Bittersweet Brooklyn: A Novel

by Thelma Adams

  Skipping school (where she was quick and good at math, which pleased the teachers and alienated the boys), Thelma slunk in the shadows of doorways on South Fourth Street. She paused under stoops in sticky spots smelling of man and dog pee, avoiding the truant officer. She sprinted across the street to the Marcy Avenue BMT Station, bought a nickel ticket with her stolen change, and hopped the train across the Williamsburg Bridge to Manhattan. The span was only a year younger than she was, but its birth had been greeted with magnificent fireworks displays, not mourning as hers was.

  She headed for Fourteenth Street, where Abie was hawking papers with Louis, having left for Manhattan long before Annie had shrieked Thelma and Moritz awake. She had to find Abie. He’d be angry at those bitches—and offer a soft shoulder where she could weep until she hiccuped. At twenty-one, he resembled a full-grown man with whiskers on his chin and a swagger in his stride, but he’d never risen above five foot two.

  Abie would have made Napoleon look tall—and he blamed this shortcoming on the orphanage cook who’d conked the kid’s cranium with a cast-iron pan. He’d never confessed the misdeed that agitated the cook but insisted the blow had stunted his growth. He’d gotten his back: dumping laxatives in the soup. But the damage had been done.

  On the other hand, Abie’s thirteen-year-old sister now towered over him, giraffe legs and jutting ribs. But, despite her height, she looked up to Abie. He was quick with a fix. She sought his counsel in everything but algebra. They were both suspicious by nature (or nurture), but he trusted her, deputizing Thelma as his eyes and ears in the house when he was on the streets. She spilled her guts religiously.

  For Thelma, the early morning Hooper Street blowup seemed like a news flash, which she had to relay to Abie before he got someone else’s version. She must be the first edition. She needed his advice about what to do next and after that. She knew Annie and Mama were wrong, but she didn’t understand what kind of father Moritz was. Why had Uncle Moe hidden in the bathroom, abandoning her? He had said he loved her best, but had that been a lie?

  Thelma was angry at Uncle Moe, but she still, in her mind, imagined him leaving the bathroom and exclaiming that he wanted her for his wife, not Mama. She had young skin. She had dancing feet. She held his secrets. She scratched the itchy skin between her legs but couldn’t find a way to quiet her heart’s hungry hollow.

  She’d tossed these feelings over and over again while on the el to Manhattan, coating them like fish fillets in flour. She had no one to blame but herself. She should have remained where she belonged in the kitchen, propped up between two chairs, either her butt sinking in the crack between them or her legs dangling. She scolded herself: she was stupid, stupid, stupid. She was unlovable—worse, despised. Did she become who she was because they didn’t love her—or did they not love her because of who she was? She was weak—weak when Annie was strong, Annie who owned their mother as if she were gloves. Annie, who’d reversed the order of things, climbing to the top of the family and pissing downhill. All Thelma had was Abie, and he was around less and less these days. Who could blame him?

  For a brief moment, during the comforting clack-click-clack of the train on the rails, Thelma snatched at a sense of well-being. No Mama. No Annie. No Uncle Moe. She could breathe again, leaning her cheek against the warm glass. The world hummed as long as her back was to Hooper Street, far from her sister’s shrill judgments. Beneath her on the East River, sailboats skipped under taut white canvas. On the opposite shore, Manhattan’s skyscrapers rose as she approached. She recognized the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower from her Corn Flakes box, now visible like a tiny toy beside a model train that she could reach out and touch and reposition. But she wasn’t deluded: it was big—you could hide there, you could get lost there, you could become everything or nothing.

  Thelma exited with the crowd at Delancey-Essex near her Norfolk Street birthplace. A mid-April heat wave made it feel like July. The bad-temper weather inspired pushing, shoving, and accusations between strangers, as she navigated uptown as she’d done in the past with her brothers. Occasionally, they’d roam the city—tough-guy Abie intimidating strangers out in front, Louis guiding them with his strong sense of direction and memory of landmarks, and she, rushing to keep up with their gang. The trio had run together for a few years. A march—a political rally or a union protest—was an opportunity to separate a wallet from its owner and have some fun. Abie loved crowds. They jacked him up. Louis had his back. And Thelma was their audience. She was their keeper of stolen property, because who would question that monkey face—and who would suspect brothers soft enough to bring their kid sister along? The Lorber kids measured all the angles.

  The boys had taught her how to ride the trolley for free, shifting from seat to seat, sidling up to maternal-looking women to avoid buying a ticket. The worst that could happen was she’d have to slip her fingers in that lady’s hand and guilt the adult into paying her fare with eyes that pled poverty backed by a body suggesting starvation.

  At Fourteenth Street, the broad thoroughfare that sliced the island below Union Square, Thelma stumbled onto the sidewalk and into the mass of purposeful humanity, alone in Manhattan for the first time. It was different from carousing in her brothers’ wake, always an arm’s grab away from the familiar. Thelma tried to repress her rising sense of panic. She gasped the ashen air, spinning to figure out which direction held the family newsstand on the corner of Fifth Avenue. Without Louis, she couldn’t tell uptown from downtown, east side from west. She moved momentarily with the crowd and attempted to get her bearings without asking for help in a voice that would betray her vulnerability. Girls who didn’t know where they were going were snatched up and sold into slavery, or so her friends Nina, Paola, and Maria had told her. She felt like a candy wrapper caught in a gutter dust devil.

  Thelma needed Abie. She needed him to explain the error of her ways and determine whether it could be fixed. She needed him to explain how Mama hadn’t even come to see if she was all right and hear her brother’s sympathetic outrage. This was always the cruelest blow: that their mother never took their side. She couldn’t erase the pathetic image of Mama, prostrate, begging at the bathroom door, calling for Moritz with her back to her own child.

  Meanwhile, a crowd had gathered on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue east of Union Square. Thelma tried to thread through but became tangled in the knot, pulled toward whatever had united the mob. She heard snatches of information: “blood,” “stabbing,” “murder,” and the strange name “Little Yiddle.” As she neared the center, the crowd’s excitement grew along with her apprehension. Nearby a jostling scrum of newsboys in knickers and caps postured, yelling at each other, raw and loud, their stock in trade. For a change, the boys were at the action’s center, not just peddling the news: czarist troop movements across the Atlantic or the ravages of Typhoid Mary closer to home.

  She sought her brothers among the youths, rising on tiptoe, looking for a familiar cap, Abie’s square jaw, the scar crossing Louis’s right brow. Instead, she spied a circle of policemen, their eyes concealed by billed caps. They wore navy wool uniforms with two parallel rows of shiny buttons on the front, gold shields pinned over their hearts. The lawmen had formed a barrier around something half-visible. “Back up,” they shouted at the crowd. “Step along.” They claimed that nothing was happening, nothing to see.

  But something had happened. Beyond the coppers, Thelma detected a lake of blood with irregular shores. The air bristled with electricity. Something had happened. Right here, but what? A trail of red footprints moved west, first backing away and then turning, but then there was also a helter-skelter of shoe prints and handprints and knee prints and what appeared to be a drag mark, first left and then right. A few feet away, a pigeon pecked at a brown tweed flat cap abandoned on the sidewalk. She gasped in recognition, trying to convince herself that it could have been anybody’s hat, even though it was identical to Abie’s.

  The crowd surged
forward. Beside Thelma, an angular, middle-aged man with pointy elbows suddenly appeared. A vivid, jagged scar sliced his left nostril, deep lines scored his face, and above, his press card sprouted from his greasy hatband. He freed his arms to lift a notebook balanced on his left hand. In his right, he clutched a thick pencil. Neglecting her, he began to grill two bickering newsboys, asking, “Who’s the victim?”

  “What’s it to you?” asked one brown-eyed boy, who couldn’t have been more than thirteen but had the shattered nose of a welterweight.

  His companion, a red-haired cupid with a devil’s sneer, squinted at the stranger. “Who’s askin’?”

  “John Atherton, Tribune.”

  “We got your story, mister,” said Broken Nose. “I was right there.”

  “No, you weren’t,” said his sneering companion. “I was there. It was Rothman, the putz. Nate to his friends, only he don’t got no friends.”

  “I was there because Rothman asks me, ‘Who’s the toughest kid on Fourteenth Street?’”

  Atherton nodded. “Who is the toughest kid?”

  “You’re the reporter,” said Cupid. “You tell us.”

  “I’m a newspaperman, boys, not a spiritualist,” said Atherton.

  “Okay, okay, it’s who I told the putz: Little Yiddle.”

  “That’s not news,” said Broken Nose while Thelma eavesdropped. “Everybody knows that.”

  “Is that Yiddle’s blood on the ground?” Atherton asked.

  Thelma leaned in. The sneering cupid laughed derisively. Broken Nose sucked his teeth. “Hell, no, mister, that beet juice is all Nathan.”

  “Got what he deserved,” said Cupid. “When Yiddle passed by, pacing like he does, back and forth on Fourteenth Street, Rothman laughed.”

  “You don’t laugh at Little Yiddle.”

  “Not if you like your nose, mister, no offense,” said Broken Nose.

  “None taken,” said Atherton, scribbling without watching his hands. He anchored his gaze on his sources, switching back and forth between the two boys with the glow of a journalist who’d found his lead.

  “Nathan starts braying like a donkey. He says, so that everybody can hear, ‘What? That kid tough? Ah, stop!’”

  Thelma’s chest tightened. Her anxiety rose, amplified by the crowd continuing to push forward. She struggled against the current, trying to stay beside the reporter so that she could hear the boys. Little Yiddle was an odd nickname. It made her uneasy. Abie wasn’t tall, but there was no kid tougher—still, she couldn’t imagine he’d let anybody call him an insulting name like that more than once.

  The reporter tapped his hat brim with his pencil. “Why was this Nate laughing?”

  “Little Yiddle got his moniker ’cause he’s short, and he’s bony . . .”

  “. . . but he’s no pushover.”

  “He’s quick with a knife.”

  Thelma’s hands felt clammy. Short. Like Abie. Bony. Like Abie. But, no, there was no shortage of angry little men on Fourteenth Street. Abie was too smart to make waves in Manhattan. He’d never stab a guy, she thought, not in broad daylight. Not that Thelma doubted he’d pull a blade if somebody looked at him sideways.

  “You don’t mess with Little Yiddle unless you want to drink your dinner through a straw.”

  “It’s orphanage rules,” said Cupid.

  It had to be Abie. What could he have been thinking? They’d take him away from her. Again. She couldn’t let that happen.

  The kid continued, “This was Little Yiddle’s territory, not Rothman’s. They don’t call you the toughest because you’re a weakling. He hears the putz, approaches Rothman, and says, ‘I’ll show you!’”

  “And he did. He gutted Rothman like the chicken he was.”

  “He was?” asked the reporter.

  “Dead,” said Cupid. Thelma felt dread, her face flushing. She looked down at the blotchy skin on her shaking fingers. He’d killed a boy. Dead.

  “Last legs,” Broken Nose corrected.

  “He’s as good as dead. The ambulance carted him off.”

  “A knife to the stomach is more than a bellyache.”

  “That’s a lot of blood,” said the newsman as the law started to disperse the crowd, supported by a flank of mounted policemen who’d just arrived on the scene. The reporter buttonholed the redhead and asked, “Where do I find this Little Yiddle?”

  “You don’t. Not if you know what’s good for you.”

  “We ain’t squealing.”

  “What’s his Christian name?”

  “He don’t have one, stupid.”

  “His Jewish name is Abie.”

  Gutted like Rothman, Thelma wanted to fly up and out of that crowd and find her brother. She’d punch her way out. She turned away from the reporter so he couldn’t see her flushed face. Wouldn’t he be surprised if the girl standing right next to him knew everything he wanted to know about the perpetrator, even where he lived? But she wouldn’t be talking.

  The cupid chimed in, “Abraham Lorber.”

  “How do you spell that?” the reporter asked. She knew it like her own name, knew that he was born Abrem, but this little sister was already struggling against the crowd, panicked, kicking shins and punching, running toward Fifth Avenue and the newsstand. Now her brother might need her protection. Sure, she was weak, and she was sad, a fatherless child, but what she was didn’t matter right then. She had to be strong for Little Yiddle—even the toughest kid on Fourteenth Street needed family.

  Thelma fled the gawkers circling Rothman’s blood. The mounted police converged from the front while a wall of cops squeezed from the rear. She hunched down, scrunching her stomach, making herself as small as possible, her eyes innocently pleading to let her through while her pointy elbows ripped holes in the mob. A rising panic snuffed her breath. She felt claustrophobic, wanting to kick out. Her shakiness, almost nausea, made it harder to get her bearings. She hated being lost. How did Louis, the human compass, find his way? If Union Square was north of Fourteenth Street, then uptown was to her right, which meant the newsstand should have been straight ahead. But it could easily have been behind her.

  Having escaped the crowd, she dashed for the newsstand, arms outstretched, desperate to discover if Abie was okay and what had really happened. She registered alarm in the strangers’ faces she passed, as if they perceived her secret knowledge of the assailant. A terror that naked could be contagious, and no one wanted to catch what she carried. To avoid pedestrians, she sidestepped off the curb, only to be nearly squashed by a crosstown streetcar. As her heart raced, a nearby matron jerked her back to the sidewalk, but then the woman’s grasp tightened around her wrist. With difficulty, Thelma shoved the lady away with her free hand while twisting her entrapped arm from the stranger’s viselike grip. As she sprinted away without looking back, she sucked in her tears and swiped her nose with the back of her hand. Distress was dangerous in public, where young girls could be traded like secondhand clothes.

  When she arrived at Fifth Avenue, sweaty and disheveled, Thelma leaned against a cast-iron street marker. Canvas-sided horse carts lined the way. She jumped when a white-speckled nag stamped its right hoof and blew out its nose, raising its head to expose black gums. Across the street stood a tall limestone building with broad shop windows that exhibited the wares of S. N. Wood & Co. Cloaks & Suits.

  A white banner stretched above the display: CLEAN-SWEEP SALE NOW GOODS AT YOUR OWN PRICES. And, in front of that, was the fir-green newsstand beneath a hand-lettered sign: LAZARUS & SONS. To Thelma’s dismay, the shack was shuttered. Gone were the stacks of newspapers, the issues of Photoplay magazine with images of Charlie Chaplin or Lillian Gish, the glass case crammed with chewing gum and cigarettes. She crossed the street and circled the seemingly abandoned wooden hut barely high enough to contain one man. She banged on the side door, with one fist and then two, despite the padlock that cinched the metal loop beneath its hasp. They never closed the newsstand.

  “Girlie,” said a ragged
peddler as he extracted a stone from his horse’s hoof with his pocketknife. “Yeah, you,” he said. “They’re shut for the day.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe I know. Maybe I don’t. But I’m not the only workingman who can handle a knife. If you want some advice, maideleh, disappear,” he said, “and don’t speak to coppers.”

  “But,” she began, “I gotta find my brother Abie.”

  The peddler raised the blade to his cracked lips, signaling silence.

  While Thelma shut her mouth, her mind raced—but her feet couldn’t follow. Without Louis, she didn’t know the city well enough to pursue Abie now that she’d discovered the newsstand closed. Her heart pounded; sweat streamed down her temples. She feared for Abie’s life, however quick he was with a knife. Where could he be? Was he hiding from the police? And if that reporter got her brother’s name in print, did it mean that he was lost to her?

  That reporter didn’t know Abie like she did—how much love he had for her and how, time and again, he’d been forced to defend himself, a scrawny kid, from bigger foes as he had in the orphanage. To hesitate was to become a victim. She understood that. There had to be justification for his attack on that Rothman kid. Abie would explain. She felt fear, yes, but something else, too, as she paced the sidewalk bracing herself to return home. It was pride. Her brother was the toughest kid on Fourteenth Street, and he would always protect her. No one on the street would dare harm her with such a daring brother in her corner.

  Chapter 9

  Enraged, Annie refused to talk to Thelma or Moe when they returned home that night. They were dead to her. They deserved the burning flames of hell and roasting on a pitchfork for how they’d crushed Mama, who had spent the day beating her breast and breaking plates on the kitchen floor, or looking up at the ceiling, raising her fist and cursing God. She’d held her mother as she had her own children, Julius and Adele, rocking the older woman until her sleeve was tear soaked and Mama had quieted down to an occasional snuffle.