A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

by Betty Smith

  "I wouldn't let him, Mama," she said.

  "But where's the harm in it?"

  "You don't want him to get into the habit of playing for free refreshments like...." She hesitated. Katie picked up the sentence.

  "Like your father? No, he'd never be like him. Your father never sang the songs he loved, like 'Annie Laurie' or 'The Last Rose of Summer.' He sang what the people wanted, 'Sweet Adeline' and 'Down by the Old Mill Stream.' Neeley's different. He'll always play what he likes and not care two cents whether anyone else likes it."

  "You're saying, then, that Papa was only an entertainer and that Neeley is an artist."

  "Well...yes," admitted Katie defiantly.

  "I think that's carrying mother love a little too far."

  Katie frowned and Francie dropped the subject.

  They had stopped reading the Bible and Shakespeare since Neeley started high school. He reported that they were studying Julius Caesar and the principal read from the Bible each assembly period and that was enough for Neeley. Francie begged off reading at night because her eyes were tired from reading all day. Katie did not insist, feeling that they were now old enough to read or not--just as they wished.

  Francie's evenings were lonely. The Nolans were together only at the supper hour when even Laurie sat up to the table in her high chair. After supper Neeley went out, either to be with his gang or to play at some ice-cream saloon. Mama read the paper and then she and Laurie went to bed at eight o'clock. (Katie was still getting up at five in order to have most of her cleaning done while Francie and Neeley were in the flat with the baby.)

  Francie seldom went to the movies because they jumped around so and hurt her eyes. There were no shows to go to. Most of the stock companies had gone out of existence. Besides she had seen Barrymore in Galsworthy's Justice on Broadway and she was spoiled for stock companies after that. That past fall she had seen a movie she liked: War Brides with Nazimova. She had hoped to see it again but read in the papers that because of the imminence of war, the film had been banned. She had a wonderful memory of journeying to a strange part of Brooklyn to see the great Sarah Bernhardt in a one-act play in a Keith vaudeville house. The great actress was past seventy, but looked half that age from the stage. Francie couldn't understand the French but she gathered that the play was written around the actress's amputated leg. Bernhardt played the part of a French soldier who had lost his leg in the War. Francie caught the word Boche from time to time. Francie would never forget the flaming red hair and the golden voice of Bernhardt. She treasured the program in her scrapbook.

  But those had been just three evenings out of months and months of evenings.

  Spring came early that year and the sweet warm nights made her restless. She walked up and down the streets and through the park. And wherever she went, she saw a boy and a girl together; walking arm-in-arm, sitting on a park bench with their arms around each other, standing closely and in silence in a vestibule. Everyone in the world but Francie had a sweetheart or a friend. She seemed to be the only lonely one in Brooklyn.

  March 1917. All the neighborhood could think or talk about was the inevitability of war. A widow living in the flats had an only son. She was afraid he'd have to go and would be killed. She bought him a cornet and made him take lessons, figuring he'd be put in an army band and play at parades and reviews only and be kept away from the front. People in the house were tormented almost to death by his incessant fumbling cornet practice. One harassed man, made crafty by desperation, told the mother that he had inside information that the military bands led the soldiers into action and invariably were the first ones killed. The terrified mother pawned the cornet immediately and destroyed the pawn ticket. There was no more dreadful practicing.

  Each night at supper Katie asked Francie, "Has the war started yet?"

  "Not yet. But any day now."

  "Well, I wish it would hurry up and start."

  "Do you want war?"

  "No, I don't. But if it has to be, the sooner the better. The sooner it starts, the quicker it will end."

  Then Sissy created such a sensation that the war was pushed into the background temporarily.

  Sissy, who was done with her wild past, and who should have been settling down into the calm that precedes satisfied middle age, threw the family into a turmoil by falling madly in love with the John to whom she had been married for more than five years. Not only that, but she got herself widowed, divorced, married, and pregnant--all in ten days' time.

  The Standard Union, Williamsburg's favorite newspaper, was delivered as usual one afternoon to Francie's desk at closing time. As usual, she took it home so that Katie could read it after supper. Francie would bring it back to the office the next morning and read and mark it. Since Francie never read newspapers outside of office hours, she had no way of knowing what was in that particular issue.

  After supper, Katie sat by the window to look through the paper. An instant after turning the third page, she exploded her "Oh, my!" of utter astonishment. Francie and Neeley ran to look over her shoulder. Katie pointed to a heading:

  HERO FIREMAN LOSES LIFE

  IN WALL ABOUT MARKET BLAZE.

  Underneath in small type was a sub-heading: "Had planned to retire on pension next month."

  Reading the item, Francie discovered that the heroic fireman had been Sissy's first husband. There was a picture of Sissy taken twenty years ago--Sissy with a towering crimped pompadour and huge leg-o'-mutton sleeves--Sissy, sixteen years old. There was a caption under Sissy's picture: "Widow of heroic fire fighter."

  "Oh, my!" repeated Katie. "Then he never married again. He must have kept Sissy's picture all that time and when he died some men must have gone through his stuff and found--Sissy!

  "I've got to go over there right away." Katie took off her apron and went to get her hat, explaining, "Sissy's John reads the papers. She told him she was divorced. Now that he knows the truth, he'll kill her. At least throw her out," she amended. "She'll have no place to go with the baby and mother."

  "He seems like a nice man," said Francie, "I don't think he'd do that."

  "We don't know what all he won't do. We don't know anything about him. He's a stranger in the family and always has been. Pray God I don't get there too late."

  Francie insisted on going along and Neeley agreed to stay home with the baby on condition that he be told every single thing that happened.

  When they got to Sissy's house, they found her rosy with excitement. Granma Mary Rommely had taken the baby and retired to the front room where she sat in the dark and prayed for everything to come out all right.

  Sissy's John gave them his version of the story.

  "I'm away working in the shop, see? These here men come to the house and say to Sissy, 'Your husband's just been killed, see?' Sissy thinks they mean me." He turned on Sissy suddenly. "Did you cry?"

  "You could hear me on the next block," she assured him. He seemed gratified.

  "They ask Sissy what they should do with the body. Sissy asks is there any insurance, see? Well, it turns out there is--for five hundred dollars, paid up ten years ago and still made out in Sissy's name. So what does Sissy go to work and do! She tells them to lay him out in Specht's Funeral Parlor, see? A five-hundred-dollar funeral she orders."

  "I had to make the arrangements," apologized Sissy. "I'm his only living relation."

  "And that's not all," he went on. "Now they're going to come around and give Sissy a pension. I won't stand for it!" he roared suddenly. "When I marry her," he went on more calmly, "she tells me she's a divorced woman. Now it turns out she's not."

  "But there's no divorce in the Catholic Church," insisted Sissy.

  "You wasn't married in the Catholic Church."

  "I know. So I never considered I was married, and didn't think I had to get a divorce."

  He threw his hands up in the air and moaned, "I give up!" It was the same cry of futile despair he had uttered when Sissy had insisted that she had given birth t
o the baby. "I marry her in good faith, see? And what does she do?" he asked rhetorically. "She turns right around and makes us live in adultery."

  "Don't say that!" said Sissy sharply. "We're not living in adultery. We're living in bigamy."

  "And it's got to stop right now, see? You're widowed from the first one and you're going to get a divorce from the second, and then you're going to marry me again, see?"

  "Yes, John," she said meekly.

  "And my name ain't John!" he roared. "It's Steve! Steve! Steve!" With each repetition of his name, he pounded on the table so hard that the blue glass sugar bowl with the spoons hanging around its rim clattered up and down. He pushed a finger into Francie's face.

  "And you! From now on I'm Uncle Steve, see?"

  Francie stared at the transformed man in dumb amazement.

  "Well? What do you say?" he barked.

  "Hel...hel...hello, Uncle Steve."

  "That's more like it." He was mollified. He took his hat from a nail behind the door and jammed it on his head.

  "Where are you going, John...I mean, Steve?" asked Katie, worried.

  "Listen! When I was a kid, my old man always went out and got ice cream when company came in his house. Well, this is my house, see? And I got company. So I'm going out and get a quart of strawberry ice cream, see?" He went.

  "Isn't he wonderful?" sighed Sissy. "A woman could fall in love with a person like that."

  "Looks like the Rommelys have a man in the family at last," commented Katie dryly.

  Francie went into the dark front room. By the light of the street lamp, she saw her grandmother sitting at the window with Sissy's sleeping baby in her lap and amber rosary beads dangling from her trembling fingers.

  "You can stop praying now, Granma," she said. "Everything's all right. He went out for ice cream, see?"

  "Glory be to the father, and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost," praised Mary Rommely.

  *

  In Sissy's name, Steve wrote to her second husband at his last-known address and put "Please Forward" on the envelope. Sissy asked him to consent to a divorce so that she might remarry. A week later, a fat letter came from Wisconsin. Sissy's second husband informed her that he was well, had obtained a Wisconsin divorce seven years ago, had promptly remarried, settled down in Wisconsin where he had a good job and was the father of three children. He was very happy, he wrote and in belligerently underlined words threatened that he intended to stay that way. He enclosed an old press clipping to prove that she had been legally informed of the divorce action by publication. He enclosed a photostatic copy of the decree (grounds, desertion), and a snapshot of three bouncing children.

  Sissy was so happy at being divorced so quickly that she sent him a silver-plated pickle dish as a belated wedding present. She felt that she had to send a letter of congratulation also. Steve refused to write it for her so she asked Francie to do it.

  "Write that I hope he'll be very happy," dictated Sissy.

  "But Aunt Sissy, he's been married seven years and it's settled by now--whether he's happy or not."

  "When you first hear that someone's married, it's polite to wish them happiness. Write it down."

  "All right." She wrote it down. "What else?"

  "Write something about his children...how cute they are...something like..." The words stuck in her throat. She knew he had sent the picture to prove that Sissy's stillborn children had not been his fault. That hurt Sissy. "Write that I'm the mother of a beautiful healthy baby girl and put a line under healthy."

  "But Steve's letter said you were only planning to get married. This man might think it funny that you got a baby so soon."

  "Write it like I said," ordered Sissy, "and write that I expect another baby to be born next week."

  "Sissy! You don't, really!"

  "Of course not. But write it down anyhow."

  Francie wrote that down. "Anything else?"

  "Say thanks for the divorce paper. Then say I got my own divorce a year before he got it. Only I forgot," she concluded lamely.

  "But that's a lie."

  "I did get the divorce before he did. I got it in my mind."

  "All right. All right," surrendered Francie.

  "Write that I'm very happy and intend to stay that way and put a line under those words like he did."

  "Gosh, Sissy. Must you have the last word?"

  "Yes. Just like your mother has to have it, and Evy and you, too."

  Francie made no more objections.

  Steve got a license and married Sissy all over again. This time a Methodist minister performed the ceremony. It was Sissy's first marriage by the Church and at last she believed that she was truly married until death did the parting. Steve was very happy. He loved Sissy and had always been afraid of losing her. She had left her other husbands, casually and with no regrets. He had been afraid that she'd leave him, too, and take with her the baby whom he had grown to love dearly. He knew that Sissy believed in the Church...any Church, Catholic, or Protestant; that she'd never walk out on a church marriage. For the first time in their relationship, he felt happy, secure, and masterful. And Sissy discovered that she was madly in love with him.

  Sissy came over one evening after Katie had gone to bed. She told her not to get up; that she'd sit in the bedroom and talk to her. Francie was sitting at the kitchen table pasting poems in old notebooks. She kept a razor blade at the office and cut out poems and stories she liked for her scrapbooks. She had a series of them. One was labeled The Nolan Book of Classical Poems. Another, The Nolan Volume of Contemporary Poetry. A third was The Book of Annie Laurie, in which Francie was collecting nursery rhymes and animal stories to be read to Laurie when she was old enough to understand.

  The voices coming from the dark bedroom made a soothing rhythm. Francie listened as she pasted. Sissy was saying:

  "...Steve, so fine and decent. And when I realized it, I hated myself on account of the others--outside of my husbands, I mean."

  "You didn't tell him about the others?" asked Katie apprehensively.

  "Do I look like a fool? But I wish with all my heart that he had been the first and only one."

  "Woman talks that way," said Katie, "it means she's going into the change of life."

  "How do you make that out?"

  "If she never had any lovers, she kicks herself around when the change comes, thinking of all the fun she could have had, didn't have, and now can't have. If she had a lot of lovers, she argues herself into believing that she did wrong and she's sorry now. She carries on that way because she knows that soon all her woman-ness will be lost...lost. And if she makes believe being with a man was never any good in the first place, she can get comfort out of her change."

  "I'm not going into any change of life," said Sissy indignantly. "In the first place I'm too young and in the second place I wouldn't stand for it."

  "It has to come to all of us some day," sighed Katie.

  There was terror in Sissy's voice. "Not to be able to have children anymore...to be half a woman...get fat...have hair grow on your chin. I'll kill myself first!" she cried passionately. "Anyhow," she added complacently, "I'm nowhere near the change because I'm that way again."

  There was a rustle from the dark bedroom. Francie could visualize her mother raising herself on her elbow.

  "No, Sissy! No! You can't go through that again. Ten times it's happened--ten children stillborn. And it will be harder this time because you're going for thirty-seven."

  "That's not too old to have a baby."

  "No, but it's too old to get over another disappointment easily."

  "You needn't worry, Katie. This child will live."

  "You've said that each time."

  "This time I'm sure because I feel that God is on my side," she said with quiet assurance. After a while she said, "I told Steve how I got Little Sissy."

  "What did he say?"

  "He knew all the while I hadn't given birth to her, but the way I claimed I had, got him mixed up. He
said it didn't matter as long as I didn't have her by another man and that since we had her from birth almost he really feels that she's his baby. It's funny how the baby looks like him. She has his dark eyes and the same round chin and the same small ears close to her head like him."

  "She got those dark eyes from Lucia and a million people in the world have round chins and small ears. But if it makes Steve happy to think the baby looks like him, that's fine." There was a long silence before Katie spoke again. "Sissy, did you ever get any idea from that Italian family as to who the father was?"

  "No." Sissy, too, waited a long time before she continued. "You know who told me about the girl being in trouble and where she lived and all?"

  "Who?"

  "Steve."

  "Oh, my!"

  Both were quiet for a long time. Then Katie said, "Of course, that was accidental."

  "Of course," agreed Sissy. "One of the fellows in his shop told him, he said; a fellow who lived on Lucia's block."

  "Of course," Katie repeated. "You know funny things happen here in Brooklyn that have no meaning at all. Like sometimes I'm walking on the street and I think of someone I haven't seen maybe in five years and I turn a corner and there's that person walking towards me."

  "I know," answered Sissy. "Sometimes I'm doing something that I never did before in my life and all of a sudden I have the feeling that I did that same thing before--maybe in another life...." Her voice died away. After a while she said, "Steve always said he'd never take another man's child."

  "All men say that. Life's funny," Katie went on. "A couple of accidental things come together and a person could make a lot out of them. It was just an accident that you got to know about that girl. That same fellow must have told a dozen men in the shop. Steve just mentioned it to you accidentally. It was just by accident that you got in with that family and just accidental that the baby has a round instead of a square chin. It's even less than accidental. It's..." Katie stopped to search for a word.

  Francie in the kitchen had become so interested that she forgot that she wasn't supposed to be listening. When she knew her mother was groping for a word, she supplied it unthinkingly.