A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [27]
Maybe that decision was her great mistake. She should have waited until some man came along who felt that way about her. Then her children would not have gone hungry; she would not have had to scrub floors for their living and her memory of him would have remained a tender shining thing. But she wanted Johnny Nolan and no one else and she set out to get him.
Her campaign started the following Monday. When the whistle blew dismissal, she ran out of the factory, reached the corner before Hildy did and sang out,
“Hello, Johnny Nolan.”
“Hello, Katie, dear,” he answered.
After that, she’d manage to get a few words with him each day. Johnny found that he was waiting around on the corner for those few words.
One day Katie, falling back on a woman’s always-respected excuse, told her forelady that it was her time of the month; she didn’t feel so good. She got out fifteen minutes before closing time. Johnny was waiting on the corner with his friends. They were whistling “Annie Rooney” to pass the time away. Johnny cocked his skimmer over one eye, put his hands in his pockets and did a waltz clog there on the sidewalk. Passers-by stopped to admire. The cop, walking his beat, called out,
“You’re losing time, Sport. You ought to be on the stage.”
Johnny saw Katie coming along and stopped performing and grinned at her. She looked mighty fetching in a tight-fitting gray suit, trimmed with black braid from the factory. Intricately whorled and squirled, the braid trimming was designed to call attention to her modest bust already helped out by two rows of ruffles pinned to her corset cover. With the gray suit, she wore a cherry-colored tam pulled over one eye and vici-kid high buttoned shoes with spool heels. Her brown eyes sparkled and her cheeks glowed with excitement and shame as she thought how fresh she must look—running after a feller like that.
Johnny hailed her. The other boys drifted away. What Katie and Johnny said to each other on that special day, they never remembered. Somehow during their aimless but oh-so-significant conversation with its delicious pauses and thrilling undercurrents of emotion, they came to know that they loved each other passionately.
The factory whistle blew and the girls streamed out of the Castle Braid. Hildy came along in a mud-colored brown suit and a black sailor skewered on to her ratted brassy pompadour with an evil-looking hatpin. She smiled possessively when she saw Johnny. But the smile changed to a spasm of hurt, fear and then hate when she saw Katie with him. She rushed down on them pulling her long hatpin from her sailor hat.
“He’s my feller, Katie Rommely,” she screamed, “and you can’t steal him away.”
“Hildy, Hildy,” said Johnny in his soft unhurried voice.
“I guess this is a free country,” said Katie, tossing her head.
“Not free for robbers,” yelled Hildy as she lunged at Katie with her hatpin.
Johnny stepped between the girls and got the scratch down his cheek. By this time, a crowd of Castle Braid girls had gathered and were watching them with delighted cluckings. Johnny took each girl by the arm and steered them around the corner. He crowded them into a doorway and imprisoned them there with his arm while he talked to them.
“Hildy,” he said, “I’m not much good. I shouldn’t have led you on because I see now that I can’t marry you.”
“It’s all her fault,” wept Hildy.
“Mine,” acknowledged Johnny handsomely. “I never knew what true love was till I met Katie.”
“But she’s my best friend,” said Hildy piteously as though Johnny were committing a kind of incest.
“She’s my best girl now and there’s nothing more to say about it.”
Hildy wept and argued. Finally Johnny quieted her down and explained how it was with him and Katie. He ended by saying that Hildy was to go her way and he’d go his.