I looked at the sharp, fragile contours of his face, harder to see now in the dark. “Is that what she told you?”
“Not in so many words. She said to me, ‘I was a bad daughter, Sidney, and I wasn’t any kind of wife. I didn’t understand the meaning of the word “duty.” I wanted to be a real mother, but I didn’t have a choice then.’ She was calling me long-distance from Moscow to tell me this. Of course I was thrilled to learn she was coming to the U.S. with the rest of the family. I said, ‘Florie, what’s changed?’ She said: ‘I already orphaned my boy once, Sidney. I can’t do it to him twice.’?”
I could feel her words suddenly in my body, rattling my veins, swelling into a clot in my throat. The sensation I’d felt that night in my hotel room, of how little I’d allowed myself to understand her all those years, returned to me now in the form of a fresh and tormenting grief. “I was thirty-six,” I said, my voice growing thin. “I had kids of my own. I wouldn’t have been devastated if Mama hadn’t…”
“Don’t you tell me,” Sidney said, not letting me finish.
He was right. I took a deep breath of the pine-scented air. I understood better than I wanted to what she’d meant. Sidney and I had never spoken like this before. He had never told me about the girl who’d turned her back on “duty” and the old woman who’d renounced her freedom for the duty she’d once forsaken.
Sidney sat with his eyes shut. The lawn had gotten louder as darkness descended. The symphony of insects was vying with the music floating down from the window. Whoever was listening had turned it up to be heard above the intruding noises of nature, but the frogs and crickets, not to be outdone, had raised their volume. I sat in the near darkness, listening to the horn and piano mix with the hissing percussion of the cicadas, the frogs keeping time—the whole pulsing orchestration of the natural world that knew nothing and cared nothing of the suffering and resplendence of our short lives.
Sidney’s eyes were still closed, and for a moment I thought he had fallen completely asleep in his cushioned chair, that our conversation had taken the last of the day’s vitality out of him, and that I would now have to shake him awake. But when I spoke his name, softly, his eyes popped open again, their slightly protuberant whites flashing like the peepers of some alert nocturnal animal.
I helped him up, taking his elbow, and guided him through almost total darkness along the steps to the back porch, where the sliding doors had been left open. “Don’t dawdle too long at the South Pole,” he warned me. “Time might stand still there, but from where I’m sitting it flies fast.”
I made him a promise that I would come back to visit him soon. I watched him walk slowly inside until he’d closed the sliding door behind him, and then I walked the ten moist, grassy yards back to my car and took the uncrowded nighttime highways home.
Every week, navigating the strange new city, she discovered what was not there. The Polo Grounds. The soaring glass cathedral of Penn Station. The splendid Gothic spire of the Singer Building, replaced by the chubby functionality of another skyscraper. The Brooklyn Bridge trolley service. Sidney’s beloved Dodgers and their old stadium at Ebbets Field, now a swarm of housing projects.
There were neighborhoods into which she could not venture alone. Brownsville, Bedford-Stuy, South Brooklyn. Places where the streets had been gutted by arson and something called “smack.” Graffiti mauled the buildings where she’d once taken her typing classes. Gone were the elevated tracks raining soot on pedestrians below. Fulton Street was not girdled by metal tracks but abandoned to light and foliage. Even the street signs had upgraded their drab yellow and gray to a bright, assertive, chemical green.
In the first months, Florence had felt assaulted by the changes, but soon she came to like that there was so little Old Brooklyn left to remind her of her past. She prided herself that she’d never been vulnerable to nostalgia. The soddenness of this destitute borough no longer had the power to disillusion her.
It was funny, Florence sometimes thought, sitting in her kitchen and looking down through the fire-escape window onto Ocean Parkway, that, after having accomplished the great act of her escape from it so young, it was to Brooklyn that she’d ultimately returned.
She’d been granted her U.S. citizenship upon arrival (her reward for being born an American). The other privileges had taken more effort. With the help of Sidney and Julian, she’d filed paperwork with the state of New York and the city to get her SSI benefits, and her Section 8 housing, and her own Jamaican home attendant, who came twice a week to help her cook and clean, to measure her blood pressure, to take her to the doctor and the hair salon. But aside from this weekly help, she was living on her own again, in a one-bedroom on the corner of Avenue C, where car alarms howled all day and night, and where each Saturday she watched black-hatted Jews, like ghosts of an ancient era, walking with their legions of children to shul.
She found that, in spite of her fears, she was not useless. At all hours of the day her new neighbors—those from Odessa and Kiev, with spilling décolletages and pumpkin-colored hair; Georgians who spoke Russian with thicker accents than her own; Tats from Azerbaijan who wore headscarves and skirts long enough to sweep up the grime off their tiled tenement floors—found reason to knock on her door, seeking translation help with the confusing paperwork that arrived every week in envelopes from Social Security, Medicaid, and the Publishers Clearing House. The elderly among them came to her for intercession with their impossible-to-understand home attendants, whom they persisted in calling “foreigners,” though these women from Jamaica and Barbados had been in the country far longer than they.
But the knock on her door she most looked forward to was her brother’s. It was Sidney who got Florence out of the house and to the old parts of Brooklyn where, fifty years ago, they’d gone in search of petty treasures: cake cutters, pencil charms, police whistles, sucking candies, parakeets. Of course there were no more Woolworths and five-and-dimes where one could scout for such cheap gems. Nothing could be bought for a nickel or a dime anymore. Even the pay telephones now cost a quarter. And there was nowhere to go that made a decent egg-cream soda. And so, instead, brother and sister sat on benches in the parks, talking while they watched the lanes of traffic, talking until the thread of words pulled a circle around them that made the past half-century vanish. Remember! Remember! “Remember when you tried to get a job like Eliza Weiss, selling clocks up at Martin’s all Christmas?”
“Eliza—dear God, could that poor girl even tell time?”
“Remember when Mama took us walking past the Menkens’ mansion so she could peek at their new ‘oriental room’?”
“Sure. She couldn’t stop talking about those paper fans and silk damask wallpaper! Word was, Mr. Menken had a lot of apologizing to do.”