Bittersweet Brooklyn: A Novel Read online

  Annie peered at the lighter as if it were a weapon, rolling it around in her fingers, perhaps considering the crime and punishment before saying, “Fire isn’t a toy.”

  Thelma nodded in agreement, although she wanted to respond So give me toys. But she sensed how dangerous this moment was, riskier than fire. She felt an emotion that she would come to recognize as betrayal, when it was one’s family administering the pain and not a stranger, a kid on the street, a schoolteacher shaming you in front of the whole class for filthy fingernails.

  “Do you want to touch the flame, silly girl?” Annie flicked the trigger with her thumb. She did what Thelma had been unable to do—summon fire from the lighter’s mouth, letting the oily butane smell waft into the room of a thousand leftover kitchen odors, the cabbage and the liver, the stew of unknown parts. “We warned you, but you knew better. You wouldn’t listen. You wouldn’t mind.”

  “I’ll mind. I’m a good girl.” Even that simple truth felt like a bad, livery taste in Thelma’s mouth as she tried to avoid Annie’s eyes. It smacked of a lie. Lying was bad. She was bad.

  Annie now shook her head. “With this foolish game, you’ll burn to death. The flame will catch your skirt, your sleeve, your curls, your eyelashes. It will swallow your arms and legs and toes. You’ll crisp like chicken skin. And all that will remain is a pile of ashes and a handful of teeth that I will have to sweep up. So I am going to teach you a lesson about fire today so that I never have to teach you again.”

  “Please, Annie, please, no.” Thelma wiggled her hips and pulled at her hand to get it back. The sound of a handball bouncing against the courtyard wall could be heard, and the screams of ordinary children playing.

  Annie gripped Thelma’s right hand tighter as the little girl strained, folding the fingers down in a fist and covering them, leaving only the pink thumb unable to run for cover, held aloft as Annie clicked the lighter. Then she depressed the trigger, leaving the flame on. “This is what happens to little girls who play with fire,” she said, holding the fire beneath her sister’s thumb but still only threatening, leaving an inch so that Thelma could feel the heat but not the burn.

  The butane smell filled Thelma’s nostrils. She was angry at Uncle Schmulie for introducing the game, for showing her the lighter, for befriending her and then abandoning her to this witch. She felt the increasing warmth on her thumb but couldn’t detach herself. She felt absolutely alone. It was loneliness like hunger that couldn’t be solved in the belly with bread and jam. Annie clearly didn’t want her, not there in the kitchen, not anywhere. Annie, her enemy, had taken play, a harmless game, and turned it into this. Thelma had to pee, to escape from the butane and the smell of Annie’s floral perfume that masked her sweat and woman’s smells.

  “This is what fire does,” Annie said, letting the flame lick the surface of her sister’s thumb. There was a moment of shock where the child felt nothing. Then pain arrived, her own skin crying out in agony to her stunned mind. The girl’s eyes teared as much as she struggled against crying before Annie.

  Thelma’s knees buckled. “Please. No.”

  It smelled like cooked meat. Thelma feared she would combust, becoming ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Her scorched thumb throbbed. She flinched, but Annie pinched her between her thighs, continuing her work, teaching her horrible lesson.

  Alarmed that she was melting, Thelma worried she would lose the thumb and then the hand. Meanwhile, the warmth and shame of the liquid soaking her underwear and flowing down her bare leg became one more crime. But Annie was apparently not yet aware of that (or the possibility that the pee flowed dangerously close to her good shoes). She said, “Fire is dangerous. Lighters are not toys, Thelma”—the name again, the hated name—“this is what it’s like to be burned. This is the pain. I need to teach you so you don’t hurt yourself.”

  Let me hurt myself, because I would never hold a match to my finger. Where was her mother that she couldn’t hear her daughter’s screams? Where was her father looking down from heaven’s fluffy clouds, refusing to send down lightning to strike this villain? Where was Schmulie to grab the lighter and spank her as was the proper punishment?

  The harsh physical pain only increased with time, but the sense of being scrawny small in the world, unloved and unlovable, was a deeper and longer-lasting wound for which there was no salve.

  A new smell wafted into the room: burning paper. Briefly, the little girl wondered if that was what she was—a paper doll that would soon catch fire and disappear.

  Her brother Abraham emerged from the room she shared with her sister and mother. The eleven-year-old stood, legs spread, as if he were Harry Houdini with a trick up one sleeve and down the other. Abie refused to cower in the shadows with his head down and his shoulders rounded, like so many other Jewish men and boys. The world was his ghetto. He never shuffled except when he played cards. He had a spring in his step and a chin that jutted forward. No one decided for him. He lived in Papa’s vacuum. His response to those who disliked or disrespected him was schmuck. It was his favorite Yiddish word in a language that contained more bendy terms for shaming and cursing than the Eskimos had for snow.

  Schmuck was the first word Abie had taught Thelma. It took half a day. What a beautiful, defiant word that filled every curve and cranny of her mouth. He roared with laughter when he deployed his sister on Mama, his hands launching her forward. Afterward he comforted her through the slap and inevitable mouth soaping. Later, he led Thelma to the corner candy store, where he had a line of credit for unnamed services rendered, and bought her a paper sack of lemon drops. When she offered him a candy, he refused, saying, “Don’t share. You earned that whole bag.”

  Now, when Thelma saw her brother through her tears beyond Annie, the air returned to her lungs. He raised a flaming dollar bill in his right hand.

  Annie swiveled her neck, turning from her torture, indignant at the interruption. “What are you doing, meshugener kop, burning your money? Are you crazy?”

  “I’m not that crazy!” Abie replied. “I’m burning your money. Why are you burning the baby?”

  There was love in his voice, a treble that had yet to change despite the recent appearance of a wispy mustache.

  Annie dropped her grip on the girl’s arm while still keeping her sister captive between her thighs. “Where did you get that?” she shrieked.

  “You think you can hide anything from me, sistah?” Abie asked, employing the term a newsboy might use on a street-corner mark. This sister was no term of endearment. It was not baby. He dropped the flaming bill on the floor when the fire singed his fingertips. He stamped it out on the linoleum, leaving a smudge. Then he removed a second crumpled bill from his pocket and lit it. “I’m burning your cash.”

  In the shock that followed, Annie relaxed her legs. Thelma kicked her shin. The larger girl pushed the child backward and rose, slipping in piss. She didn’t pause. A head taller than her little brother, she still outclassed him in weight and reach, but she stopped when she saw smoke escaping the bedroom she shared with her mother and sister.

  Annie rushed past Abraham, hissing, “You delinquent.”

  Abraham had set fire to Annie’s underwear drawer, where she stashed all her secret things, including the silk-satin brassiere for which she’d slaved and had hidden from Mama beneath the cottons. She screamed; the geschrei summoned the neighbors. Thelma flew to Abie, wrapping herself around his leg, as close as red paint on a barber’s pole. He examined her thumb and kissed it, but they lacked time for a reunion. Disentangling his little sister, he leaped to the kitchen window and slammed it up. He turned, blew a kiss, and then shot out onto the fire escape. Thelma vowed that when she had kids of her own, she would love the child like she loved Abie, unconditionally.

  Chapter 3

  Three hours after Abie dashed out the Jungers’ window onto the fire escape, his mother returned to 106th Street from her twelve-hour shift at the Ansonia Hotel laundry. They say that in hard times some women lose their ap
petites, others their capacity to nurture: the latter was Rebecca Lorber née Minzer.

  Gazing down, she saw a stranger’s hands, gnarled and old, her red fingers stiffened by starch. Crossing the alley to the service entrance, she kicked aside a stray cat nosing in a garbage pile. Her arms dragged like two overstuffed suitcases. Her advice to landsmen fleeing Eastern Europe: “Pack light.” The fellow emigrant would end up carrying the world’s weight on top of the featherbed and silver. Better to cast off those possessions early and keep the old world alive in your heart.

  Born into an extended clan in the trading hub of Galicia’s Drohobych, where the Tysmenytsia River met the Seret, the widow Lorber plodded the Manhattan streets as if invisible. Nobody here recognized that, of all her sisters, she most resembled her mother. Her close-set blue eyes appraised the world from a round face above flaring nostrils in a thick root of a nose.

  Standing five feet and a pinch, Rebecca had swollen ankles that ached from an entire shift standing. After a day scrubbing white linen stained with shit, blood, and wine, and then working the industrial steam iron with a foot pedal, she didn’t want to touch or be touched. A hug was as good as a blow. Rebecca didn’t recognize this crotchety old donkey she’d become. She’d nothing but trouble to anticipate going forward, and looking back was no picnic.

  At thirty-one, Rebecca felt herself an old woman, even though it seemed so recently that she had curls in her hair, fire in her cheeks, and the gall to yell at her children herself. She’d borne five children, four still living, and been pregnant eight times. She’d lost an infant late in a pregnancy as her husband, Jonas, began to succumb to the slow death of tuberculosis, the plague of Norfolk Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The girl was almost fully formed. Rebecca had let herself get fully attached, and she couldn’t escape the mourning, particularly to welcome Thelma within a year, as if a baby for a baby could wrap up sorrow. How could a dying man manage that? But somehow he had the energy for sex that he couldn’t summon for work. After Thelma arrived, Rebecca felt betrayed by both husband and child. The weak-chinned Jonas had hardly stuck around to see the girl’s first hairs. He’d hidden in final prayers, salvaging his eternal soul while leaving his wife carrying around that saggy torn sack of a uterus and no prospects, no safety net.

  In that hopeless state of mind—with Jonas buried in a distant pauper’s grave in Mount Zion Cemetery, alone with two sons and two daughters—she cracked for the first time. She couldn’t make herself get out of bed. Rebecca’s worst nightmare had occurred: she’d become a betteljuden, a begging Jew, those impoverished souls she’d condemned in Galicia, always assuming laziness, not a series of misfortunes, had left them penniless.

  She didn’t know how to be an individual in the new world. Annie’s strength and toughness, despite being only eleven, pulled her through the darkest days. Rebecca had passed Thelma to her oldest daughter. She never tickled or touched the baby. She couldn’t bear the child’s crying when she herself buckled in pain. Rebecca called it grief for Jonas, but that was just a black felt bag to shove her woes in: she missed having a husband to take care of what the external world demanded of a citizen. In her eyes, he became a martyr who’d never done anybody a wrong, but did she really miss him? That was less clear. His absence from her bed was a relief. No more of the monthly terror: will the blood come or not. She believed that if she became pregnant again, she’d die, ripped from the inside out. No child was worth that. And yet there was Annie: through her daughter’s strength, Rebecca survived that period, creating a bond between them that spared no room for the baby or her brothers.

  Now Rebecca relied on the United Hebrew Charities to pay the rent. She was deeply ashamed. She lacked control, sharing a room with her daughters, another woman patrolling the kitchen, a padlock on the icebox. She’d often spent her day off fighting long lines at the aid office. She lived in fear of home visits and losing the very little independence that she had, or her children.

  Once she’d been proud, surrounded by family that seemed only to exist in memory like an embroidered folktale. She’d never had to face abuse alone, even if it came from her father, who treated all his girls as if they were farm animals to be bred and sold. All he loved was that weakling son. Let them both have each other and swallow the spit in the soup from the many daughters.

  As the widow lifted one heavy foot over the other on the stairs, the apartment’s back door banged open. She almost fell backward, reaching out to clutch the banister with a chapped hand that cried in pain at the touch. Above, the landlady appeared like Moses with his stone tablets. She stomped onto the landing, a yellow thread of a woman with brown bug eyes. She seethed down at the boarder, sniffing at the smell of work sweat that rose with that of the garbage below.

  Rebecca felt humiliated even before she heard the latest outrage, an old donkey steadying herself for another whipping. She hoped this would be the last, her legs almost folding beneath her. She recognized that sharp tone, the entitled way that her mother had addressed servants, poor relations who’d overstayed their welcome in the barn, beggars who’d arrived at the back door on a black mood day. What a ridiculous notion that all Jews would stick together, German and Hungarian, Russian and Rumanian, assimilated Americans who worked on Saturdays and wore pinstripes. The landlady didn’t know Rebecca’s father or her mother, her grandfathers, the great Torah scholar who had been her father-in-law. How could she know Rebecca without knowing her family? Instead, Rebecca was some kind of savage, a necessary evil to pay the rent, a charity case to demonstrate a generosity Mrs. Junger lacked.

  Mixing German and English in a harsh tongue Rebecca hardly understood, Mrs. Junger raised her right hand and yelled, “Take those demons and go, you good-for-nothing Galizianer. This is how you repay my hospitality? I open my home to your Wildfang, your Wolfsjunge, and your boys burn it down. Dogs, I’d rather rent to mongrels.”

  “What now?” Rebecca asked, huffing up the final steps, shoulders dropping lower in anticipation of a beating despite the awareness that it would be verbal, not physical. She couldn’t imagine how this foul day could worsen. Pushing past the landlady into the kitchen, Rebecca was immediately surrounded by the other boarders rushing to the kitchen to witness the fireworks. Her gorge rose in reaction to the public dressing-down, and yet she knew enough to bite her tongue and take her punishment.

  She longed to stretch out on her bed without even washing away the shvits pooling like syrup beneath heavy breasts. She shut her eyes, wanting to be a cow in a field of her homeland lying in the high grass, the smell of mown hay, a boy’s hand up her skirt when all of that was still a mystery and not a leaky pipe, all plumbing, no pleasure.

  Mrs. Junger pointed at the door. “The street!”

  Although they were not friends, the women weren’t complete strangers, living as they did together in the thin-walled apartment. They both knew Rebecca’s biggest fear: homelessness. In Galicia, the government exiled the penniless to remote precincts. The Jewish elders, on instructions from the Christian magistrates, sent the betteljuden to labor in distant fields, because the poor lacked the coin to pay the candle tax on Jews, a sum for every wick lit in the ritual prayers or on holidays.

  Her youngest, Thelma, waited in the kitchen, demanding attention. The red-faced girl grabbed her mother’s skirt, thrusting her thumb up for inspection. The child cried anew, unable to explain through the tears and snot what had happened and why she was waving her hand so urgently at her mother.

  Rebecca saw the child in her peripheral vision, hopping from foot to foot, but only wished for her to stifle herself and stop the tsuris. Embattled, impoverished, Rebecca had nothing left for her. Thelma’s cloying closeness, the heat, Mrs. Junger’s insistence that the Lorbers pack and leave immediately, shut Rebecca down. Her head began to throb; her swollen legs bent beneath her. She reached for a chair. It collapsed, splintering under her deadweight. A smoky black cloud swirled inside her mind. She could neither see nor hear.

  In that
darkness, Rebecca felt suddenly weightless, as if she’d returned to the bed shared with her sisters in their thick-walled home with many rooms. There, she’d fit like the scent of fresh, eggy buns in the oven. When she awoke from her faint, stretched out on the featherbed that she had stitched as part of her dowry, she thought she saw her older sister Fanny leaning close. But, no, it was her eldest, her survivor.

  A burned smell made the air in the windowless room almost unbreathable. When Rebecca coughed, Annie offered her mother a tumbler. Forced by Annie, Rebecca sputtered the warm water down her chest as if she were a baby. She didn’t want to drink. She didn’t want food. She didn’t want anything but quiet, the peace of the grave. She whispered, “Enough.”

  “Drink some more, Mamaleh.”

  “Enough! I’m done.”

  “You just had a shock, your blood pressure . . .”

  “I can’t wash another sheet. I can’t raise children on my own. This is my last breath.”

  Annie removed the rag from her mother’s forehead and dipped it in a bowl. She wrung out the excess, then replaced it. Rebecca shut her eyes. Her head throbbed. She could hear a thrumming in her ears and a banging on the door, low to the ground, and Thelma’s cry of “Mama, Mama, let me in.”

  Rebecca opened her eyes. “I can’t.”

  Annie shrugged. “So don’t.”

  From outside, again, “Mama, Mama, let me in.” Ignoring the cry, Rebecca noticed the bureau drawers were ajar. Scorched linen piled high atop the chest. Hanging from a wooden knob, part of a strange blush satin undergarment stippled with burns. She looked back at Annie, whose face neared her own as the girl shifted the wet cloth and held her mother’s hand.