A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

by Betty Smith

  "You mean coincidental, Mama?" she called out.

  A shocked silence came from the bedroom. Then the conversation was resumed--but this time in whispers.

  48

  A NEWSPAPER LAY ON FRANCIE'S DESK. IT WAS AN "EXTRA" AND HAD come directly from the presses. The ink was still damp on its headline. The paper had been there five minutes and as yet she had not picked up her pencil to mark it. She stared at the date.

  April 6, 1917.

  The one-word headline was six inches high. The three letters were smudged at the edges and the word, WAR, seemed to waver.

  Francie had a vision. Fifty years from now, she'd be telling her grandchildren how she had come to the office, sat at her reader's desk and in the routine of work had read that war had been declared. She knew from listening to her grandmother that old age was made up of such remembrances of youth.

  But she didn't want to recall things. She wanted to live things--or as a compromise, re-live rather than reminisce.

  She decided to fix this time in her life exactly the way it was this instant. Perhaps that way she could hold on to it as a living thing and not have it become something called a memory.

  She brought her eyes close to the surface of her desk and examined the patterned grain of the wood. She ran her fingers along the groove where her pencils rested, fixing the feel of the groove in her mind. Using a razor blade, she nicked the next dot on one of her pencils and unraveled the paper. She held the raveling in her palm, touched it with her forefinger, and noted its spiraling. She dropped it into the metal wastebasket counting the seconds it took to fall. She listened intently so as not to miss its almost noiseless thud as it hit the bottom. She pressed her fingertips to the damp headline, examined her inked fingertips, then made fingerprints on a sheet of white paper.

  Not caring about clients who might be mentioned on pages one and two, she detached the front sheet of the newspaper and folded the sheet into a careful oblong, watching the creases come under her thumb. She inserted it into one of the strong manila envelopes that the Bureau used to mail clippings in.

  Francie heard, as if for the first time, the sound the desk drawer made when she opened it to get her purse. She noted the device of the purse's catch--the sound of its click. She felt the leather, memorized its smell and studied the whorlings of the black moire-silk lining. She read the dates on the coins in her change purse. There was a new 1917 penny which she put in the envelope. She uncapped her lipstick and made a line with it under her fingerprints. The clear red color, the texture and the scent of it pleased her. She examined in turn the powder in her compact, the ridges on her nail file, the way her comb was inflexible and the threads of her handkerchief. There was a worn clipping in the purse, a poem she had torn out of an Oklahoma newspaper. It had been written by a poet who had lived in Brooklyn, gone to the Brooklyn public schools and, as a young man, had edited The Brooklyn Eagle. She reread it for the twentieth time handling each word in her mind.

  I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise;

  Regardless of others, ever regardful of others.

  Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,

  Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse, and stuff'd with the stuff that is fine.

  The tattered poem went into the envelope. In the mirror of her compact, she looked at the way her hair was braided--how the braids wound around her head. She noticed how her straight black eyelashes were uneven in length. Then her shoes were inspected. She ran her hand down her stockings and for the first time noticed that the silk felt rough instead of smooth. The fabric of her dress was made of tiny cords. She turned back the hem and noticed that the narrow lace edge of her slip was diamond-shaped in design.

  "If I can fix every detail of this time in my mind, I can keep this moment always," she thought.

  Using the razor blade, she clipped a lock of her hair, wrapped it in the square of paper on which were her fingerprints and lipstick mark, folded it, placed it in the envelope and sealed the envelope. On the outside she wrote:

  Frances Nolan, age 15 years and 4 months. April 6, 1917.

  She thought: "If I open this envelope fifty years from now, I will be again as I am now and there will be no being old for me. There's a long, long time yet before fifty years...millions of hours of time. But one hour has gone already since I sat here...one hour less to live...one hour gone away from all the hours of my life.

  "Dear God," she prayed, "let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere--be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost."

  The delivery boy came by and slapped another city paper on her desk. This one had a two-word headline.

  WAR DECLARED!

  The floor seemed to swerve up, colors flashed before her eyes and she put her head down on the ink-damp paper and wept quietly. One of the older readers, returning from the washroom, paused by Francie's desk. She noticed the headline and the weeping girl. She thought she understood.

  "Ah, the war!" She sighed. "You have a sweetheart or a brother, I presume?" she asked in her stilted readerish way.

  "Yes, I have a brother," Francie answered truthfully enough.

  "My sympathies, Miss Nolan." The reader went back to her desk.

  "I'm drunk again," thought Francie, "and this time on a newspaper headline. And this is a bad one--I've got a crying jag."

  The war touched the Model Press Clipping Bureau with its mailed finger and made it wither away. First, the client who was the backbone of the business--the man who paid out thousands a year for clippings on the Panama Canal and such--came in the day after the declaration of war and said that since his address would be uncertain for a while, he'd call in person each day for his clippings.

  A few days later, two slow-moving men with heavy feet came in to see the boss. One of them pushed his palm under the boss's nose and what he saw in that palm made the boss turn pale. He got a thick stack of clippings from the file box of the most important client. The heavy-footed ones looked them over and returned them to the boss who put them in an envelope and put the envelope in his desk. The two men went into the boss's lavatory leaving the door ajar. They waited in there all day. At noon, they sent an errand boy out for a bag of sandwiches and a carton of coffee and they ate their lunch in the lavatory.

  The Panama Canal client came in at four-thirty. In slow motion, the boss handed him the fat envelope. Just as the client put it in his inner coat pocket, the heavy ones strolled out of the lavatory. One of them touched the client on the shoulder. He sighed, took the envelope out of his pocket and surrendered it. The second heavy one touched him on the shoulder. The client clicked his heels together, bowed stiffly and walked out between the two men. The boss went home with an acute attack of dyspepsia.

  That evening, Francie told Mama and Neeley how a German spy had been caught right in the office.

  The next day, a brisk-looking man came in with a briefcase. The boss had to answer a lot of questions and the brisk man wrote down the answers in spaces provided on a printed form. Then came the sad part. The boss had to make out a check for nearly four hundred dollars--the balance due on the involuntarily canceled account. After the brisk man left, the boss rushed out to borrow money to make the check good.

  After that, everything went to pieces. The boss was afraid to take in new accounts no matter how innocent they seemed. The theatrical season was running out and actor accounts fell off. The deluge of spring-published books which brought in hundreds of seasonal five-dollar author clients and dozens of hundred-dollar publisher clients, had not been a deluge but a mere trickle. Houses were holding off important publications until things settled down a bit. Many research workers canceled their
accounts in expectation of being called up in the draft. Even if business had been normal the Bureau couldn't have handled it because the workers began to go.

  The government, anticipating a man shortage, threw open Civil Service examinations for women workers in the big Thirty-fourth Street post office. Many of the readers took and passed the examination and were called to work immediately. The manual workers, The Club, left almost in a body to work in war projects plants. They not only tripled their earnings but they received much praise for their unselfish patriotism. The boss's wife came back to read and he fired all the remaining readers except Francie.

  The huge loft echoed with emptiness as the three of them tried to carry on the business alone. Francie and the wife read, filed, and attended to the office work. The boss slashed impotently at newspapers, printed blurry slips and pasted items askew.

  In the middle of June, he gave up. He made arrangements for the sale of his office equipment, broke his lease, and settled the matter of refunds to clients very simply by saying, "Let 'em sue me."

  Francie phoned the only other clipping bureau she knew of in New York and asked whether they needed a reader. She was told that they never hired new readers. "We treat our readers right," said an argumentative voice, "and never have to make replacements." Francie thought that was very nice, said so, and hung up.

  She spent her last morning at the Bureau marking Help Wanted ads. She skipped the office jobs knowing she'd have to start as a file clerk again. You didn't stand a chance in an office unless you were a stenographer and typist. Anyhow she preferred factory work. She liked factory people better and she liked keeping her mind free while she worked with her hands. But of course Mama wouldn't let her work in a factory again.

  She found an ad that seemed a happy combination of factory and office; operating a machine in office surroundings. A Communications Corporation offered to teach girls teletype machine operating and to pay them twelve-fifty a week while they were learning. The hours were five P.M. to one A.M. At least that would give her something to do with her evenings--if she got the job.

  When she went to say good-bye to the boss, he told her that he'd have to owe her the last week's salary. He had her address, he said, and would send it. Francie said good-bye to the boss, to his wife, and to her final week's pay.

  The Communications Corporation had a skyscraper office overlooking the East River in downtown New York. Along with a dozen other girls, Francie filled out an application after presenting a fervent letter of recommendation from her ex-boss. She took an aptitude test in which she answered questions which seemed silly--which weighs the most, a pound of lead or a pound of feathers, was an example. Evidently she passed the test for she was given a number, a locker key for which she had to pay a quarter deposit, and told to report the next day at five o'clock.

  It wasn't quite four when Francie got home. Katie was cleaning in their house and she looked upset when she saw Francie come up the stairs.

  "Don't look so worried, Mama. I'm not sick or anything."

  "Oh," said Katie relieved. "For a moment I thought you had lost your job."

  "I have."

  "Oh, my!"

  "And I won't get my last week's pay either. But I got another job...start tomorrow...twelve and a half a week. I'll get a raise in time, I expect." Katie started to ask questions. "Mama, I'm tired. Mama, I don't want to talk. We'll talk about it tomorrow. And I don't want supper. I just want to go to bed." She went upstairs.

  Katie sat on the steps and started to worry. Since war started, prices of food and everything else had skyrocketed. In the past month, Katie had not been able to add to Francie's bank account. The ten dollars a week hadn't been enough. Laurie had to have a quart of fresh milk every day and the milk modifier was expensive. Then there had to be orange juice. Now with twelve-fifty a week...after Francie's expenses were taken out there'd be less money. Soon it would be vacation. Neeley could work during the summer. But what about the fall? Neeley would return to high school. Francie had to get to high school that fall. How? How? She sat there and worried.

  Francie, after a brief glance at the sleeping baby, undressed and got into bed. She folded her hands under her head and stared at the gray patch which was the airshaft window.

  "Here I am," she thought, "fifteen years old and a drifter. I've been working less than a year and I've had three jobs already. I used to think it would be fun to go from one job to the other. But now I'm scared. I've been fired from two jobs through no fault of my own. At each job, I worked as best I could. I gave everything I could give. And here I'm starting all over again somewhere else. Only now I'm frightened. This time when the new boss says 'jump once,' I'll jump twice because I'll be afraid of losing the job. I'm scared because they're depending on me here for money. How did we ever get along before I worked? Well, there wasn't Laurie then. Neeley and I were smaller and could do with less and, of course, Papa helped some.

  "Well...good-bye college. Good-bye everything for that matter." She turned her face away from the gray light and closed her eyes.

  *

  Francie sat at a typewriter in a big room. There was a metal roof fastened over the top of Francie's machine so that she couldn't see the keyboard. An enormous chart of the keyboard diagram was tacked up in front of the room. Francie consulted the chart and felt for the letters under the shield. That was the first day. On the second day she was given a stack of old telegrams to copy. Her eyes went from the copy to the chart as her fingers groped for the letters. At the end of the second day she had memorized the position of the letters on the machine and didn't have to consult the chart. A week later, they took the shield off. It made no difference now. Francie was a touch typist.

  An instructor explained the workings of the teletype machine. For a day, Francie practiced sending and receiving dummy messages. Then she was put on the New York-Cleveland wire.

  She thought it a wonderful miracle that she could sit at that machine and type and have the words come out hundreds of miles away on a piece of paper on the roller of a machine in Cleveland, Ohio! No less miraculous was that a girl typing away in Cleveland made the hammers of Francie's machine pound out the words.

  It was easy work. Francie would send for an hour, then receive for an hour. There were two fifteen-minute rest periods in the work shift and half an hour for "lunch" at nine o'clock. Her pay had been increased to fifteen a week when she went on a wire. All in all, it wasn't a bad job.

  The household adjusted itself to Francie's new schedule. She left home soon after four in the afternoon and got home a little before two in the morning. She pressed the bell button three times before she entered the hallway so that Mama could be on the alert and make sure that Francie wouldn't be attacked by someone lurking in the hallways.

  Francie slept mornings until eleven o'clock. Mama didn't have to get up so early because Francie was in the flat with Laurie. She started work in her own house first. By the time she was ready for the other two houses, Francie was up and looking after Laurie. Francie had to work on Sunday nights but she had Wednesday night off.

  Francie liked the new arrangement. It took care of her lonely evenings, it helped Mama out and gave Francie a few hours each day to sit in the park with Laurie. The warm sun did both of them a lot of good.

  A plan took shape in Katie's mind and she spoke to Francie about it.

  "Will they keep you on night work?" she asked.

  "Will they! They're tickled to death. No girl wants to work nights. That's why they push it off on the new girls."

  "I was thinking that maybe in the fall you could keep on working nights and go to high school in the daytime. I know it'll be hard but it could be done somehow."

  "Mama, no matter what you say, I won't go to high school."

  "But you fought to go last year."

  "That was last year. That was the right time to go. Now it's too late."

  "It's not too late and don't be stubborn."

  "But what in the world could I learn
in high school now? Oh, I'm not conceited or anything, but after all, I read eight hours a day for almost a year and I learned things. I've got my own ideas about history and government and geography and writing and poetry. I've read too much about people--what they do and how they live. I've read about crimes and about heroic things. Mama, I've read about everything. I couldn't sit still now in a classroom with a bunch of baby kids and listen to an old maid teacher drool away about this and that. I'd be jumping up and correcting her all the time. Or else, I'd be good and swallow it all down and then I'd hate myself for...well...eating mush instead of bread. So I will not go to high school. But I will go to college someday."

  "But you've got to go through high school before they'll let you in college."

  "Four years of high school...no, five. Because something would come up to delay me. Then four years of college. I'd be a dried-up old maid of twenty-five before I was finished."

  "Whether you like it or not, you'll get to be twenty-five in time no matter what you do. You might as well be getting educated while you're going towards it."

  "Once and for all, Mama, I will not go to high school."

  "We'll see," said Katie as her jaw settled into a square line.

  Francie said nothing more. But the set of her jaw was like her mother's.

  However, the conversation gave Francie an idea. If Mama thought she could work evenings and go to high school in the day, why couldn't she go to college that way? She studied a newspaper ad. Brooklyn's oldest and most reputable college was advertising summer courses available for college students wishing to take advanced work or to make up or work off conditions, and for high school students wishing to gain advance college credits. Francie thought she might come under the last heading. She wasn't exactly a high school student but she was eligible to be one. She sent for the catalogue.

  From the catalogue, she chose three courses with classes meeting in the afternoon. She'd be able to sleep as usual until eleven, attend classes and go straight to work from the college. She chose Beginning French, Elementary Chemistry, and something called Restoration Drama. She figured up the tuition; a little over sixty dollars with laboratory fees. She had one hundred and five dollars in her savings account. She went to Katie.