A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [190]
“Want to see something?” he asked.
He pulled the curtain and she saw the asbestos roll up like a giant’s shade. He turned on the foots and she walked out on the apron and looked over the thousand dark empty waiting raked seats. She tilted her head and threw her voice to the last row of the gallery.
“Hello, out there!” she called and her voice seemed amplified a hundred times in the dark waiting emptiness.
“Look,” he asked good-naturedly, “are you more interested in the theater or your French?”
“Why, the theater, of course.”
It was true. Then and there she renounced all other ambitions and went back to her first love, the stage.
Ben laughed as he cut off the foots. He brought down the curtain and placed two chairs facing each other. In some way, he had gotten hold of the examination papers for five years back. From them, he had made a master exam paper using the questions asked most frequently and those seldom asked. Most of the day, he drilled Francie in these questions and answers. Then he had her memorize a page from Molière’s Le Tartuffe and its English translation. He explained:
“There’ll be one question in the exam tomorrow that will be absolute Greek to you. Don’t attempt to answer it. Do this: State frankly that you can’t answer the question but that you are offering in its stead an excerpt from Molière with translation. Then write down what you’ve memorized and you’ll get away with it.”
“But suppose they ask for that exact passage in a regular question?”
“They won’t. I picked out a very obscure passage.”
Evidently she got away with it for she passed the examination in French. True, she passed with the lowest mark but she consoled herself with the idea that passing was passing. She did very well on the chemistry and drama examinations.
Acting on Ben’s instructions, she came back for the transcript of her grades a week later and met him by arrangement. He took her to Huyler’s for a chocolate soda.
“How old are you, Francie?” he asked over the sodas.
She calculated rapidly. She was fifteen at home, seventeen at work. Ben was nineteen. He’d never speak to her again if he knew she was only fifteen. He saw her hesitation and said,
“Anything you say may be used against you.”
She took her courage into her two hands and quavered boldly, “I’m…fifteen.” She hung her head in shame.
“Hm. I like you, Francie.”
“And I love you,” she thought.
“I like you as much as any girl I’ve ever known. But, of course, I have no time for girls.”
“Not even for an hour say, on Sunday?” she ventured.
“My few free hours belong to my mother. I’m all that she has.”
Francie had never heard of Mrs. Blake until that moment. But she hated her because she pre-empted those free hours, a few of which would have made Francie happy.
“But I’ll be thinking of you,” he continued. “I’ll write if I have a moment.” (He lived half an hour away from her.) “But if you ever need me—not for any trivial reason, of course—drop me a line and I’ll manage to see you.” He gave her one of the firm’s cards with his full name, Benjamin Franklin Blake, written in the corner.
They parted outside of Huyler’s shaking hands warmly. “See you next summer,” he called back as he walked away.
Francie stood looking after him until he turned the corner. Next summer! It was only September and next summer seemed a million years away.
She had enjoyed the summer school so much that she wanted to matriculate in the same college that fall but she had no way of raising the more than three hundred dollars required for tuition. In a morning spent in studying catalogues in the Forty-second Street, New York Library, she discovered a college for women in which tuition was free to residents of New York.
Armed with her transcripts,