A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: Chapters 12-26

Katie packed their few belongings: a double bed, the babies’ crib, a busted-down baby buggy, a green plush parlor suite, a carpet with pink roses, a pair of parlor lace curtains, a rubber plant and a rose geranium, a yellow canary in a gilt cage, a plush picture album, a kitchen table and some chairs, a box of dishes and pots and pans...

She sat for long hours on the stoop with her thin arms hugging her thin legs and with her straight brown hair blowing in the slow breeze that came laden with the salt smell of the sea, the sea which was so nearby and which she had never seen.

Sometimes Francie talked and talked until the genial little boy fell asleep sitting upright on the steps with his head against the iron rail.

The little girl had heard this many times. She was shrewd enough not to debate it. “Well, I’d sooner have a dirty slob for a mother than a crazy woman. And I’d rather have no father than a drunken man for my father.”

She hopped through a game ardently wishing someone were playing with her as she was sure she won with less hops than any other little girl in the world.

The woman shook a dirty, beribboned tambourine and listlessly punched it with her elbow in time to the music. At the end of a song, she’d twirl suddenly showing her stout legs in dirty white cotton stockings and a flash of multicolored petticoats.

Francie never noticed the dirt and the lassitude. She heard the music and saw the flashing colors and felt the glamor of a picturesque people.

It was sad the way they were still babies of four and five years of age but so precocious about taking care of themselves.

The organ grinder’s tune was sad under its lilting shrillness.

Following the kitchen, there were two bedrooms, one leading into the other. An airshaft dimensioned like a coffin was built into the bedrooms. The windows were small and dingy gray.

The airshaft was topped by a miniature, slant-roofed skylight whose heavy, opaque, wrinkled glass was protected from breakage by heavy iron netting. The sides were corrugated iron slats.

Since this bottom couldn’t be reached by man (the windows being too small to admit the passage of a body), it served as a fearful repository for things that people wanted to put out of their lives.

Wistfully the woman asked Katie not to let it get damp or cold, to leave the bedroom doors open in winter so a little heat would get through from the kitchen and prevent warping.

(The Nolans ground their coffee at home. Francie loved to see Mama sitting debonairly in the kitchen with the coffee mill clutched between her knees, grinding away with a furious turn of her left wrist and looking up to talk sparklingly to Papa while the room filled up with the rich satisfying odor of freshly ground coffee.)

Miss Tynmore brought everything with her but the piano. She had a nickel alarm clock and a battered metronome.

When the health authorities tried to explain to the poor and illiterate that vaccination was a giving of the harmless form of smallpox to work up immunity against the deadly form, the parents didn’t believe it.

Weeping mothers brought bawling children to the health center for inoculation.

“I’ve got to go to work. Who’s going to do my work if I don’t?” asked Katie covering up her conscience with indignation.

Yes, she should go with them to lend the comfort and authority of her presence but she knew she couldn’t stand the ordeal.

Francie saw the white doctor coming towards her with the cruelly poised needle.

This poor child was the nagged one, the tormented one, the one on whom she vented her spinsterly spleen.

Another, passed around by little boys who had been victims, was that the lady principal, a hard-bitten, heavy, cruel woman of middle years who wore sequin-decorated dresses and smelled always of raw gin, got recalcitrant boys into her office and made them take down their pants so that she could flay their naked buttocks with a rattan cane.

Usually the press of the crowd prevented a child’s getting near the washrooms. If he was lucky enough to get there (where there were but ten lavatories for five hundred children), he’d find the places preempted by the ten most brutalized children in the school.

No one ever ascertained what pleasure they derived from this macabre game.

Technically, a child was permitted to leave the room if he asked permission. There was a system of coy evasion.

But the harassed and unfeeling teachers assured each other that this was just a subterfuge for a child to get out of the classroom for a little while.

Of course, Francie noted, the favored children, the clean, the dainty, the cared-for in the front seats, were allowed to leave at any time.

Sissy grabbed Neeley’s arm, but with a raucous cry, he twisted loose and ran down the street.

Sissy grabbed Neeley’s arm, but with a raucous cry, he twisted loose and ran down the street. With poignancy, Sissy realized that he was growing up.

Mary Rommely came over to intercede for Sissy. “What is there that is bitter between you and your sister?” she asked Katie.

When an epidemic of mumps broke out in the school, Katie went into action against communicable diseases.

He was a crotchety old grandfather and not at all accountable for how he came out.

They were old and decrepit but there were picket fences around them with gates on which Francie longed to swing.

The neighborhood stood old, quiet and serene in the Saturday sunshine. There was a brooding quality about the neighborhood, a quiet, deep, timeless, shabby peace.

Papa told her about this strange neighborhood: how its families had been Americans for more than a hundred years back; how they were mostly Scotch, English and Welsh extraction.

To a passing stranger, it might have looked silly—Johnny standing there in his greenish tuxedo and fresh linen holding the hand of a thin ragged child and singing the banal song so unself-consciously on the street.

The parents were too American, too aware of the rights granted them by their Constitution to accept injustices meekly. They could not be bulldozed and exploited as could the immigrants and the second-generation Americans.

He was a ruddy white-haired man whom even the principal addressed as Mister Jenson.

She smelled the thick bit of punk which was given gratis with each purchase and which, when lit, smoldered for hours and was used to set off the firecrackers.

“That would be Sergeant Michael McShane. It’s funny you don’t know who he is seein’ that it’s from your own precinct he is.”

She saw staid family vehicles drawn by dependable-looking teams.

These coaches did not impress Francie very much because every undertaker in Williamsburg had a string of them.

Then came the cavalcade: mounted policemen and a large open motorcar in which was seated a genial, kindly-looking man with a wreath of roses around his neck.

“It wonders me he didn’t freeze his whatzis off,” said a bawdy boy.

A cadaverous-looking man tapped Johnny on the shoulder. “Mac,” he inquired, “do you actually believe there’s a pole up there sticking out on top of the world?”

The street was jammed with masked and costumed children making a deafening din with their penny tin horns.

Some stores which had nothing to gain from the children neither locked them out nor gave them anything save a profane lecture on the evils of begging.

She asked if anyone wanted the little pumpkin pie. Thirty mouths watered; thirty hands itched to go up into the air but no one moved. Some were poor, many were hungry and all were too proud to accept charitable food.

Although Katie had this same flair for coloring an incident and Johnny himself lived in a half-dream world, yet they tried to squelch these things in their child.

Maybe they knew their own gift of imagination colored too rosily the poverty and brutality of their lives and made them able to endure it.