A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [33]
The boys grew up, handsome, able to play music, to dance and to sing and with all the girls crazy for them. Though the Nolans lived in the shabbiest house in Irish Town, the boys were the dressiest in the neighborhood. The ironing board was kept set up in the kitchen. One or the other was always pressing pants, smoothing out a tie or ironing a shirt. They were the pride of Shantytown, the tall, blond, good-looking Nolan lads. They had quick feet in shoes that were kept highly polished. Their trousers hung just so and their hats sat jauntily on their head. But they were all dead before they were thirty-five—all dead, and of the four, only Johnny left children.
Andy was the eldest and the handsomest. He had red-gold wavy hair and finely molded features. He had consumption, too. He was engaged to a girl named Francie Melaney. They kept putting off the marriage waiting for him to get better, only he never did get better.
The Nolan boys were singing waiters. They had been the Nolan Quartette until Andy got too sick to work. They became the Nolan Trio then. They didn’t earn much and spent most of that on liquor and horse-racing bets.
When Andy took to his bed for the last time, the boys bought him a genuine swansdown pillow that cost seven dollars. They wanted him to have a luxury before he died. Andy thought it was a wonderful pillow. Andy used it two days, then there was a last great gush of blood which stained the fine new pillow a rusty brown and Andy died. His mother keened over the body for three days. Francie Melaney made a vow that she would never marry. The three remaining Nolan boys swore that they would never leave their mother.
Six months later, Johnny married Katie. Ruthie hated Katie. She had hoped to keep all of her fine boys home with her until either she or they died. So far all had avoided marriage. But that girl—that girl, Katie Rommely! She did it! Ruthie was sure that Johnny had been tricked into marriage.
Georgie and Frankie liked Katie but thought it was a dirty trick for Johnny to skip out and leave them to take care of their mother. They made the best of it, however. They looked around for a wedding present and decided to give Katie the fine pillow they had bought for Andy and which he had used so briefly. The mother sewed a new ticking over it to hide the ugly stain that had been the past part of Andy’s life. The pillow thus passed on to Johnny and Katie. It was considered too good for ordinary use and only brought out when one of them was sick. Francie called it “the sick pillow.” Neither Katie nor Francie knew that it had been a death pillow.
About a year after Johnny’s marriage, Frankie, whom many thought even handsomer than Andy, wavered home after a drinking party one night and stumbled over some taut wire that a bucolic Brooklynite had strung around a square foot of grass before his house stoop. The wire was held up by sharp little sticks. As Frankie stumbled, one of the sticks pierced his stomach. He got up somehow and went home. He died during the night. He died alone and without the priest’s last absolution for all of his sins. For the rest of her days, his mother had a mass said once a month for the repose of his soul which she knew wandered about in Purgatory.
In little more than a year, Ruthie Nolan had lost three sons; two by death and one by marriage. She grieved for the three. Georgie, who never left her, died three years later when he was twenty-eight. Johnny, twenty-three, was the only Nolan boy left at the time.
These were the Nolan boys. All died young. All died sudden or violent deaths brought on by their own recklessness or their own bad way of living. Johnny was the only one who lived past his thirtieth birthday.
And the child, Francie Nolan,