Angel of Brooklyn (3 page)

Jonathan poured the ladies another glass of wine.

‘Oh, we never usually,’ said Madge, holding out her glass. ‘My cousin’s just joined the Temperance Society. What he’d make of all this, I don’t know.’

‘Ada makes a lovely lilac wine,’ said Lizzie. ‘It gives you such nice dreams.’

Candles filled the house with a buttery kind of light. Close to the fireplace, a man had all the attention. It was Lionel, with his small hunched shoulders and flat grey hair.

‘All this electricity,’ he was saying, ‘we don’t want it. It will make the birds fall out of the trees. Make fires. Create blizzards. And, you mark my words, it will hurt the innocent.’

‘You really believe that?’ said Frank.

‘Believe it?’ said Lionel. ‘I know.’

‘But electric light is just wonderful,’ exclaimed Beatrice. ‘It’s everywhere. In Luna Park alone there are a quarter of a million light bulbs. It’s a magical sight. Really it is. People stand gasping every night.’

‘It’s an amusement park,’ Jonathan explained.

‘An American amusement park?’ said Frank.

‘Yes. They call it the electric Eden.’

‘Good heavens.’ Lionel screwed up his eyes, as if all those lights had reached him.

‘It’s a marvellous place all right,’ said Jonathan.

‘Really? But what’s so wonderful about an amusement park?’

‘I don’t know. They make you feel alive.’

Frank rolled his eyes. ‘I like Blackpool. It tastes different.’

‘Another drink?’

‘Not for me,’ said Lionel, putting down his glass. ‘I have to be getting along. Being out at such a late hour only upsets my routine.’

Beatrice glanced at the clock. ‘But it’s only just gone nine.’

‘Ah.’ He tapped at his pocket watch. ‘I’ve things to do. The dogs don’t know what a party is. They’ll want walking. And I have to read a certain amount of my good friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, before my brain will tell me that I’m tired enough for sleeping.’

‘You really know Conan Doyle?’ said Beatrice.

‘We correspond from time to time but we haven’t met, so to speak, in the flesh. Well, I’ll take my overcoat from you now, and bid you all goodnight. Another Mrs Crane in the house, eh? I’ll have to get used to it. I dare say that I will. You are indeed a pleasant-looking woman, I can’t deny you that. Goodnight to you, goodnight.’

Beatrice could feel the draught from the door, making the candles flutter like gigantic yellow moths, before grabbing the back of her neck.

‘Are people helping themselves to food?’ she shivered.

‘Oh, yes,’ Ada told her, ‘they’ve been nibbling all evening. The pies look very tempting. Pork?’

‘Veal.’

‘Well,’ she smiled, ‘they almost look too perfect.’

Beatrice found the men in a huddle drinking port and puffing at their cigars. Jonathan smiled as she walked into the small clouds of smoke.

‘Now here she is again. My wife. She’s quite the conversationalist. She’ll certainly tell you what’s what.’

‘Are ladies allowed inside the smoking room?’

‘Of course,’ said Jeffrey, offering her a chair. Pale and blond, with wide grey eyes, he moved between the furniture like a dancer with oil on his shoes.

‘What we’d all really like to know,’ said Tom, ‘is how did you find him? Was he somewhere making a daft silly fool out of himself?’

‘A what silly fool? What was that word?’ Beatrice laughed, scratching the side of her head. ‘Another strange English word?’

‘Well, it means thick in the head, of course. Acting silly.’

‘Oh, I get you,’ she smiled. ‘No, he wasn’t “acting daft” as you say. Not then anyway.’

The men laughed and sucked on their cigars.

‘So how did you meet?’ asked Jeffrey.

‘I sold him some postcards.’

‘You don’t look like a shop girl,’ said Frank.

‘I worked in a booth, on the boardwalk, at Coney Island.’

‘The what?’

‘Promenade. She means promenade.’

‘I had to work. You see, my mother died when I was born, and my father was killed in a house fire. My brother Elijah went to Chicago to preach. He was drawn in by the church and I haven’t seen him since. After that, I just had to get away. And I chose New York.’

‘Why New York?’ Jeffrey pulled a strand of tobacco from his pale top lip.

‘I read plenty of magazines and people in magazines talk a lot about New York. And you know something, they’re right. It’s a wonderful tall place, full of opportunity. I was lucky. A man called Mr Cooper let me work in his booth. I hadn’t much experience, but he could see that I was honest.’

‘Aye,’ they nodded.

‘You look honest all right,’ Frank winked.

‘And that’s how we met. Jonathan bought some postcards.’

‘These,’ he said, fanning them out. ‘These are the very cards I bought from her.’

‘So, you sold him these postcards,’ said Jeffrey, ‘and that was it? Did Cupid shoot you right in the heart there and then?’

‘More or less,’ said Jonathan, looking at his wife.

‘Mary Pickford’s American,’ said Frank.

As they handed round the cards, they glanced at her, feeling the swell of the ocean, the taste of the exotic pouring through the ink.

‘It does wear you out after a while,’ said Jonathan, swirling his glass of port, throwing the last thick bite of his cigar onto the fire. ‘You never saw so many people at one time.’

‘Not like here,’ said Jeffrey with a frown. ‘I do hope you’ll like it here, Mrs Crane.’

‘Why shouldn’t she?’ said Frank. ‘Life’s just grand, and the air’s clean. There’s plenty of work for us and all the Irish. We’ve just bought ourselves a fancy new gramophone. Wonderful thing it is. We dance all night, me and Madge, and it sends the kiddies to sleep.’

‘I met your little boy,’ said Beatrice. ‘He gave me a daffodil.’

‘I’m sure he couldn’t help himself,’ said Jeffrey.

‘Aye,’ said Tom. ‘A flower, for a flower.’

By eleven, there was a lull in the house. Glasses stained with lines of red and amber had been pushed across the table. Ashtrays held pyramids of warm grey powder. There was a stain on the tablecloth, a tattered port wine daisy. Eyes were being rubbed. Lizzie had taken off her sister’s borrowed shoes.

Madge was in the kitchen. ‘I wonder,’ she said, licking pastry from her lips. ‘Could I make up a plate for Mary? It seems a shame she missed out. I don’t suppose you’ve met her? She’s ill. Never leaves her room.’

‘She doesn’t? Well, of course, go right ahead, take whatever you think she’ll like,’ Beatrice told her. ‘What’s wrong with her?’

‘No one really knows.’ Madge forked up some ham. ‘But she’s as pale as a sheet all right, and her legs are thinner than cotton. We all look in from time to time.’

‘Maybe I could too?’

‘Good idea. She needs entertaining.’

Beatrice watched Madge making up the plate with cold meats, Lancashire cheese and a broken slice of pie.

‘Have you got a tea cloth I can borrow?’ she asked. ‘To keep the food from spoiling?’

Ada appeared, grinning triumphantly. ‘Here, use this,’ she said, handing her a large paper bag, printed with the words
Swift & Son, Fine Bakers and Confectioners
.

‘Thanks,’ said Madge. ‘That’s very handy, that is.’

‘They were all mixed up,’ said Beatrice, looking hard into the fire. ‘Mr Cooper told me about the rich and poor in England, and those in between, and how they all lead very separate lives. Tonight they were all mixed up.’

‘It’s like that here. I admit that it’s strange, it isn’t at all usual, but everyone knows everyone.’

‘Apart from me.’

‘Apart from you,’ he said.

Jonathan yawned. He could feel his head crackling. The cigars had made his throat ache.

‘Congratulations, my darling,’ he said, stretching out his arms to
her
. ‘It was a success. You pulled it off all right. I’m going up. What about you?’ His shoulders made a clicking sound.

‘I think I’ll stay down here.’

He kissed her on the forehead. ‘Well, goodnight for now, my darling.’

As soon as he’d gone, she closed her eyes and pictured her America. She folded her hands in her lap and willed herself to relax, until eventually the images came floating, and she was standing outside the Galilee Hotel, 16 July 1911, wearing a cheap grey suit, her coat all creased, and a sign in the window (cardboard, handwritten) said ‘Be Good or Begone’. She didn’t go inside. She was just too tired for that.

Yawning, she thought of other, smaller things. Ice, spaghetti vongole, the sound of the breeze as it flicked at the awning, and those long afternoons sipping lemon-flavoured tea through little lumps of sugar held underneath her tongue.

She looked at the sky through the window and shivered. The wind was whistling through the trees. The party was still in her head, the women laughing behind their hands, the men clasping their fingers in knots behind their backs, rocking on their heels, faces twitching. Cold fish. That’s what Nancy called Englishmen. Tight lips. Insipid. Voices stuck somewhere deep inside their throats. And Nancy knew about these things, because she’d kissed at least half a dozen, behind McCauley’s Tavern, though a couple of those were Irish, with hair like wet coal, and eyes the colour of water.

Jonathan couldn’t sleep. His skin felt tight with whisky and tobacco, and the starch in the sheets made the cotton creak. Before America he’d slept in this room. From here, through the walls, he’d heard the nurse padding up and down, his father’s chest wheezing, then coughing, retching, and crying out for Eliza, his long-dead wife, and sometimes a woman called Margaret. Was the nurse called Margaret? She was known as Miss Hopkins. He’d asked her once. ‘No,’ she’d said, ‘I’m Catherine.’

Now all he could hear was the wind outside, pushing at the glass. He could see his old bear with its broken leather nose sitting on the washstand. A gift from his father the week his mother died. It was a stiff old thing, with a bony woollen spine and chipped glass eyes. He was seven years old, and of course, the bear hadn’t made it any better.

‘Still awake?’ said Beatrice, suddenly standing in the doorway.

‘Hmm.’

‘Well, I’m here now,’ she smiled.

‘I can see that.’

‘Are you glad?’ she said. ‘Glad I came to England?’

‘Of course I’m glad. England’s always needed a Mrs Beatrice Crane.’

‘Is America missing me?’

‘America?’ he said, loosening the sheets. ‘I’m sure all the men on the Island are wearing black armbands and weeping into their whiskey.’

St Barnabas Church, in nearby Heapy, sat cold and grey in the drizzling Sunday morning.

‘Where’s the steeple?’ said Beatrice, tipping back her head. ‘I thought all English churches had a steeple? It looks more like a schoolhouse to me.’

‘It doesn’t matter what it looks like, darling,’ said Jonathan, carefully avoiding the puddles. ‘It’s what goes on inside that really counts.’

They walked side by side up the path, Beatrice folding her hands deep inside her sleeves as the rain fell like a web.

‘My family’s grave.’ He suddenly pointed to a tall white slab beside a bent lilac bush. ‘My mother, father and my baby brother Thomas are buried there, though today is certainly not the day to be standing mourning beside it, we’d only catch our death of cold and be joining them too soon.’

Inside, people shuffled and coughed. Women rattled through their handbags, rooting for lozenges. Men’s hands ticked and trembled wishing they held cigarettes. Of course heads turned, Beatrice was the striking foreigner, the talk of the village; they’d been waiting to catch a glimpse of her, and now she was right here in front of them. She recognised Jeffrey and he waved with his fingers. Ada and Jim pretended they hadn’t seen them arrive, but of course they had, and Beatrice could see Ada nudging Jim’s elbow, his neck flushing into his collar.

As the Reverend Peter McNally stepped behind the lectern he lost his footing and dropped his sermon sheet. He had oiled black hair, a narrow white face, and Beatrice wasn’t impressed with his voice, a droning monotone, but she went along with him, singing the hymns, the numbers chalked up on a board, religious arithmetic, screwing her
eyes
at all the tiny grey print in the prayer book.

‘Let us pray for all the lost souls in the world. Those poor damned natives who have never heard the name of Jesus Christ Our Lord.’

After the final hymn, an out-of-key ‘He Who Would Valiant Be’, the reverend shook hands with his congregation, sheltering from the rain inside the vestry.

‘Oh, I’ve heard all about you,’ he said, taking Beatrice’s hand with a playful kind of squeeze.

‘Word travels fast.’

‘Like a telegraph. You are the American? The new Mrs Crane?’

‘You make it sound like I come from the moon,’ she smiled.

‘But, Mrs Crane, I have seen the moon. I have never seen America.’

‘Well, it does exist. Really. First port of call after Ireland.’

‘Her brother is a preacher,’ Jonathan added a little too brightly. ‘And although he’s a lay preacher, he trained for many years with the Church.’

‘The Church of the United States of America?’ the reverend winked. ‘A most inventive branch.’

February 18, 1914

Dearest Bea,

I have never been much of a letter writer, but here goes. The last real letter I wrote was to Stanley, telling him it was over. You remember that? I was too much of a coward to tell him face to face. I was in love with that fiddle player. The Russian. That lasted all of five minutes.

We are all fine here. I’m still with Cooper and Co. A girl called Jessie has your old job. She’s pretty enough, and fair, but she’s the argumentative type. She used to work the trapeze at Eli’s Circus, but then she put on weight. Don’t get me wrong, she isn’t even plump, but you have to be as skinny as a six-year-old to go up on the wire.

Marnie says hello. She’s been busy these last few months and has just got herself married, so she sits all day in the beauty parlor, preening, drinking hock, and buffing up her nails. She went and married Lenny the barber. You know the one? He has a scar on his face like a sickle? She’s already wife number three,
and
him not yet forty. I’ve told her to be careful. Well, we all have.