A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

by Betty Smith

  "And why do you wash your feet now?"

  "For my fiddle lessons."

  "You play with your hands, not your feet."

  "I feel ashamed standing in front of the professor with dirty feet."

  "He can see through your shoes maybe?"

  "I don't think so because he always makes me take my shoes and stockings off."

  This made Evy jump. She knew nothing of Freud and her scanty knowledge of sex did not include any of its deviations. But her common sense told her that Professor Allegretto should not charge fifty cents an hour and not attend to his work. Blossom's musical education was terminated then and there.

  Upon being questioned, Paul Jones said that he had never been asked to take anything off but his hat when he went for a lesson. He was allowed to continue. In five years, he could play the fiddle almost as well as his father, who had never taken a lesson in his life, could play the guitar.

  Aside from his music, Uncle Flittman was a dull man. At home, his only topic of conversation was the way Drummer, the milk wagon horse, treated him. Flittman and the horse had been feuding for five years and Evy hoped that one of them would get the decision soon.

  Evy really loved her husband although she could not resist mimicking him. She'd stand in the Nolan kitchen and pretend that she was the horse, Drummer, and she'd give a good imitation of Uncle Flittman trying to put the feedbag on the horse.

  "The horse is standing at the curb like this," Evy leaned over until her head was dangling at her knees. "Will comes along with the feedbag. He's just about to put it on, when up goes the horse's head." Here Evy would jerk her head high and whinny like a horse. "Will waits. The horse's head goes down again. You'd think he never could get it up in the air. The horse makes out like he's got no bones." Evy's head lolled alarmingly. "Comes Will with the feedbag, up goes the head."

  "Then what happens?" asked Francie.

  "I go down and put the feedbag on the horse. That's what happens."

  "Does he let you?"

  "Does he let me," Evy reported to Katie, then turned to Francie. "Why he runs up on the sidewalk to meet me and sticks his head in the feedbag before I can lift it up, even. Does he let me," she murmured indignantly. She turned again to Katie. "You know, Kate, sometimes I think my man is jealous the way the horse, Drummer, likes me."

  Katie stared at her a moment with her mouth open. Then she started to laugh. Evy laughed and Francie laughed. The two Rommely girls and Francie who was half a Rommely stood there laughing about a secret they shared concerning the weakness of a man.

  Those were the Rommely women: Mary, the mother, Evy, Sissy, and Katie, her daughters, and Francie, who would grow up to be a Rommely woman even though her name was Nolan. They were all slender, frail creatures with wondering eyes and soft fluttery voices.

  But they were made out of thin invisible steel.

  8

  THE ROMMELYS RAN TO WOMEN OF STRONG PERSONALITIES. THE Nolans ran to weak and talented men. Johnny's family was dying out. The Nolan men grew handsomer, weaker and more beguiling with each generation. They had a way of falling in love but of ducking marriage. That was the main reason why they were dying out.

  Ruthie Nolan had come from Ireland with her handsome young husband soon after their marriage. They had four sons born a year apart. Then Mickey died at thirty and Ruthie carried on. She managed to get Andy, Georgie, Frankie, and Johnny through the sixth grade. As each boy reached the age of twelve, he had to leave school to go out to earn a few pennies.

  The boys grew up, handsome, able to play music, to dance and to sing and with all the girls crazy for them. Though the Nolans lived in the shabbiest house in Irish Town, the boys were the dressiest in the neighborhood. The ironing board was kept set up in the kitchen. One or the other was always pressing pants, smoothing out a tie or ironing a shirt. They were the pride of Shantytown, the tall, blond, good-looking Nolan lads. They had quick feet in shoes that were kept highly polished. Their trousers hung just so and their hats sat jauntily on their head. But they were all dead before they were thirty-five--all dead, and of the four, only Johnny left children.

  Andy was the eldest and the handsomest. He had red-gold wavy hair and finely molded features. He had consumption, too. He was engaged to a girl named Francie Melaney. They kept putting off the marriage waiting for him to get better, only he never did get better.

  The Nolan boys were singing waiters. They had been the Nolan Quartette until Andy got too sick to work. They became the Nolan Trio then. They didn't earn much and spent most of that on liquor and horse-racing bets.

  When Andy took to his bed for the last time, the boys bought him a genuine swansdown pillow that cost seven dollars. They wanted him to have a luxury before he died. Andy thought it was a wonderful pillow. Andy used it two days, then there was a last great gush of blood which stained the fine new pillow a rusty brown and Andy died. His mother keened over the body for three days. Francie Melaney made a vow that she would never marry. The three remaining Nolan boys swore that they would never leave their mother.

  Six months later, Johnny married Katie. Ruthie hated Katie. She had hoped to keep all of her fine boys home with her until either she or they died. So far all had avoided marriage. But that girl--that girl, Katie Rommely! She did it! Ruthie was sure that Johnny had been tricked into marriage.

  Georgie and Frankie liked Katie but thought it was a dirty trick for Johnny to skip out and leave them to take care of their mother. They made the best of it, however. They looked around for a wedding present and decided to give Katie the fine pillow they had bought for Andy and which he had used so briefly. The mother sewed a new ticking over it to hide the ugly stain that had been the past part of Andy's life. The pillow thus passed on to Johnny and Katie. It was considered too good for ordinary use and only brought out when one of them was sick. Francie called it "the sick pillow." Neither Katie nor Francie knew that it had been a death pillow.

  About a year after Johnny's marriage, Frankie, whom many thought even handsomer than Andy, wavered home after a drinking party one night and stumbled over some taut wire that a bucolic Brooklynite had strung around a square foot of grass before his house stoop. The wire was held up by sharp little sticks. As Frankie stumbled, one of the sticks pierced his stomach. He got up somehow and went home. He died during the night. He died alone and without the priest's last absolution for all of his sins. For the rest of her days, his mother had a mass said once a month for the repose of his soul which she knew wandered about in Purgatory.

  In little more than a year, Ruthie Nolan had lost three sons; two by death and one by marriage. She grieved for the three. Georgie, who never left her, died three years later when he was twenty-eight. Johnny, twenty-three, was the only Nolan boy left at the time.

  These were the Nolan boys. All died young. All died sudden or violent deaths brought on by their own recklessness or their own bad way of living. Johnny was the only one who lived past his thirtieth birthday.

  And the child, Francie Nolan, was of all the Rommelys and all the Nolans. She had the violent weaknesses and passion for beauty of the shanty Nolans. She was a mosaic of her grandmother Rommely's mysticism, her tale-telling, her great belief in everything and her compassion for the weak ones. She had a lot of her grandfather Rommely's cruel will. She had some of her Aunt Evy's talent for mimicking, some of Ruthie Nolan's possessiveness. She had Aunt Sissy's love for life and her love for children. She had Johnny's sentimentality without his good looks. She had all of Katie's soft ways and only half of the invisible steel of Katie. She was made up of all of these good and these bad things.

  She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie's secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk.

  She was all of these things and of something mo
re that did not come from the Rommelys nor the Nolans, the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only--the something different from anyone else in the two families. It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life--the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.

  9

  JOHNNY AND KATIE WERE MARRIED AND WENT TO LIVE ON A QUIET side street in Williamsburg called Bogart Street. Johnny chose the street because its name had a thrilling dark sound. They were very happy there the first year of their marriage.

  Katie had married Johnny because she liked the way he sang and danced and dressed. Womanlike, she set about changing all those things in him after marriage. She persuaded him to give up the singing-waiter business. He did so, since he was in love and anxious to please her. They got a job together taking care of a public school and they loved it. Their day started when the rest of the world went to bed. After supper, Katie put on her black coat with the big leg-o'-mutton sleeves, lavishly trimmed with braid--her last loot from the factory--and threw a cherry wool fascinator over her head (a "noobie" she called it), and she and Johnny set off for work.

  The school was old and small and warm. They looked forward to spending the night there. They walked arm-in-arm; he in his patent leather dancing shoes and she in her high laced kid boots. Sometimes when the night was frosty and full of stars, they ran a little, skipped a little and laughed a lot. They felt very important using their private key to get into the school. The school was their world for a night.

  They played games while they worked. Johnny sat at one of the desks and Katie pretended she was a teacher. They wrote messages to each other on the blackboards. They pulled down the maps which rolled up like shades and pointed out foreign countries with the rubber-tipped pointer. They were filled with wonder at the thought of strange lands and unknown languages. (He was nineteen and she was seventeen.)

  They liked best to clean the assembly room. Johnny dusted the piano and, while doing so, ran his fingers over the keys. He picked out some chords. Katie sat in the front row and asked him to sing. He sang to her; sentimental songs of the time: "She May Have Seen Better Days," or "I'm Wearin' My Heart Away For You." People living nearby would be coaxed out of their midnight sleep by the singing. They'd lie in their warm beds, listening drowsily and murmur to each other,

  "That feller, whoever he is, is losing time. He's losing time. He ought to be in a show."

  Sometimes Johnny went into one of his dances on the little platform that he pretended was a stage. He was so graceful and handsome, so loving, so full of the grandness of just living, that Katie, watching him, thought she would die of being happy.

  At two, they went into the teachers' lunch room where there was a gas plate. They made coffee. They kept a can of condensed milk in the cupboard. They enjoyed the boiling hot coffee which filled the room with a wonderful smell. Their rye bread and bologna sandwiches tasted good. Sometimes after supper, they'd go into the teachers' rest room where there was a chintz-covered couch and lie there for a while with their arms about each other.

  They emptied the wastebaskets, last thing, and Katie salvaged the longer bits of discarded chalk and the pencils that were not too stubby. She took them home and saved them in a box. Later when Francie was growing up, she felt very rich having so much chalk and so many pencils to use.

  At dawn, they left the school scrubbed, shiny, warm and ready for the daytime janitor. They walked home watching the stars fade from the sky. They passed the baker's where the smell of freshly baked rolls came up to them from the baking room in the basement. Johnny ran down and bought a nickel's worth of buns hot from the oven. Arriving home, they had a breakfast of hot coffee and warm sweet buns. Then Johnny ran out and got the morning American and read the news to her, with running comments, while she cleaned up their rooms. At noon, they had a hot dinner of pot roast and noodles or something good like that. After dinner they slept until it was time to get up for work.

  They earned fifty dollars a month which was good pay for people of their class in those days. They lived comfortably and it was a good life they had...happy and full of small adventures.

  And they were so young and loved each other so much.

  In a few months, to their innocent amazement and consternation, Katie found out that she was pregnant. She told Johnny that she was "that way." Johnny was bewildered and confused at first. He didn't want her to work at the school. She told him she had been that way for quite a while without being sure and had been working and had not suffered. When she convinced him that it was good for her to work, he gave in. She continued working until she got too unwieldy to dust under the desks. Soon she could do little more than go along with him for company and lie on the gay couch no longer used for love-making. He did all the work now. At two in the morning, he made clumsy sandwiches and overboiled coffee for her. They were still very happy although Johnny was getting more and more worried as the time wore on.

  Towards the end of a frosty December night, her pains started. She lay on the couch, holding them back not wanting to tell Johnny until the work was finished. On the way home, there was a tearing pain that she couldn't keep back. She moaned and Johnny knew that the baby was on the way. He got her home and put her to bed without undressing her, and covered her warmly. He ran down the block to Mrs. Gindler, the midwife, and begged her to hurry. That good woman drove him crazy by taking her time.

  She had to take dozens of curlers out of her hair. She couldn't find her teeth and refused to officiate without them. Johnny helped her search and they found them at last in a glass of water on the ledge outside the window. The water had frozen around the teeth and they had to be thawed before she could put them in. That done, she had to go about making a charm out of a piece of blessed palm taken from the altar on Palm Sunday. To this, she added a medal of the Blessed Mother, a small blue bird feather, a broken blade from a penknife and a sprig of some herb. These things were tied together with a bit of dirty string from the corset of a woman who had given birth to twins after only ten minutes of labor. She sprinkled the whole business with holy water that was supposed to have come from a well in Jerusalem from which it was said that Jesus had once quenched His thirst. She explained to the frantic boy that this charm would cut the pains and assure him of a fine, well-born baby. Lastly she grabbed her crocodile satchel--familiar to everyone in the neighborhood and believed by all the youngsters to be the satchel in which they had been delivered, kicking, to their mothers--and she was ready to go.

  Katie was screaming in pain when they got to her. The flat was filled with neighbor women who stood around praying and reminiscing about their own child-bed experiences.

  "When I had my Wincent," said one, "I..."

  "I was even smaller than her," said another, "and when..."

  "They didn't expect me to come through it," proudly declared a third, "but..."

  They welcomed the midwife and shooed Johnny out of the place. He sat on the stoop and trembled each time Katie cried out. He was confused, it had happened so suddenly. It was now seven in the morning. Her screams kept coming to him even though the windows were closed. Men passed on their way to work, looked at the window from behind which the screams were coming and then looked at Johnny huddled on the stoop and a somber look came over their faces.

  Katie was in labor all that day and there was nothing that Johnny could do--nothing that he could do. Towards night, he couldn't stand it any longer. He went to his mother's house for comforting. When he told her that Katie was having a baby, she nearly raised the roof with her lamentations.

  "Now she's got you good," she wailed. "You'll never be able to come back to me." She would not be consoled.

  Johnny hunted up his brother, Georgie, who was working a dance. He sat drinking, waiting for Georgie to finish, forgetting that he was supposed to be at the school. When Georgie was free for the night, they went to s
everal all-night saloons, had a drink or two at each place and told everyone what Johnny was going through. The men listened sympathetically, treated Johnny to drinks and assured him that they had been through the same mill.

  Towards dawn, the boys went to their mother's house where Johnny fell into a troubled sleep. At nine, he woke up with a feeling of coming trouble. He remembered Katie and, too late, he remembered the school. He washed and dressed and started for home. He passed a fruit stand which displayed avocados. He bought two for Katie.

  He had no way of knowing that during the night, his wife in great pain, and after nearly twenty-four hours of labor, gave bloody birth to a fragile baby girl. The only notable thing about the birth was that the infant was born with a caul which was supposed to indicate that the child was set apart to do great things in the world. The midwife surreptitiously confiscated the caul and later sold it to a sailor from the Brooklyn Navy Yard for two dollars. Whoever wore a caul would never die by drowning, it was said. The sailor wore it in a flannel bag around his neck.

  While he drank and slept the night away, Johnny did not know that the night had turned cold and the school fires which he was supposed to tend had gone out and the water pipes had burst and flooded the school basement and the first floor.

  When he got home, he found Katie lying in the dark bedroom. The baby was beside her on Andy's pillow. The flat was scrupulously clean; the neighbor women had attended to that. There was a faint odor of carbolic acid mixed with Mennen's talcum powder. The midwife had gone after saying, "That will be five dollars and your husband knows where I live."

  She left and Katie turned her face to the wall and tried not to cry. During the night, she assured herself that Johnny was working at the school. She had hoped that he would run home for a moment during the two o'clock eating period. Now it was late morning and he should be home. Maybe he had gone to his mother's to snatch some sleep after the night's work. She made herself believe that no matter what Johnny was doing, it was all right and that his explanation would set her mind at ease.