A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [179]
Francie seldom went to the movies because they jumped around so and hurt her eyes. There were no shows to go to. Most of the stock companies had gone out of existence. Besides she had seen Barrymore in Galsworthy’s Justice on Broadway and she was spoiled for stock companies after that. That past fall she had seen a movie she liked: War Brides with Nazimova. She had hoped to see it again but read in the papers that because of the imminence of war, the film had been banned. She had a wonderful memory of journeying to a strange part of Brooklyn to see the great Sarah Bernhardt in a one-act play in a Keith vaudeville house. The great actress was past seventy, but looked half that age from the stage. Francie couldn’t understand the French but she gathered that the play was written around the actress’s amputated leg. Bernhardt played the part of a French soldier who had lost his leg in the War. Francie caught the word Boche from time to time. Francie would never forget the flaming red hair and the golden voice of Bernhardt. She treasured the program in her scrapbook.
But those had been just three evenings out of months and months of evenings.
Spring came early that year and the sweet warm nights made her restless. She walked up and down the streets and through the park. And wherever she went, she saw a boy and a girl together; walking arm-in-arm, sitting on a park bench with their arms around each other, standing closely and in silence in a vestibule. Everyone in the world but Francie had a sweetheart or a friend. She seemed to be the only lonely one in Brooklyn.
March 1917. All the neighborhood could think or talk about was the inevitability of war. A widow living in the flats had an only son. She was afraid he’d have to go and would be killed. She bought him a cornet and made him take lessons, figuring he’d be put in an army band and play at parades and reviews only and be kept away from the front. People in the house were tormented almost to death by his incessant fumbling cornet practice. One harassed man, made crafty by desperation, told the mother that he had inside information that the military bands led the soldiers into action and invariably were the first ones killed. The terrified mother pawned the cornet immediately and destroyed the pawn ticket. There was no more dreadful practicing.
Each night at supper Katie asked Francie, “Has the war started yet?”
“Not yet. But any day now.”
“Well, I wish it would hurry up and start.”
“Do you want war?”
“No, I don’t. But if it has to be, the sooner the better. The sooner it starts, the quicker it will end.”
Then Sissy created such a sensation that the war was pushed into the background temporarily.
Sissy, who was done with her wild past, and who should have been settling down into the calm that precedes satisfied middle age, threw the family into a turmoil by falling madly in love with the John to whom she had been married for more than five years. Not only that, but she got herself widowed, divorced, married, and pregnant—all in ten days’ time.
The Standard Union, Williamsburg’s favorite newspaper, was delivered as usual one afternoon to Francie’s desk at closing time. As usual, she took it home so that Katie could read it after supper. Francie would bring it back to the office the next morning and read and mark it. Since Francie never read newspapers outside of office hours, she had no way of knowing what was in that particular issue.
After supper, Katie sat by the window to look through the paper. An instant after turning the third page, she exploded her “Oh, my!” of utter astonishment. Francie and Neeley ran to look over her shoulder. Katie pointed to a heading:
HERO FIREMAN LOSES LIFE
IN WALL ABOUT MARKET BLAZE.
Underneath in small type was a sub-heading: “Had planned to retire on pension next month.”
Reading the item, Francie discovered that the heroic fireman had been Sissy’s first husband. There was a picture of Sissy taken twenty years ago—Sissy with a towering crimped pompadour and huge leg-o’-mutton