A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [153]
…a woman president. That might be.
They’ll never let a woman run the government.
There’s one running it right now.
Like hell!
Wilson can’t turn around and go to the bathroom ’less he asks Mrs. Wilson if it’s okay by her.
Wilson’s an old woman himself.
He’s keeping us out of war.
That college professor!
What we need in the White House is a sound politician and not a schoolteacher.
* * *
…automobiles. Soon the horse will be a thing of the past. That feller out in Dee-troit’s making cars so cheap that soon every working man can have one.
A laborer driving his own car! You should live so long!
Airplanes! Just a crazy fad. Won’t last long.
The moving pitchers is here to stay. The thee-ayters is closing up one by one in Brooklyn. Take me: I’d rather see this here Charlie Chaplin any day than this here Corset Payton the wife goes for.
…wireless. Greatest thing ever invented. Words come through the air, mind you, without wires. You need a kind of a machine to ketch it and earphones to listen in….
They call it twilight sleep and a woman don’t feel a thing when the kid comes. So when this friend tells my wife, she says that it’s about time they invented something like that.
What’re you talking about! Gaslight’s out of date. They’re putting ’lectricity even in the cheapest tenements.
Don’t know what’s got into the youngsters nowadays. They’re all dance crazy. Dance…dance…dance….
So I changed my name from Schultz to Scott. The judge says what do you want to go and do that for? Schultz is a good name. He was German himself, see? Listen, Mac, I says…that’s just how I talked to him; judge or no judge. I’m through with the old country, I says. After what they done to them Belgian babies, I says, I want no part of Germany. I’m an American now, I says, and I want an American name.
And we’re heading straight for war. Man, I can see it coming.
All we got to do is to elect Wilson again this fall. He’ll keep us out of war.
Don’t bet on them campaign promises. When you got a Democrat president, you got a war president.
Lincoln was a Republican.
But the south had a Democrat president and they was the ones started the Civil War.
I ask you how long we gotta stand for it? The bastards sunk another one of our ships. How many do they gotta sink before we get up enough nerve to go over there and lick hell out of them?
We got to stay out. This country’s getting along fine. Let them fight their own wars without dragging us in.
We don’t want war.
War’s declared, I’ll enlist the next day.
You can talk. You’re past fifty. They wouldn’t take you.
I’d sooner go to jail than to war.
A feller’s got to fight for what he thinks is right. I’d be glad to go.
I got nothing to worry about. I got a double hernia.
Let the war come. They’ll need us working men then to build their ships and their guns. They’ll need the farmer to grow their food. Then watch them come sucking around us. Us laborers will have the God-damned capitalists by the throat. They won’t tell us. We’ll tell them. By Jesus, we’ll make them sweat. War can’t come quick enough to suit me.
Like I’m telling you. Everything is machines. I heard a joke the other day. Feller and his wife going around getting food, clothes, everything out of machines. So they come to this baby machine and the feller puts money in and out comes a baby. So the feller turns around and says, give me the good old days.
The good old days! Yeah. I guess they’re gone forever.
Fill ’em up again, Jim.
And Francie, pausing in her sweeping to listen, tried to put everything together and tried to understand a world spinning in confusion. And it seemed to her that the whole world changed in between the time that Laurie was born and graduation day.
42
FRANCIE HARDLY HAD TIME TO GET USED TO LAURIE WHEN GRADUATION night came around. Katie couldn’t go to both graduations so it was decided that she go to Neeley’s. And that was right. Neeley shouldn’t be deprived because Francie had felt like changing schools. Francie understood but felt a bit hurt