets in that crowd. Those Sullivan boys…” Aunt Annie poked around in the range with her poker, nudging the ashes. With her back to Claire she added, “I don’t worry about you, Claire. You’re sensible. Sensible people don’t get caught up in any old foolishness, any trouble.”

  “I know,” Claire said, folding up her books and scribblers, zipping her pencil and eraser and sharpener away neatly in her case. It was a precise little case with flaps and folds for everything and she loved the orderly ritual of putting each thing back in its appointed spot. Valerie’s pencil case was a disgrace, full of inkblots and folded notes and things shoved in any old way at all. Claire’s was as tidy as Aunt Annie’s pantry shelves. A place for everything, and everything in its place.

  ETHEL

  BROOKLYN, JUNE 1944

  THE APARTMENT WAS QUIET now, an hour before the children got home from school. Ethel immersed herself in these quiet hours like a bath. Jim worked from eight till six, practicing the trade he’d picked up from Harold – radio repair – at a small shop a few blocks down Flatbush. Diane and Jimmy spent all day at school, came home to change their clothes and then ran out again with their friends. Ethel was alone most of the day. It seemed such a short time since everyone had been underfoot, never giving her a minute’s peace. She knew that soon the warm bathwater of peace and privacy would rise like a flood tide and close over her head, and that knowledge worried her. But other times she thought, Let them go. I’m better on my own anyway.

  Ethel’s life was neat and ordered. Her son Jimmy was no trouble, a big hearty fourteen-year-old who liked nothing better than to play stickball all day with his friends in the lot at the end of the street. Diane was another story. She was only twelve but was starting to Develop Early. Also, the mouth on her – Ethel couldn’t believe it sometimes, the things she said to her own mother. She would be trouble. Daughters were more tr
ouble than sons.

  Ethel creamed a block of butter with a firm hand, wishing daughters were as yielding and predictable. Today was Friday; tonight she and Jim were having three other couples over for cards. They had been doing this for years, though the guest list had changed. Jean and Robert were still the old standbys, like Ethel and Jim themselves. Once upon a time it used to be Harold and Frances, but they moved back to Newfoundland years ago, before the war. Dick and Eileen Mouland were gone too; Eileen had moved back home after Dick was killed overseas last year. So many women, even here in this building, had lost husbands and sons.

  Ethel half-listened to a radio serial as she worked, calling it “foolishness” if any other woman mentioned it but following the stories all the same. She liked The Guiding Light and a few of the others, though she credited herself for not getting all caught up in it like some did. On today’s story, Nora was arguing with her daughter Doreen, who she had only discovered was her daughter a few weeks ago, because she had given her up to be adopted at birth. Ethel shook her head. “Where do they come up with the stories at all?” she said to the radio, measuring out two cups of flour from the bin on the counter.

  A sharp rap at the door startled her. Ethel wiped her hands on a towel, untied her apron, and went to the door.

  The tall young man standing there was nobody she knew. Too old to be one of Jimmy’s friends, and dressed in a badly cut, out-of-style wool coat, soaked in the pouring rain, dressed like someone from…could it be someone from home? And then, before he opened his mouth, she saw the ridiculous thin spray of flowers he had clutched in his fist, and knew. Of course she knew.

  “Ah…Mother? Mom?” The boy spoke as though it were a new word in an unfamiliar language. Ethel said nothing and his eyes widened; she saw his panic. He stuck out the hand with the flowers, holding the drooping florist’s carnations in front of him like a shield.

  “Ralph,” she said at last, wondering why she couldn’t put more feeling into her voice. When Nora on the radio found out Doreen was her daughter they fell into each other’s arms sobbing. Here in real life, she stood like a porcelain doll in front of the son she had prayed for and cried over every night since she left him at home in 1933.