A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: Chapters 38-45

The ladies for whom she worked winced and looked away as they saw her, big with child, standing at the ironing board in their kitchens; or saw her in an awkward sprawling position on her hands and knees scrubbing their floors.

“I’d hate to see your policies lapse, Mrs. Nolan. Especially after you kept them up all these years.”
“You wouldn’t lapse me just because I got behind a little in my payments?”

I wouldn’t want to be buried as a pauper in Potter’s Field.

She put a fifty-cent piece on the table. Anticipating Katie’s refusal, she spoke belligerently.

Aside from keeping the door hinges so well oiled that the slightest touch made them swing open easily, he offered no more inducements than other saloon keepers.

And the children that Mae gave him ran the streets like hoodlums and bragged about their father owning a saloon. To his grievous disappointment, they were proud of it.

He felt that he could love those children if he knew they were another man’s. Then he could see their meanness and their stupidity objectively; then he could pity them and help them.

“Take those curtains,” McGarrity said, waving a thick hand at the half curtains made of yellow calico with a red rose design.

McGarrity talked for two hours without stopping. Katie listened intently.

She took a mound of rosy Jell-O out of the icebox, cut it in half and slid a portion on another plate. She garnished it liberally with whipped cream, plunked two spoons on the table, sat down and indicated that Francie do the same.

“I’m not hungry,” lied Francie.
“Eat anyhow, to be sociable,” Mae said.

It was the only piece of furniture she had brought from Austria and it had stood by the hearth in her family’s hut for more than a hundred years.

With a sharp knife, she cut the roll into paper-thin strips, unwound the strips and hung them on a rack made of slender dowel sticks, which stood before the kitchen stove.

There was an iron-bound convention in Brooklyn that children must have their picture taken by a regular photographer when they were confirmed.

"One delves into the imagination and finds beauty there. The writer, like the artist, must strive for beauty always.”

“But I’d be a dull person if I wrote about nothing but being poor and hungry, wouldn’t I?” Francie didn’t answer. “Wouldn't I?” repeated Miss Garnder emphatically.

“I’ve taken all this time with you because I honestly believe that you have promise. Now that we’ve talked things out, I’m sure you’ll stop writing those sordid little stories.”
Sordid. Francie turned the word over. It was not in her vocabulary. “What does that mean—sordid?”

“I’m surprised! A well-behaved girl like you. What would your mother say if she knew you had been impertinent to your teacher?”
Francie was frightened. Impertinence to a teacher was almost a reformatory offense in Brooklyn.

“Please excuse me. Please excuse me,” she repeated abjectly. “I didn’t mean it.”

Katie surmised that something had gone wrong in school to upset Francie.

“Don’t put your hands in that water. It has soda and lye in it. Look what it’s done to my hands.” She held out her shapely but work-scarred hands.

"Because he’s always such a great comfort to you.” She said it without malice or jealousy. It was a simple statement of fact.

Her mind veered off to something that seemed irrelevant but wasn’t.

Going down the last flight of stairs, she heard a hoarse guttural scream.

“All right then,” said Francie mollified.

The principal made an earnest speech to the children about how they were going out into a troubled world and about how it would be up to them to build a new world after the war which was sure to come to America.

She held out her hand. “Good-bye, Miss Garnder.”
Miss Garnder was taken aback. “Well—good-bye, then,” she said.

He was going to run for Assemblyman from Queens, his home borough, next Election.

“These people are caught,” she thought. “And why? Because” (remembering her grandmother’s repeated convictions), “they haven’t got enough education.”

Covertly, she studied the girls at the long table.

The youngest looked sixteen and the oldest, thirty, and all were swarthy.

And her conscience bothered her only a little bit when she joined the others in tormenting Mark, the martyr, who didn’t know that if he would laugh but once, his troubles in the shop would be over.

They were Brooklyn migratory workers following seasonal work from one part of the borough to the other.

The big room was echoingly empty and she felt desolate and lost.

She saw that Miss Armstrong wasn’t pretty; her face was almost simian with its wide mouth and flat thick nostrils, and her figure was merely passable.

They informed her of trouble-making office rumors, expecting that she would relay them to the readers and create dissension.

She thought it was preposterous, that she, a girl of fourteen, with nothing but a grade school education, would be considered eligible to take over the work of a thirty-year-old college graduate like Miss Armstrong.

She stood in desperate futility, helplessly enduring the indignity.

She could have called out and protested but she was too ashamed to call public attention to her predicament.

Francie’s heart jumped. She, city reader! The most coveted job in the Bureau!

“She’s over sixteen,” decided the boss, “and she’s going to hold me up for a big raise.” To forestall her, he said, “We’ll give you fifteen a week, starting...”

Francie was proud of the center altar because the left side had been carved by Granpa Rommely more than half a century ago when, as a young fellow lately come from Austria, he had begrudgingly given his tithe of labor to his Church.

The thatched crèche was inside the altar rail. Francie knew that the tiny hand-carved figures of Mary, Joseph, the kings, and shepherds were grouped about the Child in the manger as they had first been grouped a hundred years ago when they had been brought over from the old country.

Why art thou sad, my soul, and why dost thou disquiet me, chanted the priest in his deep rich voice.

The priest ascended the curved steps to the pulpit.