A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [205]
He never came home with the prize money and his instruments, and no one in the family had seen him since.
They heard about him now and then. It seemed that he was roaming the streets of Brooklyn as a one-man band and living on the pennies he collected. Evy said he’d be home again when the snow started to fly but Francie, for one, doubted it.
Evy got a job in the factory where he had worked. She earned thirty dollars a week and got along fine, except at night, when, like all Rommely women, she found it hard to get along without a man.
Francie, standing at the window overlooking the river, recalled how always there had been something dreamlike about Uncle Willie. But then, so many things seemed like dreams to her. That man in the hallway that day: Surely that had been a dream! The way McShane had been waiting for Mother all those years—a dream. Papa dead. For a long time that had been a dream but now Papa was like someone who had never been. The way Laurie seemed to come out of a dream—born the living child of a father five months dead. Brooklyn was a dream. All the things that happened there just couldn’t happen. It was all dream stuff. Or was it all real and true and was it that she, Francie, was the dreamer?
Well, she’d find out when she got out to Michigan. If there was that same dream feeling about Michigan, then Francie would know that she was the one dreaming.
Ann Arbor!
The University of Michigan was there. And in two more days, she would be on a train heading for Ann Arbor. Summer school was over. She had passed the four subjects she had elected. Crammed by Ben, she had passed the regents’ college entrance examinations, too. That meant that she, sixteen and a half years old, could now enter college with half a year’s freshman credits behind her.
She had wanted to go to Columbia in New York or Adelphi in Brooklyn, but Ben said that part of education was adapting oneself to a new environment. Her mother and McShane had agreed. Even Neeley said it would be a good thing for her to go far off to college—she might get rid of her Brooklyn accent that way. But Francie didn’t want to get rid of it any more than she wanted to get rid of her name. It meant that she belonged some place. She was a Brooklyn girl with a Brooklyn name and a Brooklyn accent. She didn’t want to change into a bit of this and a bit of that.
Ben had chosen Michigan for her. He said it was a liberal state college, had a good English department and low tuition. Francie wondered, if it was so good, why he hadn’t matriculated there instead of at the university of another midwestern state. He explained that eventually he would practice in that state, enter into its politics and he might as well be classmates with its prominent citizens of the future.
Ben was twenty now. He was in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps of his college and he looked very handsome in his uniform.
Ben!
She looked at the ring on the third finger of her left hand. Ben’s high school ring. “M.H.S. 1918.” Inside was engraved, “B.B. to F.N.” He had told her that while he knew his mind, she was too young to know hers. He gave her the ring to bind what he called their understanding. Of course, it would be five more years before he’d be in a position to marry, he said. By that time she’d be old enough to know her own mind. Then, if there was still the understanding, he’d ask her to accept another kind of ring. Since Francie had five years in which to make up her mind, the responsibility of deciding whether or not to marry Ben did not weigh too heavily upon her.
Amazing Ben!
He had graduated from high school in January 1918, had entered college immediately, taken a staggering number of courses and had come back to summer school in Brooklyn to take more work, and—as he confessed at the end of the session—to be with Francie again. Now, in September 1918, he was returning to college to start his junior year!
Good old Ben!
Decent, honorable, and brilliant. He knew his own mind.