A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [133]
Katie took stock. The rent was paid as long as she could keep those three tenements clean. There was a dollar and a half a week from Neeley’s paper route. That would keep them in coal if they used a fire only at night. But wait! Twenty cents weekly insurance premium had to come out of that. (Katie was insured for a dime a week and each of the children for a nickel.) Well, a bit less coal and a little earlier to bed would take care of that. Clothes? Not to be thought of. Lucky Francie had those new shoes and Neeley the suit. The big question, then, was food. Maybe Mrs. McGarrity would let her do the washing again. That would be a dollar a week. Then she’d get a few outside cleaning jobs. Yes, they’d get along somehow.
They got through to the end of March. By that time Katie was unwieldy. (The baby was due in May.) 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. They had to help her out of pity. Soon they realized that they were paying a cleaning woman and doing most of the work themselves anyhow. So, one after another, they told her they didn’t need her any more.
A day came when Katie didn’t have the twenty cents for the insurance collector. He was an old friend of the Rommelys and knew Katie’s circumstances.
“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. But the company would. Look! Why don’t you cash in the children’s policies?”
“I didn’t know you could do that.”
“Few people know. They stop paying premiums and the company keeps mum. Time passes and the company just keeps the money already paid in. I’d lose my job if they knew I told you about this. But here’s how I look at it: I insured your father and mother and all you Rommely girls and your husbands and children, and, I don’t know, but I carried so many messages back and forth among you about birth and sickness and death that I feel like part of the family.”
“We couldn’t do without you,” said Katie.
“Here’s what you do, Mrs. Nolan. Cash in your children’s policies but keep your own. If anything happens to one of the children, God forbid, you could manage to get them buried. Whereas if something happened to you, also God forbid, they couldn’t get you buried without insurance money, now could they?”
“No, they couldn’t. I must keep my own policy up. I wouldn’t want to be buried as a pauper in Potter’s Field. That’s something they could never rise above; neither they, nor their children, nor their children’s children. So I’ll keep my policy and take your advice about the children’s. Tell me what I have to do.”
The twenty-five dollars that Katie got for the two policies got them through until the end of April. In five more weeks the child would be born. In eight more weeks, Francie and Neeley would graduate from grade school. There were those eight weeks to be gotten through somehow.
The three Rommely sisters sat around Katie’s kitchen table in conference.
“I’d help if I could,” said Evy. “But you know Will’s not been right since that horse kicked him. He’s fresh to the boss and doesn’t get along with the men and it’s gotten so that not a horse will go out with him. They put him on stable work, sweeping out manure and dumping broken bottles. They cut him to eighteen a week and that doesn’t go far with three children. I’m looking for odd cleaning jobs myself.”
“If I could think of some way,” began Sissy.
“No,” said Katie firmly. “You’re doing enough by taking Mother to live with you.”
“That’s right,” said Evy. “Kate and I used to worry so about her living alone in one room and going out cleaning to make a few pennies.”
“Mother’s no expense