A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [140]
Sissy’s husband sat by the window, holding the baby while he gave it its bottle. After Mary and Sissy had been greeted, Francie and Katie greeted him.
“Hello, John,” said Katie.
“Hello, Kate,” he answered.
“Hello, Uncle John.”
“Hello, Francie.”
He never said another word during the entire visit. Francie stared at him, wondering about him. The family regarded him as temporary, as they had regarded Sissy’s other husbands and lovers. Francie wondered whether he, himself, felt temporary. His real name was Steve but Sissy always referred to him as “my John” and when the family spoke of him, they called him “The John” or “Sissy’s John.” Francie wondered whether the men in the publishing house where he worked called him John, too. Did he ever protest? Did he ever say, “Look here, Sissy. My name is Steve and not John. And tell your sisters to call me Steve, too.”
“Sissy, you’re getting stouter,” mama was saying.
“It’s natural for a woman to put on a little weight after she’s had a baby,” said Sissy with a straight face. She smiled at Francie. “Would you like to hold the baby, Francie?”
“Oh, yes!”
Without a word, Sissy’s tall husband got up, gave over the baby and its bottle to Francie, and still without a word, walked out of the room. No one commented on his going.
Francie sat in his vacated chair. She had never held a baby in her arms before. She touched the baby’s soft round cheek with her fingers as she had seen Joanna do. A thrill started at her fingertips, went up her arm, and through her entire body. “When I get big,” she decided, “I’ll always have a new baby in the house.”
While she held the baby, she listened to Mama and Granma talking and watched Sissy making up a month’s supply of noodles. Sissy took a ball of stiff yellow dough, rolled it flat with the rolling pin, then rolled the flat dough up like a jelly roll. With a sharp knife, she cut the roll into paper-thin strips, unwound the strips and hung them on a rack made of slender dowel sticks, which stood before the kitchen stove. This was to dry out the noodles.
Francie felt that there was something different about Sissy. She wasn’t the old Aunt Sissy. It wasn’t that she was a bit less slender than usual; the being different was something that did not have to do with the way she looked. Francie puzzled over it.
Mary Rommely wanted to hear every word of news and Katie told her everything, starting from the end and working back. First she told of the children working for McGarrity’s, and how the money they brought in was keeping them. Then she went back to the day McGarrity had sat in her kitchen and talked about Johnny. She ended up with saying:
“I tell you, Mother, if McGarrity hadn’t come along when he did, I don’t know what would have happened. I was so low, that just a few nights before that, I had prayed to Johnny to help me. That was foolish. I know.”
“Not foolish,” said Mary. “He heard you and he helped you.”
“A ghost can’t help anyone, Mother,” said Sissy.
“Ghosts are not always those who pass through closed doors,” said Mary Rommely. “Katie has told how her husband used to talk to this saloon man. In all those years of the talking, Yohnny gave away pieces of himself to this man. When Katie called on her man for help, the pieces of him came together in this man, and it was Yohnny within the saloon man’s soul that heard and came to her help.”
Francie turned it over in her mind. “If that is so,” she thought, “then Mr. McGarrity gave us back all those pieces of Papa when he talked so long about him. There is nothing of Papa in him now. Maybe that’s why we can’t talk to him the way he wants us to.”
When it was time to leave, Sissy gave Katie a shoebox full of noodles to take home. As Francie kissed her grandmother in good-bye, Mary Rommely held her close and whispered in her own language: