Bittersweet Brooklyn: A Novel Read online

  Annie didn’t need the aggravation: she was early in a pregnancy and feared the tsuris, the anxiety, would cause her to lose the baby, the child changing its mind about entering this world, this family. That night, even Jesse couldn’t comfort his wife, and when he touched her, she slapped away his fingers, handed him a pillow and exiled him to the couch. At least there he would ensure that nothing further happened between the perverts: her stepfather and the husband thief.

  The following morning, she didn’t emerge from her room until she heard the door close behind those going to work and school. In the silence that followed, she remained in her nightgown and curlers, lacking the energy to get dressed and begin the day. She felt a heavy weariness that began in her uterus and tugged her down so that almost without thinking she cupped her hands beneath her expanding belly that created a table on top where her enormous breasts rested. She sat for a long time in front of the mirror, looking at her angry eyes in their cold-cream mask, and only when she heard Mama crying her name did she wipe off the gelatinous goo and shuffle out in worn slippers that had once been robin’s-egg blue but were now mouse gray. She knew she was the only one in the household who had the chutzpah to do what had to be done—but her gut said that one of the participants had to go. With his steady paycheck, Moe was still valuable to the family, but what could she do with Thelma?

  By the time she reached Mama, Annie felt hot liquid dribbling between her legs. She ran for the water closet with Mama beside her, entering the bathroom where Moe had hidden his weak self the previous day. She pulled down her underpants and witnessed her worst fear: bright-red blood spots. When she sat down on the toilet and pushed, the flow became heavier. Panic flooded her and she considered her dear baby, already beloved and tight inside her. Now her anger returned with a level of fear: this was her third child and it had been stolen by Thelma’s selfishness, as if the girl had reached her hand up and ripped the infant from her.

  By early that afternoon, after Annie fought her living children down for an early nap and admonished them not to move until she awakened them, she planted herself on the ratty armchair abandoned by previous tenants. A wet washcloth covered her brow, swollen feet soaking in a tub of Epsom salts. Her brain throbbed as if it were too big for her skull and would burst through her eye sockets. In her veins, the blood rushed up and down like uncontrollable children pounding the walls in an empty hallway. A roaring anger erupted from the ache and emptiness of her womb, where the baby had been sloshing and content until yesterday. Now, a bucket in the bathroom held rags clumped with blood and that bit of baby on to which she’d clung when the cramping began.

  Wait until she got her hands on Thelma. It was all her fault. Annie’s fists clenched at the thought of wrapping them around her sister’s skinny neck until it cracked and she was silenced. Always wanting, needing, and demanding. Her siblings were rotten, all of them, corrupt, dissolute, reckless. They endangered her family’s future, the security of Julie and Adele. Only she could halt them before they were all ragged and begging on the Brooklyn streets.

  That goniff Abie had ruined Thelma and Louis. And now Thelma had stolen her unborn child, wrapped her legs around Mama’s Moritz, and would suck them all down into her lazy, lustful hell if Annie didn’t step up and squash her immediately while she was still weak, young, and ignorant of her power over men. The safety of Julius, Adele, and Annie’s future children depended on her complete control.

  Anger coiled up Annie’s spine. She’d never wanted to be a mother to Thelma. Even when their father had been alive, she’d wanted nothing to do with that colicky infant. She’d have been content to abandon her to the wolves. She didn’t even want to be her sister, not then, not now. She hated the curly-haired child who resembled their father, long legs and arms, green eyed and excitable, selfish and weak. Annie had been a girl herself when Papa died, only eleven years old, still sleeping with a rag doll, still dreaming, obedient and devoted to her mother.

  Annie had watched her father’s last breath curl from his lips in the stifling Norfolk Street tenement. She’d cleaned the bloody bubbles from his wiry beard after Mama had collapsed by his side. Her mother had cried, “Take me now,” wailing for a Galicia she would never see again, for the sisters she resembled, the mother with the house keys dangling from her waist who knew right from wrong as she knew salt from pepper, absolutely. And so Annie took the bowl from her mother’s shaking fingers before the water splashed on the floor and washed her father’s emaciated body with a rag, learning his scars and bumps, the rosy nipples, the way a wife would, the way no daughter should. She had felt disgusted and enraged but had also felt the birth of something new, of her own ability to take control in a crisis. She sensed a path to power and, without reflecting, grabbed it.

  It was not an easy road. With Papa gone, Mama disappeared in her own mind, playing hide-and-seek with her oldest living child, physically visible, still sweating and shitting, but mentally absent, incapable of making even the smallest decision. Annie had become responsible for children she didn’t want surrounded by strangers loath to help but quick to comment, always judging, coughing, the men davening, the women cleaning. Mama couldn’t scrub anymore, couldn’t feed her family. She wouldn’t rise from bed. She screamed like her feet were aflame whenever they touched the rough wood floor and cowered back on the featherbed, fetal.

  No one had ever asked Annie if this was what she wanted, if she could handle the responsibility. She just did. There was a fire. She extinguished it. She’d summoned the strength. It had been her or no one, her or the street. If they’d eaten gruel, so be it. At least they’d eaten.

  Now cursing Thelma for the miscarriage, Annie groaned. She would kick her, pull her hair, shove her out of the apartment and onto the streets like the mongrel she was. Let her take care of herself from now on. Her sister threatened the balance that Annie had achieved with the goldsmith’s arrival, lifting their mother’s weight off the daughter’s shoulders and onto the second husband’s. Steady paychecks paid for food and rent. Mama, in turn, had kept the Sabbath, had cooked in her own kitchen, had cared for Annie and her grandchildren, repaying a debt to her eldest child that could never be retired. They all owed her. She was the family’s backbone in America. She had rescued the past for the future—and she was the only one with the sense and spine to make decisions for their survival.

  She blamed the girl for seducing Moritz, a good provider, a talented craftsman who loved her mother’s cooking. So it wasn’t an ideal match, but what was? It was still a bond in God’s eyes. She cursed Thelma for upsetting Mama and unleashing the chain of mishegas Annie worked so hard to quell. All the yelling and the screaming after the men had left for work yesterday, Mama crying, picking up the sharpened scissors and claiming first she would kill Moritz, and then Thelma, and then herself.

  Annie shook her head in disgust and immediately regretted it as the pain swelled. She’d prayed inside herself: let the baby live. But she’d feared from the first blood leaking down her leg that it was a lost cause.

  Her own belly had betrayed her. She still had bits and pieces of the child inside her, cells that clung to her, a boy, she believed, whom she would have named Friedel, after her father’s father, a peacemaker, a leader. Now there would be no calm, no child. She felt like she had expelled her uterus along with the baby bits, anxious that she would never be able to make children again and would lose Jesse’s love and devotion. Like Moritz, he would turn elsewhere—to her sister.

  As Annie flipped the damp cloth on her forehead so that its coolness touched her skin, she heard a rap on the door. “It’s me, Mrs. Dickman. Let me in.”

  The neighbor was the first, but not the last. Annie, still heavy and sore, couldn’t force herself to rise in answer, but that didn’t deter her neighbor, who opened the door unbidden, crying, “Have you heard?” With excitement in her wheezy voice, she asked, “Mrs. Mandel, where are you hiding?”

  Mama entered from the kitchen, her meat-hook hands splotchy with fa
t and flesh. “Heard what?”

  “Abie,” Mrs. Dickman said. “They found him.”

  “Was he lost?” asked Annie. “Mamaleh, please, do me a favor: go back and wash the kishkes from your hands before you touch something.”

  Mrs. Dickman pursed her fish lips. “Look at you, queen of the May, sitting on your tuchus while your mother works.”

  “As if it’s your business in my house who sits and who stands,” said Annie, slitting her eyes and glaring, yet Mrs. Dickman remained. Mrs. Famant rushed in next. The third floor’s childless beauty, with lavender eyes and strawberry curls, played the cello, a melancholy instrument, and feasted on others’ sadness. “Have you heard?”

  “Your Abie killed a boy,” said Mrs. Dickman.

  “A Jewish boy,” added Mrs. Famant. “Such a shonda.”

  A lament escaped Annie’s lips. It sounded foreign to her, as if she doubted herself capable of that horrible sound. This news of a killer under her own roof beggared belief. Was Abie capable of murder? Yes. He was an animal. She herself had been tempted to kill him and, although she’d never resort to that level of violence, she recognized his rage because it mirrored her own.

  Mrs. Spiegelberg shouldered her way into the apartment, dragging her twins behind her. “Have you heard?”

  “In Manhattan,” said Mrs. Dickman.

  Mrs. Famant added, “With a knife, no less.”

  “A knife?” asked Mama, her cheeks reddening.

  Annie couldn’t handle her mother’s ululation. She had no more comfort to give, drained as she was herself. She feared what would happen if she fell prey to Mama’s hysterics and cracked. Jesse, in all his good nature, lacked the strength to navigate conflict and protect their children. “Get out, all of you.”

  “You should know,” said Mrs. Dickman. “We didn’t want you to find out from the police. Abie butchered the boy.”

  “In broad daylight,” said Mrs. Famant, pointing at the ceiling. “Before God.”

  “A Jewish boy.”

  “Shonda.”

  “The shame.”

  “The newspaper called him Little Yiddle.”

  “That can’t be Abie with that ridiculous name,” Annie said, bristling, her voice thready and unfamiliar. “It must be another ape. My brother’s too tough to take that insult.”

  “It’s in the newspaper,” said Mrs. Dickman.

  “It has to be true,” agreed Mrs. Famant.

  “So show me,” said Annie. But the women hadn’t bought the paper. They carried rumors overheard on the street and at the grocer’s but no proof. Annie’s rage rose, attended by heartburn, even if she remained too weak to stand and spew her anger at these yentas.

  Her family, which she’d struggled to glue together, continued unraveling. How much tsuris could she stomach? Surely she’d been tested enough. Her jaw ground and her chin jutted. She had to push through—and yet she couldn’t. Not today. Not having lost so much blood. Then it gradually dawned on her, through her anger and resentment, that maybe, just maybe, she could exploit bad news for the advantage of her and her children.

  What if Abie had slaughtered a boy before witnesses? Wouldn’t he go to jail? Let them lock him up and drop the key down the sewer. He was the only remaining threat to her power within the home and, as she had told anyone who’d listen, he was his own worst enemy. She was only a sister, a daughter, a mother—he was lawless.

  Glee: that was what she felt, like a shot of morphine for the pain. Prison was too good for him. Even as she growled, “Get out, you yentas,” and the neighbors looked daggers at her before dispersing, part of her hoped their gossip was true. If the police wanted Abie, she’d turn him in herself. What was bad for Abie might be good for her growing family, despite the disgrace.

  After the hens left to cook for their husbands, Rebecca locking the door behind them, Annie passed out in her chair despite the sad, needy looks aimed at her by her mother. She dreamed of giving birth in their old tenement apartment with her father lying shrouded beside her, the baby arriving too soon. In her dream, she tried to hold the child in with all her muscles, to no avail, and she wept tears of anger at Abie and Thelma for their curses that caused this theft of life. She didn’t awaken until she felt a wet kiss at her temple and the weight of her husband’s muscled arm on her shoulder. “Anechka,” he whispered, removing the washcloth from her forehead and feeling the skin gently with the back of his hand to check for fever. “How’s my little girl?”

  Annie put her hands to her hair, raising her lips to accept his kiss, ready to cry about the loss of their third child and be comforted. And then she spied the New-York Tribune tucked under Jesse’s elbow. Scanning her husband’s gray eyes, she recognized that the news was as bad as the gossips had reported. When she said, “Give it to me, Jesse,” he winced and complied.

  “Show me.” Annie grabbed the Tribune while Mama crept next to her, collapsing onto the couch with a groan of relief, still wearing her bloody apron, her slipper-shod feet barely touching the ground. Making a big display of opening the paper, Annie flapped the pages as she prepared to read the item to Mama and Jesse.

  Just then the front door cracked as Moritz returned from work, hat in one hand and metal lunch pail in the other, round-shouldered and apparently repentant. Annie said, “Look who’s here.” Mama made a loud spitting noise, ptui. She tightened her grip on Annie’s arm.

  Moritz said nothing, just slowly followed his usual routine, removing his hat and coat and carefully hanging them on hooks by the door, shuffling into the kitchen to put his pail by the side of the sink for Mama to wash as she did every day. Meanwhile, the Mint followed, head bowed, a nothing to Annie but at least he contributed to the family pot, despite consuming more than his fair share. He was neither ally nor foe, which she couldn’t say for her mother’s husband, a coward who deserved the curled-lip look of disgust she dispatched as if he were the poor relation rather than the savior whose salary had rescued the family in troubled times. Yesterday, Moritz had squandered all his capital. Now, she sucked her teeth and shook her head but believed she restrained herself by not cursing him aloud on sight for the pervert he was, plowing his wife’s daughter while Mama slept a room away. He was an animal, even if that wasn’t apparent now in his mud-brown suit and scuffed shoes, his shirt she had ironed, using her own spit to smooth the creases.

  Annie returned her attention to the broadsheet, squinting to find the article. “It’s not here,” she said, suspecting the neighbors had lied.

  Jesse pointed, saying, “Look there, down on the left, below ‘Husband Beaten; Wife Pays Fine.’” Jesse scraped a wooden side chair, placing it beside Annie. “See that headline, ‘Toughest Kid Proves It’?”

  “Oy vey ist mere,” cried Mama. Annie moaned, holding her side as if wincing from the aftershock of a delayed contraction.

  Jesse stroked Annie’s shoulder. “I had to hide this copy under the counter. We sold out. It’s not every day the family makes news.”

  “Here it is,” said Annie, “‘Newsboy Stabs Boy Who Doubted Title Given Him’? It’s not exactly the Nobel Peace Prize.”

  Jesse shrugged. “He’s no Teddy Roosevelt.”

  The door opened. Annie gazed up from the newsprint. “Speaking of no Teddy Roosevelt,” she said as she coldly eyed Thelma, dragging her schoolbooks tied with twine, her scabby knees dirty and infected. “If it isn’t the hooker of Hooper Street,” she said.

  “Annie, please” was all the mournful child answered, her hair frizzing out of her pigtail braids from the humidity. She reached up to hang her books on a hook by the door, revealing a sliver of underpants, and pivoted.

  “Stool,” Annie said, pointing to the corner.

  “I have to pish,” said Thelma.

  “Sit,” said Mama.

  Thelma sat.

  “In the corner,” said Annie.

  Mama said, “Face the wall.”

  “Why punish me? What about Uncle Moe?”

  Moritz said nothing. Keeping his
eyes down, he leaned on his elbows at the head of the dinner table beside the bowl of walnuts, which he began to crack like bones with his bare hands and, occasionally, his molars.

  “Hey, schoolgirl,” said Annie, “pull up your socks, because you’ll want to hear this. Your favorite brother made the news. Such a big man, a macher! Look, the paper says ‘toughest kid on Fourteenth Street.’” She snorted. “He’s not even the toughest kid on the block.”

  Thelma, glued to the stool, swiveled her head toward Annie, her eyes wide. “He is too.”

  “Don’t defend that monster,” said Annie.

  “Don’t underestimate him,” said Moritz. He dug for nut meat in a half-broken shell and studiously avoided looking at Thelma.

  “Who asked you, Moritz?” said Annie while Mama examined her hands, digging meat scraps out of her fingernails, wiping them on the soiled apron.

  “I can talk in my own home,” said Moritz, his attention focused on cracking a shell.

  “Like your opinion matters,” said Mama.

  “My name’s on the lease, Rebecca, not yours,” said Moritz, pausing to split the recalcitrant walnut with his back teeth. “You’re welcome to leave at any time.”

  Mama’s lips began to twist uncontrollably, her chin jutting left then right, a dam trying to contain the waterworks. She shrieked, “You have shamed and dishonored us.”

  “Aren’t you in the kitchen yet, woman? Is it too much to expect dinner on the table when I return from work?”

  “Yes,” said Annie, defending her mother while extending her arm to prevent Mama from standing.

  Moritz ignored Annie. “Five thirty has passed. Where’s my food?”

  “You don’t deserve Mama’s cooking,” said Annie.

  “Don’t push me, Annie,” he said.

  “Let Thelma cook for you. Maybe she can boil an egg.”

  Moritz paused, glanced for what might have been the first time that afternoon at Thelma, humiliated on the stool, her shoulders hunched and her chin gouging her knees. In the daylight, she was a child. “That’s not all your sister can do, Annie,” said Moritz.