A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: Chapters 1-11

Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York. Especially in the summer of 1912.

Somber, as a word, was better. But it did not apply to Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Some people called it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly, but only in the tenements districts.

You saw a small one of these trees through the iron gate leading to someone’s yard and you knew that soon that section of Brooklyn would get to be a tenement district.

Afterwards, poor foreigners seeped in and the quiet old brownstone houses were hacked up into flats, feather beds were pushed out on the window sills to air and the Tree of Heaven flourished. That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people.

On Sunday, most people crowded into the eleven o’clock mass. Well, some people, a few, went to early six o’clock mass. They were given credit for this but they deserved none for they were the ones who had stayed out so late that it was morning when they got home. So they went to this early mass, got it over with and went home and slept all day with a free conscience.

Soon after nine o’clock of a Saturday morning, kids began spraying out of all the side streets on to Manhattan Avenue, the main thoroughfare.

From each side street hordes of little ragamuffins emerged to swell the main tide.

No matter that her brother would straggle back, empty-handed with his gang and taunt later comers the same way.

Francie's face burned at the name. No comfort knowing that the taunters were rag pickers too. No matter that her brother would straggle back, empty-handed with his gang and taunt later comers the same way.

Neeley would have to come along that great day because girls seldom patronized Charlie’s.

At the baker’s, she picked out four buns, carefully choosing those with the most sugar. She met Neeley outside the store. He peeped into the bag and cut a caper of delight when he saw the buns.

“We ain’t doing nothing, lady,” said Neeley with that ingratiating smile which always won over his mother.

“My old man’s tough,” offered a smaller boy.
“Who the hell cares?” inquired the big boy languidly.

The boy played an interminable game of graveyard. He dug miniature graves, put live captured caterpillars into little match boxes, buried them with informal ceremony and erected little pebble headstones over the tiny earth mounds.

Then I joined the Union. Your mother shouldn’t begrudge the dues. The Union gets me jobs where the boss has to pay me certain wages, regardless of tips.

“I was a boy of twelve then. I sang in saloons for the drunks and they threw pennies at me. Then I started working around saloons and restaurants...waiting on people....”

The satin lapels of the tuxedo were threadbare but who would look at that when the suit fitted him so beautifully and the crease in his trousers was so perfect?

The one sleeve was made of pea green chiffon. Francie admired the costume.

A patriarch with a long white beard, black skull cap and toothless gums presided over the vats with a big forked wooden stick.

The line was longest at Father O’Flynn’s cubicle. He was young, kind, tolerant and easy on the penances.

She genuflected before the altar, then knelt at the rail. She said her penance using her mother-of-pearl rosary to keep count of the prayers.

He had nearly reached the end of his repertoire when Francie came in. She was just in time to hear his last selection.

Francie saw a girl who lived in a flat across the street come home from a dance with her feller. They stood pressed close together in her vestibule.

He lived the life of an aristocratic New Yorker in the squalor of Williamsburg.

Katie refused to dance with the feller provided for her, a vacuous vulgar boy given to remarks like: “I thought you musta fallen in,” when Katie returned from a trip to the ladies’ room.

He was a massive handsome man with iron-gray curly hair covering a leonine head.

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.

Her eyes were soft brown, limpid and innocent.

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.

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.

The baby was born. It was a girl and a very easy birth. The midwife down the block was called in. Everything went fine.

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.

About a year after Johnny’s marriage, Frankie, whom many thought even handsomer than Andy, wavered home after a drinking party one night and stumbled over some taut wire that a bucolic Brooklynite had strung around a square foot of grass before his house stoop.

He died during the night. He died alone and without the priest’s last absolution for all of his sins.

For the rest of her days, his mother had a mass said once a month for the repose of his soul which she knew wandered about in Purgatory.

In a few months, to their innocent amazement and consternation, Katie found out that she was pregnant.

The midwife surreptitiously confiscated the caul and later sold it to a sailor from the Brooklyn Navy Yard for two dollars.

The flat was scrupulously clean; the neighbor women had attended to that.

With the memory of her own birth pangs still lingering, she had knowledge now of what her mother had suffered when she, Katie, was born.

Mary looked around the room furtively. “It is not fitting for a good Catholic to say so but I believe that the Protestant Bible contains more of the loveliness of the greatest story on this earth and beyond it..."

Take the money and buy a lot in the country. Get the papers that say it is yours. Thus you become a landowner. Once one has owned land, there is no going back to being a serf.

The baby looked blue and wizened to him and he felt that there must be something wrong with it.

She rushed out to the delicatessen store and beguiled the man into letting her open a charge account until Saturday payday.

The house smelled of warmth, good food, sweet powder and a stronger candylike smell that came from a hard chalkish disc that Sissy wore in an imitation-silver filigree heart on a chain around her neck.

Katie nursed her doggedly although the neighbor women told her that her milk was bad for the child.

That fall in the false warmth of a Brooklyn Indian summer, Katie sat on the stoop and held her sickly baby against the bigness which was another child soon to be born. Pitying neighbors stopped to commiserate over Francie.

“Aw, somebody ought to cut that tree down, the homely thing.”

Johnny had a hankering after immortality which made him a useless dreamer.

She loved all the scratching curs on the street and wept for the gaunt scavenging cats who slunk around Brooklyn corners with their sides swollen looking for a hole in which they might bring forth their young.