A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

  Johnny hailed her. The other boys drifted away. What Katie and Johnny said to each other on that special day, they never remembered. Somehow during their aimless but oh-so-significant conversation with its delicious pauses and thrilling undercurrents of emotion, they came to know that they loved each other passionately.

  The factory whistle blew and the girls streamed out of the Castle Braid. Hildy came along in a mud-colored brown suit and a black sailor skewered on to her ratted brassy pompadour with an evil-looking hatpin. She smiled possessively when she saw Johnny. But the smile changed to a spasm of hurt, fear and then hate when she saw Katie with him. She rushed down on them pulling her long hatpin from her sailor hat.

  "He's my feller, Katie Rommely," she screamed, "and you can't steal him away."

  "Hildy, Hildy," said Johnny in his soft unhurried voice.

  "I guess this is a free country," said Katie, tossing her head.

  "Not free for robbers," yelled Hildy as she lunged at Katie with her hatpin.

  Johnny stepped between the girls and got the scratch down his cheek. By this time, a crowd of Castle Braid girls had gathered and were watching them with delighted cluckings. Johnny took each girl by the arm and steered them around the corner. He crowded them into a doorway and imprisoned them there with his arm while he talked to them.

  "Hildy," he said, "I'm not much good. I shouldn't have led you on because I see now that I can't marry you."

  "It's all her fault," wept Hildy.

  "Mine," acknowledged Johnny handsomely. "I never knew what true love was till I met Katie."

  "But she's my best friend," said Hildy piteously as though Johnny were committing a kind of incest.

  "She's my best girl now and there's nothing more to say about it."

  Hildy wept and argued. Finally Johnny quieted her down and explained how it was with him and Katie. He ended by saying that Hildy was to go her way and he'd go his. He liked the sound of his words. He repeated them again, enjoying the drama of the moment.

  "So you go your way and I'll go mine."

  "You mean, I go my way and you go her way," said Hildy bitterly.

  Finally Hildy went her way. She walked down the street with her shoulders sagging. Johnny ran after her, and there on the street he put his arms about her and kissed her tenderly in farewell.

  "I wish it could have been different with us," he said sadly.

  "You wish no such thing," snapped Hildy. "If you did"--she started crying again--"you'd just give her the gate and start going out with me again."

  Katie was crying too. After all, Hildy O'Dair had been her best friend. She too kissed Hildy. She looked away when she saw Hildy's tear-wetted eyes so close to hers, grow small with hate.

  So Hildy went her way and Johnny went Katie's way.

  They kept company for a little while, became engaged, and were married in Katie's church on New Year's Day, nineteen hundred and one. They had known each other not quite four months when they married.

  Thomas Rommely never forgave his daughter. In fact he never forgave any of his daughters for marrying. His philosophy about children was simple and profitable: a man enjoyed himself begetting them, put in as little money and effort into their upbringing as was possible, and then put them to work earning money for the father as soon as they got into their teens. Katie, at seventeen, had only been working four years when she married. He figured that she owed him money.

  Rommely hated everybody and everything. No one ever found out why. He was a massive handsome man with iron-gray curly hair covering a leonine head. He had run away from Austria with his bride to avoid being conscripted into the army. Although he hated the old country, he stubbornly refused to like the new country. He understood and could speak English if he wanted to. But he refused to answer when addressed in English and forbade the speaking of English in his home. His daughters understood very little German. (Their mother insisted that the girls speak only English in the home. She reasoned that the less they understood German, the less they would find out about the cruelty of their father.) Consequently, the four daughters grew up having little communion with their father. He never spoke to them except to curse them. His Gott verdammte came to be regarded as hello and good-bye. When very angry, he'd call the object of his temper, Du Russe! This he considered his most obscene expletive. He hated Austria. He hated America. Most of all he hated Russia. He had never been to that country and had never laid eyes on a Russian. No one understood his hatred of that dimly known country and its vaguely known people. This was the man who was Francie's maternal grandfather. She hated him the way his daughters hated him.

  *

  Mary Rommely, his wife and Francie's grandmother, was a saint. She had no education; she could not read or write her own name, but she had in her memory over a thousand stories and legends. Some she had invented to entertain her children; others were old folk tales told to her by her own mother and her grandmother. She knew many old-country songs and understood all the wise sayings.

  She was intensely religious and knew the life story of every Catholic saint. She believed in ghosts and fairies and all supernatural folk. She knew all about herbs and could brew you either a medicine or a charm--provided you intended no evil with the charm. Back in the old country she had been honored for her wisdom and much sought out for advice. She was a blameless sinless woman, yet she understood how it was with people who sinned. Inflexibly rigid in her own moral conduct, she condoned weaknesses in others. She revered God and loved Jesus, but she understood why people often turned away from these Two.

  She had been a virgin when she married and had humbly submitted to her husband's brutal love. His brutality early killed all of her latent desires. Yet she could understand the fierce love hunger that made girls--as people put it--go wrong. She understood how a boy who had been driven from the neighborhood for rape could still be a good boy at heart. She understood why people had to lie and steal and harm one another. She knew of all pitiful human weaknesses and of many cruel strengths.

  Yet she could not read or write.

  Her eyes were soft brown, limpid and innocent. She wore her shining brown hair parted in the middle and drawn down over her ears. Her skin was pale and translucent and her mouth was tender. She spoke in a low, soft, warmly melodious voice that soothed those who listened. All of her daughters and granddaughters inherited this quality of voice from her.

  Mary was convinced that because of some sin she had unwittingly committed in her life, she was mated with the devil himself. She really believed this because her husband told her so. "I am the devil himself," he told her frequently.

  She often looked at him--the way two locks of his hair stood up on either side of his head, the way his cold gray eyes slanted upward at the outer corners, and she sighed and said to herself, "Yes, he is the devil."

  He had a way of looking full into her saintly face and in a falsely caressing tone he would accuse Christ of unspeakable things. This always terrified her so much that she'd take her shawl from the nail behind the door, throw it over her head and rush forth into the street where she would walk and walk until concern for her children drove her back into the house.

  She went to the public school that the three youngest girls attended and in halting English told the teacher that the children must be encouraged to speak only English; they were not to use a German word or phrase ever. In that way, she protected them against their father. She grieved when her children had to leave school after the sixth grade and go out working. She grieved when they married no-account men. She wept when they gave birth to daughters, knowing that to be born a woman meant a life of humble hardship.

  Each time Francie began the prayer, Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, her grandmother's face came before her.

  Sissy was the oldest child of Thomas and Mary Rommely. She had been born three months after her parents landed in America. She had never gone to school. At the time when she should have started, Mary did not understand that free educ
ation was available for people like them. There were laws about sending children to school but no one sought out these ignorant people in order to enforce the law. By the time the other girls reached school age, Mary had learned about free education. But Sissy was then too big to start in with the six-year-olds. She stayed home and helped her mother.

  At ten, Sissy was as fully developed as a woman of thirty and all the boys were after Sissy and Sissy was after all the boys. At twelve, she started keeping steady company with a lad of twenty. Her father nipped that romance by beating up the boy. At fourteen, she was going with a fireman of twenty-five. Because he licked her father, instead of the other way around, this romance ended in the fireman marrying Sissy.

  They went to City Hall, where Sissy swore that she was eighteen, and were married by one of the clerks. The neighbors were shocked but Mary knew that marriage was the best thing that could happen to her highly sexed daughter.

  Jim, the fireman, was a good man. He was considered educated, having graduated from grammar school. He made good money and wasn't home much. He was an ideal husband. They were very happy. Sissy demanded little from him except a lot of love-making, which made him very happy. Sometimes he was a little ashamed because his wife couldn't read or write. But she was so witty and clever and warmhearted that she made of living a high joyous thing and in time he began to overlook her illiteracy. Sissy was very good to her mother and her younger sisters. Jim gave her a fair household allowance. She was very careful with it and usually had money left over to give her mother.

  She became pregnant a month after marriage. She was still a hoyden girl of fourteen in spite of her womanly status. The neighbors were horrified when they watched her skipping rope on the street with other children, heedless of the yet-to-be-born baby who was now an almost unwieldy bulge.

  In the hours not devoted to cooking, cleaning, love-making, rope skipping and trying to get into the baseball game with the boys, Sissy made plans for the coming baby. If it were a girl, she was going to call it Mary after her mother. If a boy, it would be named John. For some unknown reason, she had a great affection for the name John. She began calling Jim by the name of John. She said she wanted to name him after the baby. At first, it was an affectionate nickname but soon everyone got to calling him John and many people believed that that was his real name.

  The baby was born. It was a girl and a very easy birth. The midwife down the block was called in. Everything went fine. Sissy was in labor only twenty-five minutes. It was a wonderful delivery. The only thing wrong with the whole business was that the baby was born dead. Coincidently, the baby was born and died on Sissy's fifteenth birthday.

  She grieved a while and her grief changed her. She worked harder at keeping her house spotless and clean. She became even more thoughtful of her mother. She stopped being a tomboy. She was convinced that the rope skipping had cost her the child. As she quieted down, she seemed younger and more childlike.

  By the time she was twenty, she had had four children, all born dead. Finally she came to the conclusion that her husband was at fault. It wasn't her fault. Hadn't she stopped skipping rope after the first child? She told Jim that she didn't care for him any more since nothing but death grew out of their love-making. She told him to leave her. He argued a little but went finally. At first he sent her money from time to time. Sometimes when Sissy got lonesome for a man, she'd walk past the firehouse where Jim would be sitting outside with his chair tilted against the brick wall. She'd walk slow, smiling and swaying her hips, and Jim would take unauthorized leave, run up to the flat and they'd be very happy together for a half hour or so.

  Eventually Sissy met another man who wanted to marry her. What his real name was nobody in her family knew, because she began calling him John right away. Her second marriage was arranged very simply. Divorce was complicated and expensive. Besides she was a Catholic and didn't believe in divorce. She and Jim had been married by a clerk in City Hall. She reasoned that it hadn't been a church, or a real marriage so why let it stand in her way? Using her marriage name and saying nothing about her previous marriage, she was married again in City Hall but by a different clerk.

  Mary, her mother, was distressed because Sissy hadn't married in the church. This second marriage provided Thomas with a new implement of torture for his wife. He often told her that he was going to tell a policeman and have Sissy arrested for bigamy. But before he could get around to it, Sissy and her second John had been married four years, she had given birth to four more children, all born dead, and she had decided that this second John wasn't her man either.

  She dissolved the marriage very simply by telling her husband, a Protestant, that since the Catholic Church didn't recognize her marriage, she didn't recognize it either and she now announced her freedom.

  John Two took it in his stride. He liked Sissy and had been fairly happy with her. But she was like quicksilver. In spite of her terrifying frankness and overwhelming naivete, he really knew nothing about her and he was tired of living with an enigma. He didn't feel too bad about going away.

  Sissy at twenty-four had borne eight children, none of whom had lived. She decided that God was against her marrying. She got a job in a rubber factory where she told everyone she was an old maid (which no one believed), and went home to live with her mother. Between her second and third marriage, she had a succession of lovers all of whom she called John.

  After each futile birth, her love of children grew stronger. She had dark moods in which she thought she would go crazy if she didn't have a child to love. She poured out her frustrated maternity on the men she slept with, on her two sisters, Evy and Katie, and on their children. Francie adored her. She had heard it whispered that Sissy was a bad girl but she loved her fiercely just the same. Evy and Katie tried to be mad at their erring sister but she was so good to them that they couldn't hold out against her.

  Soon after Francie was eleven, Sissy married for the third time at City Hall. The third John was the one who worked in the magazine company and through him Francie had those fine, new magazines each month. She hoped the third marriage would endure because of the magazines.

  Eliza, the second daughter of Mary and Thomas, lacked the prettiness and fire of her three sisters. She was plain and dull and indifferent to life. Mary, wanting to give one of her daughters to the church, decided that Eliza was the one. Eliza entered a convent at sixteen. She chose a very rigid order of nuns. She was never permitted to leave the convent walls except on the occasion of her parents' death. She took the name of Ursula and as Sister Ursula she became an unreal legend to Francie.

  Francie saw her once when she came out of the convent to attend Thomas Rommely's funeral. Francie was nine at the time. She had just made her first communion and had given herself so wholeheartedly to the church that she thought she might like to be a nun when she grew up.

  She awaited Sister Ursula's coming with excitement. Just think of it! An aunt who was a nun! What an honor. But when Sister Ursula stooped to kiss her, Francie saw that she had a fine fringe of hair on her upper lip and chin. This frightened Francie into believing that hair grew on the faces of all nuns who entered the convent at a tender age. Francie decided against sisterhood.

  Evy was the third Rommely girl. She, too, had married young. She married Willie Flittman, a handsome, black-haired man with a silky mustache and liquid eyes like an Italian. Francie thought that he had a very comical name and she laughed to herself every time she thought of it.

  Flittman wasn't much good. He wasn't exactly a bum, he was just a weak man who whined all the time. But he played the guitar. Those Rommely women had a weakness for any kind of man who was by way of being a creator or a performer. Any kind of musical, artistic or storytelling talent was wonderful to them and they felt it their duty to nurture and guard these things.

  Evy was the refined one of the family. She lived in a cheap basement flat on the fringes of a very refined neighborhood and studied her betters.

  She wanted to
be somebody; wanted her children to have advantages she had never had. She had three children; a boy named after his father, a girl named Blossom and another boy called Paul Jones. Her first step towards refinement was to take her children out of the Catholic Sunday School and put them in the Episcopal Sunday School. She had gotten it into her head that the Protestants were more refined than the Catholics.

  Evy, loving talent in music and lacking it herself, sought for it avidly in her children. She hoped that Blossom would like to sing and that Paul Jones would want to play the fiddle and Little Willie the piano. But there was no music in the children. Evy took the bull by the horns. They would have to love music whether they wanted to or not. If talent wasn't born in them, maybe it could be shoved in at so much per hour. She bought a secondhand fiddle for Paul Jones and negotiated lessons for him at fifty cents an hour from a man who called himself Professor Allegretto. He taught little Flittman fearsome scrapings and at the end of the year gave him the piece called "Humoresque." Evy thought it was wonderful when he got a piece to play. It was better than playing the scales all the time...well, a little better. Then Evy got more ambitious.

  "Beings," she said to her husband, "that we've got the fiddle for Paul Jones, little Blossom could take lessons too and both could practice on the same fiddle."

  "At different times, I hope," replied her husband sourly.

  "What do you think," she answered indignantly.

  So fifty cents more a week was scraped up and folded into Blossom's reluctant hand and she was sent off to take fiddle lessons, too.

  It so happened that Professor Allegretto had a very slight peculiarity concerning his girl pupils. He made them take off their shoes and stockings and stand in their bare feet on his green carpet while they sawed away. Instead of beating time or correcting their fingering, he spent the hour in a revery staring at their feet.

  Evy was watching Blossom getting ready for a lesson one day. She noticed that the child removed her shoes and stockings and washed her feet carefully. Evy thought that commendable but a little strange.