Read Online By the Rivers of Brooklyn by Trudy Morgan-Cole - Free Book Online

back and giggled to cover the rudeness, both hers and his. Then she collected herself and said, “Pleased to meet you, I’m sure, Mr. Martelli. Rose has told us so much about you.”
    The Italian smiled. “Tony, please. Yes, Rose speaks so well of you all.” He and Ethel smiled at each other, acknowledging the polite lies.
    Jim broke the silence. “Come on, we better get a move on, let’s catch the subway.”
    Ethel never liked travelling on the subway; she preferred trolleys. The dark tunnels and the hot crowded cars bothered her: it was impossible not to think of the cars and horses and people and houses all piled on top of her, ready to collapse. Jim strode onto the car behind Rose and Tony. Harold gave Ethel his arm to help her on. She shot him a look of gratitude. A kindly man, like Bert.
    Harold was short, with bright blue eyes and sandy, crinkly hair. “Well, this is something, ain’t it?” he said as he squeezed onto the seat next to Jim and Ethel.
    â€œSit back, kid. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” Rose said. She turned to Tony. “I hope you got big bucks today, Tony Martelli, cause we are going to show my baby brother a good time at Coney Island. We’re gonna eat a Feltman’s hot dog and go for a ride on the Cyclone, right?”
    Ethel glanced up at Jim. They had two dollars to entertain themselves and Harold, and fifteen cents was already gone on the subway fare. But Jim didn’t look worried.
    Finally the car lurched to a stop where the doors opened and people poured out in a living flood. “This is it,” Rose said. Ethel scrambled on the floor, feeling for the lunch basket, the bags, her purse. Rose, a tiny handbag slung over one shoulder, stood up empty-handed without glancing down, leaving Tony to carry her bags while she led them out into the glaring sunlight.
    Ethel hated Coney Island at first glance. Between the steady flow of people on all sides she caught glimpses of garish signs, heard barkers’ voices luring them in to games of chance, smelled food in the air. She felt hot, faint, and queasy. But the others charged ahead, eager to get to the boardwalk. Ethel felt Jim’s hand on her elbow and let him propel her along.
    Her first glimpse of the beach was a shock too. Already, only ten in the morning, the sand was black with people, swarming like ants down off the boardwalk and onto the seashore. The ocean looked very far away, a narrow line of dark blue at the edge of a seething mass of humanity.
    â€œLook, there’s a bathhouse down there. Let’s go change,” Jim said.
    Rose ruffled her brother’s hair. “Don’t go playing the big-shot New Yorker with me, Jimmy. You might impress Harry and the little woman there, but you don’t know from nothin’. See the line-up outside that bathhouse? You wanna wait two hours and throw fifty cents each for a private locker? You follow me.”
    She led them off the Boardwalk and up onto a sidewalk where they joined a line-up outside a small, dilapidated house. “Ten cents apiece,” Rose told them.
    Ethel breathed a sigh of relief: thirty cents for her, Jim and Harold instead of a dollar fifty, just for a place to change your clothes. Maybe Rose’s street sense had its place. But when she found herself and Rose crowded into a room with twenty other women shiggling out of their clothes and into their bathing costumes, Ethel could have cursed Rose to eternal damnation, never mind the money saved. She had never in all her life stripped full naked in front of another person in broad daylight, not even Jim. Nobody seemed to be looking but she flushed like a boiled lobster as she peeled off her stockings, dress and slip. Nearby, hugely fat women undressed, jiggling breasts and bottoms almost bumping each other. Skinny young girls stripped like snakes shedding their skins, and Rose, caught in the corner of Ethel’s eye, undressed like a