by Betty Smith
to call the next one?"
Sheila patted her rounding stomach. "Fern! To trim up
my bow-key." She nodded at ~~l~ggie-Nov.7. "This the
only one you ot? "
b
"The only one."
"What's the matter? Did you marry a night watchman or
something?" She prodded Mary with her elbow and
laughed. Mary looked a little apprehensively at
Maggie-Now. Sheila understood the look. "Listen, kids,"
she said, "why don't you go play with your cousin from
Brooklyn so Cousin Mary and I can talk?"
The kids stood rigid except for Daisy, who removed her
thumb guard and took three big sucks.
"Go on and play when I tell you'" veiled Sheila' "or I'll
give it to you. Good!"
Whooping like Comanches, the four kids dragged
l/laggie-Nov. away into the dirty wash. They bounced on
the bundles and scattered the sorted clothes. They delved
into the basket of wet clothes waiting to be hung on the
line and belted each other with wet towels, screaming and
laughing all the time while Mary and Sheila talked.
Finally, they knocked over the ironing board with a
sadiron upended on it. The iron missed Daisy by about an
inch.
"Just for that," shouted Sheila, "you'll all get it!"
They lined up somberly. Then Sheila did a strange thing.
She put her arm around Rose, gave her a walloping slap
on the backside, and a kiss on the cheek at the same time.
She did the same to the other three. They sobbed. And
grinned slyly at each other at the same time, making the
dimples come and go.
"My turn! My turn!" demanded Maggie-Now.
Sheila gave her the same, explaining to Mary: "I give
'em a slap and a kiss at the same time so they know
they're getting punished with no hard feelings."
~ limo I
Home again in Brooklyn, Maggie-Now remembered her
"cousins." She spent her pennies on picture postcards to
send to Boston. Her salutation was: "My dear Boston
cousins." Her ending: "From your loving Brooklyn cousin."
Sometimes she got a card back, always written by Sheila.
"From cousin Sheila and all her flowers to the one rose,
Maggie-Now."
A few months after their return, Mary had a letter from
her mother saying that Sheila had given birth to her fifth
child; a son. She had named him Joe.
"Why, oh why," wailed Maggie-Now, "didn't she ask me?
I would have told her to call him Chris."
"Why Chris?" asked her mother.
"Chris is short for chris-san-thee . . . yak know what
flower I mean, Mama. Then he would have fitted in the
bouquet."
Her next card had the salutation: "My dear Boston
cousins and Joe."
A' CHAPTER SIXTEEN ~
THE growing years of Maggie-Now were not unhappy
ones. She always had enough to eat, although the food was
plain. She had warm clothes in winter even if they were
not beautiful. She liked her school days although she
didn't like to study. She loved the Sisters who taught her
although they were very strict in their discipline.
She was well adjusted because she knew where she
belonged in the social SftUp of her small world. She had
a friend who had a hair ribbon for every day in the week.
Maggie-Now had but two one for Sunday, one for
weekdays. On the other hand, another friend was too poor
to have any hair ribbon. Her hair was tied back with a
dirty shoestring. Maggie-Now was sorry she didn't have
seven hair ribbons but she was glad she didn't have to use
a shoestring to tie back her hair.
As she grew older1 she gave some thought to poverty
and riches. Her mother had asked her to read Little
Wome7', explaining that ~ cot 1
it was a book about four girls who were very poor but
happy just the same. Maggie-Now read the book and took
issue with her mother.
"How can they be poor," she asked, "when they can
waste hot potatoes to put in their muff. And I ain't . . .
haven't a muff even. And then they have a servant and
their father has money to go away on."
"To some people who are, say, used to three servants, to
have only one servant is being poor. Poverty is relative."
The word "relative" puzzled Maggie-Now. How could
"poor" be a relation, she wondered. She didn't probe
further into the meaning of the word because she was
anxious to go out to play. The word came up later, in
another conversation.
One night, Father Flynn was paying a parish call and he,
Mary, Pat and lYlaggie-Now sat in the kitchen having
coffee. Mary, as always, was talking eagerly with the priest.
He was one of the few people who made her articulate.
Patsy was listening with outward respect becau e he had
been brought up to respect priests, but he didn't b. lieve
a word Father Flynn was saying.
"I came from a small town," Father Flynn was saying.
"Everyone seemed the same. No one was rich and no one
starved. I had an idea, then, that poor people wore
colorful rags and had rosy cheeks and danced all night to
the music of a concertina. Those were my Fran,cois Villon
days. Later, I thought poor people lived in cellars and had
lice and lived on hard crusts of bread which they stole
from each other. I was reading the Russian novelists in
those days. Why, I was quite mature before I knew that
poverty, like so many other things, was relative."
That word again, thought Maggie-Nov.
The next day she asked her mother: "Why are some
people rich and other people poor?"
"Yesterday, you wanted to know how big was the sky.
And last week you wanted to know where the wind went
when it stopped blowing down Ainslie Street."
"I mean like: Florry says we're poor. Bea thinks we're
rich."
"Florry9, father makes much more money than your
father. Naturally, she thinks you're poorer than she is. But
Beatrice's mother has to go out scrubbing for a dollar a
day. Of course, she
1 1021
thinks that you, with a father who has a steady job, are
richer than she is."
"It's all relations, then."
"Relations:" asked Mary, puzzled.
"Relations. But different than my Boston cousins are
relations." "Oh, you mean, relative. Yes, like everything
else, I suppose it is relative."
"What's relative?"
"Oh, Maggie-Now! How high is the sky?"
"I asked first."
"Well, say a man has only one dollar in all the world.
Somebody gives him a hundred dollars. Another man has
a hundred dollars. He's always had a hundred dollars.
Someone gives him a dollar. He's just as poor as he was
before. Now both men have one hundred and one dollars.
But one is rich and one isn't. That's relative, I suppose."
"You're just talking, Mama. You're not telling me."
>
"To tell you the truth, I don't know how to tell you."
"Did you live in a rich house when you were a girl?"
"Oh, dear!" sighed Marv. "Well, people who lived in
crowded tenements thought we had a rich house. But the
Mayor's wife thought our house was poor compared to
hers."
"What did you think, Mama?"
"I didn't think one wan or the other," said Mary, trying
not to get irritated by the incessant questioning. "I lived
there."
"Why? "
"Don't be silly. I lived there because I was born
there because my parents lived there."
"Did you like it?"
"Of course. I didn't know about any other home, you see."
"Did that make it relative?"
"Oh, Maggie-Now, please stop. I'm getting such a
headache.' "So'm I," admitted Maggie-Now.
Maggie-Now asked Sister Veronica what a rich home
was and what was a poor home.
"A cell," said the nun, "with a cot in it and a chair and
a nail on the wall on which to hang a shawl, is a rich home
if our Holy Mother and our Blessed Lord are there. A
grand home, with thick
~ hod]
carpets and velvet curtains and a golden harp in the
parlor, is a poor home if our Blessed Lord and our Holy
Mother are denied there."
Maggic-Now asked her father: "Papa, did you have a
rich home or a poor home when you were a boy back in
Ireland?"
"'Tis time you knew," he said, "how your poor father
lived. It was a poor house. Poor. Poor. The poorest of the
poor. A oneroom sod shanty with a leanto where me bed
was and me bed a bag of straw. And the neighbor's
starving pig sneaking in on cold nights and wanting to lcep
with me for the warmth of it." The child laughed.
" 'Tis not to laugh at the v. ay the slanty roof came
down to the ground where me head lay and me bumping
me head on it every time I moved ill me sled p.
"And the black hole in the wall where the poor fire
didn't keep us warm in winter but roasted us in summer
when we cooked our food in it. And oh, the poor food!
The small potatoes from the starving ground and the
rough, black bread burned on the bottom, and an egg
maybe once every two weeks, and our Christmas dinner,
a hen, itself, tough, and she being too old to lay.
"And water from the well, and the well a cruel walk
from the shanty on a cold winter s morning and the
bucket too heavy for a skinny boy. And no toil . . . no
plumbing in the house a-tall and we using the woods in
back of our shanty."
"I betcha you were happy there, Papa."
"Happy, she says!" h' commented bitterly. "I hated it and
left
ithout looking back once when the time came."
But he thought of how green the fields were in summer
and the meadow flowers hit den in knee-deep grass and
the lake that took its color from the sky or did the sky
take its color from the lake? And the way the thrown,
dusty road to the village looked so lazy in the sun. He
remembered the good nights in the tavern with the men
liking the way he danced. His mind went to Rory-Boy in
the great days when they had been true friends. He
thought of his fiercely protective and possessive mother.
And oh, the dear sweetness of his Maggie Rose! He
thought of the idle, golden days of his youth and he wept
in his heart.
God forgive the lie size saying I hated it so, he prayed.
Remembering, he spoke with bitterness to his daughter;
his
~ i 4 1
darling's namesake. "Your mother was the one raised in
a rich house. Tell her to take you over to Bushwick
Avenue and show you the house. Tell her to show you the
stable where your father laid his head nights. Look good
at that rich house what should have been mine . . . ours .
. . if that crook . . ."
Ah, he thought, let the dead rest in peace even if he was
a black'ard in life.
Walking over to the old house, Mary answered
Maggie-Now's question: "Why didn't I take you there
before? Because the house is so changed and it makes me
sad."
Yes, it was changed. The rooms on either side of the
stoop had been made into shops. The bay windows were
now store windows. One was a hairdressing parlor with
intricately coifed wax dummy heads in the window. The
other window showed only a swan, pure, white and
immobile and with each feather in place. The swan sat
proudly on a bed of swansdown. A card, dangling by a
brass chain suspended from the swan's beak, read:
Genuine Swansdown Filled Pillows.
"Is it real>" breathed llaggie-Now.
"It was. Once. Now it's stuffed."
"Maybe it's still alive and they give it medicine to sit still."
"Now you know better."
The upstairs windows had a blank look. A card in one
of them said: Rooms. The basement rooms had been
converted. A swinging sign with a red seal informed
people that a notary public was available there. A
rooms-for-rent sign was attached to the notary's shingle.
Mary figured it out that the man who'd bought the
house was the notary in the basement. He was squeezing
every penny of revenue out of his investment. She
wondered how many transients had slept in her white
room since she had left. She sighed as she thought of her
piano once standing in the room that now held sewing
machines, bolts of ticking and bags of down.
The stable was now a separate property, divided from
the big house by an iron picket fence. An unevenly
painted sign over the barn door read: Pheid ~ Son.
Plumbers. Day e; Night. A broken toilet lay on its side in
the yard. A man, Pheid himself, was uncrating a pair of
double, soapstone washtubs. A boy, a few year older than
Maggie-Now, was helping the man. The man
~ ` s ]
looked up as Mary and Maggie-Now approached.
"Yes?" he asked.
"I used to live here when I was a girl," explained Mary.
"That so? Well, a E'etalian owns the house now. But I
own the shop."
"Is that so?"
"That sign: Pheid & Son? Well, this here is son. Son
Pheid." He put his arm about the boy's shoulder. His
pride was evident. "I'm breaking him in young. I believe
in that," he said.
"I see," said Mary.
"Well, help yourself. Look around." He went back to his
work. "Where did Papa sleep?" asked Maggie-Now.
"Up there. That little window. Where the pipes are
sticking out.
"Chee! "
"After we were married, we lived in the big house, of
course. For a little while, anyhow."
"Where is . . . are, all the snowball trees you said was
always in the yard?"
"Someone cut them down, I suppose."
/>
"I'm glad I never lived here."
"Why, Maggie-Now, don't say that. It was very nice
before it was all cut up into rental property. It was good
to live here long ago. It was cool and dark in the summer
and bright and warm in the winter."
"Why did you all move away then, if it was so nice?"
"Well, your grandfather died."
"Why? "
"Oh, Maggie-Now! 1r was his time tO die."
"Papa said he died from being scared."
"Your father didn't mean that."
Mary knew this was a logical time to tell her of her
grandfather. But how could she tell the child that her
grandfather had been a thief? But was he? The others
who had stood trial had been exonerated. And politicians
still kept on doing the same things.
No' I will not complicate her growing years by telling her.
Patrick won't tell her since he hasn't so far. She may find
out when she's grown up. 7Ry that time, his crimes if
crimes they were will be softened; faded and far away.
~ ~o61
"What did he die of then?" asked Maggie-Now.
"What we all die of in the end. His heart stopped beating."
"I'm glad . . . not that he died," amended Maggie-Now
quickly. "I mean I'm glad I don't have to live here. I like
our own house where we live now. And 1 don't care if
it's rich or poor."
l'n~ glad she's got that settled, thought Mary. A~Iaybe
no~v she'll stop tcsirlg that Ivory "relative."
"Of course," said Maggie-Now airily, "it's all relative."
~ (2HAPTkR SEVENTEEN ~
MORE wonderful to Maggie-Now, almost, than Christmas,
the first day of summer vacation or the trip to Coney
Island, was Memorial Day, called Decoration Day in
Brooklyn, when her mother took her on the yearly trip to
the cemetery.
"When will it come? When will it come?" she began
asking her mother soon after Easter.
"You'll know by the lilac bush in Father Flynn's yard.
Lilacs always bloom for Decoration Day." And it was so.
It was always a warm, sunny day with a sweet-smelling
wind around the next corner. When Maggie-Now went to
the baker's for the morning buns, thtre was usually a
customer there who confided to the bakery woman: "I'm
going to the cemetery in my shape today." That meant it
was warm enough to go without a coat.
Maggie-Now and her mother went to the cemetery in
their shapes. The girl wore her Easter dress and Sunday
hat and Mary dressed in her brushed and mended best.
They let the cars go by, waiting for an "open" trolley to
come along. They sat in the front seat so they could see
far ahead. The car picked up people along the way until it
was filled with people in fresh summer clothes. Most of
the men wore new straw hats because Decoration Day was
the official day to start wearing them.
In no time at all, the car was out of the city and in the
country heading for Cypress Hills in Queens County. Grass
now grew
~ ion ~
between the car tracks. Daisies, buttercups and sweet,
purple clover grew in empty lots. Bouncing Bet grew along
the car tracks and seemed to be running ahead of the
trolley.
"It has another name," explained Mary. "Soapwort. And
it loves the tracks: car tracks, train tracks and wagon
tracks. No matter w here you go, you see it along the
tracks even growing out of cinders."
"Oh, smell that country air!" said a woman in the seat
behind them. "Just smell it!"
"Yeah, it smells healthy," said her companion. "I feel
years voungerd'
Maggie-Now always remembered that warm,
new-summer smell. It was like smelling buckwheat honey
through warm dust.
They got off the trolley and had to walk several long
blocks to the cemetery. It was a beautiful walk. The stores
had the summer awnings down; red, or.mge, green-striped
and scalloped. All the stores save a tombstone-cutting
store or two were flower stores with the flowering plants