A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [180]
“Oh, my!” repeated Katie. “Then he never married again. He must have kept Sissy’s picture all that time and when he died some men must have gone through his stuff and found—Sissy!
“I’ve got to go over there right away.” Katie took off her apron and went to get her hat, explaining, “Sissy’s John reads the papers. She told him she was divorced. Now that he knows the truth, he’ll kill her. At least throw her out,” she amended. “She’ll have no place to go with the baby and mother.”
“He seems like a nice man,” said Francie, “I don’t think he’d do that.”
“We don’t know what all he won’t do. We don’t know anything about him. He’s a stranger in the family and always has been. Pray God I don’t get there too late.”
Francie insisted on going along and Neeley agreed to stay home with the baby on condition that he be told every single thing that happened.
When they got to Sissy’s house, they found her rosy with excitement. Granma Mary Rommely had taken the baby and retired to the front room where she sat in the dark and prayed for everything to come out all right.
Sissy’s John gave them his version of the story.
“I’m away working in the shop, see? These here men come to the house and say to Sissy, ‘Your husband’s just been killed, see?’ Sissy thinks they mean me.” He turned on Sissy suddenly. “Did you cry?”
“You could hear me on the next block,” she assured him. He seemed gratified.
“They ask Sissy what they should do with the body. Sissy asks is there any insurance, see? Well, it turns out there is—for five hundred dollars, paid up ten years ago and still made out in Sissy’s name. So what does Sissy go to work and do! She tells them to lay him out in Specht’s Funeral Parlor, see? A five-hundred-dollar funeral she orders.”
“I had to make the arrangements,” apologized Sissy. “I’m his only living relation.”
“And that’s not all,” he went on. “Now they’re going to come around and give Sissy a pension. I won’t stand for it!” he roared suddenly. “When I marry her,” he went on more calmly, “she tells me she’s a divorced woman. Now it turns out she’s not.”
“But there’s no divorce in the Catholic Church,” insisted Sissy.
“You wasn’t married in the Catholic Church.”
“I know. So I never considered I was married, and didn’t think I had to get a divorce.”
He threw his hands up in the air and moaned, “I give up!” It was the same cry of futile despair he had uttered when Sissy had insisted that she had given birth to the baby. “I marry her in good faith, see? And what does she do?” he asked rhetorically. “She turns right around and makes us live in adultery.”
“Don’t say that!” said Sissy sharply. “We’re not living in adultery. We’re living in bigamy.”
“And it’s got to stop right now, see? You’re widowed from the first one and you’re going to get a divorce from the second, and then you’re going to marry me again, see?”
“Yes, John,” she said meekly.
“And my name ain’t John!” he roared. “It’s Steve! Steve! Steve!” With each repetition of his name, he pounded on the table so hard that the blue glass sugar bowl with the spoons hanging around its rim clattered up and down. He pushed a finger into Francie’s face.
“And you! From now on I’m Uncle Steve, see?”
Francie stared at the transformed man in dumb amazement.
“Well? What do you say?” he barked.
“Hel…hel…hello, Uncle Steve.”
“That’s more like it.” He was mollified. He took his hat from a nail behind the door and jammed it on his head.
“Where are you going, John…I mean, Steve?” asked Katie, worried.
“Listen! When I was a kid, my old man always went out and got ice cream when company came in his house. Well, this is my house, see? And I got company. So I’m going out and get a quart of strawberry ice cream, see?” He went.
“Isn’t he wonderful?” sighed Sissy. “A woman could fall in love with a person like that.”
“Looks like the Rommelys have a man in the family at last,” commented Katie dryly.
Francie went into the dark front room. By the light of the street lamp, she saw