A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

  One day after one of those "rescues" Francie asked Mama:

  "When explorers get hungry and suffer like that, it's for a reason. Something big comes out of it. They discover the North Pole. But what big thing comes out of us being hungry like that?"

  Katie looked tired all of a sudden. She said something Francie didn't understand at the time. She said, "You found the catch in it."

  Growing up spoiled the theater for Francie--well, not the theater exactly, but the plays. She found she was becoming dissatisfied with the way things just happened in the nick of time.

  Francie loved the theater dearly. She had once wanted to be a hand-organ lady, then a schoolteacher. After her first Communion, she wanted to be a nun. At eleven, she wanted to be an actress.

  If the Williamsburg kids knew nothing else, they knew their theater. In those days, there were many good stock companies in the neighborhood: Blaney's, Corse Payton's and Phillip's Lyceum. The Lyceum was just around the corner. Local residents called it first "The Lyce," and then changed that into "The Louse." Francie went there every Saturday afternoon (except when it was closed for the summer) when she could scrape up a dime. She sat in the gallery and often waited in line an hour before the show opened in order to get a seat in the first row.

  She was in love with Harold Clarence, the leading man. She waited at the stage door after the Saturday matinee and followed him to the shabby brownstone house where he lived untheatrically in a modest furnished room. Even on the street, he had the stiff-legged walk of the old-time actor and his face was baby pink as though he still had juvenile grease paint on it. He walked stiff-leggedly and leisurely, looking neither to right nor left and smoking an important-looking cigar which he threw away before he entered the house, as his landlady did not permit the great man to smoke in her rooms. Francie stood at the curb, looking down reverently at the discarded butt. She took the paper ring off it and wore it for a week, pretending it was his engagement ring to her.

  One Saturday, Harold and his company put on The Minister's Sweetheart in which the handsome village minister was in love with Gerry Morehouse, the leading lady. Somehow, the heroine had to seek work in a grocery store. There was a villainess, also in love with the handsome young minister, and out to get the heroine. She swaggered into the store in her un-villagelike furs and diamonds and regally ordered a pound of coffee. There was a dreadful moment when she uttered the fatal words, "Grind it!" The audience groaned. It had been planted that the delicate beautiful heroine wasn't strong enough to turn the great wheel. It had also been planted that her job was contingent on her being able to grind coffee. She struggled like anything but couldn't get the wheel to go round even once. She pleaded with the villainess; told her how much she needed the job. The villainess repeated, "Grind it!" When all seemed lost, Handsome Harold entered with his pink face and his clerical garb. Taking in the situation, he threw his wide minister's hat clear across the stage in a dramatic but unseemly gesture, stepped stiff-leggedly to the machine and ground the coffee and thus saved the heroine. There was an awed silence as the odor of freshly ground coffee permeated the theater. Then bedlam broke loose. Real coffee! Realism in the theater! Everyone had seen coffee ground a thousand times but on the stage it was a revolutionary thing. The villainess gnashed her teeth and said, "Foiled again!" Harold embraced Gerry, making her face upstage, and the curtain came down.

  During intermission, Francie did not join the other kids in the interim pastime of spitting down on the plutocrats in the thirty-cent orchestra seats. Instead, she pondered over the situation at curtain. All very well and good that the hero came in the nick of time to grind the coffee. If he hadn't dropped in, what then? The heroine would have been discharged. All right and so what? After she got hungry enough, she'd go out and find another job. She'd go out scrubbing floors like Mama or graft chop suey off of her men friends like Floss Gaddis did. The grocery-store job was important only because it said so in the play.

  She wasn't satisfied with the play she saw the following Saturday, either. All right. The long-lost lover came home just in time to pay the mortgage. What if he had been held up and couldn't make it? The landlord would have to give them thirty days to get out--at least that's how it was in Brooklyn. In that month something might turn up. If it didn't and they had to get out, well, they'd have to make the best of it. The pretty heroine would have to get on piece work in the factory; her sensitive brother would have to go out peddling papers. The mother would have to do cleaning by the day. But they'd live. You betcha they'd live, thought Francie grimly. It takes a lot of doing to die.

  Francie couldn't understand why the heroine didn't marry the villain. It would solve the rent problem and surely a man who loved her so much that he was willing to go through all kinds of fuss because she wouldn't have him wasn't a man to ignore. At least, he was around while the hero was off on a wild-goose chase.

  She wrote her own third act to that play--what would happen if. She wrote it out in conversations and found it a remarkably easy way of writing. In a story you had to explain why people were the way they were but when you wrote in conversation you didn't have to do that because the things the people said explained what they were. Francie had no trouble selling herself on dialogue. Once more she changed her mind about what profession she'd follow. She decided she wouldn't be an actress after all. She'd be a writer of plays.

  29

  IN THE SUMMER OF THAT SAME YEAR, JOHNNY GOT THE NOTION THAT his children were growing up ignorant of the great ocean that washed the shores of Brooklyn. Johnny felt that they ought to go out to sea in a ship. So he decided to take them for a rowboat ride at Canarsie and do a little deep-sea fishing on the side. He had never gone fishing and he'd never been in a rowboat. But that's the idea he got.

  Weirdly tied up with this idea, and by a reasoning process known only to Johnny, was the idea of taking Little Tilly along on the trip. Little Tilly was the four-year-old child of neighbors whom he had never met. In fact, he had never seen Little Tilly but he got this idea that he had to make something up to her on account of her brother Gussie. It all tied up with the notion of going to Canarsie.

  Gussie, a boy of six, was a murky legend in the neighborhood. A tough little hellion, with an overdeveloped underlip, he had been born like other babies and nursed at his mother's great breasts. But there all resemblance to any child, living or dead, ceased. His mother tried to wean him when he was nine months old but Gussie wouldn't stand for it. Denied the breast, he refused a bottle, food or water. He lay in his crib and whimpered. His mother, fearful that he would starve, resumed nursing him. He sucked contentedly, refusing all other food, and lived off his mother's milk until he was nearly two years old. The milk stopped then because his mother was with child again. Gussie sulked and bided his time for nine long months. He refused cow's milk in any form or container and took to drinking black coffee.

  Little Tilly was born and the mother flowed with milk again. Gussie went into hysterics the first time he saw the baby nursing. He lay on the floor, screaming and banging his head. He wouldn't eat for four days and he refused to go to the toilet. He got haggard and his mother got frightened. She thought it wouldn't do any harm to give him the breast just once. That was her big mistake. He was like a dope fiend getting the stuff after a long period of deprivation. He wouldn't let go.

  He took all of his mother's milk from that time on and Little Tilly, a sickly baby, had to go on the bottle.

  Gussie was three years old at this time and big for his age. Like other boys, he wore knee pants and heavy shoes with brass toe tips. As soon as he saw his mother unbutton her dress, he ran to her. He stood up while nursing, an elbow on his mother's knee, his feet crossed jauntily and his eyes roving around the room. Standing to nurse was not such a remarkable feat as his mother's breasts were mountainous and practically rested in her lap when released. Gussie was indeed a fearful sight nursing that way and he looked not unlike a man with his foot on a bar rail, smoking a fat pale cigar.

/>   The neighbors found out about Gussie and discussed his pathological state in hushed whispers. Gussie's father got so that he wouldn't sleep with his wife; he said that she bred monsters. The poor woman figured and figured on a way to wean Gussie. He was too big to nurse, she decided. He was going for four. She was afraid his second teeth wouldn't come in straight.

  One day she took a can of stove blackening and the brush and closed herself in the bedroom where she copiously blackened her left breast with the stove polish. With a lipstick she drew a wide ugly mouth with frightening teeth in the vicinity of the nipple. She buttoned her dress and went into the kitchen and sat in her nursing rocker near the window. When Gussie saw her, he threw the dice, with which he had been playing, under the washtubs and trotted over for feeding. He crossed his feet, planted his elbow on her knee and waited.

  "Gussie want tiddy?" asked his mother wheedlingly.

  "Yup!"

  "All right. Gussie's gonna get nice tiddy."

  Suddenly she ripped open her dress and thrust the horribly made-up breast into his face. Gussie was paralyzed with fright for a moment, then he ran away screaming and hid under the bed where he stayed for twenty-four hours. He came out at last, trembling. He went back to drinking black coffee and shuddered every time his eyes went to his mother's bosom. Gussie was weaned.

  The mother reported her success all over the neighborhood. It started a new fashion in weaning called, "Giving the baby the Gussie."

  Johnny heard the story and contemptuously dismissed Gussie from his mind. He was concerned about Little Tilly. He thought she had been cheated out of something very important and might grow up thwarted. He got a notion that a boat ride off the Canarsie shore might wipe out some of the wrong her unnatural brother had done her. He sent Francie around to ask could Little Tilly go with them. The harassed mother consented happily.

  The next Sunday, Johnny and the three children set out for Canarsie. Francie was eleven years old, Neeley ten and Little Tilly well past three. Johnny wore his tuxedo and derby and a fresh collar and dicky. Francie and Neeley wore their everyday clothes. Little Tilly's mother, in honor of the day, had dressed her up in a cheap but fancy lace dress trimmed with dark pink ribbon.

  On the trolley ride out, they sat in the front seat and Johnny made friends with the motorman and they talked politics. They got off at the last stop which was Canarsie and found their way to a little wharf on which was a tiny shack; a couple of water-logged rowboats bobbed up and down on the frayed ropes which held them to the wharf. A sign over the shack read:

  "Fishing tackle and boats for rent."

  Underneath was a bigger sign which said:

  FRESH FISH TO TAKE HOME FOR SALE HERE.

  Johnny negotiated with the man and, as was his way, made a friend of him. The man invited him into the shack for an eye opener saying that he himself only used the stuff for a night cap.

  While Johnny was inside getting his eyes opened, Neeley and Francie pondered how a night cap could also be an eye opener. Little Tilly stood there in her lace dress and said nothing.

  Johnny came out with a fishing pole and a rusty tin can filled with worms in mud. The friendly man untied the rope from the least sorry of the rowboats, put the rope in Johnny's hand, wished him luck and went back to his shack.

  Johnny put the fishing stuff into the bottom of the boat and helped the children in. Then he crouched on the wharf, the bit of rope in his hand and gave instructions about boats.

  "There is always a wrong and a right way to get on a boat," said Johnny, who had never been on any boat except an excursion boat once. "The right way is to give the boat a shove and then jump in it before it drifts out to sea. Like this."

  He straightened up, pushed the boat from him, leaped...and fell into the water. The petrified children stared at him. A second before, Papa had been standing on the dock above them. Now he was below them in the water. The water came to his neck and his small waxed mustache and derby hat were in the clear. His derby was still straight on his forehead. Johnny, as surprised as the children, stared at them a moment before he said:

  "Don't any of you damned kids dare to laugh!"

  He climbed into the boat almost upsetting it. They didn't dare laugh aloud but Francie laughed so hard inside that her ribs hurt. Neeley was afraid to look at his sister. He knew that if their eyes met, he'd burst out laughing. Little Tilly said nothing. Johnny's collar and dicky were a sodden paperish mess. He stripped them off and threw them overboard. He rowed out to sea waveringly, but with silent dignity. When he came to what he thought was a likely spot, he announced that he was going to "drop anchor." The children were disappointed when they discovered that the romantic phrase simply meant that you threw a lump of iron attached to a rope overboard.

  Horrified, they watched Papa squeamishly impale a muddy worm on the hook. The fishing started. It consisted in baiting the hook, casting it dramatically, waiting a while, pulling it up minus worm and fish and starting the whole thing over again.

  The sun grew bright and hot. Johnny's tuxedo dried to a stiff wrinkled greenish outfit. The children started to get a whopping case of sunburn. After what seemed hours, Papa announced to their intense relief and happiness that it was time to eat. He wound up the tackle, put it away, pulled up the anchor and made for the wharf. The boat seemed to go in a circle which made the wharf get further away. Finally they made shore a few hundred yards further down. Johnny tied up the boat, told the children to wait in it and went ashore. He said he was going to treat them to a nice lunch.

  He came back after a while walking sideways, carrying hot dogs, huckleberry pie and strawberry pop. They sat in the rocking boat tied to the rotting wharf, looked down into the slimy green water that smelled of decaying fish, and ate. Johnny had had a few drinks ashore which made him sorry that he had hollered at the kids. He told them they could laugh at his falling into the water if they wanted to. But somehow, they couldn't bring up a laugh. The time was past for that. Papa was very cheerful, Francie thought.

  "This is the life," he said. "Away from the maddening crowd. Ah, there's nothing like going down to the sea in a ship. We're getting away from it all," he ended up cryptically.

  After their amazing lunch, Johnny rowed them out to sea again. Perspiration poured down from under his derby and the wax in the points of his mustache melted, causing the neat adornment to change into disorganized hair on his upper lip. He felt fine. He sang lustily as he rowed:

  Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main.

  He rowed and rowed and kept going around in a circle and never did get out to sea. Eventually his hands got so blistered that he didn't feel like rowing any more. Dramatically he announced that he was going to pull for the shore. He pulled and pulled and finally made it by rowing in smaller and smaller circles and making the circles come near the wharf. He never noticed that the three children were pea green in the spots where they were not beet red from the sunburn. If he had only known it, the hot dogs, huckleberry pie, strawberry pop and worms squirming on the hook weren't doing them much good.

  At the wharf, he leaped to the dock and the children followed his example. All made it excepting Tilly who fell into the water. Johnny threw himself flat on the dock, reached in and fished her out. Little Tilly stood there, her lace dress wet and ruined, but she said nothing. Although it was a broiling hot day, Johnny peeled off his tuxedo jacket, knelt down and wrapped it around the child. The arms dragged in the sand. Then Johnny took her up in his arms and strode up and down the dock patting her back soothingly and singing her a lullaby. Little Tilly didn't understand a thing of all that happened that day. She didn't understand why she had been put into a boat, why she had fallen into the water or why the man was making such a fuss over her. She said nothing.

  When Johnny felt that she was comforted, he set her down and went into the shack where he had either an eye opener or a night cap. He bought three flounders from the man for a quarter. He came out with the wet fish wrapped in a newspaper. He told
his children that he had promised to bring home some fresh-caught fish to Mama.

  "The principal thing," said Papa, "is that I am bringing home fish that were caught at Canarsie. It makes no difference who caught them. The point is that we went fishing and we're bringing home fish."

  His children knew that he wanted Mama to think he caught the fish. Papa didn't ask them to lie. He just asked them not to be too fussy about the truth. The children understood.

  They boarded one of those trolley cars that had two long benches facing each other. They made a queer row. First there was Johnny in green wrinkled salt-stiff pants, an undershirt full of big holes, a derby hat and a disorderly mustache. Next came Little Tilly swallowed up in his coat with salt water dripping from under it and forming a brackish pool on the floor. Francie and Neeley came next. Their faces were brick red and they sat very rigid trying not to be sick.

  People got on the car, sat across from them and stared curiously. Johnny sat upright, the fish in his lap, trying not to think of the holes in his exposed undershirt. He looked over the heads of the passengers pretending to study an Ex-Lax advertisement.

  More people got on, the car got crowded but no one would sit next to them. Finally one of the fish worked its way out of the sodden newspaper and fell on the floor where it lay slimily in the dust. It was too much for Little Tilly. She looked into the fish's glazed eye, said nothing but vomited silently and thoroughly all over Johnny's tuxedo jacket. Francie and Neeley, as if waiting for that cue, also threw up. Johnny sat there with two exposed fish in his lap, one at his feet and kept staring at the ad. He didn't know what else to do.