Sweet Breath of Gin

Words by Pamela Schoenewaldt

Art by Sandra Eckert

I was drunk for the first and last time when I was thirty-five. It was New Year’s Eve. “Come on, Holtz, down the hatch,” my brothers at the Masonic lodge kept saying. “That’s prime Canadian gin, not bathtub home brew. Here’s to 1930. Sure the market crashed, but it’s America. We’ll be bouncing back.” 

Soon after midnight, Margaret had a taxicab bring us home to Brooklyn. “You go on to bed,” I told her. “I’ll be there soon.” I thought of heating up some milk, but in the end, just sat a long time in the kitchen before tackling the stairs, pulling myself up by the banister.

I passed Henry Jr.’s door, then got turned around in the hallway and found myself inside Freddy’s bedroom where nothing looked familiar. Gripping the doorknob, I closed my eyes to think. In the ten years since he was born, how often had I been in here? Maybe a dozen times? Almost all when he was a baby and subject to the croup.  

“Go keep him calm while I get the bathroom steaming,” Margaret would tell me. I work in German imports—soaps and cleaning agents. What did I know about calming sick children? “Mother’s coming soon,” I’d tell Freddy, but that terrible barking cough went on and on as I held my knees and rocked, remembering how my father’s cough shook our East Side walk-up—until it stopped and the silence cracked my ears.  

I quit school after his funeral to work as an errand boy. Eleven years old that winter, criss-crossing New York City in a cotton jacket, holes in my shoes and hands wrapped in rags. Somehow, we scraped by. My mother and deaf brother did piecework at home. Once she could thread a needle, my little sister helped. I took night classes and slowly moved up—from errand boy to the mailroom, then office boy, clerk, and finally chief shipping agent at Schmidt Brothers. I joined the Masonic lodge, married Margaret, and we bought this house in Brooklyn. 

I work long hours in the city and check my ledgers at home. Naturally, there’s not much time for the boys. People said Mr. Sorensen over on Avenue P got down on the living room carpet to play with the children. He sat on their beds at night and read whole books to them. Never mind the Sorensens, Margaret told me. They’re Swedes. What really matters is that Henry Jr. and Freddy will never be errand boys.  They could even go to college. 

I let go of the doorknob as my eyes adjusted to the dimness in Freddy’s room, catching on a handbill pinned over his desk: “Al Smith for President, 1928.” Two years ago, when he was eight, my son cared about politics? What else didn’t I know about him? I eased closer to the desk, stepping softly not to creak the floorboards.  

There was a stack of marbled composition books, three sharpened pencils in a cup, eraser, pen, inkstand and ruler, everything set out in neat precision. Henry Jr. made do with one shelf. Freddy had three shelves of books, the chemistry set from his uncle and a school award that Margaret had framed. All I could read on the parchment was “Excellence.” For what, I didn’t know and I was ashamed, a feeling as unusual and peculiar as the head-swirling of what I now had to call drunkenness. 

I had to sit, but the desk chair might scrape if I pulled it out. With careful steps, I crossed the room to Freddy’s bed and let myself down slowly, not to wake him. I didn’t, but then the hooked rug started turning, first clockwise and then slowly back again. When I stopped it with my shoe, the patent leather glinted back at me, a mocking eye. Never mind it, look up, but now the striped wallpaper was circling around me, first like a carousel and then like a cage. 

I looked down at Freddy, the room’s one still point, his breath so gentle that the blankets barely moved, his body straight as a rod. Long lashes—wasted on a boy, Margaret said—brushed the pale cheeks. The thick brown hair would be silky to the touch, but when I reached out my hand, the rug started spinning again and needed a jab of my foot to stop it. That shifted weight made a book by Freddy’s pillow start sliding off the mattress. I caught it in time, but the sudden movement hurt my head. 

Avoiding rug and walls, I fixed on the book in my hand. By the smooth leather binding, I knew it came from the fifty-book set of Harvard Classics we bought last year. Essential for the modern home, our lodge master said. When we first got the set, I’d flipped through a few volumes, but the close-printed pages were daunting and I figured I’d try later, like if we took that vacation upstate Margaret kept talking about.  Meanwhile the set looked distinguished in our living room—until I started noticing gaps on the shelf like missing teeth. 

“Freddy borrows them,” Martha explained when I asked about the missing books. When I pointed out that most boys his age go for adventure stories, she said, “Oh, he reads lots of those.” 

I could just make out Plutarch’s Lives. I’d never heard of Plutarch and once again felt silently judged, diminished, although it’s not like I’d been lazy all my life, not at all. 

When Freddy sighed in his sleep, blankets clasped around him, I tumbled back ten years to the night when he was born and the midwife came out of our bedroom with a bundle in her arms. “See, Mr. Holtz,” she said, “another fine boy.” I saw, but when I didn’t move to hold him, Mrs. Grantz took the bundle back to Margaret. I stood alone in the dim hallway, remembering our Karl, another fine boy, dead of pneumonia before he turned two. Day nurse, night nurse, famous doctor from the city and we couldn’t save him. Even now, I’ll be doing something, anything, and see again Karl’s little casket lowered into the ground, again, again, always the same. Enough grieving can crack your heart—or make it turn away, safe from yet more pain. 

Freddy stirred. I looked over just as his eyes flew open and he cried out in alarm, “Papa!” 

Was it my rented tuxedo that startled him, the cummerbund and odd glint of satin on lapels? No, eyes wide, his back against the wall, he was afraid of me. I’d feared my father’s hand, his belt and leather shaving strop, but why fear me, who never raised a hand to either boy?  

Again, “Papa?” 

“Yes, Freddy,” I said, holding very still not to rattle my head. “It’s me.” 

“Why are you here?” 

Why? Should I say “Because I mistook the door” or “Because of gin”? I couldn’t look away—the walls were still turning. Freddy’s eyes, bright in a slash of streetlight, dug into me. I held my knees. “I’m here because—to tell you—” 

“Tell me what?” his voice was still a child’s, high and thin. 

At fifteen, his brother looked and sounded like a young man. When I brought home bills of lading from the Hamburg shippers, Henry Jr. wanted them explained. At dinner, he asked about the export business, how we found buyers and set prices. Meanwhile Freddy, if Margaret didn’t catch him, would be hiding a book on his lap, as if all I did to feed, clothe and house him didn’t matter at all. 

But now Freddy studied me, back still pressed against the wall, hands like paws by his pale face, clutching the blankets. “Tell me what?” he asked again. 

“Tell you that—you’re a good boy.” The tiny motion of his blinking set the room turning backwards. Bile burned my throat. I choked it down. 

He half-sat, braced on his elbow, nearly eye-to-eye with me as I felt his fear drain away in the strangeness of the scene—that we two so rarely alone, were now the only ones awake in a sleeping house. “I get better grades than Henry, but you love him more. Why?” 

Cold as it was on that winter night with the coal damped low, I was sweating in my tuxedo. Even sober, his why would have stumped me. Nobody talked about love when I was a boy. We all moved like cats around my father, careful not to provoke him. My deaf brother Rudy never talked at all, just bent over his piece work. Even after my father died, we folded into Rudy’s silence and the daily work of getting by. 

“You know I skipped fourth grade?” Freddy persisted. 

Like an outline slowly sharpening, I saw myself in the cot I shared with my brother, watching our father read the German newspaper that was his solace. I’m here. Notice me, I burned to say. 

“I do know. You’re very smart,” I said, but it wasn’t enough. Words weren’t enough, but without them I was floundering. My hands ached for a touch of the silky brown hair, but the gesture felt too great and my balance too unsteady. So I did nothing, just sat, gripping my knees. 

Fred sniffed the air, nostrils flaring. “What’s that smell?” he asked suddenly.

“Gin,” I said, piecing out words like a foreign language. “Mother and I went to a party at the lodge and I had—a few.”

The eyes widened and a tiny smile showed a fringe of teeth. “Bathtub gin?”

“No, imported, Canadian.” 

“Papa, are you—drunk?” 

“A little. I don’t recommend it.” 

“Maybe you should lie down.” 

“Yes, I think so.” That little back and forth—could it be the closest to conversation that we’d ever had? Maybe so. I stood up, making the bed springs groan. “Go back to sleep,” I said. “You’re a good boy.” I crossed the room, careful not to weave and turned at the door to ask, “You want it closed?” 

“Yes please—Papa.” 

I closed it softly, hoping my son might somehow discern a hidden heart in the sweet breath of gin.

About the author

Pamela Schoenewaldt is a historical novelist. When We Were Strangers, Swimming in the Moon, and Under the Same Blue Sky (all with HarperCollins) focus on the immigrant experience, inspired by her own experience as “L’Americana” for ten years in a small town in Southern Italy. Her novels have been translated into five languages, USAToday Bestsellers and short listed for the Langum Prize in American Historical Fiction. Her award-winning short stories have appeared in England, France, Italy and the US. She lives in Knoxville, TN with her husband, Maurizio, a medical physicist. Visit her website at PamelaSchoenewaldt.com and find her on X: @PSchoenewaldt

About the artist

Sandra Eckert is a doodler, a dabbler, and a messy and restless individual. An avid naturopath and off-the-road walker, she finds inspiration in the unscenic vistas and hidden places. While her interests currently lie in the world of art, she has been known to tend goats, whitewater kayak, fish for piranha, and teach teenaged humans. She is fascinated by the lessons of the natural world, both seen and unseen. Sandra holds a BFA with certification, and has continued her education both formally and informally, though she is too distracted to gather up her credits. She lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania with her husband, Peter, and her rescue dogs, Jack and Teddy.  Additional works are available here.