A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

by Betty Smith

  She lay awake, holding him in her arms and staring into the darkness. She felt towards him as she would have felt towards her babies had they only lived to know her warm love. She stroked his curling hair and smoothed his cheek gently. When he moaned in his sleep, she soothed him with the kind of words she would have spoken to her babies. Her arm cramped and she tried to move it. He woke up for a moment, clutched her tightly and begged her not to leave him. When he spoke to her, he called her mother.

  Whenever he woke up and got afraid, she gave him a swallow of whiskey. Towards morning he woke. His head was clearer but he said it hurt. He jerked away from her and moaned.

  "Come back to Mama," she said in her soft fluttering voice.

  She opened her arms wide and once more he crept into them and rested his cheek on her generous breast. He wept quietly. He sobbed out his fears and his worries and his bewilderment at the way things were in the world. She let him talk, she let him weep. She held him the way his mother should have held him as a child (which she never did). Sometimes Sissy wept with him. When he had talked himself out, she gave him what was left of the whiskey and at last he fell into a deep exhausted sleep.

  She lay very still for a long time not wanting him to feel her withdrawing from him. Towards dawn, his tight holding of her hand relaxed; peace came into his face and made it boyish again. Sissy put his head on the pillow, expertly undressed him and put him under the covers. She threw the empty whiskey bottle down the airshaft. She figured that what Katie didn't know couldn't possibly bother her. She tied her pink ribbons carelessly and adjusted her waist. She closed the door very softly when she went out.

  Sissy had two great failings. She was a great lover and a great mother. She had so much of tenderness in her, so much of wanting to give of herself to whoever needed what she had, whether it was her money, her time, the clothes off her back, her pity, her understanding, her friendship or her companionship and love. She was mother to everything that came her way. She loved men, yes. She loved women too, and old people and especially children. How she loved children! She loved the down-and-outers. She wanted to make everybody happy. She had tried to seduce the good priest who heard her infrequent confessions because she felt sorry for him. She thought he was missing the greatest joy on earth by being committed to a life of celibacy.

  She loved all the scratching curs on the street and wept for the gaunt scavenging cats who slunk around Brooklyn corners with their sides swollen looking for a hole in which they might bring forth their young. She loved the sooty sparrows and thought that the very grass that grew in the lots was beautiful. She picked bouquets of white clover in the lots believing they were the most beautiful flowers God ever made. Once she saw a mouse in her room. The next night she set out a tiny box for him with cheese crumbs in it. Yes, she listened to everybody's troubles but no one listened to hers. But that was right because Sissy was a giver and never a taker.

  When Sissy came into the kitchen, Katie looked at Sissy's disordered clothing with swollen and suspicious eyes.

  "I'm not forgetting," she said with pitiful dignity, "that you are my sister. And I hope you remembered that, too."

  "Don't be such a heimdickischer ass," said Sissy, knowing what Katie meant. But she smiled deeply into Katie's eyes. Katie was suddenly reassured.

  "How's Johnny?"

  "Johnny will be fine when he wakes up. But for Christ's sweet sake, don't nag him when he wakes up. Don't nag him, Katie."

  "But he's got to be told...."

  "If I hear that you nag him, I'll get him away from you. I swear it. Even though I am your sister."

  Katie knew that she meant it and was a little frightened. "I won't then," she mumbled. "Not this time."

  "Now you're growing up into a woman," approved Sissy as she kissed Katie's cheek. She felt sorry for Katie as well as for Johnny.

  Katie broke down then and cried. She made hard ugly noises because she hated herself for crying, yet couldn't help it. Sissy had to listen, to go through again all she had gone through with Johnny, only this time from Katie's angle. Sissy handled Katie differently than she had handled Johnny. She had been gentle and maternal with Johnny because he needed that. Sissy acknowledged the steeliness that was in Katie. She hardened to that steeliness as Katie finished her story.

  "And now you know it all, Sissy. Johnny's a drunk."

  "Well, everybody's something. We all got a tag of some kind. Take me, now: I never took a drink in my life. But do you know," she stated with honest and consummate ignorance, "that there are some people who talk about me and call me a bad woman? Can you imagine that? I admit that I smoke a Sweet Caporal once in a while. But bad...."

  "Well, Sissy, the way you carry on with men makes people..."

  "Katie! Don't nag! All of us are what we have to be and everyone lives the kind of life it's in him to live. You've got a good man, Katie."

  "But he drinks."

  "And he always will until he dies. There it is. He drinks. You must take that along with the rest."

  "What rest? You mean the not working, the staying out all night, the bums he has for friends?"

  "You married him. There was something about him that caught your heart. Hang on to that and forget the rest."

  "Sometimes, I don't know why I married him."

  "You lie! You know why you married him. You married him because you wanted him to sleep with you but you were too religious to take a chance without a church wedding."

  "How you talk. The whole thing was that I wanted to get him away from someone else."

  "It was the sleeping. It always is. If it is good, the marriage is good. If it is bad, the marriage is bad."

  "No. There are other things."

  "What other things? Well, maybe there are," conceded Sissy. "If there are other good things too, that's so much velvet."

  "You're wrong. That might be important to you, but..."

  "It's important to everybody or should be. Then all marriages would be happy."

  "Oh, I admit that I liked the way he danced, how he sang a song...the way he looked..."

  "You're saying what I'm saying but you're using your own words."

  "How can you win out with a person like Sissy," thought Katie. "She's got everything figured out her way. Maybe her way is a good way to figure things out. I don't know. She is my own sister but people talk about her. She is a bad girl and there is no getting around that. When she dies, her soul will wander through Purgatory through all eternity. I have often told her that and she always answers that it wouldn't wander alone. If Sissy dies before I do, I must have masses said for the repose of her soul. Maybe after a while she'll get out of Purgatory because even if they say she is bad, she is good to all the people in the world who are lucky enough to run across her. God will have to take that into consideration."

  Suddenly Katie leaned over and kissed Sissy on the cheek. Sissy was astonished because she could not know Katie's thoughts.

  "Maybe you're right, Sissy, maybe you're wrong. With me it comes down to this: Aside from his drinking, I love everything else about Johnny and I will try to be good to him. I will try to overlook..." She said no more. In her heart, Katie knew that she was not the overlooking kind.

  Francie lay awake in the washbasket set up near the kitchen range. She lay sucking her thumb and listening to the conversation. But she learned nothing from it being but two years old at the time.

  12

  KATIE WAS ASHAMED TO STAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD AFTER Johnny's great spree. A good many of the neighbors' husbands were no better than Johnny, of course, but that was no standard for Katie. She wanted the Nolans to be better and not as good as anybody. Too there was the question of money. Although it was no question because they had very little and now there were two children. Katie looked around for a place where she could work for their rent. At least, they'd have a roof over their heads.

  She found a house where she would get rent free in return for keeping it clean. Johnny swore that he wouldn't have his
wife a janitress. Katie told him in her new crisp hard way that it was janitor or no home, as it was harder and harder each month to get the rent money together. Johnny finally gave in after promising that he would do all the janitor work until he got a steady job when they would move again.

  Katie packed their few belongings: a double bed, the babies' crib, a busted-down baby buggy, a green plush parlor suite, a carpet with pink roses, a pair of parlor lace curtains, a rubber plant and a rose geranium, a yellow canary in a gilt cage, a plush picture album, a kitchen table and some chairs, a box of dishes and pots and pans, a gilt crucifix with a music box in its base that played "Ave Maria" when you wound it up, a plain wooden crucifix that her mother had given her, a wash basket full of clothes, a roll of bedding, a pile of Johnny's sheet music and two books, the Bible and the Complete Works of Wm. Shakespeare.

  There was such a little bit of stuff that the ice man could load it all on his wagon and his one shaggy horse could pull it. The four Nolans rode along on the ice wagon to their new home.

  The last thing Katie did in their old home after it had been stripped bare and had that look of a near-sighted man with his glasses off, was to rip up the tin-can bank. It had three dollars and eighty cents in it. Out of that, she knew regretfully, she would have to give the ice man a dollar for moving them.

  The first thing she did in the new home, while Johnny was helping the ice man carry in the furniture, was to nail down the bank in a closet. She put two dollars and eighty cents back in it. She added a dime from the few pennies in her worn purse. That was the dime she wasn't going to give to the ice man.

  In Williamsburg, it was the custom to treat the movers to a pint of beer when they had completed their job. But Katie reasoned: "We'll never see him again. Besides, the dollar is enough. Think of all the ice he'd have to sell to make a dollar."

  While Katie was putting up the lace curtains, Mary Rommely came over and sprinkled the rooms with holy water to drive out any devils that might be lurking in the corners. Who knows? Protestants might have been living there before. A Catholic might have died in the rooms without the last absolution of the church. The holy water would purify the home again so that God might come in if He chose.

  The baby Francie crowed with delight as her grandmother held up the cruet and the sun shone through it and made a small fat rainbow on the opposite wall. Mary smiled with the child and made the rainbow dance.

  "Schoen! Schoen!" she said.

  "Shame! Shame!" repeated Francie and held out her two hands.

  Mary let her hold the half-filled cruet while she went to help Katie. Francie was disappointed because the rainbow went away. She thought it must be hidden in the bottle. She poured the holy water out into her lap expecting a rainbow to come slithering from the bottle. Later Katie noticed that she was wet and paddled her softly telling her that she was too big to wet her pants. Mary explained about the holy water.

  "Ai, the child has but blessed herself and a spanking comes from the blessing."

  Katie laughed then. Francie laughed because her mama wasn't mad anymore. Neeley exposed his three teeth in a baby laugh. Mary smiled at them all and said it was good luck to start life in a new home with laughter.

  They were settled by supper time. Johnny stayed with the children while Katie went to the grocery store to establish credit. She told the grocer she had just moved into the neighborhood and would he trust her with a few groceries until Saturday payday? The grocer obliged. He gave her a bag of groceries and a little book in which he jotted down her indebtedness. He told her she was to bring the book along each time she came to "trust." With that little ceremony, Katie's family was assured of food until the next money came in.

  After supper, Katie read the babies to sleep. She read a page of the introduction to Shakespeare and a page of begats from the Bible. That was as far as she had gotten to date. Neither the babies nor Katie understood what it was all about. The reading made Katie very drowsy but doggedly she finished the two pages. She covered the babies carefully, then she and Johnny went to bed too. It was only eight o'clock but they were tired out from moving.

  The Nolans slept in their new home on Lorimer Street which was still in Williamsburg but almost near where Greenpoint began.

  13

  LORIMER STREET WAS MORE REFINED THAN BOGART STREET. IT WAS peopled by letter carriers, firemen and those store owners who were affluent enough not to have to live in the rooms in back of the store.

  The flat had a bathroom. The tub was an oblong wooden box lined with zinc. Francie couldn't get over the wonder of it when it was filled with water. It was the largest body of water she had seen up to that time. To her baby eyes, it seemed like an ocean.

  They liked the new home. Katie and Johnny kept the cellar, halls, the roof, and the sidewalk before the house spotlessly clean in return for their rent. There was no airshaft. There was a window in each bedroom and three each in the kitchen and front room. The first autumn there was pleasant. The sun came in all day long. They were warm that first winter, too. Johnny worked fairly steadily, did not drink much and there was money for coal.

  When summer came, the children spent most of the day outdoors on the stoop. They were the only children in the house, so there was always room on the stoop. Francie, who was going on four, had to mind Neeley, who was going on three. She sat for long hours on the stoop with her thin arms hugging her thin legs and with her straight brown hair blowing in the slow breeze that came laden with the salt smell of the sea, the sea which was so nearby and which she had never seen. She kept an eye on Neeley as he scrambled up and down the steps. She sat, rocking to and fro, wondering about many things: what made the wind blow and what was grass and why Neeley was a boy instead of a girl like her.

  Sometimes Francie and Neeley sat regarding each other with steady eyes. His eyes were the same as hers in shape and depth but his were a bright clear blue and hers a dark clear gray. There was steady unbroken communication between the two children. Neeley spoke very little and Francie spoke a lot. Sometimes Francie talked and talked until the genial little boy fell asleep sitting upright on the steps with his head against the iron rail.

  Francie did "stitching" that summer. Katie bought her a square of goods for a penny. It was the size of a lady's handkerchief and had a design outlined on it: a sitting Newfoundland dog with his tongue lolling out. Another penny bought a small reel of red embroidery cotton and two cents went for a pair of small hoops. Francie's grandmother taught her how to work the running stitches. The child became adept at stitching. Women passing would stop and cluck in pitying admiration at the tiny girl, a deep line already showing at the inner edge of her right eyebrow, pushing the needle in and out of the taut material while Neeley hung over her to watch the bright sliver of steel disappear like magic and then come back up again through the cloth. Sissy gave her a fat little cloth strawberry for cleaning the needle. When Neeley got restless, Francie let him push the needle through the strawberry for a while. You were supposed to stitch a hundred or so of these squares and then sew them together to make a bedspread. Francie heard that some ladies had actually made a bedspread that way and that was Francie's great ambition. But though she worked intermittently on the square all summer, autumn found it only half done. The bedspread had to be saved for the future.

  The fall came again, winter, spring and summer. Francie and Neeley kept getting bigger, Katie kept working harder and Johnny worked a little less and drank a little more with each season. The reading went on. Sometimes Katie skipped a page when she was tired at night, but most of the time she stuck with it. They were in Julius Caesar now and the stage direction "Alarum" confused Katie. She thought it had something to do with fire engines and whenever she came to that word, she shouted out "clang-clang." The children thought it was wonderful.

  Pennies accumulated in the tin-can bank. Once it had to be ripped open and two dollars taken out to pay the druggist the time Francie ran a rusty nail into her knee. A dozen times one prong was unfaste
ned and a nickel fished out with a knife to provide Johnny with car-fare to get to a job. But the rule was that he had to put ten cents back out of his tip money. So the bank profited.

  On the warm days, Francie played alone on the streets or on the stoop. She yearned for playmates but did not know how to make friends with the other little girls. The other youngsters avoided her because she talked funny. Owing to Katie's nightly reading, Francie had a queer way of saying things. Once, when taunted by a youngster, she had retorted, "Aw, you don't know what you're saying. You're jus' full of soun' 'n' furry siggaflying nothing."

  Once, trying to make friends with a little girl, she said,

  "Wait here and I'll go in and begat my rope and we'll play jumping."

  "You mean you'll git your rope," the little girl corrected.

  "No. I'll begat my rope. You don't git things. You begat things."

  "What's that--begat?" asked the little girl who was just five years old.

  "Begat. Like Eve begat Cain."

  "You're buggy. Ladies don't git canes. Only men git canes when they can't walk good."

  "Eve begat. She begat Abel too."

  "She gits or she don't git. You know what?"

  "What."

  "You talk just like a Wop."

  "I do not talk like no Wop," cried Francie. "I talk like...like...God talks."

  "You'll be struck down dead saying a thing like that."

  "I won't neither."

  "Nobody home upstairs in your house." The little girl tapped her forehead.

  "There is so."

  "Why do you talk like that then?"

  "My mother reads those things to me."

  "Nobody home upstairs in your mother's house," corrected the little girl.

  "Well, anyhow, my mother ain't a dirty slob like your mother." That was the only reply Francie could think of.

  The little girl had heard this many times. She was shrewd enough not to debate it. "Well, I'd sooner have a dirty slob for a mother than a crazy woman. And I'd rather have no father than a drunken man for my father."