A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [188]
“And when you come right down to it, that’s no lie,” she assured herself.
To her utter relief and astonishment, she was not challenged in any way. The cashier took her money and gave her a receipt for her tuition. She was given a registration number, a pass to the library, a schedule of her classes, and a list of the textbooks she needed.
She followed a crowd to the college bookshop further down the block. She consulted her list and ordered a “Beginning French” and an “Elementary Chemistry.”
“New or secondhand?” asked the clerk.
“Why, I don’t know. Which am I supposed to have?”
“New,” said the clerk.
Someone touched her on the shoulder. She turned and saw a handsome well-dressed boy. He said, “Get secondhand. Serves the same purpose as new and half the price.”
“Thank you.” She turned to the clerk. “Secondhand,” she said firmly. She started to order the two books for the drama course. Again the touch on her shoulder.
“Uh-uh,” said the boy negatively. “You can read them in the library before and after classes and when you get cuts.”
“Thank you again,” she said.
“Any time,” he answered and sauntered away.
Her eyes followed him out of the store. “Gosh, he’s tall and good-looking,” she thought. “College is certainly wonderful.”
She sat in the El train on her way to the office, clutching the two textbooks. As the train grated over the tracks its rhythm seemed to be, college-college-college. Francie started to feel sick. She felt so sick that she had to get off at the next station even though she knew she’d be late for work. She leaned against a penny weighing machine wondering what was the matter with her. It couldn’t have been anything she ate because she had forgotten to eat lunch. Then a thunderous thought came to her.
“My grandparents never knew how to read or write. Those who came before them couldn’t read or write. My mother’s sister can’t read or write. My parents never even graduated from grade school. I never went to high school. But I, M. Frances K. Nolan, am now in college. Do you hear that, Francie? You’re in college!
“Oh gosh, I feel sick.”
49
FRANCIE CAME AWAY FROM HER FIRST CHEMISTRY LECTURE IN A GLOW. In one hour she had found out that everything was made up of atoms which were in continual motion. She grasped the idea that nothing was ever lost or destroyed. Even if something was burned up or left to rot away, it did not disappear from the face of the earth; it changed into something else—gases, liquids, and powders. Everything, decided Francie after that first lecture, was vibrant with life and there was no death in chemistry. She was puzzled as to why learned people didn’t adopt chemistry as a religion.
The drama of the Restoration, aside from the time-consuming reading required, was easy to manage after her home study of Shakespeare. She had no worries about that course nor the chemistry course. But when it came to Beginning French, she was lost. It wasn’t really beginning French. The instructor, working on the knowledge that his students either had taken it before and flunked it, or had already had it in high school, sluffed over the preliminaries and got right down to translation. Francie, shaky enough regarding English grammar, spelling, and punctuation, didn’t stand a chance with the French language. She’d never pass the course. All she could do was memorize vocabulary each day and try to hang on.
She studied going back and forth on the El. She studied in her rest periods and ate her meals with a book propped up on the table before her. She typed out her assignments on one of the machines in the instruction room of the Communications Corporation. She was never late or absent and she asked nothing more than to pass at least two of her courses.
The boy who had befriended her in the bookstore became her guardian angel. His name was Ben Blake and he was a most amazing fellow. He was a senior in a Maspeth