A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [177]
The night was heady and frosty. There was no wind and the air was cold and still. The stars were brilliant and hung low in the sky. There were so many stars that their light made the sky a deep cobalt blue. There wasn’t a moon but the starlight served better than moonlight.
Francie stood on tiptoe and stretched her arms wide. “Oh, I want to hold it all!” she cried. “I want to hold the way the night is—cold without wind. And the way the stars are so near and shiny. I want to hold all of it tight until it hollers out, ‘Let me go! Let me go!’”
“Don’t stand so near the edge,” said Neeley, uneasily. “You might fall off the roof.”
“I need someone,” thought Francie desperately. “I need someone. I need to hold somebody close. And I need more than this holding. I need someone to understand how I feel at a time like now. And the understading must be part of the holding.
“I love Mama and Neeley and Laurie. But I need someone to love in a different way from the way I love them.
“If I talked to Mama about it, she’d say, ‘Yes? Well, when you get that feeling don’t linger in dark hallways with the boys.’ She’d worry, too, thinking I was going to be the way Sissy used to be. But it isn’t an Aunt Sissy thing because there’s this understanding that I want almost more than I want the holding. If I told Sissy or Evy, they’d talk the same as Mama, although Sissy was married at fourteen and Evy at sixteen. Mama was only a girl when she married. But they’ve forgotten…and they’d tell me I was too young to be having such ideas. I’m young, maybe, in just being fifteen. But I’m older than those years in some things. But there is no one for me to hold and no one to understand. Maybe someday…someday….”
“Neeley, if you had to die, wouldn’t it be wonderful to die now—while you believed that everything was perfect, the way this night is perfect?”
“You know what?” asked Neeley.
“No. What?”
“You’re drunk from that milk punch. That’s what.”
She clenched her hands and advanced on him. “Don’t you say that! Don’t you ever say that!”
He backed away, frightened at her fierceness. “Tha…tha…that’s all right,” he stammered. “I was drunk myself, once.”
She lost her anger in curiosity. “Were you, Neeley? Honest?”
“Yeah. One of the fellers had some bottles of beer and we went down the cellar and drank it. I drank two bottles and got drunk.”
“What did it feel like?”
“Well, first the whole world turned upside down. Then everything was like—you know those cardboard toots you buy for a penny, and you look in the small end and turn the big end, and pieces of colored paper keep falling around and they never fall around the same way twice? Mostly though, I was very dizzy. Afterwards I vomited.”
“Then I’ve been drunk, too,” admitted Francie.
“On beer?”
“No. Last spring, in McCarren’s Park, I saw a tulip for the first time in my life.”
“How’d you know it was a tulip if you’d never seen one?”
“I’d seen pictures. Well, when I looked at it, the way it was growing, and how the leaves were, and how purely red the petals were, with yellow inside, the world turned upside down and everything went around like the colors in a kaleidoscope—like you said. I was so dizzy I had to sit on a park bench.”
“Did you throw up, too?”
“No,” she answered. “And I’ve got that same feeling here on this roof tonight, and I know it’s not the milk punch.”
“Gee!”
She remembered something. “Mama tested us when she gave us that milk punch. I know it.”
“Poor Mama,” said Neeley. “But she doesn’t have to worry about me. I’ll never get drunk again because I don’t like to throw up.”
“And she doesn’t have to worry about me, either. I don’t need to drink to get drunk. I can get drunk on things like the tulip—and this night.”
“I guess it is a swell night,” agreed Neeley.
“It’s so still and bright…almost…holy.”
She waited. If Papa were here with her now….
Neeley sang.
Silent night. Holy night.
All is calm, all is bright.
“He’s just like Papa,” she thought happily.
She looked out over Brooklyn. The starlight half revealed, half concealed. She looked out over the flat roofs, uneven