A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [184]
“If I can fix every detail of this time in my mind, I can keep this moment always,” she thought.
Using the razor blade, she clipped a lock of her hair, wrapped it in the square of paper on which were her fingerprints and lipstick mark, folded it, placed it in the envelope and sealed the envelope. On the outside she wrote:
Frances Nolan, age 15 years and 4 months. April 6, 1917.
She thought: “If I open this envelope fifty years from now, I will be again as I am now and there will be no being old for me. There’s a long, long time yet before fifty years…millions of hours of time. But one hour has gone already since I sat here…one hour less to live…one hour gone away from all the hours of my life.
“Dear God,” she prayed, “let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry…have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere—be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.”
The delivery boy came by and slapped another city paper on her desk. This one had a two-word headline.
WAR DECLARED!
The floor seemed to swerve up, colors flashed before her eyes and she put her head down on the ink-damp paper and wept quietly. One of the older readers, returning from the washroom, paused by Francie’s desk. She noticed the headline and the weeping girl. She thought she understood.
“Ah, the war!” She sighed. “You have a sweetheart or a brother, I presume?” she asked in her stilted readerish way.
“Yes, I have a brother,” Francie answered truthfully enough.
“My sympathies, Miss Nolan.” The reader went back to her desk.
“I’m drunk again,” thought Francie, “and this time on a newspaper headline. And this is a bad one—I’ve got a crying jag.”
The war touched the Model Press Clipping Bureau with its mailed finger and made it wither away. First, the client who was the backbone of the business—the man who paid out thousands a year for clippings on the Panama Canal and such—came in the day after the declaration of war and said that since his address would be uncertain for a while, he’d call in person each day for his clippings.
A few days later, two slow-moving men with heavy feet came in to see the boss. One of them pushed his palm under the boss’s nose and what he saw in that palm made the boss turn pale. He got a thick stack of clippings from the file box of the most important client. The heavy-footed ones looked them over and returned them to the boss who put them in an envelope and put the envelope in his desk. The two men went into the boss’s lavatory leaving the door ajar. They waited in there all day. At noon, they sent an errand boy out for a bag of sandwiches and a carton of coffee and they ate their lunch in the lavatory.
The Panama Canal client came in at four-thirty. In slow motion, the boss handed him the fat envelope. Just as the client put it in his inner coat pocket, the heavy ones strolled out of the lavatory. One of them touched the client on the shoulder. He sighed, took the envelope out of his pocket and surrendered it. The second heavy one touched him on the shoulder. The client clicked his heels together, bowed stiffly and walked out between the two men. The boss went home with an acute attack of dyspepsia.
That evening, Francie told Mama and Neeley how a German spy had been caught right in the office.
The next day, a brisk-looking man came in with a briefcase. The boss had to answer a lot of questions and the brisk man wrote down the answers in spaces provided on a printed form. Then came the sad part. The boss had to make out a check for nearly four hundred dollars—the balance due on the involuntarily