A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

by Betty Smith

  "Few people know. They stop paying premiums and the company keeps mum. Time passes and the company just keeps the money already paid in. I'd lose my job if they knew I told you about this. But here's how I look at it: I insured your father and mother and all you Rommely girls and your husbands and children, and, I don't know, but I carried so many messages back and forth among you about birth and sickness and death that I feel like part of the family."

  "We couldn't do without you," said Katie.

  "Here's what you do, Mrs. Nolan. Cash in your children's policies but keep your own. If anything happens to one of the children, God forbid, you could manage to get them buried. Whereas if something happened to you, also God forbid, they couldn't get you buried without insurance money, now could they?"

  "No, they couldn't. I must keep my own policy up. I wouldn't want to be buried as a pauper in Potter's Field. That's something they could never rise above; neither they, nor their children, nor their children's children. So I'll keep my policy and take your advice about the children's. Tell me what I have to do."

  The twenty-five dollars that Katie got for the two policies got them through until the end of April. In five more weeks the child would be born. In eight more weeks, Francie and Neeley would graduate from grade school. There were those eight weeks to be gotten through somehow.

  The three Rommely sisters sat around Katie's kitchen table in conference.

  "I'd help if I could," said Evy. "But you know Will's not been right since that horse kicked him. He's fresh to the boss and doesn't get along with the men and it's gotten so that not a horse will go out with him. They put him on stable work, sweeping out manure and dumping broken bottles. They cut him to eighteen a week and that doesn't go far with three children. I'm looking for odd cleaning jobs myself."

  "If I could think of some way," began Sissy.

  "No," said Katie firmly. "You're doing enough by taking Mother to live with you."

  "That's right," said Evy. "Kate and I used to worry so about her living alone in one room and going out cleaning to make a few pennies."

  "Mother's no expense and no trouble," said Sissy. "And my John don't mind having her around. Of course, he only earns twenty a week. And now there's the baby. I wanted to get my old job back but Mother's too old to take care of baby and the house. She's eighty-three now. I could work but I'd have to hire somebody to look after Mother and the baby. If I had a job, I could help you out, Katie."

  "You just can't do it, Sissy. There's no way," said Katie.

  "There's only one thing to do," said Evy. "Take Francie out of school and let her get working papers."

  "But I want her to graduate. My children will be the first ones in the Nolan family to get diplomas."

  "You can't eat a diploma," said Evy.

  "Haven't you any men friends who could help you?" asked Sissy. "You're a very pretty woman, you know."

  "Or will be, when she gets her shape back again," put in Evy.

  Katie thought briefly of Sergeant McShane. "No," she said. "I have no men friends. There's always been Johnny and no one else."

  "I guess Evy's right then," decided Sissy. "I hate to say it, but you've got to put Francie to work."

  "Once she leaves grammar school without graduating, she'll never be able to get into high school," protested Katie.

  "Well," sighed Evy, "there's always the Catholic Charities."

  "When the time comes," said Katie quietly, "that we have to take charity baskets, I'll plug up the doors and windows and wait until the children are sound asleep and then turn on every gas jet in the house."

  "Don't talk like that," said Evy sharply. "You want to live, don't you?"

  "Yes. But I want to live for something. I don't want to live to get charity food to give me enough strength to go back to get more charity food."

  "Then it comes back to this again," said Evy. "Francie's got to get out and work. It's got to be Francie because Neeley is only thirteen and they won't give him his working papers."

  Sissy put her hand on Katie's arm. "It won't be so terrible. Francie's smart and reads a lot and that girl will get herself educated somehow. "

  Evy stood up. "Look! We've got to go." She put a fifty-cent piece on the table. Anticipating Katie's refusal, she spoke belligerently. "And don't think that's a present. I expect to be paid back someday."

  Katie smiled. "You needn't holler so. I don't mind taking money from my sister."

  Sissy took a short cut. As she leaned over to kiss Katie's cheek in good-bye, she slipped a dollar bill in her apron pocket. "If you need me," she said, "send for me and I'll come, even if it's in the middle of the night. But send Neeley. It's not safe for a girl to walk through those dark streets past the coal yards."

  Katie sat alone at the kitchen table far into the night. "I need two months...just two months," she thought. "Dear God, give me two months. It's such a little time. By that time, my baby will be born and I'll be well again. By that time, the children will be graduated from public school. When I'm boss of my own mind and my own body, I don't need to ask You for anything. But now my body is boss over me and I've got to ask You for help. Just two months...two months..." She waited for that warm glow that meant that she had established communication with her God. There was no glow. She tried again.

  "Holy Mary, Mother of Jesus, you know how it is. You had a child. Holy Mary..." She waited. There was nothing.

  She placed Sissy's dollar and Evy's fifty-cent piece on the table. "That will get us through three more days," she thought. "After that...?" Not aware of what she did, she whispered: "Johnny, wherever you are, pull yourself together just one more time. One more time...." She waited again and this time the glow came.

  And it so happened that Johnny helped them.

  McGarrity, the saloon keeper, couldn't get Johnny out of his mind. Not that McGarrity's conscience bothered him; no, nothing like that. He didn't force men to come into his saloon. Aside from keeping the door hinges so well oiled that the slightest touch made them swing open easily, he offered no more inducements than other saloon keepers. His free lunch was no better than theirs and there was no beguiling entertainment other than that spontaneously contributed by his customers. No, it wasn't his conscience.

  He missed Johnny. That was it. And it wasn't the money, either, because Johnny always owed him. He had liked having Johnny around because he gave class to the place. It was something, all right, to see that slender young fellow standing debonairly at the bar among the truck drivers and ditch diggers. "Sure," admitted McGarrity, "Johnny Nolan drank more than was good for him. But if he didn't get it here, he would have got it somewhere else. But he wasn't a rummy. He never got to cursing or brawling after he had a few drinks. Yes," decided McGarrity, "Johnny had been all right."

  The thing that McGarrity missed was Johnny talking. "How that fellow could talk," he thought. "Why, he'd tell me about those cotton fields down south or about the shores of Araby or sunny France just like he'd been there instead of getting the information out of those songs he knew. I sure liked to hear him talk about those far-off places," he mused. "But best of all, I liked to hear him talk about his family."

  McGarrity used to have a dream about a family. This dream family lived far away from the saloon; so far that he had to hop a trolley to get home in the early morning after he locked up the saloon. The gentle wife of his dreams waited up for him and had hot coffee and something nice to eat ready. After eating, they'd talk...talk about other things than the saloon. He had dream children--clean, pretty, smart children who were growing up sort of ashamed that their father ran a saloon. He was proud of their shame because it meant that he had the ability of begetting refined children.

  Well, that had been his dream of marriage. Then he had married Mae. She had been a curvy, sensuous girl with dark red hair and a wide mouth. But after a while of marriage, she turned into a stout blowsy woman, known in Brooklyn as "the saloon type." Married life had been fine for a year or two, then McGarrity woke up one morn
ing and found that it was no good. Mae wouldn't change into his dream wife. She liked the saloon. She insisted that they rent rooms above it. She didn't want a house in Flushing; she didn't want to do housework. She liked to sit in the saloon's back room day and night and laugh and drink with the customers. And the children that Mae gave him ran the streets like hoodlums and bragged about their father owning a saloon. To his grievous disappointment, they were proud of it.

  He knew that Mae was unfaithful to him. He didn't care so long as it didn't get around to the extent that men laughed at him behind his back. Jealousy had left him years ago when physical desire for Mae left him. He gradually grew indifferent about sleeping with her or with any other woman. Somehow, good talking had gotten tied up with good sex in his mind. He wanted a woman to talk to, one to whom he could tell all his thoughts; and he wanted her to talk to him, warmly, wisely and intimately. If he could find such a woman, he thought, his manhood would come back to him. In his dumb fumbling way, he wanted union of mind and soul along with union of body. As the years passed, the need of talking intimately with a woman who was close to him became an obsession.

  In his business, he observed human nature and came to certain conclusions about it. The conclusions lacked wisdom and originality; in fact, they were tiresome. But they were important to McGarrity because he had figured them out for himself. In the first years of their marriage, he had tried to tell Mae about these conclusions, but all she said was, "I can imagine." Sometimes she varied by saying, "I can just imagine." Gradually then, because he could not share his inner self with her, he lost the power of being a husband to her and she was unfaithful to him.

  McGarrity was a man with a great sin on his soul. He hated his children. His daughter, Irene, was Francie's age. Irene was a pink-eyed girl and her hair was of such a pale red that it, too, could be called pink. She was mean and stupid. She had been left back so many times that at fourteen she was still in the sixth grade. His son, Jim, ten years old, had no outstanding characteristic excepting that his buttocks were always too fat for his breeches.

  McGarrity had another dream; it was that Mae would come to him and confess that the children were not his. This dream made him happy. He felt that he could love those children if he knew they were another man's. Then he could see their meanness and their stupidity objectively; then he could pity them and help them. As long as he knew they were his, he hated them because he saw all of his own and Mae's worst traits in them.

  In the eight years that Johnny had been patronizing McGarrity's saloon, he had spoken daily to McGarrity in praise of Katie and the children. McGarrity played a secret game during those eight years. He pretended that he was Johnny and that he, McGarrity, was talking so about Mae and his children.

  "Want to show you something," Johnny said once, proudly, as he pulled a paper from his pocket. "My little girl wrote this composition in school and got 'A' on it and she's only ten years old. Listen. I'll read it to you."

  As Johnny read, McGarrity pretended that it was his little girl who had written the story. Another day, Johnny brought in a pair of crudely made wood book ends and placed them on the bar with a flourish.

  "Want to show you something," he said proudly. "My boy, Neeley, made these in school."

  "My boy, Jimmy, made these in school," said McGarrity proudly to himself as he examined the book ends.

  Another time, to start him talking, McGarrity had asked, "Think we'll get in the war, Johnny?"

  "Funny thing," Johnny had answered. "Katie and I sat up till near morning talking about that very thing. I convinced her finally that Wilson will keep us out of it."

  How would it be, McGarrity thought, if he and Mae sat up all night to talk about that, and how would it be if she said, "You're right, Jim." But he didn't know how it would be because he knew that could never happen.

  So when Johnny died, McGarrity lost his dreams. He tried to play the game by himself but it didn't work out. He needed someone like Johnny to start him off.

  About the time that the three sisters sat in Katie's kitchen talking, McGarrity got an idea. He had more money than he knew how to spend, and nothing else. Maybe through Johnny's children he could buy the way of dreaming again. He suspected that Katie was hard up. Maybe he could scare up a little easy work for Johnny's kids to do after school. He'd be helping them out...God knows he could afford it, and maybe he'd get something in return. Maybe they would talk to him the way they must have talked to their father.

  He told Mae he was going up to see Katie about some work for the children. Mae told him, cheerfully enough, that he'd be thrown out on his ear. McGarrity didn't think he'd be thrown out on his ear. As he shaved for the visit, he recalled the day that Katie had come in to thank him for the wreath.

  After Johnny's funeral, Katie went around thanking each person who had sent flowers. She had walked straight through McGarrity's front door disdaining the deviousness of the side door marked "Ladies' Entrance." Ignoring the staring men hanging on the bar, she had come straight to where McGarrity was. Seeing her, he had tucked up one bottom end of his apron into the belt, signifying that he was off duty for the moment and had come from behind the bar to meet her.

  "I came to thank you for the wreath," she said.

  "Oh that," he said, relieved. He thought she had come to bawl him out.

  "It was thoughtful of you."

  "I liked Johnny."

  "I know." She put her hand out. He looked at it dumbly for a moment before he got the idea that she wanted to shake him by the hand. As he wrung her hand, he asked, "No hard feelings?"

  "Why?" she answered. "Johnny was free, white and over twenty-one." She had turned then and walked out of the saloon.

  No, decided McGarrity, such a woman wouldn't throw him out on his ear if he came with well-meant intentions.

  He sat ill at ease on one of the kitchen chairs talking to Katie. The children were supposed to be doing their homework. But Francie, head bent deceptively over her book, was listening to Mr. McGarrity.

  "I talked it over with my Missus," dreamed McGarrity, "and she agreed with me that we could use your girl. No hard work, you understand, just making the beds and washing a few dishes. I could use the boy downstairs, peeling eggs and cutting cheese into hunks, you know, for the free lunch at night. He wouldn't be anywhere near the bar. He'd work in the back kitchen. It would be for an hour or so after school and half a day on Saturday. I'd pay each two dollars a week."

  Katie's heart jumped. "Four dollars a week," she figured to herself, "and the dollar and a half from the paper route. Both of them could stay in school. There'd be enough to eat. It would get us through."

  "What do you say, Mrs. Nolan?" he asked.

  "It's up to the children," she answered.

  "Well?" He threw his voice in their direction. "What do you say?"

  Francie pretended to tear herself away from her book. "What did you say?"

  "Would you like to help Mrs. McGarrity around the house?"

  "Yes, sir," said Francie.

  "And you?" He looked at Neeley.

  "Yes, sir," echoed the boy.

  "That's settled." He turned to Katie. "Of course it's only temporary until we can get a regular woman to take over the house and kitchen work."

  "I'd rather it was temporary, anyhow," said Katie.

  "You might be a little short." He worked his hand down into his pocket. "So I'll pay the first week's salary in advance."

  "No, Mr. McGarrity. If they earn the money, they'll have the privilege of collecting it and bringing it home themselves at the end of the week."

  "All right." But instead of taking his hand from his pocket, he closed it over the thick roll of bills. He thought, "I've got so much money that buys me nothing. And they haven't got anything." He had an idea.

  "Mrs. Nolan, you know how Johnny and I done business. I gave him credit and he turned his tips over to me. Well, when he died, he was a little ahead." He took out the thick roll of bills. Francie's eyes popped when she
saw all that money. McGarrity's idea was to say that Johnny was twelve dollars ahead and to give Katie that sum. He looked at Katie as he took the rubber band off the money. Her eyes narrowed and he changed his mind about the twelve dollars. He knew she'd never believe it. "Of course, it isn't much," he said casually. "Just two dollars. But I figure it belongs to you." He detached two bills and held them out to her.

  Katie shook her head. "I know there is no money owing us. If you told the truth, you'd say that Johnny owed you." Ashamed at being caught, McGarrity put the thick roll back in his pocket where it felt uncomfortable against his thigh. "But, Mr. McGarrity, I do thank you for your kind intentions," Katie said.

  Her last few words released McGarrity's tongue. He started to talk; he spoke of his boyhood in Ireland, of his mother and father and the many brothers and sisters. He spoke of his dream marriage. He told her everything that had been in his thoughts for years. He didn't run down his wife and children. He left them out of his story entirely. He told about Johnny; how Johnny had spoken daily of his wife and children.

  "Take those curtains," McGarrity said, waving a thick hand at the half curtains made of yellow calico with a red rose design. "Johnny told me how you ripped up an old dress of yours and made kitchen curtains out of it. He said it made the kitchen look fine, like the inside of a Gypsy wagon."

  Francie, who had abandoned the pretense of study, picked up McGarrity's last two words. "Gypsy wagon," she thought, looking at the curtains with new eyes. "So Papa had said that. I didn't think he noticed the new curtains at the time. At least he didn't say anything. But he had noticed. He had said that nice thing about them to this man." Hearing Johnny spoken of so made Francie almost believe that he wasn't dead. "So Papa had said things like that to this man." She stared at McGarrity with new interest. He was a short stocky man with thick hands, a short red neck and thinning hair. "Who'd ever guess," thought Francie, "looking at the outside of him, that he was so different inside?"

  McGarrity talked for two hours without stopping. Katie listened intently. She was not listening to McGarrity talking. She was listening to McGarrity talking about Johnny. When he stopped for a second, she gave him little transitional replies, such as "Yes?" or "Then what?" or "And then...?" When he fumbled for a word, she offered him one which he accepted gratefully.