A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [28]
“So you go your way and I’ll go mine.”
“You mean, I go my way and you go her way,” said Hildy bitterly.
Finally Hildy went her way. She walked down the street with her shoulders sagging. Johnny ran after her, and there on the street he put his arms about her and kissed her tenderly in farewell.
“I wish it could have been different with us,” he said sadly.
“You wish no such thing,” snapped Hildy. “If you did”—she started crying again—“you’d just give her the gate and start going out with me again.”
Katie was crying too. After all, Hildy O’Dair had been her best friend. She too kissed Hildy. She looked away when she saw Hildy’s tear-wetted eyes so close to hers, grow small with hate.
So Hildy went her way and Johnny went Katie’s way.
They kept company for a little while, became engaged, and were married in Katie’s church on New Year’s Day, nineteen hundred and one. They had known each other not quite four months when they married.
Thomas Rommely never forgave his daughter. In fact he never forgave any of his daughters for marrying. His philosophy about children was simple and profitable: a man enjoyed himself begetting them, put in as little money and effort into their upbringing as was possible, and then put them to work earning money for the father as soon as they got into their teens. Katie, at seventeen, had only been working four years when she married. He figured that she owed him money.
Rommely hated everybody and everything. No one ever found out why. He was a massive handsome man with iron-gray curly hair covering a leonine head. He had run away from Austria with his bride to avoid being conscripted into the army. Although he hated the old country, he stubbornly refused to like the new country. He understood and could speak English if he wanted to. But he refused to answer when addressed in English and forbade the speaking of English in his home. His daughters understood very little German. (Their mother insisted that the girls speak only English in the home. She reasoned that the less they understood German, the less they would find out about the cruelty of their father.) Consequently, the four daughters grew up having little communion with their father. He never spoke to them except to curse them. His Gott verdammte came to be regarded as hello and good-bye. When very angry, he’d call the object of his temper, Du Russe! This he considered his most obscene expletive. He hated Austria. He hated America. Most of all he hated Russia. He had never been to that country and had never laid eyes on a Russian. No one understood his hatred of that dimly known country and its vaguely known people. This was the man who was Francie’s maternal grandfather. She hated him the way his daughters hated him.
* * *
Mary Rommely, his wife and Francie’s grandmother, was a saint. She had no education; she could not read or write her own name, but she had in her memory over a thousand stories and legends. Some she had invented to entertain her children; others were old folk tales told to her by her own mother and her grandmother. She knew many old-country songs and understood all the wise sayings.
She was intensely religious and knew the life story of every Catholic saint. She believed in ghosts and fairies and all supernatural folk. She knew all about herbs and could brew you either a medicine or a charm—provided you intended no evil with the charm. Back in the old country she had been honored for her wisdom and much sought out for advice. She was a blameless sinless woman, yet she understood how it was with people who sinned. Inflexibly rigid in her own moral conduct, she condoned weaknesses in others. She revered God and loved Jesus, but she understood why people often turned away from these Two.
She had been a virgin when she married and had humbly submitted to her husband’s brutal love. His brutality early killed all of her latent desires. Yet she could understand the fierce love hunger that made girls—as people put it—go wrong.