A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [102]
Johnny sat at the kitchen window until far into the night trying to figure out why everything had been so wrong. He had sung many a song about ships and going down to the sea in them with a heave ho and a heave to. He wondered why it hadn’t turned out the way it said in songs. 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. Why, oh why hadn’t it turned out the way it did in a song? Why did there have to be his blistered hands and his spoiled suit and sunburn and rotting fish and nausea? Why didn’t Little Tilly’s mother understand the intention and overlook the result? He couldn’t figure it out—he couldn’t figure it out.
The songs of the sea had betrayed him.
30
“TODAY, I AM A WOMAN,” WROTE FRANCIE IN HER DIARY IN THE summer when she was thirteen. She looked at the sentence and absently scratched a mosquito bite on her bare leg. She looked down on her long thin and as yet formless legs. She crossed out the sentence and started over. “Soon, I shall become a woman.” She looked down on her chest which was as flat as a washboard and ripped the page out of the book. She started fresh on a new page.
“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.”
She read the words over aloud. They sounded like words that came in a can; the freshness was cooked out of them. She closed the book and put it away.
* * *
That summer Saturday was a day that should have gone down in her diary as one of the happiest days of her life. She saw her name in print for the first time. The school got out a magazine at the end of the year in which the best story written in composition class from each grade was published. Francie’s composition called “Winter Time” had been chosen as the best of the seventh-grade work. The magazine cost a dime and Francie had had to wait until Saturday to get it. School closed for the summer the day before and Francie worried that she wouldn’t get the magazine. But Mr. Jenson said he’d be working around on Saturday and if she brought the dime over, he’d give her a copy.
Now in the early afternoon, she stood in front of her door with the magazine opened to the page of her story. She hoped someone would come along to whom she could show it.
She had shown it to Mama at lunchtime but Mama had to get back to work and didn’t have time to read it. At least five times during lunch, Francie mentioned that she had a story published. At last Mama said,
“Yes, yes. I know. I saw it all coming. There’ll be more stories printed and you’ll get used to it. Now, don’t let it go to your head. There are dishes to be washed.”
Papa was at Union Headquarters. He wouldn’t see the story till Sunday but Francie knew he’d be pleased. So she stood on the street with her glory tucked under her arm. She couldn’t let the magazine out of her hands even for a moment. From time to time she’d glance at her name in print and the excitement about it never grew less.
She saw a girl named Joanna come out of her house a few doors away. Joanna was taking her baby out for an airing in its carriage. A gasp came up from some housewives who had stopped to gossip on the sidewalk while going to and fro about their shopping. You see, Joanna was not married. She was a girl who had gotten into trouble. Her baby was illegitimate—bastard was the word they used in the neighborhood—and these good women felt that Joanna had no right to act like a proud mother and bring her baby out into the light of day. They felt that she should have kept it hidden in some dark place.
Francie was curious about Joanna and the baby. She had heard Mama and Papa talking about them. She stared at the baby when the carriage came by. It was a beautiful little thing sitting up happily in its carriage. Maybe Joanna was a bad girl but certainly