A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [204]
Francie took the sleeping baby from him in order to let him smoke.
“Help me put her to bed, Neeley.”
“Why?” Neeley was thoroughly enjoying himself and didn’t want to leave.
“To fix the blankets in the crib. Somebody’s got to do it while I hold her.” Didn’t Neeley know anything? Didn’t he know that maybe McShane and mother wanted to be alone for a minute, at least?
In the darkness of the front room, Francie whispered to her brother, “What do you think of it?”
“It’s sure a good break for Mama. Of course he isn’t Papa….”
“No. No one will ever be…Papa. But aside from that, he’s a nice man, though.”
“Laurie’s going to have a mighty easy life all right.”
“Annie Laurie McShane! She’ll never have the hard times we had, will she?”
“No. And she’ll never have the fun we had, either.”
“Gosh! We did have fun, didn’t we, Neeley?”
“Yeah!”
“Poor Laurie,” said Francie pityingly.
Book Five
55
FRANCIE JUMPED AS SOMEONE TAPPED HER ON THE SHOULDER. THEN she relaxed and smiled. Of course! It was one o’clock in the morning, she was through, and her “relief” had come to take over the machine.
“Let me send just one more,” begged Francie.
“The way some people like their job!” smiled the “relief.”
Francie typed her last message slowly and lovingly. She was glad it was a birth announcement rather than a notification of a death. The message was her farewell. She hadn’t told anyone she was leaving. She was afraid she’d break down and cry if she went around saying good-bye. Like her mother, she was afraid of being openly sentimental.
Instead of going directly to her locker, she stopped in the big recreation room where some girls were making the most of their fifteen-minute rest period. They were grouped around a girl at the piano and were singing, “Hello, Central, Give Me No Man’s Land.”
As Francie walked in, the pianist drifted into another song inspired by Francie’s new gray fall suit and her gray suede pumps. The girls sang: “There’s a Quaker Down in Quaker Town.” A girl put her arm around Francie and drew her into the circle. Francie sang with them.
Down in her heart I know, she’s not so slow…
“Francie, where’d you ever get the idea for an all-gray outfit?”
“Oh, I don’t know—some actress I saw when I was a kid. Don’t remember her name but the show was The Minister’s Sweetheart.”
“It’s cute!”
She has that “meet me later” look…
My little Quaker down in Quaker town.
Do-o-o-own To-o-o-o-own, harmonized the girls in a grand finale.
Next they sang “You’ll Find Old Dixieland in France.” Francie went over to stand at the great window from which she could see the East River twenty stories below. It was the last time she’d see the river from that window. The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. This that I see now, she thought, to see no more this way. Oh, the last time how clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn’t held it tighter when you had it every day.
What had Granma Mary Rommely said? “To look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.”
Granma Mary Rommely!
She had lingered on for months in her last illness. But a time had come when Steve came just before dawn to tell them.
“I’ll miss her,” he said. “She was a great lady.”
“You mean a great woman,” said Katie.
Why, puzzled Francie, had Uncle Willie chosen that time to leave his family? She watched a boat glide under the Bridge before she resumed her thoughts. Was it that one less Rommely woman to be accountable to made him feel more free? Had her death given him the idea that there was such a thing as escape? Or was it (as Evy claimed) that he was able in his meanness to take advantage of the confusion created by Granma’s funeral to run away from his family? Whatever it was, Willie was gone.
Willie Flittman!
He had practiced desperately until he got so that he could play all the instruments at once. Then as a one-man