Bittersweet Brooklyn: A Novel Read online

  By then, Abraham and Louis had been gainfully employed as newsboys, shouting the daily headlines until their voices rasped, yelling at the Manhattan crowds where Fourteenth Street crossed Fifth Avenue. Jesse had leased the newsstand, a narrow green shack with room for one on prime real estate. His bride did the books for the family business.

  At night, the brothers returned to Hooper Street, sharing stories from the world beyond the neighborhood. They both read the paper from front page to sports, starting at dawn when piles of papers landed heavily, tossed down from a horse-drawn wagon beside the green kiosk—and stolen by rivals if they hadn’t arrived to stack and sort them. In 1915, the Germans bombed the British. The Allies—take that!—landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula pressing for Constantinople. Up in Inwood, female inmates at the Magdalen Home for Wayward Girls on 191st Street rioted. They tossed plates and broke windows, Abraham cheering them on. Despite ten arrests, the cost of their struggle may or may not have embodied President Wilson’s idea when he stated that he valued a setback on the road to a just cause over a victory. Abraham preferred local crime stories, like the Magdalens, while Louis scrutinized world politics. The younger brother felt the call to war, waiting only for armed conflict to get close enough to sweep him up and out of the house.

  During that time, Thelma’s best friends were Italian girls from the neighborhood clustered around Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church: Nina, Paola, and Maria or, as Abraham called them, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. They became the soul sisters lacking at home. Their news was not the kind that made the papers. Maria’s father fell off a ladder and broke his neck. What was he doing on that ladder on a Saturday night anyway? wondered her aggravated and now-widowed mother. Nina’s little brother drowned in a rain barrel. Paola had her first tongue kiss, with an altar-boy cousin in the sacristy. She described it to the rest of the girls, down to the salty taste of spit like anchovies, and the smell of sex that seemed to her like frankincense and myrrh—an odor completely alien to Thelma.

  At home, the thirteen-year-old idolized Uncle Moe, although he was no big macher, simply a craftsman carrying his salami sandwich in a metal pail to the jewelers’ each morning. To her, even so young, he was a steadying influence. He rarely raised his voice and, then, only in the most extreme circumstances. He had simple tastes, relishing the sweet foods of his Austro-Hungarian childhood, the sugary lokshen kugel dotted with raisins, which she liked, too, and the gefilte fish, which she spat out and refused to chase with that vile magenta horseradish.

  When Moritz returned home at dusk, Thelma ran to him. It was as if he had returned from the Alaskan wilderness, a pickax on his back rather than a lunch box in his hand. She’d fling her arms around his waist and bury her forehead above his belt buckle. The world seemed lighter when he was around. His pale goldsmith’s hand on hers kept Thelma from disappearing into that invisibility that seemed to envelop her. She imagined that this was what it was like to have a father, someone who liked you best in the world, even better than your siblings, even more than your mother. Her needs were so large they were bigger than her field of vision. She was the only child who hadn’t known their real father, had no memory of his voice or touch, the scratch of his beard, of his authority over them, of what he expected from his children.

  She’d learned not to mention her father’s name, Jonas, which meant “gift from God,” a present she’d never shared. Annie filled that gaping hole in the family where their father had been with blame, linking Thelma’s arrival with Papa’s departure, as if the two things were connected in a puzzle that the youngest couldn’t solve.

  And so Thelma attached herself to Uncle Moe. Making him comfortable became her pleasure. The rewards had been a simple intimacy: he twirled her curls, stroked her cheek that others had been so quick to pinch. She’d plump sofa cushions, urging him to take his comfy corner of the couch while she retrieved his worn blue-leather slippers from their hiding place below. She knew he liked baseball and klezmer music, particularly the clarinet. On a Saturday night after Shabbos, he liked a bottle of beer and a cuddle, narrating folktales about a mischievous child who happened to share his name while Mama cleared the dishes and retreated to her room, easing her swollen ankles.

  With Mama gone, a shoeless Thelma knelt beside Moritz on the couch, brushing his rhapsodic black curls that crested over his forehead. He submitted to her attentions with a doll’s patience, sighing with apparent pleasure. Then he would pull a small comb from his pocket and let her groom the lavish mustache that ran from beneath his wide nose and joined up with muttonchops on the side. Afterward, he would gaze at Thelma with topaz eyes, which had already begun to squint from the close work of twisting fine platinum into diamond rings. She basked in the gentle kindness, only turning away to nestle deeper into the crook of his arm and snuggle into his neck.

  They’d been dancing together since her seventh birthday. She’d held his hand walking to the synagogue when Annie had wed Jesse and hidden in his arms when Annie gave birth first to Julius (named after Jonas) and then baby Adele, the blonde bubble.

  Thelma had never understood how Annie could envelop these new arrivals with such maternal affection after the horrors she’d experienced as a child under her sister’s brutal care. The unfairness had rankled her as this new generation filled the apartment with their screams and hungers, shoving Thelma farther down the food chain. When Annie demanded more room so her kids could sleep in peace, Mama had relegated Thelma to a bed made of two kitchen chairs pushed together and covered in a sheet. She kept her clothes nearby in a kitchen drawer beside a rotary eggbeater.

  At night, the saving grace was that both Mama and Annie slept soundly, immobile until the morning once their heads, set with curling rags, compressed their pillows. In the kitchen, Thelma, having tossed and turned, her legs dangling through the back of one chair, her arms outstretched and wrapped around the back of the other, would rise, drawn to male voices in the living room. She wanted to join their circle. She’d wander as far as the doorway, dragging a moth-eaten blanket, announcing, “I can’t sleep,” to the assembled men, insomniacs all.

  “Go to bed,” Jesse would say, playing the responsible father who brooked no dissent.

  “Go to chair,” Abraham said, lowering his voice, mimicking Jesse.

  “Go to hell,” Thelma would say, as Abie had taught her, and they muffled their laughter so as not to awaken the gorgons and babes. Uncle Moe would pat the couch beside him where he sat scanning the Yiddish paper with the ripped cover that the boys had retrieved from the newsstand.

  Thelma became part of the insomniac conspiracy . . . and then something more. As the night wore on, one by one, the males would disappear. Jesse crept away to join Annie, clicking their door behind him, succeeded by the squeal and release of the box springs under the expanding husband’s weight. One settled, Thelma thought as she tucked herself deeper into the crook of Uncle Moe’s arm. The thirteen-year-old nestled within his body’s musty cave so that she smelled the workday’s sharp sweat and smoky pipe tobacco, her head resting on his shoulder. Increasingly impatient, she would watch the Mint rise, cracking his back and neck with sounds like bones snapping in a noose.

  Shortly thereafter, as the streets beyond the curtains calmed, the hollow hoofbeats of a workhorse retreating, she swallowed her impatience as she waited for Abraham to smoke, then squash his last cigarette. The young men left last, Abraham often poking the sleeping Louis to urge him toward their bed for the few hours before 3:00 a.m., when the brothers, now twenty-one and nearly nineteen, had to rise to return to Union Square.

  Uncle Moe remained with his left elbow on the armrest, but she could feel his right arm’s power as he’d squeeze her tighter. He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes with his left hand, setting the gold-rimmed specs on the side table as if preparing for sleep. That was when their game began. Thelma inquired whether she could remain on the couch beside Moritz, where it was soft and comfortable and she could sleep. Was that too much to ask
? He agreed it was an insult, banishing a daughter to the meanness of two kitchen chairs shoved together as if they were a bed and not a penalty.

  Moritz and Thelma began each night in concord: she’d done nothing wrong to deserve such mistreatment, and, he sympathized, it was unfair. What followed in the midnight quiet, punctuated by a cough from beyond the bedroom doors, or the flip and flop of unsound sleep, was an unspoken union against Mama, an old crone who fed their bellies but remained blind to their inner lights.

  After a few minutes, Moritz would sigh with what sounded to Thelma like satisfaction, as if shedding the day’s adult responsibilities. His voice would soften to a whisper and deepen as Moritz narrated the folktales he’d heard as a boy, mixing English with Yiddish. To Thelma, he seemed a gentle man who loved children but was forced to marry a barren witch. He described remote villages where geese and cows wandered packed-earth roads beside fields of sunflowers. In the old country, he explained, men married girls of thirteen—twelve, even. She interpreted this as a preference for her over her mother.

  An intense tenderness filled her as she listened to his soft, accented speech. His eyes unfocused, he would praise Thelma’s graceful body, her spirit, her dancing. His reassurance eased her anxiety that she was inferior: skinny, good-for-nothing, and foul tempered.

  Some nights, Moritz asked Thelma to scratch his back, hiking up his shirt and exhaling deeply at her touch. And, afterward, it was only fair he would scratch her back beneath her nightshirt. And this was where it began.

  Thelma cast aside the thought that what they were doing, whatever it was, betrayed Mama’s trust. She was too far down the road, too close to the man, and she couldn’t keep her hand from rising to his cheek, gently, tentatively, tugging the woolly mustache. Down swooped his lips, covering her mouth until she could hardly breathe, the spit tasting of smoke and herring. His tongue pushed past her teeth, the snail seeking its shell. It frightened her. And it excited her, too, because it seemed to be the only real thing that happened to her, an unexpected portal to the adult world toward which she was rushing.

  When Moritz’s fingers migrated from Thelma’s back to her bottom and snaked in between her thin thighs, an alarm sounded. But she was torn: so grateful was she for his attention that she was willing to give him anything he asked. She convinced herself that by each pat of his, each stroke, he was reciprocating her affection.

  Despite the possibility that, at any time, someone might enter, seeking matches for a final cigarette, sneaking a sandwich, Thelma couldn’t resist the man’s gentleness as he pulled her onto his lap. Terrified or intrigued—she couldn’t tell the difference as her heart raced. And then she was lost. It was not one night but many. She would fall asleep, turning toward Uncle Moe as if they were a couple, and awaken as he took her hand. She hoped for affection, wordless tenderness, only to have him guide her fingers to the rod between his legs, teaching her to stroke until he gasped and fell immediately asleep, leaving her with a disturbing gooey handful. She would wipe her messy fingers on her nightshirt, but long hours passed before she fell asleep again.

  Many months later, Thelma awoke to Annie screaming, standing at her bedroom door. In her arms, the infant amplified her mother’s cry. Thelma had been dreaming that she held on to a stick to defend herself from the disapproving glares of her mother and sister, who were like ghosts surrounded by other women who resembled them but whom she didn’t recognize. She knew from their faces that she’d disappointed. She was late, or in the wrong place. She had broken something, or was broken herself. She became aware that she was in the curve of Moritz’s arm, like a pussycat, or a stuffed toy, or a woman.

  As Annie shrieked for Jesse and the children joined in a chorus that roused everybody else, Thelma realized that Uncle Moe was seminaked. Her hand rested on his pickle, which was doing what it did in the morning—popping up with the sun. Her first thought was that he loved her more than anybody else, more than Mama, or Annie, or those brats.

  Thelma’s second thought shriveled as Moritz picked her off him like lint. Rising, he rushed to the bathroom with an uneven gait, abandoning the adolescent to Annie’s rage.

  Annie’s face flushed red at the edges of her white cold cream, already streaked with tears. “Get up, you floozy!”

  Thelma, crusty eyed, recoiled at Annie’s curled-lip look of disgust. Had her nightmare continued? Awake or asleep, she cringed, still careful not to rub her sticky hands on the upholstery.

  Handing Jesse the baby, Annie pounced on Thelma. She slapped her, hard, with follow-through, a pause, and then a backhanded, knuckled fist. As her head snapped back, Thelma realized she wasn’t dreaming. She cried out, “Moritz!”

  “Shut your mouth,” said Annie. “Don’t speak his name.”

  Annie grabbed Thelma by the collar, lifting her off the couch and into the air, bare feet dangling and juice dribbling down her thigh. Annie shook the girl with two hands, violently. Between flashes of light and dark, Thelma wondered, why hadn’t Uncle Moe come out of the bathroom? Why had he abandoned her?

  Meanwhile, Annie jerked the child’s stinging face close, flush with her own. The closeness terrified Thelma, the hate-filled eyes, the anger that radiated heat. But it was Annie’s words that seared: “You sick, twisted, filthy little husband thief. We should throw you out with the garbage. What do you think you’re doing with Mama’s man?”

  Thelma tried to raise her chin in defiance. “He loves me.”

  Annie snorted. She looked to Jesse, who laughed outright.

  “How’d you trick Uncle Moe, you shameful hussy?”

  She shrugged. “He likes me?”

  Hoping for an ally, Thelma eyed the bathroom door that hid Uncle Moe. She felt his betrayal deep in her belly, a familiar hollow love hunger more painful than Annie’s violence. Out of the corner of her swollen eye, she saw Mama enter. She knew immediately that her mother had already heard the commotion, because Mama, appearing at the bedroom door in her ratty bathrobe and curling-rag crown, was already weeping and howling in operatic torment.

  Mama strangled out the question: “What now?”

  “Ask Moe.” Jesse gestured to the bathroom door with his chin.

  “Ask your daughter,” said Annie. “She had her hand down Moe’s pants.”

  Mama ignored Thelma, falling to her knees outside the bathroom. She began to bang on the door, her arms raised above her head, her handkerchief waving like a flag of surrender. “Moe,” she pleaded. “Moe, Moritz, Moe!”

  Baby Adele wailed and wiggled in her father’s arms, while four-year-old Julius slipped into the room behind Jesse. The curly-headed boy, who had yet to have his first haircut, ran to his kneeling grandmother. He threw his arms around her, crying, “Bubbe, Bubbe.” He tried to pull her up, but she continued her banging.

  “Always tsuris,” said Jesse. “I have to get to the newsstand.”

  Annie shook her head. “Look what you’ve done, Temmy, lying with Moe. Look what you’ve done to Mama.”

  “She’s killing me,” Mama cried as she ripped at her nightgown’s neckline. Met with Moritz’s silence, she creaked up on her knees, leaning on her grandson. She shuffled to Annie and collapsed on her in a tearful embrace. Her grandson, excluded from the circle, began to cry.

  “Julie,” Thelma called to her nephew, opening her arms. She squatted and he came running. She held him tightly, kissing the light-brown curls, his eyelids, tasting the salty tears. Were they his? Were they hers? What did it matter? A beautiful boy blessed with Jesse’s balanced disposition, his affection temporarily filled her stomach’s hollow.

  “Julie,” Annie said over her mother’s head, “come away from Aunt Temmy. She’s no good. She’s nothing.”

  The words smarted, and Thelma hurled back, “He’s older than me when you burned my thumb. Have you tried that lighter trick on your own kid yet?”

  “What’s she talking about?” asked Jesse.

  “Bubba maisa,” Annie said. Bullshit. “She makes things up, the tsuri
s queen. Always she turns a chicken into a turkey.”

  “You should burn in hell, Thelma,” Mama said, the curse landing on the startled girl like a slap so that she automatically covered her face with her hands. “What wild animal shtups her own father?”

  “It was him first. It was his idea.”

  “Liar,” Annie said, assessing her sister’s chest. “You don’t even have broisten.”

  Thelma wondered how Abie would have handled this situation, how he’d have defended her. He’d have known the perfect response. But he was already at the newsstand, miles away. So Thelma sharpened her tongue and spat the words he’d often spoken behind their mother’s back since her remarriage: “Who’d want to touch an old hag like Mama?”

  Annie had to hold their mother back from rushing Thelma, who regretted the cruel remark as soon as she’d said it. But, cornered and alone, she only had her sharp tongue to defend herself.

  “You’re nothing to me,” said Mama.

  The rejection cracked Thelma, releasing all her feelings of self-hate so that if she were capable of crawling out of her worthless body, she would have, gladly, and wormed down the drain. Instead, she collapsed, crying, inconsolable, with no one to comfort her. Her family was no family. Without her brothers, she felt alone and abandoned.

  The toilet flushed. The bathroom door remained shut.

  Chapter 8

  Later that same morning, after Moritz had slipped out the bathroom, donned his suit, and crept off to work, the time came for Thelma to walk to school. Mama and Annie ignored Thelma, huddling in the kitchen, whispering. Their teaspoons jangled in short glasses. She exploited the opportunity and tiptoed into Annie’s room and palmed her sister’s loose change (stuffed beneath the baby’s bassinet, where the angelic Adele slept beneath her crown of curls).