by Betty Smith
Johnny studied Sissy as he smoked an after-supper cigar. He wondered what criterion people used when they applied the tags "good" and "bad" to their fellowmen. Take Sissy. She was bad. But she was good. She was bad where the men were concerned. But she was good because wherever she was, there was life, good, tender, overwhelming, fun-loving and strong-scented life. He hoped that his newly born daughter would be a little like Sissy.
When Sissy announced that she was going to stay the night, Katie looked worried and said there was but the one bed which she and Johnny shared. Sissy declared that she was willing to sleep with Johnny if he could guarantee her a fine baby like Francie. Katie frowned. She knew Sissy was joking of course. Yet there was something true and direct about Sissy. She started to give her a lecture. Johnny cut the whole thing short by saying he had to get over to the school.
He couldn't bring himself to tell Katie that he had lost their job. He hunted up his brother, Georgie, who was working that night. Fortunately, they needed another man to wait on table and sing in-between. Johnny got the job and was promised another for the following week. He drifted back into the singing-waiter business and from that time on never worked at any other job.
Sissy got into bed with Katie and they talked most of the night away. Katie told of her worry about Johnny and her fears of the future. They talked about Mary Rommely; what a good mother she was to Evy and Sissy and Katie. They spoke of their father, Thomas Rommely. Sissy said he was an old rip and Katie said Sissy ought to show more respect. Sissy said, "Oh, fudge!" and Katie laughed.
Katie told Sissy of the talk she had had with their mother that day. The idea of the bank so fascinated Sissy, that she got up--even though it was the middle of the night--emptied out a can of milk into a bowl and made the bank then and there. She tried to crawl into the narrow crowded closet to nail it down but her voluminous nightgown got her tangled up. She pulled it off and crawled naked into the closet. All of her couldn't fit into the closet. The large luminous naked back end of her stuck out as she crouched on her knees hammering the bank to the floor. Katie had such a fit of giggling that she was afraid she'd bring on a hemorrhage. The loud banging at three o'clock in the morning woke the other tenants. They pounded on the ceiling from below and on the floor from above. Sissy threw Katie into another spasm of giggles by mumbling from the closet that the tenants had a nerve raising such a racket when there was a sick woman in the house. "How can anybody sleep?" she asked, giving the last nail a terrific bang.
The bank in place, she put on her nightgown again, started off the land account by putting a nickel in the bank and got back into bed. She listened excitedly while Katie told her about the two books. She promised that she would get the two books; they would be her christening present to the baby.
Francie spent her first night on earth sleeping snugly between her mother and Sissy.
The next day, Sissy set about getting the two books. She went to a public library and asked the librarian how she could get a Shakespeare and a Bible for keeps. The librarian couldn't help her out on the Bible but said there was a worn-out copy of Shakespeare in the files, about to be discarded, which Sissy could have. She bought it. It was a tattered old volume containing all the plays and sonnets. It had intricate footnotes and detailed explanations as to the playwright's meaning. There was a biography and picture of the author and steel-cut engravings illustrating scenes from each play. It was printed in small type, two columns to the page on thin paper. It cost Sissy twenty-five cents.
The Bible, while a little harder to come by, was cheaper in the long run. In fact, it cost Sissy nothing. It had a name, Gideon, on the front.
A few days after buying the volume of Shakespeare, Sissy woke up one morning and nudged her current lover, with whom she was spending the night in a quiet family hotel.
"John," (she called him John although his name was Charlie), "what's that book on the dresser?"
"A Bible."
"A Protestant Bible?"
"That's right."
"I'm going to hook it."
"Go ahead. That's why they put it there."
"No!"
"Yeah!"
"No kidding!"
"People swipe it, read it, reform and repent. They bring it back and buy another one, too, so that other people can swipe, read and reform. In that way, the firm that puts out the books loses nothing."
"Well, here's one they're not going to get back." She wrapped it up in a hotel towel that she was also swiping.
"Say!" A cold fear enveloped her John. "You might read it and reform and then I'd have to go back to my wife." He shuddered and put his arms around her. "Promise me that you won't reform."
"I won't."
"How do you know you won't?"
"I never listen to what people tell me and I can't read. The only way I know what is right and wrong is the way I feel about things. If I feel bad, it's wrong. If I feel good, it's right. And I feel good being here with you." She threw her arm across his chest and exploded a kiss in his ear.
"I sure wish we could get married, Sissy."
"So do I, John. I know we could hit it off. For a while, anyhow," she added honestly.
"But I'm married and that's the hell of the Catholic religion. No divorce."
"I don't believe in divorce anyhow," said Sissy who always remarried without the benefit of a divorce.
"You know what, Sissy?"
"What?"
"You got a heart of gold."
"No kidding?"
"No kidding." He watched her snap a red silk garter over the sheer lisle stocking she had pulled up over her shapely leg. "Give us a kiss," he begged suddenly.
"Have we time?" she asked in a practical way. But she pulled the stocking off again.
That's how the library of Francie Nolan was started.
10
FRANCIE WASN'T MUCH OF A BABY. SHE WAS SKINNY AND HAD A BLUE look and didn't thrive. Katie nursed her doggedly although the neighbor women told her that her milk was bad for the child.
Francie was put on the bottle soon enough because Katie's milk stopped suddenly when the child was three months old. Katie worried. She consulted her mother. Mary Rommely looked at her, sighed but said nothing. Katie went to the midwife for advice. The woman asked her a foolish question.
"Where do you buy your fish of a Friday?"
"Paddy's market. Why?"
"You wouldn't be after seeing an old woman in there buying a codfish head for her cat, would you now?"
"Yes. I see her every week."
"She did it! She dried up your milk on you."
"Oh, no!"
"She put the eye on you."
"But why?"
"Jealous she is because you're too happy with that pretty Irish lad of yours."
"Jealous? An old woman like that?"
"A witch she is. I knew her back in the old country. Sure and didn't she come over on the same boat as meself. When she was young she was in love with a wild County Kerry boy. And didn't he go and get her that way and he wouldn't go to the priest with her when her old father went after him. He slipped away on a boat for America in the dead of the night. Her baby died when it was born. Then she sold her soul to the devil and he did give her the power of drying up the milk of cows and nanny goats and of girls married to young boys."
"I remember she looked at me in a funny way."
" 'Twas then she put the eye on you."
"How can I get my milk back?"
"I'll tell you what you must do. Wait until the moon is full. Then make a little image out of a lock of your curling hair, a cutting from your fingernail and a bit of rag sprinkled with holy water. Christen it Nelly Grogan, and that's the witch's name, and stick three rusty pins in it. That will spoil her power over you and sure your milk will be flowing again like the River Shannon. That will be a quarter."
Katie paid her. When the moon was full, she made the little doll and stabbed it and stabbed it. She remained dry. Francie sickened on the bottle. In desperation
, Katie called Sissy in for advice. Sissy listened to the witch story.
"A witch my foot," she said scornfully. "It was Johnny who did it and it wasn't with an eye."
In that way Katie knew that she was pregnant again. She told Johnny and he started to worry. He had been fairly happy back in the singing-waiter business and he worked pretty often, was steady, didn't drink too much and brought home most of his money. The news that a second child was on the way made him feel trapped. He was only twenty and Katie was eighteen. He felt that they were both so young and so defeated already. He went out and got drunk after he heard the news.
The midwife came around later to see how the charm had worked. Katie told her that the charm had failed since she was pregnant and the witch was not to blame. The midwife lifted her skirt and dug down into a capacious pocket made in her petticoat. She brought up a bottle of evil-looking dark brown stuff.
"Sure and there is nothing to worry about," she said. "A good dose of this night and morning for three days and you'll come around again." Katie shook her head negatively. "You're not afraid of what the priest would be saying to you if you did it?"
"No. It's just that I couldn't kill anything."
"It wouldn't be killing. It don't count until you've felt life. You're not after feeling it move, are you?"
"No."
"There!" she slammed her fist on the table triumphantly. "I'll only be charging you a dollar for the bottle."
"Thank you, I don't want it."
"Don't be foolish. You're just a bit of a girl and have trouble enough with the one you do be having already. And your man is pretty but not the steadiest boy in the world."
"The way my man is, is my own business and my baby is no trouble."
"I'm only after trying to help you out."
"Thank you and good-bye."
The midwife returned the bottle to her petticoat pocket and got up to go. "When your time comes, you know where I live." At the door, she gave a last bit of optimistic advice. "If you keep running up and down the stairs, maybe you'll have a miscarriage."
That fall in the false warmth of a Brooklyn Indian summer, Katie sat on the stoop and held her sickly baby against the bigness which was another child soon to be born. Pitying neighbors stopped to commiserate over Francie.
"You'll never raise that one," they told her. "Her color ain't good. If the good Lord takes her, it will be for the best. What good is a sickly baby in a poor family? There is too many children on this earth already and no room for the weak ones."
"Don't say that," Katie held her baby tightly. "It's not better to die. Who wants to die? Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating. It gets no sun, and water only when it rains. It's growing out of sour earth. And it's strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way."
"Aw, somebody ought to cut that tree down, the homely thing."
"If there was only one tree like that in the world, you would think it was beautiful," said Katie. "But because there are so many, you just can't see how beautiful it really is. Look at those children." She pointed to a swarm of dirty children playing in the gutter. "You could take any one of them and wash him good and dress him up and sit him in a fine house and you would think he was beautiful."
"You've got fine ideas but a very sick baby, Katie," they told her. "This baby will live," said Katie fiercely. "I'll make it live."
And Francie lived, choking and whimpering her way through that first year.
Francie's brother was born a week after her first birthday.
This time Katie was not working when the pains came. This time she bit her lip and did not scream out in her agony. Helpless in her pain, she was capable still of laying the foundation for bitterness and capability.
When the strong healthy boy, howling at the indignity of the birth process, was put to her breast, she felt a wild tenderness for him. The other baby, Francie, in the crib next her bed, began to whimper. Katie had a flash of comtempt for the weak child she had borne a year ago, when she compared her to this new handsome son. She was quickly ashamed of her contempt. She knew it wasn't the little girl's fault. "I must watch myself carefully," she thought. "I am going to love this boy more than the girl but I mustn't ever let her know. It is wrong to love one child more than the other but this is something that I cannot help."
Sissy begged her to call the boy after Johnny but Katie insisted that the boy had a right to a name all his own. Sissy got very angry and told Katie a thing or two. Finally Katie, more in anger than in truth, accused Sissy of being in love with Johnny. Sissy answered, "maybe," and Katie shut up. She was a little afraid that if they quarreled further, she would find out that it was so about Sissy loving Johnny.
Katie called the boy Cornelius after a noble character she had seen a handsome actor represent on the stage. As the boy grew up, the name was changed into Brooklynese and he was known as Neeley.
Without devious reasoning or complicated emotional processes, the boy became Katie's whole world. Johnny took second place and Francie went to the back of her mother's heart. Katie loved the boy because he was more completely hers than either Johnny or Francie. Neeley looked exactly like Johnny. Katie would make him into the kind of man Johnny should have been. He would have everything that was good about Johnny; she would encourage that. She would stamp out all of the things that were bad about Johnny as they came up in the boy, Neeley. He would grow up and she would be proud of him and he would take care of her all of her days. He was the one that she had to see through. Francie and Johnny would get by somehow, but she would take no chances with the boy. She'd see to it that he more than got by.
Gradually, as the children grew up, Katie lost all of her tenderness although she gained in what people call character. She became capable, hard and far-seeing. She loved Johnny dearly but all the old wild worship faded away. She loved her little girl because she felt sorry for her. It was pity and obligation towards her that she felt rather than love.
Johnny and Francie felt the growing change in Katie. As the boy grew stronger and handsomer, Johnny grew in weakness and went further and further downhill. Francie felt the way her mother thought about her. She grew an answering hardness against her mother and this hardness, paradoxically enough, brought them a little closer together because it made them more alike.
By the time Neeley was a year old, Katie had stopped depending on Johnny. Johnny was drinking heavily. He worked when he was offered one-night jobs. He brought home his wages but kept his tips for liquor. Life was going too swiftly for Johnny. He had a wife and two babies before he was old enough to vote. His life was finished before it had a chance to begin. He was doomed and no one knew it better than Johnny Nolan.
Katie had the same hardships as Johnny and she was nineteen, two years younger. It might be said that she, too, was doomed. Her life, too, was over before it began. But there the similarity ended. Johnny knew he was doomed and accepted it. Katie wouldn't accept it. She started a new life where her old one left off.
She exchanged her tenderness for capability. She gave up her dreams and took over hard realities in their place.
Katie had a fierce desire for survival which made her a fighter. Johnny had a hankering after immortality which made him a useless dreamer. And that was the great difference between these two who loved each other so well.
11
JOHNNY CELEBRATED HIS VOTING BIRTHDAY BY GETTING DRUNK FOR three days. When he was coming out of it, Katie locked him in the bedroom where he couldn't get anything more to drink. Instead of sobering up, he started to get delirium tremens. He wept and begged by turns for a drink. He said he was suffering. She told him it was a good thing, that suffering would harden him, would teach him such a lesson that he'd stop drinking. But poor Johnny just wouldn't harden. He softened into a wailing, screaming banshee.
Neighbors banged on her door and told her to do something for the poor man. Katie's mouth set in a hard cold line
and she called out to them to mind their own business. But even as she defied the neighbors, she knew that they would have to move as soon as the month was up. They couldn't live in the neighborhood after the way Johnny was disgracing them.
In the late afternoon, his tortured cries unnerved Katie. Crowding the two babies in the buggy she went over to the factory and had Sissy's long-suffering foreman get her away from her machine. She told Sissy about Johnny, and Sissy said she'd come over and fix him up as soon as she could get away.
Sissy consulted a gentleman friend about Johnny. The friend gave her instructions. Accordingly, she bought a half pint of good whiskey, concealed it between her full breasts and laced her corset cover and buttoned her dress over it.
She went over to Katie's and told her that if she could be left alone with Johnny she'd get him out of it. Katie locked Sissy in the bedroom with Johnny. She went back into the kitchen and spent the night with her head on her arms on the table, waiting.
When Johnny saw Sissy, his poor mixed-up brain unscrambled for a minute and he grabbed her arm. "You're my friend, Sissy. You're my sister. For God's sake give me a drink."
"Take it slow, Johnny," she said in her soft comforting voice. "I've got a drink right here for you."
She unbuttoned her waist releasing a cascade of foaming white embroidered ruffles and dark pink ribbon. The room filled up with the sweet scent of the warm strong sachet she used. Johnny stared as she undid an intricate bow and loosened her corset cover. The poor fellow remembered her reputation and misunderstood.
"No, no, Sissy. Please!" he moaned.
"Don't be a dockle, Johnny. There's a time and a place for everything and this isn't the time." She pulled out the bottle.
He grabbed it. It was warm from her. She let him take a long drink, then she dug the bottle out of his clutching fingers. He quieted down after the drink; got sleepy and begged her not to go away. She promised. Without bothering to tie up her ribbons or button her waist, she lay on the bed beside him. She put her arm under his shoulders and he rested his cheek on her bare warm-scented breast. He slept and tears came from under his closed lids and they were warmer than the flesh they fell on.