By the Rivers of Brooklyn (24 page)

“You drink that, it's good for you. What a shock, hey? I never heard of that, seeing someone on the newsreel before you get the telegram. But then, we don't go the movies.”

“I hardly ever go,” Ethel said, hearing her own voice like an echo. “It was a special treat, last night. Maybe…maybe I was mistaken,” she added, trying to convince herself

Mrs. Liebowitz sat down heavily in a chair across the table from Ethel. “I hope it's not true. Your oldest son, that's a terrible thing. And when he just come home again, after so long time away.”

Ethel nodded. “It makes me so angry,” she said, suddenly finding words. “What's it all for, anyway? All this death, our boys dying in some foreign war. It makes no sense to me. We hear all the time how Hitler was so bad and the Japs are so bad, but why can't we just let them be? Let them live their lives and we live ours? Why do our sons have to die for what's happening thousands of miles away?” Her throat knotted and tears spilled from her eyes; she fumbled in her handbag for a handkerchief and dabbed at them. Looking up, she saw Mrs. Liebowitz's face had changed; the sisterly sympathy, one mother to another, had been replaced by something cold. Foreign, Ethel thought again.

“You think that? It's not America's business?” Mrs. Liebowitz leaned over, pulled a stack of newspapers from the other end of the table, thrust one into Ethel's hands. “You think you got trouble? Look at those people.” Her thick finger jabbed at a picture on a page torn from
The New York Times
. Three men so emaciated they looked like skeletons stared at the camera, skimpy clothes hanging from their bodies. Ethel shuddered.

“I saw this before,” she said. “Those Nazi camps our boys liberated.”

“You think you know suffering, because your son is killed?” Mrs. Liebowitz's face was like stone. “You know nothing. Nothing. This boy…you sent him away to be raised. You were never a mother to him. Why do you cry for him? Ask what happened to my family: my brother,my sister,my nieces and nephews. Then come back and tell me about how Hitler was a bad man!”

She did not slap Ethel but she might as well have. Ethel stood, shaking. She looked at the picture again through blurred eyes and thought that God was not absent from the world, as she'd feared. That would be too easy. What she hadn't realized, in all her long struggle to bargain with God and pay for her sins, was that God was malignant, twisted – that He hated the world. She had thrown her life's energy into trying to appease a monster.

One of the girls – Sarah, it was Sarah, who used to mind Ethel's children when they were little – took her arm as she stumbled towards the door. “Forgive my mama, Mrs. Evans. She is terribly unhappy. She didn't mean to speak to you as she did.” Ethel went through the door, turned back only to close it. Sarah tried once more. “I remember Ralphie so well,” she said. “Such a bright little boy, such a smile. If I prayed anymore, I would pray for him, Mrs. Evans.”

Ethel managed to nod. Then she was alone in the hallway, staring at the door of her own apartment. A man came through the front door of the building, scanning the board for names and numbers. He wore a uniform: he was a telegram delivery man.

An hour later, Jim came home, looking like an old man, walking with a slight stoop. Ethel was sitting in the armchair. Jimmy and Diane were in the kitchen finding something to eat, talking in whispers. Jim walked into the living room.

“I watched it over and over,” he said. “Five times I made the guy show it to me.” He looked at his feet. “I think you're right, Ethel. I think it looks like him too.”

His words fell into a well of silence.

“The guy at the theatre, he said we should contact the War Office if we were sure. He said if we never got a telegram yet, he didn't see how it could be, but my God, Ethel, it looked so much like him. The eyes…”

Ethel still held the telegram crumpled in her hand, the telegram informing Mr. James Evans that Private Ralph Evans had been killed in action on Okinawa on the eighteenth of April. She stood up now and threw it in his face.

“My son is dead, Jim. And for twelve years I never got to touch him, hear his voice, hold his hand. I swear to God I'll never forgive you, not till the day I die. And I hope that's tomorrow.”

She turned from him, went into the bedroom and locked the door.

CLAIRE
 
ST. JOHN'S, APRIL 1945

T
HE NEWS CAME BY
telegram, a cable from Uncle Jim in New York: RALPH KILLED IN ACTION OKINAWA APRIL 18 STOP.

Stop, stop, stop. The word punctuated the family babble and clatter of the next few days. Claire wanted to put her hands over her ears, to shut out Aunt Annie's voice: “I can't believe it, I should have known, I begged him not to go.” Aunt Frances' tears: “Poor Ethel, poor Ethel, this will kill her.” Valerie's obsessive memorializing: “Do you remember how Ralph used to… Do you remember when he said…” Valerie made a little shrine out of two photos of Ralph, a clothespin doll he made for her when she was six, and several newspaper headlines about the fighting in Okinawa. She was working on a poem, a tribute. And Claire wanted to scream at her, at them all, “STOP.”

At night, Claire sat alone in her room while the kitchen below filled up with relatives and grief. All the Evanses, the cousins, Aunt Ethel's relatives, the neighbours, the families of boys Ralph used to run around with, some of whom were overseas themselves now. They sat in the kitchen eating and drinking one cup of tea after another, hearing over and over the story of how Ethel and Jim saw him on the newsreel before they ever got the telegram. And Claire hid in her room, wanting them all to stop, stop, STOP.

She had her geography homework spread over the bed. When Aunt Frances came upstairs to find out what was wrong with her, she said, “I have homework to do. I can't do it downstairs, there's too many people.”

Aunt Frances frowned, her small face puckered up like a worried bird. “Sure, you don't need to worry about homework, Claire girl. Your teachers will understand; there's been a death in the family.” Claire noticed that Aunt Frances wouldn't usually say the word
death
or
died
– people passed away or passed on; good Salvationists were Promoted to Glory. Soldiers in wartime, like Ralph, were “lost,” a word that suggested carelessness. But the phrase, death-in-the-family, all run together like that, was acceptable as an excuse. It permitted any sort of erratic behaviour.

Please excuse me from the kitchen. I need to stay in my room, as there has been a
death-in-the-family
, Claire thought. Aloud she said, “I don't want to fall behind. I have exams soon.”

“So does Valerie,” Aunt Frances said, and shook her head, backing away, pulling the door to behind her. Claire guessed that Aunt Frances was relieved that, for once, Valerie was the one behaving normally: crying, talking about Poor Ralph, sitting around the table drinking tea like a good girl.

Claire wondered how long the parade of people and condolences would last. When Poppy Evans had died – she was only little then – people came by every night before the funeral. But there would be no funeral for Ralph, not here anyway; they would have a memorial service for him at Aunt Ethel's church in Brooklyn, where no-one would remember him. Claire felt cheated. She hated funerals and didn't especially want there to be one, but this way there would be no clear end to the mourning. It could go on forever.

She picked up geography again, a book written before the war, listing the countries of Europe. Ralph had told her once it was a waste of time learning it; all the countries would be different after the war. She had said, “I can't write that on my geography test, Ralph.”

“Sure you can. Just put down:
This question left unfinished until the end of the
war. Please contact me after peace has been declared for a list of the countries of Europe.
”

Germany. Austria. Czechoslovakia. Poland. She leafed ahead, to the Pacific, a section of the book they had not yet covered. She had already looked there, finding Okinawa on the map. It seemed so small, hardly worth all the trouble.

A light tap at the door. “Come in,” sighed Claire.

Valerie drifted in, sat down at the edge of the bed. She shoved school papers aside. “I don't see how you can study.”

“Well, I can.”

“I finished the poem. Do you want to see it?” Valerie's voice was very tiny, almost breathless. Like it wasn't enough to come in here and make Claire read the fool thing; she had to make Claire beg for it.

“Whatever you want,” said Claire, wondering how it would feel to slap Valerie.

“Here.” Valerie thrust the paper at her and turned away.

Valerie's handwriting, full of curls and flourishes, filled the torn-out exercise book sheet front and back.

A soldier boy of eighteen years
Full of dreams and hopes and fears
Set foot upon a foreign shore
From which he would return no more….

There was quite a lot of it: fourteen verses. Claire read as attentively as she could: she didn't like poetry. “It's very good,” she said.

Valerie snatched it back, eyed her own words greedily. “I don't think it's really
that
good. The last verse…I wonder if it should be
weep his loss
or
mourn
his loss
. What do you think?”

Claire shrugged. “I wouldn't have a clue. It means the same thing, doesn't it?” She stared at Valerie, who frowned over the page, hovering with her pen. Claire wondered how at a time like this – well, at any time, really – anyone could waste time or thought on something so insubstantial, so unimportant as choosing one word over another in a stupid poem.

“I'm going to put it up on the wall after I make a copy,” Valerie said. “I wish you'd give me the other doll, the one Ralph made for you, if you're not doing anything special with it. I could have both of them up there together, like a set.”

“I don't know where it is,” said Claire, and looked down at her geography. The silence was sharp, with edges.

“How come you won't come down in the kitchen?” Valerie said, folding the paper. “Mom says it's queer for you to stay locked up in your room doing homework.”

“Then I'm queer,” said Claire. “An oddball. An odd sock. I just don't want to be down there. Why do all these people have to hang around, anyway?”

Valerie stood. “To show their sympathy,” she said. “It makes people feel better, in time of loss.” The phrase was practiced, like something from her poem.

When Valerie had gone, Claire opened her bottom drawer. She kept very little of the past, as little as possible. Underneath neatly folded underclothes, slips and stockings, she had her mother's last two letters, and a card Aunt Annie gave her on her thirteenth birthday, with a picture she liked on it. A photograph of herself and Ralph in Uncle Harold's new house before it was all built. Her report card from Grade Six:
Claire is a very bright girl who works hard and shows
great promise.
The clothespin doll Ralph made for her when she was six, lying facedown at the bottom of the drawer. Claire did not pick it up, but turned it over with a finger, so it faced up into the whiteness of her cotton underwear.

She went out of the room and down the stairs, pausing at the bottom. Laughter drifted out from the kitchen. Nobody was actually talking about Ralph: they were talking about some other fellow, some old fellow way back in the first war, the Great War, who went out on purpose trying to “get blighty” so he'd get sent back home. “Of course he came through without a scratch,” said old Mr. Winsor. “God looks out for fools.”

“Only the good die young,” said Mrs. Stokes, and there was a little circle of silence under the hissing of the kettle. In the yellow light of the doorway Claire saw Aunt Annie standing alone at the stove, her hand on the handle of the kettle, frozen for a moment.
He's more my son than Ethel's
, she remembered Aunt Annie saying to Nan, months before, when Ralph went away. She remembered the fierce anger in Aunt Annie's voice. And Claire went down the stairs, into the kitchen, like a good girl.

ANNIE
 
ST. JOHN'S, SEPTEMBER 1945