A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

  "Mama, could I have sixty-five dollars of the money you've been saving for me towards college?"

  "What for?"

  "College, of course." She was deliberately casual for the drama of it. She was rewarded by the way Mama's voice scaled up as she repeated after Francie:

  "College?"

  "Summer school college."

  "But-but-but," sputtered Katie.

  "I know. No high school. But maybe I can get in if I tell them I don't want a diploma or any grades--that I just want the lessons." Katie got her green hat down from the closet shelf. "Where're you going, Mama?"

  "To the bank for the money."

  Francie laughed at her mother's eagerness. "It's after hours. The bank's closed. Besides there's no hurry. Registration's a week off yet."

  *

  The college was located in Brooklyn Heights, another strange section of great Brooklyn for Francie to explore. As she filled out the registration blank, her pen hovered over the question of previous education. There were three headings with blanks after them: Elementary Schools, High Schools, and Colleges. After a little thought, she crossed out the words and wrote in the space above them, "Privately educated."

  "And when you come right down to it, that's no lie," she assured herself.

  To her utter relief and astonishment, she was not challenged in any way. The cashier took her money and gave her a receipt for her tuition. She was given a registration number, a pass to the library, a schedule of her classes, and a list of the textbooks she needed.

  She followed a crowd to the college bookshop further down the block. She consulted her list and ordered a "Beginning French" and an "Elementary Chemistry."

  "New or secondhand?" asked the clerk.

  "Why, I don't know. Which am I supposed to have?"

  "New," said the clerk.

  Someone touched her on the shoulder. She turned and saw a handsome well-dressed boy. He said, "Get secondhand. Serves the same purpose as new and half the price."

  "Thank you." She turned to the clerk. "Secondhand," she said firmly. She started to order the two books for the drama course. Again the touch on her shoulder.

  "Uh-uh," said the boy negatively. "You can read them in the library before and after classes and when you get cuts."

  "Thank you again," she said.

  "Any time," he answered and sauntered away.

  Her eyes followed him out of the store. "Gosh, he's tall and good-looking," she thought. "College is certainly wonderful."

  She sat in the El train on her way to the office, clutching the two textbooks. As the train grated over the tracks its rhythm seemed to be, college-college-college. Francie started to feel sick. She felt so sick that she had to get off at the next station even though she knew she'd be late for work. She leaned against a penny weighing machine wondering what was the matter with her. It couldn't have been anything she ate because she had forgotten to eat lunch. Then a thunderous thought came to her.

  "My grandparents never knew how to read or write. Those who came before them couldn't read or write. My mother's sister can't read or write. My parents never even graduated from grade school. I never went to high school. But I, M. Frances K. Nolan, am now in college. Do you hear that, Francie? You're in college!

  "Oh gosh, I feel sick."

  49

  FRANCIE CAME AWAY FROM HER FIRST CHEMISTRY LECTURE IN A GLOW. In one hour she had found out that everything was made up of atoms which were in continual motion. She grasped the idea that nothing was ever lost or destroyed. Even if something was burned up or left to rot away, it did not disappear from the face of the earth; it changed into something else--gases, liquids, and powders. Everything, decided Francie after that first lecture, was vibrant with life and there was no death in chemistry. She was puzzled as to why learned people didn't adopt chemistry as a religion.

  The drama of the Restoration, aside from the time-consuming reading required, was easy to manage after her home study of Shakespeare. She had no worries about that course nor the chemistry course. But when it came to Beginning French, she was lost. It wasn't really beginning French. The instructor, working on the knowledge that his students either had taken it before and flunked it, or had already had it in high school, sluffed over the preliminaries and got right down to translation. Francie, shaky enough regarding English grammar, spelling, and punctuation, didn't stand a chance with the French language. She'd never pass the course. All she could do was memorize vocabulary each day and try to hang on.

  She studied going back and forth on the El. She studied in her rest periods and ate her meals with a book propped up on the table before her. She typed out her assignments on one of the machines in the instruction room of the Communications Corporation. She was never late or absent and she asked nothing more than to pass at least two of her courses.

  The boy who had befriended her in the bookstore became her guardian angel. His name was Ben Blake and he was a most amazing fellow. He was a senior in a Maspeth high school. He was editor of the school magazine, president of his class, played half-back on the football team, and was an honor student. For the past three summers, he had been taking college courses. He would finish high school with more than one year of college work out of the way.

  In addition to his school work, he put in his afternoons working for a law firm. He drew up briefs, served summonses, examined deeds and records, and searched out precedents. He was familiar with the state's statutes and was completely capable of trying a case in court. Besides doing so well in school, he earned twenty-five dollars a week. His firm wanted him to come into the office full-time after his graduation from high school, read law with them, and eventually take the bar exam. But Ben was contemptuous of non-college lawyers. He had a great midwestern college picked out. He planned to complete work for an A.B. degree and then enter law school.

  At nineteen, his life was planned out in a straight unswerving line. After passing the bar exam, he was all set to take over a country law practice. He believed that a young lawyer had more political opportunities in a small-town practice. He even had the practice picked out. He was to succeed a distant relative, an aged country lawyer who had a well-established practice. He was in constant touch with his future predecessor and received long weekly letters of guidance from him.

  Ben planned to take over this practice and await his turn to be county prosecutor. (By agreement, the lawyers in this small county rotated the office among them.) That would be his start in politics. He'd work hard, get himself well-known and trusted, and eventually be elected to the House of Representatives from his state. He'd serve faithfully and be re-elected. Then he'd come back and work himself up to the governorship of his state. That was his plan.

  The amazing thing about the whole idea was that those who knew Ben Blake were sure that everything would come out the way he planned it.

  In the meantime in that summer of 1917, the object of his ambitions, a vast midwestern state, lay dreaming beneath the hot prairie sun--lay dreaming among its great wheat fields and its unending orchards of Winesap, Baldwin and Northern Spy apples--lay dreaming--unaware that the man who planned to occupy its White House as its youngest governor was, at the moment, a boy in Brooklyn.

  That was Ben Blake; well-dressed, gay, handsome, brilliant, sure of himself, well-liked by the boys, with all the girls crazy about him--and Francie Nolan tremulously in love with him.

  She saw him every day. His fountain pen flashed through her French assignments. He checked her chemistry work and cleared up obscurities in the Restoration plays. He helped her plan her next summer's courses and, obligingly enough, tried to plan out the rest of her life for her.

  As the end of summer came near, two things saddened Francie. Soon she wouldn't be seeing Ben every day, and she wasn't going to pass the French course. She took Ben into her confidence about the latter sadness.

  "Don't be silly," he told her briskly. "You paid for the course, you sat in class all summer, you're not a moron. You'll pass. Q.E.D."


  "No," she laughed, "I'll flunk P.D.Q."

  "We'll have to cram you for the final exam, then. We'll need a whole day. Now where can we go?"

  "My house?" suggested Francie timidly.

  "No. There'd be people around." He thought for a moment. "I know a good place. Meet me Sunday morning at nine, corner Gates and Broadway."

  He was waiting for her when she stepped off the trolley. She wondered where in the world he'd take her in that neighborhood. He took her to the stage door of a theater given over to Broadway shows on the first lap of the road. He got through the magic door merely by saying, "Morning, Pop," to the white-haired man sitting on a tilted chair in the sun beside the opened door. Francie then discovered that this amazing boy was a Saturday night usher in this theater.

  She had never been backstage before and she was so excited that she almost ran a temperature. The stage seemed vast and the roof of the theater house seemed lost--so far away it was. As she walked across the stage, she changed her stride and walked slowly and stiff-leggedly as she remembered Harold Clarence walking. When Ben spoke, she turned slowly, with dramatic intensity, and said in a throaty voice, "You" (pause: then with meaning) "spoke?"

  "Want to see something?" he asked.

  He pulled the curtain and she saw the asbestos roll up like a giant's shade. He turned on the foots and she walked out on the apron and looked over the thousand dark empty waiting raked seats. She tilted her head and threw her voice to the last row of the gallery.

  "Hello, out there!" she called and her voice seemed amplified a hundred times in the dark waiting emptiness.

  "Look," he asked good-naturedly, "are you more interested in the theater or your French?"

  "Why, the theater, of course."

  It was true. Then and there she renounced all other ambitions and went back to her first love, the stage.

  Ben laughed as he cut off the foots. He brought down the curtain and placed two chairs facing each other. In some way, he had gotten hold of the examination papers for five years back. From them, he had made a master exam paper using the questions asked most frequently and those seldom asked. Most of the day, he drilled Francie in these questions and answers. Then he had her memorize a page from Moliere's Le Tartuffe and its English translation. He explained:

  "There'll be one question in the exam tomorrow that will be absolute Greek to you. Don't attempt to answer it. Do this: State frankly that you can't answer the question but that you are offering in its stead an excerpt from Moliere with translation. Then write down what you've memorized and you'll get away with it."

  "But suppose they ask for that exact passage in a regular question?"

  "They won't. I picked out a very obscure passage."

  Evidently she got away with it for she passed the examination in French. True, she passed with the lowest mark but she consoled herself with the idea that passing was passing. She did very well on the chemistry and drama examinations.

  Acting on Ben's instructions, she came back for the transcript of her grades a week later and met him by arrangement. He took her to Huyler's for a chocolate soda.

  "How old are you, Francie?" he asked over the sodas.

  She calculated rapidly. She was fifteen at home, seventeen at work. Ben was nineteen. He'd never speak to her again if he knew she was only fifteen. He saw her hesitation and said,

  "Anything you say may be used against you."

  She took her courage into her two hands and quavered boldly, "I'm...fifteen." She hung her head in shame.

  "Hm. I like you, Francie."

  "And I love you," she thought.

  "I like you as much as any girl I've ever known. But, of course, I have no time for girls."

  "Not even for an hour say, on Sunday?" she ventured.

  "My few free hours belong to my mother. I'm all that she has."

  Francie had never heard of Mrs. Blake until that moment. But she hated her because she pre-empted those free hours, a few of which would have made Francie happy.

  "But I'll be thinking of you," he continued. "I'll write if I have a moment." (He lived half an hour away from her.) "But if you ever need me--not for any trivial reason, of course--drop me a line and I'll manage to see you." He gave her one of the firm's cards with his full name, Benjamin Franklin Blake, written in the corner.

  They parted outside of Huyler's shaking hands warmly. "See you next summer," he called back as he walked away.

  Francie stood looking after him until he turned the corner. Next summer! It was only September and next summer seemed a million years away.

  She had enjoyed the summer school so much that she wanted to matriculate in the same college that fall but she had no way of raising the more than three hundred dollars required for tuition. In a morning spent in studying catalogues in the Forty-second Street, New York Library, she discovered a college for women in which tuition was free to residents of New York.

  Armed with her transcripts, she went over to register. She was told that she couldn't matriculate lacking a high school education. She explained how she had been permitted to go to summer school. Ah! That was different. There courses were given for credit only. No degree was offered in summer courses. She asked couldn't she take courses now without expecting a degree. No. If she were past twenty-five, she might be permitted to enter as a special student and take courses without being a candidate for a degree. Francie regretfully acknowledged that she was not yet past twenty-five. There was an alternative, however. If she was able to pass the entrance or regents' examination, she would be permitted to enroll regardless of high school credits.

  Francie took the examinations and flunked everything but chemistry.

  "Oh, well! I should have known," she told her mother. "If people could get into college that easy, no one would ever bother with high school. But don't you worry, Mama. I know what the entrance examinations are now, and I'll get the books and study and take those examinations next year. And I'll pass next year. It can be done and I'll do it. You'll see."

  *

  Even if she had been able to enter college, it wouldn't have worked out because she was put on the day shift after all. She was now a fast and expert operator and they needed her in the day when the traffic was heaviest. They assured her that she could go back on night work in the summer if she wished. She got her next raise. She was now earning seventeen-fifty a week.

  Again the lonely evenings. Francie roamed the Brooklyn streets in the lovely nights of fall and thought of Ben.

  ("If you ever need me, write and I'll manage to see you.")

  Yes, she needed him but she was sure he'd never come if she wrote: "I'm lonely. Please come and walk with me and talk to me." In his firm schedule of life, there was no heading labeled "Loneliness."

  The neighborhood seemed the same, yet it was different. Gold stars had appeared in some of the tenement windows. The boys still got together on the corner or in front of a penny candy store of an evening. But now, often as not, one of the boys would be in khaki.

  The boys stood around harmonizing. They sang "A Shanty in Old Shantytown" and "When You Wore a Tulip," "Dear Old Girl," "I'm Sorry I Made You Cry," and other songs.

  Sometimes the soldier boy led them in war songs: "Over There," "K-K-K-Katy" and "The Rose of No Man's Land."

  But no matter what they sang, always they finished off with one of Brooklyn's own folk songs: "Mother Machree," "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling," "Let Me Call You Sweetheart," or "The Band Played On."

  And Francie walked past them in the evenings and wondered why all the songs sounded so sad.

  50

  SISSY EXPECTED HER BABY LATE IN NOVEMBER. KATIE AND EVY went to a lot of trouble to avoid discussing it with Sissy. They were certain it would be another stillbirth and they reasoned that the less said about it, the less Sissy would have to remember afterward. But Sissy did such a revolutionary thing that they had to talk about it. She announced that she was going to have a doctor when the baby came and that she was going to a
hospital.

  Her mother and sisters were stunned. No Rommely women had had a doctor at childbirth, ever. It didn't seem right. You called in a midwife, a neighbor woman, or your mother, and you got through the business secretively and behind closed doors and kept the men out. Babies were women's business. As for hospitals, everyone knew you went there only to die.

  Sissy told them they were way behind the times; that midwives were things of the past. Besides, she informed them proudly, she had no say in the matter. Her Steve insisted on the doctor and the hospital. And that wasn't all.

  Sissy was going to have a Jewish doctor!

  "Why, Sissy? Why?" asked her shocked sisters.

  "Because Jewish doctors are more sympathetic than Christian ones at a time like that."

  "I've nothing against the Jews," began Katie, "but..."

  "Look! Just because Dr. Aaronstein's people look at a star when they pray and our people look at a cross has nothing to do with whether he's a good doctor or not."

  "But I'd think you'd want a doctor of your own faith around at a time of..." (Katie was going to say, "death" but checked herself in time)..."birth."

  "Oh, sugar!" said Sissy contemptuously.

  "Like should stick to like. You don't see Jews calling in Christian doctors," said Evy, thinking she had made a telling point.

  "Why should they," countered Sissy, "when they and everybody else knows that the Jewish doctors are smarter."

  The birth was the same as all the others. Sissy had her usual easy time made easier by the skill of the doctor. When the baby was delivered, she closed her eyes tightly. She was afraid to look at it. She had been so sure that this one would live. But now that the time had come, she felt in her heart that it wouldn't be so. She opened her eyes finally. The baby was lying on a nearby table. It was still and blue. She turned her head away.

  "Again," she thought. "Again and again and again. Eleven times. Oh, God, why couldn't You let me have one? Just one out of eleven? In a few years, my time of childbearing will be over. For a woman to die at last...knowing that she has never given life. Oh, God, why have You put Your curse on me?"