A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [151]
Floss said: “The men have all the fun and women, the pain.” The mother said nothing. She trembled when next Katie cried out. “It seems funny,” said Floss, “to be making a costume with two sleeves.”
“Yes.”
They worked a while in silence before Floss spoke again. “I wonder are they worth it? The children, I mean.”
Mrs. Gaddis thought of her dead son and her daughter’s withered arm. She said nothing. She bent her head over her knitting. She had come around to the place where she dropped a stitch. She concentrated on picking it up.
The spare Tynmore spinsters lay in their hard virginal bed. They groped for each other’s hands. “Did you hear it, Sister?” asked Miss Maggie.
“Her time has come,” answered Miss Lizzie.
“That’s why I didn’t marry Harvey—long ago when he asked me. I was afraid of that. So afraid.”
“I don’t know,” Miss Lizzie said. “Sometimes I think it’s better to suffer bitter unhappiness and to fight and to scream out, and even to suffer that terrible pain, than just to be…safe.” She waited until the next scream died away. “At least she knows she’s living.”
Miss Maggie had no answer.
The flat across the hall from the Nolans was vacant. The remaining flat in the house was occupied by a Polish dock walloper, his wife and their four kids. He was filling a glass from a can of beer on the table when he heard Katie.
“Women!” he grunted contemptuously.
“Shut up, you,” snarled his wife.
And all the women in the house tensed each time Katie cried out, and they suffered with her. It was the only thing the women held in common—the sure knowledge of the pain of giving birth.
Francie had to walk a long way up Manhattan Avenue before she found a Jewish dairy open. She had to go to another store for the crackers and then find a fruit stand that had navel oranges. As she came back, she glanced at the large clock in Knipe’s Drug Store, and noted that it was nearly half past ten. She didn’t care what time it was except that it seemed so important to her mother.
When she walked into the kitchen, she felt a difference. There was a new quiet feeling and an indefinable smell, new and faintly fragrant. Sissy was standing with her back to the basket.
“What do you think,” she said. “You have a baby sister.”
“Mama?”
“Your mother’s fine.”
“So that’s why I was sent to the store.”
“We thought you knew too much already for fourteen,” said Evy coming out of the bedroom.
“I just want to know the one thing,” said Francie fiercely. “Did Mama send me out?”
“Yes, Francie, she did,” said Sissy gently. “She said something about sparing those you love.”
“All right then,” said Francie mollified.
“Don’t you want to see the baby?”
Sissy stepped aside. Francie lifted the blanket from the baby’s head. The baby was a beautiful little thing with white skin and downy black curls which grew down into a point on her forehead, like Mama’s. The baby’s eyes opened briefly. Francie noticed that they were a milky blue. Sissy explained that all new babies had blue eyes and that probably they’d be dark as coffee beans as she grew older.
“It looks like Mama,” Francie decided.
“That’s what we thought,” said Sissy.
“Is it all right?”
“Perfect,” Evy told her.
“Not crooked or anything?”
“Certainly not. Where do you get such ideas?”
Francie didn’t tell Evy how she was afraid the baby would be born crooked because Mama had worked on her hands and knees up to the last minute.
“May I go in and see Mama?” she asked humbly, feeling like a stranger in her own home.
“You can bring the plate in to her.” Francie took the plate holding two buttered crackers in to her mother.
“Hello, Mama.”
“Hello, Francie.”
Mama looked like Mama again, only very tired. She couldn’t raise her head so Francie held the crackers while she ate them. After they were gone,