A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [25]
After she had eaten, Francie at last faced the fact that she had broken the fast which started at midnight and was to have lasted until after mass next morning. Now she could not receive communion. Here was a real sin to confess to the priest next week.
Neeley went back to bed and resumed his sound sleep. Francie went into the dark front room and sat by the window. She didn’t feel like sleeping. Mama and Papa sat in the kitchen. They would sit there and talk until daybreak. Papa was telling about the night’s work; the people he had seen, what they had looked like and how they spoke. The Nolans just couldn’t get enough of life. They lived their own lives up to the hilt but that wasn’t enough. They had to fill in on the lives of all the people they made contact with.
So Johnny and Katie talked away the night and the rise and fall of their voices was a safe and soothing sound in the dark. Now it was three in the morning and the street was very quiet. Francie saw a girl who lived in a flat across the street come home from a dance with her feller. They stood pressed close together in her vestibule. They stood embracing without talking until the girl leaned back and unknowingly pressed the bells. Then her father came down in his long underdrawers and, with quiet but intense profanity, told the fellow what he could go and do to himself. The girl ran upstairs giggling hysterically while the boy friend walked away down the street whistling, “When I Get You Alone, Tonight.”
Mr. Tomony who owned the pawnshop came home in a hansom cab from his spendthrift evening in New York. He had never set foot inside his pawnshop which he had inherited along with an efficient manager. No one knew why Mr. Tomony lived in the rooms above the shop—a man with his money. He lived the life of an aristocratic New Yorker in the squalor of Williamsburg. A plasterer who had been in his rooms reported them furnished with statues, oil paintings, and white fur rugs. Mr. Tomony was a bachelor. No one saw him all week. No one saw him leave Saturday evenings. Only Francie and the cop on the beat saw him come home. Francie watched him, feeling like a spectator in a theater box.
His high silk hat was tipped over an ear. The street light picked up the gleam of his silver-knobbed cane as he tucked it under his arm. He swung back his white satin Inverness cape to get some money. The driver took the bill, touched the butt of his whip to the rim of his plug hat and shook the horse’s reins. Mr. Tomony watched him drive away as though the cab were the last link in a life that he had found good. Then he went upstairs to his fabulous apartment.
He was supposed to frequent such legendary places as Reisenweber’s and the Waldorf. Francie decided to see these places some day. Some day she would go across Williamsburg Bridge, which was only a few blocks away and find her way uptown in New York to where these fine places were and take a good look at the outside. Then she’d be able to place Mr. Tomony more accurately.
A fresh breeze blew in over Brooklyn from the sea. From far away on the north side where the Italians lived and kept chickens in their yards, came the crowing of a rooster. It was answered by the distant barking of a dog and an inquiring whinny from the horse, Bob, comfortably bedded in his stable.
Francie was glad for Saturday and hated to end it by going to sleep. Already the dread of the week to come made her uneasy. She fixed the memory of this Saturday in her mind. It was without fault except for the old man waiting