A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [182]
The voices coming from the dark bedroom made a soothing rhythm. Francie listened as she pasted. Sissy was saying:
“…Steve, so fine and decent. And when I realized it, I hated myself on account of the others—outside of my husbands, I mean.”
“You didn’t tell him about the others?” asked Katie apprehensively.
“Do I look like a fool? But I wish with all my heart that he had been the first and only one.”
“Woman talks that way,” said Katie, “it means she’s going into the change of life.”
“How do you make that out?”
“If she never had any lovers, she kicks herself around when the change comes, thinking of all the fun she could have had, didn’t have, and now can’t have. If she had a lot of lovers, she argues herself into believing that she did wrong and she’s sorry now. She carries on that way because she knows that soon all her woman-ness will be lost…lost. And if she makes believe being with a man was never any good in the first place, she can get comfort out of her change.”
“I’m not going into any change of life,” said Sissy indignantly. “In the first place I’m too young and in the second place I wouldn’t stand for it.”
“It has to come to all of us some day,” sighed Katie.
There was terror in Sissy’s voice. “Not to be able to have children anymore…to be half a woman…get fat…have hair grow on your chin. I’ll kill myself first!” she cried passionately. “Anyhow,” she added complacently, “I’m nowhere near the change because I’m that way again.”
There was a rustle from the dark bedroom. Francie could visualize her mother raising herself on her elbow.
“No, Sissy! No! You can’t go through that again. Ten times it’s happened—ten children stillborn. And it will be harder this time because you’re going for thirty-seven.”
“That’s not too old to have a baby.”
“No, but it’s too old to get over another disappointment easily.”
“You needn’t worry, Katie. This child will live.”
“You’ve said that each time.”
“This time I’m sure because I feel that God is on my side,” she said with quiet assurance. After a while she said, “I told Steve how I got Little Sissy.”
“What did he say?”
“He knew all the while I hadn’t given birth to her, but the way I claimed I had, got him mixed up. He said it didn’t matter as long as I didn’t have her by another man and that since we had her from birth almost he really feels that she’s his baby. It’s funny how the baby looks like him. She has his dark eyes and the same round chin and the same small ears close to her head like him.”
“She got those dark eyes from Lucia and a million people in the world have round chins and small ears. But if it makes Steve happy to think the baby looks like him, that’s fine.” There was a long silence before Katie spoke again. “Sissy, did you ever get any idea from that Italian family as to who the father was?”
“No.” Sissy, too, waited a long time before she continued. “You know who told me about the girl being in trouble and where she lived and all?”
“Who?”
“Steve.”
“Oh, my!”
Both were quiet for a long time. Then Katie said, “Of course, that was accidental.”
“Of course,” agreed Sissy. “One of the fellows in his shop told him, he said; a fellow who lived on Lucia’s block.”
“Of course,” Katie repeated. “You know funny things happen here in Brooklyn that have no meaning at all. Like sometimes I’m walking on the street and I think of someone I haven’t seen maybe in five years and I turn a corner and there’s that person walking towards me.”
“I know,” answered Sissy. “Sometimes I’m doing something that I never did before in my life and all of a sudden I have the feeling that I did that same thing before—maybe in another life….” Her voice died away. After a while she said, “Steve always said he’d never take another man’s child.”
“All men say that. Life’s funny,” Katie went on. “A couple of accidental things come together and a person could make a lot out of them. It was just an accident that you got to know about that girl. That same fellow must have told a dozen men in the shop.