Bittersweet Brooklyn: A Novel

by Thelma Adams

  Crime suited Abie. And he wasn’t an aberration among the yidlach, who tended toward crimes of property rather than passion. He appreciated variety, a little bit of this and a little bit of that. He liked every day different—some days burglary, others shlamming for the garment union when the bosses introduced scabs or clubbing strikers if the bosses paid more. Sometimes he’d say he had to meet a guy about a thing, a friend of Lepke or Gurrah, which could mean a shakedown or a robbery, nothing complicated. In and out, he’d say, one, two, three. He acted as a courier for skulls like Monk Eastman and performed some conflict resolution that could involve words or fists. People talked to him; he was that kind of guy, a kibitzer. And he’d sell what he knew, maybe stopping by the cop shop that took a piece of the newsstand and prepaying for some future infraction. He had friends everywhere but, he told Thelma, he wasn’t confused. He could only trust her and Louis—and that made her feel important.

  The newsstand and the permanent address were good investments, making him appear to have ties to the community, which never hurt with the law. So, in that respect, he and Annie had common interests. And since his cash helped underwrite her household, he didn’t appreciate it when she nagged him about his new suits or pinkie ring. She’d criticize him for making the Jewish people look bad, but that didn’t keep her from lobbying for a bigger house for her growing family.

  If Annie pushed too hard, he’d grab his crotch and tell her to go bake a cake. If he was going to come home on Friday nights, he preferred to discuss taking dates to see a Douglas Fairbanks or Charlie Chaplin picture at Broadway’s Rialto Theatre with a full pit orchestra. Even when prodded, he wouldn’t name his girlfriends.

  This refusal enraged Annie, who lashed out, “No good girl would date you more than once, Abraham.”

  “Who said anything about good girls?”

  While Abie was enjoying himself, Louis was antsy awaiting America’s entry into the fray. In April, President Woodrow Wilson obliged, declaring war on Germany. On June 5, the brothers went together, compelled to register for the draft, joining ten million other American men. They filled in the blanks—white, medium build, no dependents: the only visible difference between them was that Louis was two inches taller than Abie’s five foot two. And his eyes were gray, not brown.

  Having registered at the local draft board, the brothers lingered on the stoop with Thelma, bringing two beers and a sack of lemon drops, reluctant to go inside. Louis seemed energized, as if his world were cracking open. Meanwhile, Abie was unusually quiet, saying, “I’m not really a khaki kind of guy.”

  “We have to do our duty.”

  The thought of their going overseas shredded Thelma. She needed them all together. She sucked on a lemon drop, hard, to keep from crying. They were all tired of her tears, no one more than she was, but the goopy suckers formed at the inside corners of her eyes and threatened to tip out over her lower lashes. She was embarrassed, sitting outside, that strangers would see her and judge. She felt panicked, like the boys, her boys, were already gone, the way one day they’d been at home to protect her from that beast Annie and the next day disappeared into the orphanage. She breathed, feeling what it was to still sit beside Abie with Louis at her back. How this was something good in her life. She reached out to take Abie’s hand. Instead, he passed her his beer. And even that had an intimacy she appreciated. What was his was hers. She didn’t have to ask. And yet, she sensed a growing distance that she tried to dispel with a swig of his bitter adult brew.

  Louis, who typically stood, the sentinel, sat down on the other side of Thelma and took her hand in his. He had nice hands, with square fingertips and a strong grip. It was as if he sent her love through his touch. She’d been so self-involved that she hadn’t noticed something new about Louis, how much he’d grown into a handsome man she would have smiled at on the street if they were strangers. He’d become a person separate from his brother, the quiet man who watched and listened, who didn’t care about opinions. Actions were everything to him and all of hers were loyal; the pressure of his fingers told her that.

  As much as she didn’t want to be a damper on Louis’s rare high spirits, the idea of their leaving her behind permanently terrified her. What if they died under enemy fire? What if they came home in a box? She wouldn’t have a family without them. And she knew that only then would Annie praise them, hypocrite that she was.

  She reached her free hand out and when Abie handed her the beer, saying, “Go easy,” she shook her head no.

  “Don’t leave me,” she said.

  “I’m too short for the army,” Abie said. “They’ll throw me back.”

  “There’s something fishy to that story,” Louis said.

  “Did you just make a joke?” Abie asked. “We should register every day!” Thelma could tell her brothers were trying to be funny for her sake. It wasn’t working.

  “You won’t like it, Louis,” Thelma said. “They’ll force you to salute and make your bed, Private.”

  “At least I’ll have my own bed, unlike some of us,” he said.

  “You never know,” said Thelma. “Mama may come along with you.”

  “Nope: Annie’s the killer,” Abie said.

  “We’ve been trained by the best, Abie. We’ve been battling that bitch all our lives. What’s boot camp after the Hebrew Orphan Asylum?”

  Abie made a noise, a cross between a swallow and a harrumph. “I’ve never hated anybody like I hated her that first night, not even the Huns,” Abie said. “If curses could kill, she’d have been dead five times over. When she finally showed up to gloat, I was surprised to see her alive.”

  “By then, we didn’t give a shit.”

  “We’d met scarier people than Annie.”

  “What happened?” Thelma asked, digging her elbows into her thighs and cradling her chin in her hands.

  “Some kid crapped in our cots.”

  “That stinks,” said Thelma, wrinkling her nose. “But it’s better than sharing Mama’s bed.”

  “I’d take her hairbrushes any day,” Abie said. “This was no prank.”

  “The big boys were gunning for Abie and me.”

  “There was a guy with one eye and an empty socket—Blinky.”

  “Another, Floppy, had the bottom half of his ear bitten off.”

  “The thugs asked us who wanted to go first. Louis asked them what they were talking about.”

  “I was just a kid. They snickered. Then they dropped their pants and wiggled their schlongs at us.”

  “So I said, ‘It’s kosher weenie night,’ mouthing off, acting like the big macher I wasn’t. But I blamed Annie, not those boys. They weren’t doing this to us. She was.”

  “So we sat on the floor . . .”

  “. . . back-to-back on the cold concrete all night. Didn’t sleep a wink,” said Abie.

  “I could barely keep my eyes open, but I felt Abie awake through my back, and when he felt my head drop, he’d shove me with his shoulder.”

  “And, then, on the third night . . .”

  “I just couldn’t keep my eyes open,” said Louis. “I started to slide and all of a sudden . . .”

  “. . . wham!” Abie clapped his hands. Thelma jumped.

  “Someone was hovering. I’d fallen asleep.”

  “Not me.”

  “Abie struck—bang—like a cobra.”

  “Blinky was never gonna see again.”

  “Abie saved me.”

  “I bought us some time, that’s all.”

  “So, Temmy, if you wanna know how we got so tough . . .”

  “. . . or why we hate kosher hot dogs . . .”

  “That’s the story.”

  From above and behind, a window slammed open. Annie stuck her head out and shrilled, “What, are you going to keep me waiting all day? Come up already.”

  Abie spat. “Like we said . . .”

  “. . . the army’s going to be a cakewalk,” Louis concluded.

  Chapter 16

  Th
at summer of ’17, the army plastered posters all over Williamsburg. One showed a gruesome gorilla wielding a club in his right hand, while a swooning damsel, her breasts exposed, languished in his left. The message: “Destroy This Mad Brute: Enlist.” Wartime anxiety and excitement swept Thelma’s third Giglio. Uniformed men—some local, some not—cruised the festival, buttoned up early in the evenings but increasingly disheveled toward midnight. Thelma saw the soldiers’ flushed faces, so full of life, and imagined those of her own brothers, gray and lifeless, with blown-off bits. It was unsettling, to say the least. But she wasn’t alone. Mothers cried in public. They shot lovelorn looks at grown sons preparing to cross the Atlantic to fight after the family had struggled to root themselves in America. These women spoiled their younger boys who lingered behind while watching their daughters with a jailer’s eye.

  Despite Giorgio’s kiss last summer, Thelma sensed he now avoided her when she went to gossip at Nina’s across the head of her little girl still in diapers as she nursed the boy. The girls were in different situations now, with her friend subject to the will of her husband and his parents as well as her own. Having always been the more serious of the two, Nina now treated Thelma with patience, as if she were still a child unburdened by the obligations of being a wife and mother. When her brother came up in the conversation, Nina downplayed Giorgio’s attentions and Thelma was quick to agree: she considered the smooch sweet but not serious, a practice kiss. He was Nina’s kid brother, after all, the pest.

  Maybe that’s why her guard was down that July when he invited her to the fair. She couldn’t miss it; she might as well accompany him, since Nina was tending her newborn baby boy, Enrico, the blessed first grandson, and would remain safely upstairs with her mother. Thelma buckled her good shoes and embraced that first night; after a long year, she was hungry for warm evenings when a breeze would rise and she felt like she could stay out all night and become someone new by dawn. The lights arching over North Eighth Street in brilliant curlicues gilded familiar blocks, while the brassy Giglio band inspired her to skip, not walk, hurrying toward the action. On those vibrant streets, she felt like she was in a foreign country, and yet it was also familiar—like Giorgio.

  Thelma resisted linking her arm through his as the pair passed the clam bar. They followed the men carrying the plaster statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, which they placed in the outdoor niche where she’d remain for ten days. Thelma wasn’t yet ready to celebrate Christmas, but she felt more at home here than on Hooper Street. She wouldn’t confess, but she’d even come to revere the Virgin Mary: compassionate, generous, patient. What was not to love?

  In sight of the Madonna, a somber Giorgio claimed Thelma’s hand and laced it through his elbow, covering it with his left palm. He’d grown even more over the last year, shoulders spreading and neck thickening. By the jealous glances of the neighborhood girls, she registered that he’d become truly good-looking. She laughed, and it sounded strange and high to her, girlish in a way that embarrassed her. But she knew the baby boy lurking inside the man: she’d seen him running around in his underwear, slopping in the bathtub and weeping over a lost horse carved from soap.

  They did the usual things that night: munched corn, tossed pennies, aimed air rifles. He wasn’t chatty and so she filled the void discussing movies—Charlie Chaplin in The Immigrant and Douglas Fairbanks’s Wild and Woolly. They turned a street corner, where a band played “Goodbye Broadway, Hello France” surrounded by singing soldiers. When she asked him his favorite song, he shrugged, so she dropped it, letting the silence wash over them with the warm night.

  He stopped at a relatively quiet spot down Havemeyer Street, removing a packet of sparklers. He lit two and gave her one, like a suave leading man sharing cigarettes. For a while, they faced each other making arcs of light, watching them glow and sizzle gold and bright. Oblivious, she hardly noticed anyone or anything else, although neighbors passed by, shouting greetings and asking Giorgio whether he’d win the greased pole this year. Bring me a sausage, they’d say. He shrugged, distracted, smiling into her eyes, forming a charmed circle between them, an isolated island of two. She removed her shoes and danced barefoot with her sparkler, creating fiery figure eights and spirals. He wrote her name in the air. She wrote his. They lit another and another, the pure luxury of it, making big circles and stars. And then he said, “Look,” and she watched as he made a big heart. She smiled. He spelled the word L-O-V-E and, this time, she dropped her sizzled sparkler and rose on her toes to kiss the familiar cheek.

  He pulled away and dragged her farther from the noise as she laughed and protested half-heartedly, his hand gripping hers so that all her blood rushed to the fingers touching his. He ducked down an alley, descending the four back stairs of a shuttered bakery. There was no pause to acknowledge the change as he twirled her around, flattening her back against the bricks with his hips. She grabbed a breath before he swooped and there was absolutely nowhere else on earth but his lips on hers. She felt the truth of his confession. His kiss communicated love, soft then urgent, as if all the words he hadn’t said earlier came rushing out.

  Surrendering to the thrill, she repressed her doubts. Wasn’t it satisfactory to be loved for who she was, even if the feeling wasn’t quite mutual? Given all she’d experienced, would she recognize love when she felt it?

  In the days that followed, the Giorgio nights, she lied to herself. On North Eighth Street, the lifters danced the Giglio, the singer sang to make his mama proud, the priest prayed, old women fainted, gamblers pinned dollar bills to the Madonna’s shrine. The pair returned to their spot behind the bakery earlier each night and would emerge inflamed, love bites on their necks. Sometimes they bumped into Trulia and Gabriela, who smirked at the sight and wagged their fingers.

  Thelma loved the old Giorgio like a sister, which was a relationship she understood. Propelled by that kinship, she fell for the full lips, wide shoulders, and strong hands of this golden man who adored her. She was in love with love, which wasn’t the same as Giorgio.

  That year, the boy didn’t climb the pole, didn’t bring home the sausage to Mama Allegra. He made promises the world wouldn’t let him keep. On the fair’s final night, as the street cleaners swept the stinking garbage into piles and carpenters began to dismantle the food stalls, Thelma ascended the stairs to the Gigantiellos’ apartment, having promised to return the borrowed shorthand manual to Trulia. It was strangely quiet there, as if no one was home—no one except Mama Allegra, who sat on the sofa, squinting slightly as she mended Giorgio’s pajamas. She raised her eyes when Thelma entered, a little weary, and she smiled but kept her lips together as she patted the adjacent cushion. Thelma sat down. A bowl filled with green beans rested on the side table. Placing it on her lap, Thelma pinched the tips, discarding them into a rag.

  The odor of rancid oil and nearly two weeks of sidewalk sausages clung to the room. Then Mama Allegra set aside her needle and thread and put her veined hands on top of Thelma’s. “Stop, carina, we need to talk.”

  “Why?” Thelma tasted a metallic tang: disappointment. Mama Allegra’s measured, slightly chilled tone dismayed her. “Where are Nina and the baby?”

  “They’re at Tonino’s.” Mama Allegra traced her fingertips on the girl’s face, as if marking the familiar features before a journey. Resigned, she said, “I love you like a daughter.”

  “That can be good or bad,” Thelma said with an awkward laugh. “Look at my mother.”

  “Not bad, good, carina. But hard,” she said. “I need you to be loyal—like Nina, like Trulia and Gabriela.”

  “I am loyal.”

  “Maybe yes,” she said, clasping the girl’s chin and reading her eyes, “and maybe no.”

  “Maybe nothing: I love you more than my own mama.”

  “Yes, that’s true, but we both know about your mama.” The mother studied the girl’s eyes. She shook her head. “Turn around and I’ll braid your hair.” She smoothed Thelma’s collar, collecting the curls ma
de antic and sticky by the humidity. Her tender fingers gentled the girl’s scalp, parting the hair into two and each half into three. She combed each strand until the knots melted. Thelma’s shoulders relaxed as Mama Allegra worked, brushing then braiding. “This thing with Giorgio . . .”

  “It’s just the summer, the feast,” Thelma said, trying to sound light despite feeling caught, a fish on a hook, flapping.

  “No, it’s not. Not even the summer. Not even tomorrow.”

  Thelma opened her mouth, but no more words formed. Of course Mama Allegra knew—hadn’t Gabriela and Trulia seen them? The neighborhood was a sieve. They might as well have printed an announcement in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

  “He’s serious about you, my boy. I know his heart even though he tries to keep this secret. He never hides things from me, and that’s how I knew this is serious. He loves you and that’s a dangerous thing for a boy in a man’s body. Do you love my Giorgio?”

  Thelma paused. That was the question. Did she love Giorgio?

  Yes.

  No.

  She hadn’t figured it out herself. She was only fifteen. Confusion was everywhere. During the feast she’d enjoyed his company with no promise of a future, and that high was the yummiest. She’d sped toward Giorgio without brakes, as if, like the movies, his regiment left at dawn. They only had tonight. They’d last as long as the fireworks glowed. Today she had brothers. Next summer, who knew? Life’s transitory nature was in the air like popular music—“Goodbye Broadway, Hello France.”

  She adored him. He made her heart race. He was more than the delicious darkness at the bottom of the stairs. She wanted to be there for him, too: to be that beautiful spark reflected in his eyes. If he believed, then she almost did. He was the most beautiful boy, Tarzan to her Jane.