A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [29]
Yet she could not read or write.
Her eyes were soft brown, limpid and innocent. She wore her shining brown hair parted in the middle and drawn down over her ears. Her skin was pale and translucent and her mouth was tender. She spoke in a low, soft, warmly melodious voice that soothed those who listened. All of her daughters and granddaughters inherited this quality of voice from her.
Mary was convinced that because of some sin she had unwittingly committed in her life, she was mated with the devil himself. She really believed this because her husband told her so. “I am the devil himself,” he told her frequently.
She often looked at him—the way two locks of his hair stood up on either side of his head, the way his cold gray eyes slanted upward at the outer corners, and she sighed and said to herself, “Yes, he is the devil.”
He had a way of looking full into her saintly face and in a falsely caressing tone he would accuse Christ of unspeakable things. This always terrified her so much that she’d take her shawl from the nail behind the door, throw it over her head and rush forth into the street where she would walk and walk until concern for her children drove her back into the house.
She went to the public school that the three youngest girls attended and in halting English told the teacher that the children must be encouraged to speak only English; they were not to use a German word or phrase ever. In that way, she protected them against their father. She grieved when her children had to leave school after the sixth grade and go out working. She grieved when they married no-account men. She wept when they gave birth to daughters, knowing that to be born a woman meant a life of humble hardship.
Each time Francie began the prayer, Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, her grandmother’s face came before her.
Sissy was the oldest child of Thomas and Mary Rommely. She had been born three months after her parents landed in America. She had never gone to school. At the time when she should have started, Mary did not understand that free education was available for people like them. There were laws about sending children to school but no one sought out these ignorant people in order to enforce the law. By the time the other girls reached school age, Mary had learned about free education. But Sissy was then too big to start in with the six-year-olds. She stayed home and helped her mother.
At ten, Sissy was as fully developed as a woman of thirty and all the boys were after Sissy and Sissy was after all the boys. At twelve, she started keeping steady company with a lad of twenty. Her father nipped that romance by beating up the boy. At fourteen, she was going with a fireman of twenty-five. Because he licked her father, instead of the other way around, this romance ended in the fireman marrying Sissy.
They went to City Hall, where Sissy swore that she was eighteen, and were married by one of the clerks. The neighbors were shocked but Mary knew that marriage was the best thing that could happen to her highly sexed daughter.
Jim, the fireman, was a good man. He was considered educated, having graduated from grammar school. He made good money and wasn’t home much. He was an ideal husband. They were very happy. Sissy demanded little from him except a lot of love-making, which made him very happy. Sometimes he was a little ashamed because his wife couldn’t read or write. But she was so witty and clever and warmhearted that she made of living a high joyous thing and in time he began to overlook her illiteracy. Sissy was very good to her mother and her younger sisters. Jim gave her a fair household allowance. She was very careful with it and usually had money left over to give her mother.
She became pregnant a month after marriage. She was still a hoyden girl of fourteen