A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [183]
Francie in the kitchen had become so interested that she forgot that she wasn’t supposed to be listening. When she knew her mother was groping for a word, she supplied it unthinkingly.
“You mean coincidental, Mama?” she called out.
A shocked silence came from the bedroom. Then the conversation was resumed—but this time in whispers.
48
A NEWSPAPER LAY ON FRANCIE’S DESK. IT WAS AN “EXTRA” AND HAD come directly from the presses. The ink was still damp on its headline. The paper had been there five minutes and as yet she had not picked up her pencil to mark it. She stared at the date.
April 6, 1917.
The one-word headline was six inches high. The three letters were smudged at the edges and the word, WAR, seemed to waver.
Francie had a vision. Fifty years from now, she’d be telling her grandchildren how she had come to the office, sat at her reader’s desk and in the routine of work had read that war had been declared. She knew from listening to her grandmother that old age was made up of such remembrances of youth.
But she didn’t want to recall things. She wanted to live things—or as a compromise, re-live rather than reminisce.
She decided to fix this time in her life exactly the way it was this instant. Perhaps that way she could hold on to it as a living thing and not have it become something called a memory.
She brought her eyes close to the surface of her desk and examined the patterned grain of the wood. She ran her fingers along the groove where her pencils rested, fixing the feel of the groove in her mind. Using a razor blade, she nicked the next dot on one of her pencils and unraveled the paper. She held the raveling in her palm, touched it with her forefinger, and noted its spiraling. She dropped it into the metal wastebasket counting the seconds it took to fall. She listened intently so as not to miss its almost noiseless thud as it hit the bottom. She pressed her fingertips to the damp headline, examined her inked fingertips, then made fingerprints on a sheet of white paper.
Not caring about clients who might be mentioned on pages one and two, she detached the front sheet of the newspaper and folded the sheet into a careful oblong, watching the creases come under her thumb. She inserted it into one of the strong manila envelopes that the Bureau used to mail clippings in.
Francie heard, as if for the first time, the sound the desk drawer made when she opened it to get her purse. She noted the device of the purse’s catch—the sound of its click. She felt the leather, memorized its smell and studied the whorlings of the black moiré-silk lining. She read the dates on the coins in her change purse. There was a new 1917 penny which she put in the envelope. She uncapped her lipstick and made a line with it under her fingerprints. The clear red color, the texture and the scent of it pleased her. She examined in turn the powder in her compact, the ridges on her nail file, the way her comb was inflexible and the threads of her handkerchief. There was a worn clipping in the purse, a poem she had torn out of an Oklahoma newspaper. It had been written by a poet who had lived in Brooklyn, gone to the Brooklyn public schools and, as a young man, had edited The Brooklyn Eagle. She reread it for the twentieth time handling each word in her mind.
I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise;
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others.
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
Stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse, and stuff’d with the stuff that is fine.
The tattered poem went into the envelope. In the mirror of her compact, she looked at the way her hair was braided—how the braids wound around her head. She noticed how her straight black eyelashes were uneven in length. Then her shoes were inspected. She ran her hand down her stockings