A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [30]
In the hours not devoted to cooking, cleaning, love-making, rope skipping and trying to get into the baseball game with the boys, Sissy made plans for the coming baby. If it were a girl, she was going to call it Mary after her mother. If a boy, it would be named John. For some unknown reason, she had a great affection for the name John. She began calling Jim by the name of John. She said she wanted to name him after the baby. At first, it was an affectionate nickname but soon everyone got to calling him John and many people believed that that was his real name.
The baby was born. It was a girl and a very easy birth. The midwife down the block was called in. Everything went fine. Sissy was in labor only twenty-five minutes. It was a wonderful delivery. The only thing wrong with the whole business was that the baby was born dead. Coincidently, the baby was born and died on Sissy’s fifteenth birthday.
She grieved a while and her grief changed her. She worked harder at keeping her house spotless and clean. She became even more thoughtful of her mother. She stopped being a tomboy. She was convinced that the rope skipping had cost her the child. As she quieted down, she seemed younger and more childlike.
By the time she was twenty, she had had four children, all born dead. Finally she came to the conclusion that her husband was at fault. It wasn’t her fault. Hadn’t she stopped skipping rope after the first child? She told Jim that she didn’t care for him any more since nothing but death grew out of their love-making. She told him to leave her. He argued a little but went finally. At first he sent her money from time to time. Sometimes when Sissy got lonesome for a man, she’d walk past the firehouse where Jim would be sitting outside with his chair tilted against the brick wall. She’d walk slow, smiling and swaying her hips, and Jim would take unauthorized leave, run up to the flat and they’d be very happy together for a half hour or so.
Eventually Sissy met another man who wanted to marry her. What his real name was nobody in her family knew, because she began calling him John right away. Her second marriage was arranged very simply. Divorce was complicated and expensive. Besides she was a Catholic and didn’t believe in divorce. She and Jim had been married by a clerk in City Hall. She reasoned that it hadn’t been a church, or a real marriage so why let it stand in her way? Using her marriage name and saying nothing about her previous marriage, she was married again in City Hall but by a different clerk.
Mary, her mother, was distressed because Sissy hadn’t married in the church. This second marriage provided Thomas with a new implement of torture for his wife. He often told her that he was going to tell a policeman and have Sissy arrested for bigamy. But before he could get around to it, Sissy and her second John had been married four years, she had given birth to four more children, all born dead, and she had decided that this second John wasn’t her man either.
She dissolved the marriage very simply by telling her husband, a Protestant, that since the Catholic Church didn’t recognize her marriage, she didn’t recognize it either and she now announced her freedom.
John Two took it in his stride. He liked Sissy and had been fairly happy with her. But she was like quicksilver. In spite of her terrifying frankness and overwhelming naïveté, he really knew nothing about her and he was tired of living with an enigma. He didn’t feel too bad about going away.
Sissy at twenty-four had borne eight children, none of whom had lived. She decided that God was against her marrying. She got a job in a rubber factory where she told everyone she was an old maid (which no one believed), and went home to live with her mother. Between her second and third marriage, she had a succession of lovers all of whom she called John.
After each