A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [18]
“Listen!” He went to her and put an arm around her thin shoulders. “If I get a lot of tips tonight, I’ll put the money on a good horse that I know is running Monday. I’ll put a couple of dollars on him and win ten. Then I’ll put the ten on another horse I know and win a hundred. If I use my head and have any kind of luck at all, I’ll run it up to five hundred.”
Pipe dreams, he thought to himself, even while he was telling her about his dream winnings. But oh, how wonderful, he thought, if everything you talked about could come true! He went on talking.
“Then do you know what I’m going to do, Prima Donna?” Francie smiled happily, pleased at his using the nickname he had given her when, as a baby, he swore that her crying was as varied and as tuneful as an opera singer’s range.
“No. What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to take you on a trip. Just you and me, Prima Donna. We’ll go way down south where the cotton blossoms blow.” He was delighted with the sentence. He said it again. “Down where the cotton blossoms blow.” Then he remembered that the sentence was a line in a song that he knew. He jammed his hands in his pockets, whistled, and started to do a waltz clog like Pat Rooney. Then he went into the song.
…a field of snowy white.
Hear the darkies singing soft and low.
I long there to be, for someone waits for me,
Down where the cotton blossoms blow.
Francie kissed his cheek softly. “Oh, Papa, I love you so much,” she whispered.
He held her tight. Again the stab-wound feeling. “Oh, God! Oh, God!” he repeated to himself in almost unendurable agony. “What a hell of a father I am.” But when he spoke to her again, it was quietly enough.
“All this isn’t getting my apron ironed, though.”
“It’s all done, Papa.” She folded it into a careful square.
“Is there any money in the house, Baby?”
She looked into the cracked cup on the shelf. “A nickel and some pennies.”
“Would you take seven cents and go out and get me a dicky and a paper collar?”
Francie went over to the dry-goods store to get her father’s Saturday-night linen. A dicky was a shirt front made of stiffly starched muslin. It fastened around the neck with a collar button and the vest held it in place. It was used instead of a shirt. It was worn once and then thrown away. A paper collar was not exactly made out of paper. It was called that to differentiate it from a celluloid collar which was what poor men wore because it could be laundered simply by being wiped with a wet rag. A paper collar was made out of thin cambric stiffly starched. It could be used only once.
When Francie got back, papa had shaved, wetted his hair down, shined his shoes and put on a clean undershirt. It was unironed and had a big hole in the back but it smelled nice and clean. He stood on a chair and took down a little box from the top cupboard shelf. It contained the pearl studs that Katie had given him for a wedding present. They had cost her a month’s salary. Johnny was very proud of them. No matter how hard up the Nolans were, the studs were never pawned.
Francie helped him put the studs in the dicky. He fastened the wing collar on with a golden collar button, a present that Hildy O’Dair had given him before he became engaged to Katie. He wouldn’t part with that either. His tie was a piece of heavy black silk and he tied an expert bow with it. Other waiters wore readymade bows attached to elastics. But not Johnny Nolan. Other waiters wore soiled white shirts or clean shirts indifferently ironed, and celluloid collars. But not Johnny. His linen was immaculate, if temporary.
He was dressed at last. His wavy blond hair gleamed and he smelled clean and fresh from washing and shaving. He put his coat on and buttoned it up jauntily. The satin lapels of the tuxedo were threadbare but who would look at that when the suit fitted him so beautifully and the crease