By the Rivers of Brooklyn

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  She took a step backwards, almost bumped into the doorknob. “Come in, come in.” Then, with relief, she recalled a cliché. “This is a surprise! What brings you to New York?”

  Ralph was relieved too, she could see. His wide mouth relaxed into a smile. “I just made up my mind to come, you know, come see you and Dad. I told them at home not to write and let you know I was coming, I wanted to surprise you. I came on the boat yesterday, stayed at a boarding house last night; Uncle Harold gave me the name of the place. Walked around the streets for awhile on my way up here, trying to see if I could remember anything.”

  “Did it…did anything look familiar to you? It’s been so long.”

  “The building kind of felt familiar. But nothing else. I was only…what? Six?”

  “Six,” said Ethel.

  They stood there, three feet apart, in the hallway of what had once been his home. He had been a child here, played here. Ethel found she couldn’t think about that. Better to pretend this Ralph was someone new and different, someone who had never been here before. He might as well be, this young man with his strong St. John’s accent and out-of-style clothes. Bad teeth, she noticed as he spoke, like everyone at home. His nose was crooked, not the nice straight nose she remembered. Of course – he broke it when he was ten. She remembered his letter, and Annie’s. She had saved all the letters.

  “Come in, sit down. Will you have a cup of tea?” She led him into the living room, an awkward two-step as she steered him around the furniture. When he was sitting on the sofa he remembered the flowers and passed them to her. He still had not taken off his outside jacket.

  “How are they all at home?” she called, going into the kitchen for a vase and the teapot.

  “All right. Grandmother’s arthritis is bad, of course, like it always is. Aunt Annie is still goin’ strong. You knew Bill Winsor was overseas, didn’t you? And Uncle Harold is doin’ the same kind of work as…as Dad, fixin’ radios and stuff. The children are all growing like weeds, of course, Claire and Valerie and the boys.”

  His voice made a pleasant background hum as the kettle started to hiss. Then the apartment door burst open and Ethel stepped out quickly as she heard Diane and Jimmy arguing in the hall.

  “I have a surprise for you,” she said, blocking them at the living room door. “We had a visitor, a surprise visitor, someone from home. It’s your brother! Ralph!” Her voice sounded as bright and unnatural as the women on the radio. Her smile stretched her lips back into her cheeks.

  “Ralph?” Jimmy was the first one into the room. He grinned, opening his arms like Ethel was supposed to have done. All his life he had hero-worshipped Ralph from afar, the wonderful big brother who was never there to smack him or tell him to mind his own business. “Remember me? I know you don’t remember Diane; she was only a baby when you left.”

  They had grown up with stories of Ralph, his letters and a handful of pictures. Ethel had had to invent a story, of course, to explain why Ralph was back in Newfoundland and they were here in Brooklyn. For all Jim had set himself against Ralph – never read his letters or wanted to hear any news about him, never mentioned his name if he could help it – he wouldn’t have it said out loud that Ralph was another man’s son.

  “Those were hard times,” she remembered telling the children. “It was the Depression and everyone was very poor. We all went home to St. John’s – that was where you were born, Diane – but after awhile your father thought he’d have a better chance here in New York, so we came back. It wasn’t an easy place or time to raise children, and in some ways I thought you’d all be better off at home. But you two were just babies, you couldn’t do without me. Ralph was older, and his Aunt Annie took a real liking to him. I thought he’d have a better chance, a better childhood, growing up there than here. Of course we’ll go back someday, or maybe he’ll come to New York, and you’ll have a chance to meet him.”

  Someday was today. Ethel retreated to the kitchen again, pouring the cups of tea, laying out a plate of cookies for the youngsters. Well, for Ralph too; he was still a growing boy, wasn’t he?

  Her heart had not slowed since she saw him at the door. She wondered if it ever would; or would it just keep racing till she had a heart attack and dropped down dead? She had never stopped praying to see him again. Once she had thought that losing him, Jim turning his back on Ralph and making her leave him behind, was God’s punishment and she would finally be even for the sin that had made him, so long ago. But then she began to think of it differently. She saw that this was a new sin, that leaving Ralph was the worst thing she had ever done. Perhaps this unexpected visit was God’s way of telling her she had paid her debt. Her boy had come back to her, once and for all.

  On that happy thought Ethel put the teacups and cookies on a tray and moved out of the kitchen. Jimmy was saying, “–the boys round here. Don’t s’pose you remember any of them, but most of them are gone, joined up. Are you eighteen yet? You ain’t joined up?”

  The cold finger touched her heart at Jimmy’s words, and Ethel looked at her older son, who was just getting to his feet and taking off his coat. She looked at him, knowing that he had kept the coat on to spare her a second shock on top of the first, knowing how Jimmy’s and Diane’s eyes would widen in admiration and the room would spin when they all saw that under it he was wearing a U.S. Army uniform, brand-spanking new.

  “Wow!” Jimmy said.

  “Nice,” said Diane.

  “I signed up and did my basic training with the U.S. Army there at Fort Pepperrell,” Ralph was telling his younger brother. He went on, explaining where he was being posted now and how he had a couple of days’ leave to come visit his parents in Brooklyn, but Ethel didn’t hear his words. She laid the tray down with care but still slopped a little tea out of the cups. To stop her hands shaking she laid them one on each of Ralph’s arms, holding him away as if to get a better look, touching him for the first time in eleven years.

  She nodded slowly, not trusting herself for words, and Ralph smiled again, seeing the approval and pride he wanted to see. And Ethel saw what God had in store for her and knew she had not yet even begun to pay for her sins and would pay till the day she died.

  ETHEL

  BROOKLYN, APRIL 1945

  “WHERE DO YOU THINK you’re going, young lady?”

  Ethel sighed and laid down her crochet. Behind her, Diane was trying to sneak from her bedroom to the door without being seen by her father. Jim sat in the armchair these evenings, behind his newspaper, and whenever Diane passed, he barked out a line that sounded like some old-fashioned father in a stage play. He had no idea how to handle a daughter who was turning into a young woman too fast, and seemed to have decided that sounding like his own grandfather was the best way to deal with a modern young girl. Ethel knew his crusade was doomed; they were all doomed where Diane was concerned. Ethel turned to see her thirteen-year-old daughter dressed in a bright red sweater stretched tight over her two aggressive little breasts, sharp and unmistakable as ice-cream cones. Her shoulders were padded, though her brassiere didn’t need to be. The narrow black skirt was a hand-me-down of Ethel’s, and below it Diane had carefully covered her legs with pancake make-up and pencilled pretend seams up the back of both legs.

  “Out, I’m just going out. Down to the candy store with Carol and Lorraine,” said Diane with the full-lipped pout Ethel thought she must practice in front of the mirror.

  “Well, be back in by eight-thirty,” Ethel said.

  “Carol’s allowed to stay out till ten on weekends!”

  “Am I Carol’s mother?”

  “No, but golly, I wish you were!” Diane shot back over her shoulder.

  “Don’t speak to your mother like that!” barked Jim on cue.

  “You and Daddy are so old-fashioned, Mother. You know, I’m a teenager now, I’m not living back in ancient times like when you grew up in Newfoundland.”

  Teenager. Something new, that word, like the bitter sarcasm dripping from the
word Newfoundland. Ethel really did feel ancient.

  But she tried. She had a quick glimpse of time, life, her daughter, slipping through her fingers like water, and she closed her hand around what couldn’t be grasped. She got up and touched Diane’s shoulder, felt the warm flesh under the sweater turn hard as bone.

  “Daddy and I aren’t trying to be harsh with you, Diane. It’s just…we just worry about you. You’re still just a little girl…”

  Wrong thing to say. Of course. Diane turned away and shut the door behind her without a word.

  Ethel stood alone in the hall. She thought of Annie’s and Frances’ letters telling about the girls back home – how Claire and Valerie competed for the best marks in their class, Claire excelling in her math classes, Valerie writing the best English compositions. How Claire still came home muddy and scratched from playing football with the boys in the field; how Valerie curled up in a corner with a book and couldn’t be roused from her dream world. How the two girls led Valerie’s little brothers, Kenny and Danny, on a raid of the henhouse and then took the eggs and broke them all over the unfinished floor of the new house Bill Winsor’s brother was building, and went skating on the slippery mess, and Annie was worried at how little the hens were laying until she discovered the truth. Claire and Valerie were growing up back home as normal, healthy young girls, and here was Diane growing up a New York girl, saucy as a crackie to her mother, with tight sweaters and made-up legs.

  Back in the living room Ethel eased down in her chair and picked up her crocheting again. She was surprised when Jim laid down the paper a few minutes later. Often he’d sit behind it all evening until bedtime, only speaking to share aloud a news item that interested him. These days he did that less and less; there was no more war news from Europe since V-E Day and he knew Ethel hated to hear news of the Pacific theatre, though she would take the paper when he was at work and read the stories herself.

  Jim folded the paper on his lap and she looked up at him. He was forty-five years old this year. His hair had gone mostly grey, and the lines on either side of his mouth were deeper and more permanent.

  “I don’t know what to be doing with that one,” he said, nodding at the door.

  Ethel, who didn’t know herself, said, “Don’t worry. She’s growing up, is all. We can’t stop her.”

  Jim was the one who let out a gusty sigh this time. “They’re all growing up too fast,” he said. All, not both. The word hung between them; the acknowledgment that they had three children hovered in the silence. Fewer and fewer things, as the years went by, were safe to talk about.

  “House is quiet with the youngsters out,” Jim went on. “I tell you what, Ethel, let’s you and me go out. Let’s go take in a movie.”

  This was unexpected. Jim and Ethel went out to dinner and a movie three times a year, on their anniversary and on each of their birthdays. Every Friday night they had their card-party, rotating between their apartment and their friends’ apartments in turn. The other three hundred or so nights of the year, Jim sat in one chair and read the paper while Ethel sat in the other and knitted or crocheted, and they turned out the lights and went to bed at ten-thirty.

  “What’s got into you tonight?” Ethel said.

  Jim stood up, paced to the window and back. “Come on, Ethel girl, we don’t have to sit here like two old fogies, do we? Our youngsters are out having a bit of fun, why shouldn’t we go out too?”

  Ethel understood a little of what he felt. As always when she caught a rare glimpse of Jim’s inner life, she felt like she was standing at the edge of a foreign country, seeing only the borderlands, curious but not really wanting to cross.

  Fifteen minutes later they were walking down Flatbush Avenue towards the Loew’s Kings. Flatbush had changed in the twenty years they had lived here: more shops, more lights. And always the boys in uniform these days, young men with girls hanging off their arms, the girls Diane must want to be like, Ethel supposed. She looked at the young men, seeing Ralph in each one, wishing he could turn up safe and surprise her just as he did that day last year.

  “They say in the paper it’s going well on Okinawa,” Jim said. “Our boys expect to have the Jap army cleared out of there in another few weeks. The worst is over, they say.”

  Ethel nodded. “Please God, he’ll be out of there by June. Will it end the war, do you think?”

  “How much more can the Japs take?” Jim said. “They can’t hold out forever no matter how many of those bloody kamikazes they have. Queer thing, isn’t it, a man who’d crash his own plane just to kill someone else?”

  No queerer than anything else in wartime, Ethel thought: those boys going overseas, risking their lives and dying to straighten out foreign messes that had nothing to do with them. In spite of the men in uniform, the patriotic advertising slogans and songs and even movies – tonight it was Blood on the Sun with James Cagney, all about the Japs and how bad they were – the war still seemed a faraway, pointless adventure.

  Since Ralph turned up in uniform Jim’s thinking had changed. He had been awkward and restrained with the boy during his visit, but once Ralph was gone Jim put the picture of him in his uniform up on the living room wall and asked, for the first time ever, to read Ralph’s letters to his mother. He added one-line messages to Ethel’s letters: Your father sends his love and hopes you are keeping safe and well. Safe and well. A strange message to send to a boy on a ship in the Pacific, strafed by kamikaze planes. Ethel had his letters, and a blue-star Son in Service flag to hang in the window that faced the courtyard.

  The theatre was Saturday-night crowded: young kids Jimmy’s age out in crowds, fellows in uniform out with their girls, a few old fogies like themselves. Jim had a bucket of popcorn on his lap and one arm draped over the back of Ethel’s seat, just like they were on a date themselves. They laughed along with everyone else at the funny short that began the show, but then the newsreel came up. Ethel saw that it was called Death on Okinawa, and the rest of the theatre dropped away.

  “I’m sorry,” Jim said. “I never knew…well, you know there’s going to be something about the war but not…do you want to leave?”

  Ethel said nothing, her eyes on the screen, on the black-and-white images of men, boys, running and shooting and falling. It was just what the title promised, Death on Okinawa, and not just dead Japs but American boys and men. She was a taut string ready to be plucked, sitting in the stillness watching the awful mayhem.

  Then she saw him. A glimpse, only a few seconds. A bloodied body, one of hundreds, carried past on a stretcher. White face, uniform, gaping chest wound.

  “Jim! Jim! I saw him, I saw Ralph.”

  “What?”

  Ethel stared at the screen. Would there be another glimpse? The man on that stretcher could not have been alive. And he could not have been Ralph. Except that he was. The camera closed for a split second on his face, and his mother knew.

  “Ethel,” Jim said in her ear, “did you say you saw Ralph?”

  She whispered back without turning away from the screen. “On a stretcher, he was being carried off. It was him, Jim, I know it was.”

  “On a stretcher? No, no, couldn’t have been. You must have imagined…”

  Ethel was silent. The images flickered on but she saw nothing, only Ralph’s face, the bleeding body. He was wounded, or worse. She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth, bit hard, felt nothing.

  In the pause between the newsreel and the feature Jim leaned over again. “Ethel, don’t drive yourself cracked now. You know that couldn’t have been Ralph. Sure, these newsreels take awhile to make and send over here. If he was wounded or…if he was hurt we’d have had word by now.”

  “It was him,” she said again.

  “No, Ethel, some boy who looked a bit like him, is all. Some other poor sod, not our son.” His arm moved from the back of the seat to her shoulders.

  The credits rolled, the feature started. As soon as she saw a Japanese face on the screen Ethel stood up, blun
dered to the end of the row, up the aisle to the bathroom. The bathrooms here were glorious temples of marble and chrome and mirror glass, monuments to cleanliness and comfort. She just made it to a toilet before vomit flooded her mouth.

  She stayed there a long time, even after she’d thrown up, kneeling on the floor, shaking. When she came out, Jim was waiting in the lobby.

  “I’ll take you home,” he said. “You shouldn’t get all worked up like this. It’s nothing.”

  She fell into step beside him. “I know what I saw.”

  Out again through the red and gold lobby, under the marquee lights, into the crowded street. “It couldn’t happen like that, Ethel. You couldn’t see him dead – wounded – on a newsreel before we got a telegram. If we haven’t heard from the War Office, then nothing’s happened, see?”

  It made sense; she knew it was true, but she also knew what she’d seen.

  Back at the apartment Jimmy and Diane were home and fighting. “I don’t know what you see in that guy Malone anyway, he’s a creep,” Jimmy said, and Diane yelled, “Yeah, you’re jealous because Malone and all his crowd think you and your friends are sooo square.”

  “Square? Is that a fact? Well, I’ll tell you one thing, little sister, I might not know what you see in Malone, but I sure know what he sees in you, and if I catch him laying a hand on you I’ll knock him into the middle of next week, I swear.”

  The fight was so loud they failed to hear their parents coming in through the hall. They fell silent as Jim and Ethel entered. Jimmy said, “Hi Dad, hi Mom, where were you guys?” But Ethel drifted past the whole disturbing scene as if it didn’t exist, said nothing to her daughter or younger son, went straight to the bedroom.