My brother Jack didn't seem to care. "It's a free country," he'd say. "Let 'em live where they want." Ma, however, was disturbed by the encroachment of so many "lost souls." A"Christ-fearing woman," she would pray the rosary every night on her neighbors' behalf. I, for one, could have cared less about the state of their souls...or my own for that matter. My only concern was fitting in, a real trick with the name Kate O'Meara.
It wasn't that we were the only micks left in Brooklyn. The south of Flatbush was still teeming with 'em, as were many of the neighborhoods over towards Long Island. Ma, I know, would have gladly moved, but for the fact that rents there started at sixty-nine a month. Fifty-eight was our max now that Pop was gone off, into the sunset. Pop was like Roy Rogers, only better looking, without the horse and the white hat. Pop's hat had been blue, like all the officers'. Some of them had looked pretty dumb, walking the beat on Eighteenth Street, but not Pop. He'd been the handsomest cop in all of Brooklyn. By contrast, Ma had been the kind of Irish rose who'd withered instead of bloomed. Destined, it had seemed, for the convent, she'd met Pop prior to his stint in the war. After fifteen years of marriage, four spent overseas, he had wised up and split. Another year had passed before Ma realized that he wasn't coming back. Even now, she would burst into tears every time the radio played "I'm Just Wild About Harry." That had been their song. I hated it.
Jack was the spitting image of Pop. I guess that's why Ma loved him best. She got up at dawn to fix him breakfast before he went to work. My brother was an assistant repairman down at the Armory, but he was going places, Ma said. At night, he took engineering courses over at Brooklyn College. Soon, he would be earning enough to support Ma and me and whatever girl he married. This, at least, was the line Ma fed her fellow clerks at Stillwell Realty. They were all from our neighborhood; all Jewish, of course. Many had sons, Jack's age, at CCNY and Columbia. Future doctors and lawyers all, they made my brother and my preening mother look like asses. It killed me how Ma would go on and on about Jack and his crummy classes. She must have known, as well as I, that the Jewish mamas were all laughing at her behind her back. Yet, for some reason, she persisted in a pathetic show of superiority.
