A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: Chapters 27-37

A few ordered a tree set aside for the day; others stopped to price, inspect and conjecture.

A spurt of derisive laughter came from the tree man.

The cop on their corner stopped them, examined the tree, and solemnly offered to buy it for ten cents—fifteen cents if they’d delivered it to his home. Francie nearly burst with pride although she knew he was joking.

She had no compunctions about the lie and getting the doll under false pretenses. She was paying for the lie and for the doll by giving up her pride.

She had no compunctions about the lie and getting the doll under false pretenses.

She woke up from time to time in the night and whispered "Mary” and touched the doll’s infinitesimal slipper with a light finger.

She stopped watching for Mr. Tomony to come home on Saturday nights from his New York jaunts.

She waited at the stage door after the Saturday matinee and followed him to the shabby brownstone house where he lived untheatrically in a modest furnished room.

It had also been planted that her job was contingent on her being able to grind coffee.

Taking in the situation, he threw his wide minister’s hat clear across the stage in a dramatic but unseemly gesture, stepped stiff-leggedly to the machine and ground the coffee and thus saved the heroine.

There was an awed silence as the odor of freshly ground coffee permeated the theater. Then bedlam broke loose. Real coffee! Realism in the theater!

He got haggard and his mother got frightened.

He was like a dope fiend getting the stuff after a long period of deprivation. He wouldn’t let go.

One day she took a can of stove blackening and the brush and closed herself in the bedroom where she copiously blackened her left breast with the stove polish.

Johnny heard the story and contemptuously dismissed Gussie from his mind.

They got off at the last stop which was Canarsie and found their way to a little wharf on which was a tiny shack; a couple of water-logged rowboats bobbed up and down on the frayed ropes which held them to the wharf.

He straightened up, pushed the boat from him, leaped...and fell into the water. The petrified children stared at him.

Horrified, they watched Papa squeamishly impale a muddy worm on the hook.

Next came Little Tilly swallowed up in his coat with salt water dripping from under it and forming a brackish pool on the floor.

When the grisly trip was ended, Johnny took Tilly home, feeling that his was the responsibility of explaining.

The children should have returned exhilarated and with a deep and abiding love for the sea and he should have returned with a fine mess of fish.

"Intolerance,” she wrote, pressing down hard on the pencil, "is a thing that causes war, pogroms, crucifixions, lynchings, and makes people cruel to little children and to each other. It is responsible for most of the viciousness, violence, terror and heart and soul breaking of the world.”

"Intolerance,” she wrote, pressing down hard on the pencil, "is a thing that causes war, pogroms, crucifixions, lynchings, and makes people cruel to little children and to each other. It is responsible for most of the viciousness, violence, terror and heart and soul breaking of the world.”

“You’re all jealous,” said Joanna evenly.
“She says we’re jealous,” reported the interlocutor.

It was the signal for the other women to start throwing stones. One, droller than the rest, threw a ball of horse manure.

In this way they reached the stables without mishap and the horse cantered in proudly to his usual place in the row.

She told him how much they needed that twenty-two-fifty a week. She pleaded so hard, and looked so little and pretty and spunky, that he gave in at last.

Francie thought her diary would be like that, but excepting for some romantic observations on Harold Clarence, actor, the entries were prosaic.

Francie thought the revolver looked like a grotesque beckoning finger, a finger that beckoned to death and made it come running. She was glad when Papa put it out of sight under his pillow.

There was a hearing, but Katie was told beforehand that it was a technicality.

The mother-to-be was frightened and defiant and also very thin from the starvation diet.

Sissy was so realistic about her pregnancy by proxy that she simulated morning sickness in the beginning weeks. When Lucia announced that she felt life, Sissy told her husband that she felt life.

Maybe he would be punished for treating his flesh and blood so inhumanly. Contrite, he brought her a plate heaped with spaghetti.

They called her frivolous Sal,
A peculiar sort of a gal.

Her thoughts went to birth’s corollary: death.

There was a foreboding about her as though she were carrying tragedy within herself.

They pondered a while over their mother’s inscrutable ways.

There was a screen, connoting dying, around Johnny’s bed.

“They said he died of pneumonia.”
“That was the direct cause of death. But this acute alcoholism was a definite contributing factor; probably the main cause of death, if you wish the truth.”

"Why should I want to cheat you, Mrs. Nolan?” he asked plaintively as he put the money away carefully.

The cops from the precinct, in memory of the capture of the murderer, sent a cross of red roses. Sergeant McShane sent a sheaf of lilies.

It was a gray day and a chill wind was blowing. Little whirls of frozen dust eddied about Francie’s feet.

Fastidious Johnny had bought his own cup, emulating men who were in better circumstances.

They came to the brilliantly lighted facade of a big vaudeville house.

“Maybe you shouldn’t talk about God like that,” said Neeley apprehensively.