A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [135]
He missed Johnny. That was it. And it wasn’t the money, either, because Johnny always owed him. He had liked having Johnny around because he gave class to the place. It was something, all right, to see that slender young fellow standing debonairly at the bar among the truck drivers and ditch diggers. “Sure,” admitted McGarrity, “Johnny Nolan drank more than was good for him. But if he didn’t get it here, he would have got it somewhere else. But he wasn’t a rummy. He never got to cursing or brawling after he had a few drinks. Yes,” decided McGarrity, “Johnny had been all right.”
The thing that McGarrity missed was Johnny talking. “How that fellow could talk,” he thought. “Why, he’d tell me about those cotton fields down south or about the shores of Araby or sunny France just like he’d been there instead of getting the information out of those songs he knew. I sure liked to hear him talk about those far-off places,” he mused. “But best of all, I liked to hear him talk about his family.”
McGarrity used to have a dream about a family. This dream family lived far away from the saloon; so far that he had to hop a trolley to get home in the early morning after he locked up the saloon. The gentle wife of his dreams waited up for him and had hot coffee and something nice to eat ready. After eating, they’d talk…talk about other things than the saloon. He had dream children—clean, pretty, smart children who were growing up sort of ashamed that their father ran a saloon. He was proud of their shame because it meant that he had the ability of begetting refined children.
Well, that had been his dream of marriage. Then he had married Mae. She had been a curvy, sensuous girl with dark red hair and a wide mouth. But after a while of marriage, she turned into a stout blowsy woman, known in Brooklyn as “the saloon type.” Married life had been fine for a year or two, then McGarrity woke up one morning and found that it was no good. Mae wouldn’t change into his dream wife. She liked the saloon. She insisted that they rent rooms above it. She didn’t want a house in Flushing; she didn’t want to do housework. She liked to sit in the saloon’s back room day and night and laugh and drink with the customers. 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 knew that Mae was unfaithful to him. He didn’t care so long as it didn’t get around to the extent that men laughed at him behind his back. Jealousy had left him years ago when physical desire for Mae left him. He gradually grew indifferent about sleeping with her or with any other woman. Somehow, good talking had gotten tied up with good sex in his mind. He wanted a woman to talk to, one to whom he could tell all his thoughts; and he wanted her to talk to him, warmly, wisely and intimately. If he could find such a woman, he thought, his manhood would come back to him. In his dumb fumbling way, he wanted union of mind and soul along with union of body. As the years passed, the need of talking intimately with a woman who was close to him became an obsession.
In his business, he observed human nature and came to certain conclusions about it. The conclusions lacked wisdom and originality; in fact, they were tiresome. But they were important to McGarrity because he had figured them out for himself. In the first years of their marriage, he had tried to tell Mae about these conclusions, but all she said was, “I can imagine.” Sometimes she varied by saying, “I can just imagine.” Gradually then, because he could not share his inner self with her, he lost the power of being a husband to her and she was unfaithful to him.
McGarrity was a man with a great sin on his soul. He hated his children. His daughter, Irene, was Francie’s age. Irene was a pink-eyed girl and her hair was of such a pale red that it, too, could be called pink. She was mean and stupid. She had been