Bittersweet Brooklyn: A Novel

by Thelma Adams

  “Can’t live with her, can’t shoot her” became his motto. Years before, Abie had lost the capacity to trust, and now, following the shooting, his eyes shifted constantly as he tried to see around corners, anticipating the next threat and the one after that. He might have been considered paranoid if it weren’t for the matching bullet-hole scars and the nerve damage in his left hand.

  It didn’t take a genius to sense that she wouldn’t have Abie around much longer and that, on some level, she now depended more on him than vice versa. He was giving her a gentle push: She had to start looking ahead, too. She had to make a life for herself separate from his. As winter hit and the slush iced over, the movie audience expanded to include those who begged pennies on the corner to enter the heated auditorium. Frequently Phil would arrive, strolling past their aisle in a business suit, carrying his overcoat, hat, and popcorn. He’d settle two rows down and, at Abie’s urging, she’d join him. When she glanced over her shoulder, Abie was gone. After a few weeks, when the Lorbers saw Phil, Abie would gather his gear and shuffle away while the young man took his seat. As cowboys fought Indians and hussies hustled their next mark and toffs downed martinis, the pair ascended to the sparsely filled balcony with rising excitement and a sense of daring. She found the spontaneity intoxicating, even if it was true that their actions mimicked those of young lovers on the screen. He would loosen his tie and she would ease her garters, teasing, “Wanna see my magic leg? Wanna see it again?”

  “Yes,” he whispered. Beneath the rafters, they rubbed against each other and did those things a man and a woman could do fully clothed in semipublic. Sometimes they had to shoo away neighborhood rascals who crept up to watch, incriminating themselves with giggles and sighs of “Oh, baby, baby.” When they broke for a smoke, she’d leave her leg hooked over Phil’s knee while he puffed cigarettes and drank from a flask; she popped lemon drops from a paper sack he’d brought, or Jordan almonds. She had an endless sweet tooth.

  She convinced herself they were happy for months at a time in the company of Valentino and Negri, Chaplin and Mary Pickford. The future didn’t preoccupy them when all they hungered for was each other, the touch and feel, the awkward bumping of noses, battling frustrating armrests, as they adjusted to each other’s preferences and pace. Gradually, they began to wonder aloud if they preferred movies with happy or tragic endings. Was there a wedding in their future (or an abyss)? They lived with their families and couldn’t afford to marry and set up a third household. Besides, they preferred spending money on movies, dance, and drinks at basement speakeasies. Only suckers saved for a rainy day.

  Throughout 1925 and into 1926, every Wednesday they went to the pictures: Negri’s A Woman of the World and Valentino’s Cobra and Chaplin’s The Gold Rush.

  They spent weekends together: their golden thirty-six hours viewing the cherry blossoms in the spring at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the leaves rusting in the fall, returning again and again to Coney Island without ever getting sand in their shoes, riding the Wonder Wheel and relishing the private time it allowed them to survey Brooklyn as if they alone could lay claim to the world below, passing the flask that Phil inevitably carried. Meanwhile, they ascended in status at the Roseland, becoming one of the privileged couples that danced in the center during breaks, introducing new steps, teaching the tango, the dance that had made Valentino a star. (Only three years before, the actor had traded his screen career for an eighty-eight-city tour dancing onstage with his second wife, Natacha Rambova, née Winifred Kimball Shaughnessy.)

  The couple excelled at that most intimate of dances—the tango. They danced chest to chest or upper thigh to hip in close embrace. It required intense focus to perform the elegant, serpentine steps, but the footwork was nothing compared to the emotional immediacy that rose to a torrent of passion—man leading woman, woman leading man—so that each fluid movement forward or back became a sensual act. For Thelma, these moments were exhilarating, Phil’s gaze arresting hers with an intensity she’d never seen off the dance floor, his breath filling her lungs. Her worries fled like gamblers from a police whistle. She fell on him, her chest balanced on his as he carried her weight, dragging her first this way then that until she reached up and smoothed his hair, then ran her hand lovingly down his neck, caressing his chest. Then he pulled her close again, twisting her around and bending her back until her bob brushed the floor and she looked up to the stars sparkling in the ceiling. Then he reeled her back into his arms for a final embrace, their lips brushing each other with heat but going no farther.

  The tango was a dance of absolute trust. It couldn’t be faked. The couple lost track of the audience during these interludes: they were performing something very private in public. Often, during their routine, a female spectator fainted, requiring smelling salts to revive. And, if Phil left her side afterward, a line of men formed to dance with Thelma.

  Thelma loved Phil for those thirty-six hours a week, and their affection buoyed her for all the time that separated them when he went back to Wyona Street and she returned to her room at the back of Montauk Avenue, a formal portrait of the pair entwined at the Roseland on her nightstand. Over the summer, they attended the Rialto in Manhattan to see if this new thing, air-conditioning, really worked. It did! And she even had to bring a sweater in mid-August to avoid gooseflesh. It was delicious. It was the future. That fall, they queued for hours to gain entrance to the opening night of the Kinema on Pitkin Avenue and Berriman, a five-minute walk from her house.

  Those were relatively carefree times, and they floated along on the liberating spirit of the ’20s as the weight of their parents’ immigrant struggles began to lift from their shoulders. They were Americans. The war was over. The Germans were defeated and they were on the winning side. Even as months passed and they became confident their love was mutual, they avoided discussing marriage. Like saving money, that was for suckers, too. They’d witnessed plenty of relatives standing under the chuppah. They knew children arrived shortly thereafter and raising kids was work—and that it wasn’t for them. Not now, not while they were having so much fun. Maybe someday they’d wed and have “their little schmuck,” but they seemed content to be Thelma and Phil: partners in life and dance.

  In truth, the logistics had been more complicated. Thelma wasn’t entirely lighthearted about the arrangement. She had misgivings about Phil’s commitment when he arrived quiet and distant or disappeared for weeks at a time, only to return as happy to see her as ever with no explanation for his absence. These occurrences fed into her doubts about being good enough for him, but she kept them to herself, letting him lead on and off the dance floor. She would have happily escaped Montauk Avenue and Annie with a clenched-fist send-off. However, Philip was more reticent, seeming to appreciate their limited time Wednesdays and weekends to bear the rest: selling ties by day on Pitkin Avenue, moving from one unsatisfying job to the next, nurturing his mother, Mildred, and his younger sister, Pearl.

  He didn’t talk much about life on Wyona Street, but gradually Thelma culled the essentials: his father, the landlord, stayed in an apartment near his office on 79 Fifth Avenue, spitting distance from the newsstand. This rejection tore the Schwartzes apart: on one hand, mother and children had financial security in a brick house the Rumanian immigrant had owned since 1904; on the other, they’d been discarded by their father the macher, who’d seemingly paid his way out of family obligations with his American financial success.

  On Friday nights, Solomon Schwartz punctually returned home for roast chicken, delivering the strict household budget with all its conditions and demanding that expenses be recorded in a leather-bound ledger kept in the sideboard beside the good silver. He expected the family, including older brother Herman and younger Samuel, to preserve the fiction that he’d been home all week. He demanded to be treated like the pillar of respectability who deserved obedience he presented to the public. The lie of this situation, and Mrs. Schwartz’s howling sense of betrayal, brought Phil’s despairing
mother to the edge of hysteria that had her fingering the carving knife at the Shabbat table. Her outbursts appeared to justify the father’s contention that he couldn’t live under the same roof with his crazy wife, and he was being merciful not to have her committed.

  Born in Rumania and wed to Solomon before they had Herman and emigrated, Mildred, called Minnie, was a passionate woman—and they didn’t have a single set of dishes that wasn’t missing a plate she’d smashed in anger on the kitchen floor or tossed at her husband’s head. According to Phil, he felt obligated to play peacekeeper once his older brother Herman got married, taking Samuel to live with him and his wife. Phil remained on Wyona Street, becoming the partner his mother so desperately needed. She was a woman who lived for family, and her husband’s absence was a sharp rebuke to her skills as wife and mother. Because she often became agitated, one minute weeping about the loss of her spouse and then raging at his villainy, at first tearing her clothes and then cooking elaborate cakes to woo him back that went uneaten, Phil worried that if Thelma joined the family, his divided loyalties might send his mother over the edge.

  The one thing Phil’s combative parents could agree on was that Thelma, the Galician gangster trash, wasn’t good enough for their intellectual son. With his looks and money, any mediocre matchmaker could find him a better bride—but they hadn’t convinced Phil. Unlike his father, he was a romantic to his core. Once he’d fallen for Thelma at the glove store, even before the magic legs walked around the counter, that emotion only increased in intensity with the passage of time.

  The couple was in no rush to settle down among one familial hornet’s nest or the other. Meanwhile, Abie set up shop in a basement flat on Marcy Avenue in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. Not far from Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Abie’s scantily lit subterranean apartment doubled as a social club. It featured a cramped bedroom, a kitchen that doubled as an office, a rectangular living room with a bar and three round card tables—and a back door for quick escapes, always necessary in Abie’s world. He’d spent his time recuperating wisely, planning a hangout where Brooklyn boys and Manhattan mugs could meet away from glaring eyes, where the Irish cops he’d known for years could be bribed and he could anchor himself at the center of a net of enterprises while still siphoning money from the newsstand and ongoing rackets. He called it the Williamsburg Boys Club.

  Abie granted Thelma a key to Marcy Avenue for emergencies, saying he owed her. She hesitated, but occasionally she and Phil sought privacy in the late afternoon when the business that had no official office hours was more or less shut. Despite its dankness, the flat provided them the luxury of sharing the single bed where Abie slept. Even now, as they twisted around each other in the twilight of the darkened room on sheets that had likely not been washed since they were new, they felt as if they were resting on satin, just because they were alone together. She reclined on her back as he stroked the curls from her forehead, discovering that if he softly scratched her scalp, her entire body relaxed into a puddle where there was no future or past, just the security of his touch until she dropped off to sleep.

  Thelma awoke to a strangling sound. In the murk, she recognized Phil hunched against the wall, his legs tucked up, his arms crossed over his knees. He was so vulnerable in his underwear without the armor of suit and tie and hat. She realized that the horrible sound had come from Phil. He was weeping and struggling against it, hiding his head in his arms. She’d never seen a man cry before, and her shattered heart cried out to console him as she had so often wanted comfort alone in the dark. She felt a level of tenderness, raw and powerful, that she’d never experienced before.

  She knelt across the mattress, reaching a hand to his face. He batted it away. She flinched. She watched his face as it moved uncontrollably, collapsing, shifting like he could no longer rule his jaw, his lips, or his chin, as if there were a stranger strangling the sensitive man she loved and thought she knew. She didn’t know what scrape to kiss to make it better.

  “Can you hear it rattling?” he asked.

  “What are you talking about, Phil? You’re scaring me.”

  “The glass,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I can’t go on. My head is cracking. I’m a shell and inside there’s broken glass. I can hear it rattling.”

  Despite her fear, she crawled closer. “I can’t hear any rattling.”

  “Are you saying I’m a liar?” He slithered away. “I’m broken.”

  “We’re all broken,” she said. “Look at me.”

  He tried to collect himself, gulping, his eyes looking wildly at her face, over her shoulder, up at the ceiling. “I’m broken and I can’t be fixed. I want to die. Let me go.”

  “If you go, I go. And I’m not going anywhere.” A powerful love expanded inside her and expressed itself as compassion for his broken bits that cut her heart and the beautiful suffering, the black hair falling loose over his broad forehead. This was intimacy like she’d never known before. There was no boundary between them, no tallying of the ways she was unworthy. He was naked to her, a spinning, frightened man not so different from herself. She would find out the why but not today, when he needed comfort, when he needed to be soothed and carried back to the living. She had the strength to hold him together. She had nursed Abie back to life. She had the will to put the pieces of Phil back together. Nothing was broken forever.

  She curved her arm around his broad shoulders knotted with tension, feeling the warmth that she refused to let leave that beautiful body. Death wouldn’t steal him from her. She would find a way. She must find a way. She pulled him close, settling his head in her lap as she pressed her spine against the wall, rocking him gently, rubbing his neck, stroking the thick eyebrows until he closed his eyelids and the tears flowed without a struggle. The room darkened. She sat with him, realizing the darkness inside her was not singular, something of which she should be ashamed. His sadness was transitory. She wouldn’t let it drag them both down. She would scratch her way out of the grave to dance with him again, to walk the boardwalk in their Sunday shoes. She would escort him into the light. Tomorrow would be different.

  Phil was breathing heavily as Thelma worried, wiping her own eyes now that he slept. She heard the front door unlock followed by the heavy footsteps of a stranger crossing the living room, dropping his coat, opening a bottle, and whistling the song “Bye Bye Blackbird.”

  Thelma nudged Phil awake, whispering, “We’ve got to go.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Marcy Avenue.”

  “Did I fall asleep?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m so, so sorry, Temmy.”

  “I know you are.”

  “I didn’t want it to end like this.”

  “Shh, sweetheart,” she said, fearing the contagion of his panic, “nothing ended.”

  “I love you.”

  “Me, too, but we have to scram now.”

  “You won’t leave me?”

  “I’ll never leave you.”

  “You should leave me. Run, now, while you still can.”

  “I’m not going anywhere except out that door before all the gorillas arrive. Someone just let themselves in and I can tell by the heavy footsteps it’s not Abie. Now, please, Phil: get dressed.”

  They rushed in the dark, standing separately, their backs to each other. While he knotted his tie, she made the bed, thinking it was a wasted effort in this dump. She tried not to contemplate who had lain in the bed before them and what might happen there tonight. She heard the man in the other room shove the swinging door into the kitchen and the tap turn on. “Now, Phil, let’s go now.”

  Chapter 26

  1926

  After leading Phil from Abie’s apartment, Thelma became confused. The neighborhood’s Italian women were weeping openly on Marcy Avenue, old and young hanging on to each other’s sleeves, wailing. Mourning hung in the air like ashes, smudging anyone in the vicinity. Thelma stopped one lady after the other, asking, “What happened?” Had the Gr
eat War to end all wars failed and another started? Had the typhoid returned? On the corner, an excited newsboy hawked her answer: “Rudolph Valentino, Movie Sheik, Dies.”

  She flushed. “That can’t be true, Phil, can it?”

  He shrugged, still distant. “What’s truth?”

  Thelma pulled him along like a child with one hand while digging three pennies from the dust and gum wrappers at her pocketbook’s bottom. She bought the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, reading the subhead aloud:

  Screen star, operated on for appendicitis and gastric ulcers, had made heroic struggle toward recovery until pleurisy assailed him and toxic poisons spread. Last English words to doctor expressed hope to fish with him next week.

  She looked up at Phil, who still hadn’t registered the news but resembled the saddest living Valentino in Brooklyn. “He was only thirty-one, Phil. How could he die?” And, yet, there it was in black and white, a publicity photo of the Latin lover in profile under the caption “Movie Star Dead.” Those three words united her, the neighborhood movie widows, and fans across America all the way to his paramour Pola Negri’s Beverly Hills mansion, where she was undoubtedly weeping, too, only in ermine and silk.

  Valentino had reached his virile peak, riding the comeback wave with The Son of the Sheik. And yet, in the photograph, Thelma recognized the actor’s melancholy as he stared into a future that would never unfold. Glancing at Phil’s profile, she saw an identical dismay. Underlying her shock lurked her intuition that if Valentino could die so young, so could Phil.