A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [35]
They emptied the wastebaskets, last thing, and Katie salvaged the longer bits of discarded chalk and the pencils that were not too stubby. She took them home and saved them in a box. Later when Francie was growing up, she felt very rich having so much chalk and so many pencils to use.
At dawn, they left the school scrubbed, shiny, warm and ready for the daytime janitor. They walked home watching the stars fade from the sky. They passed the baker’s where the smell of freshly baked rolls came up to them from the baking room in the basement. Johnny ran down and bought a nickel’s worth of buns hot from the oven. Arriving home, they had a breakfast of hot coffee and warm sweet buns. Then Johnny ran out and got the morning American and read the news to her, with running comments, while she cleaned up their rooms. At noon, they had a hot dinner of pot roast and noodles or something good like that. After dinner they slept until it was time to get up for work.
They earned fifty dollars a month which was good pay for people of their class in those days. They lived comfortably and it was a good life they had…happy and full of small adventures.
And they were so young and loved each other so much.
In a few months, to their innocent amazement and consternation, Katie found out that she was pregnant. She told Johnny that she was “that way.” Johnny was bewildered and confused at first. He didn’t want her to work at the school. She told him she had been that way for quite a while without being sure and had been working and had not suffered. When she convinced him that it was good for her to work, he gave in. She continued working until she got too unwieldy to dust under the desks. Soon she could do little more than go along with him for company and lie on the gay couch no longer used for love-making. He did all the work now. At two in the morning, he made clumsy sandwiches and overboiled coffee for her. They were still very happy although Johnny was getting more and more worried as the time wore on.
Towards the end of a frosty December night, her pains started. She lay on the couch, holding them back not wanting to tell Johnny until the work was finished. On the way home, there was a tearing pain that she couldn’t keep back. She moaned and Johnny knew that the baby was on the way. He got her home and put her to bed without undressing her, and covered her warmly. He ran down the block to Mrs. Gindler, the midwife, and begged her to hurry. That good woman drove him crazy by taking her time.
She had to take dozens of curlers out of her hair. She couldn’t find her teeth and refused to officiate without them. Johnny helped her search and they found them at last in a glass of water on the ledge outside the window. The water had frozen around the teeth and they had to be thawed before she could put them in. That done, she had to go about making a charm out of a piece of blessed palm taken from the altar on Palm Sunday. To this, she added a medal of the Blessed Mother, a small blue bird feather, a broken blade from a penknife and a sprig of some herb. These things were tied together with a bit of dirty string from the corset of a woman who had given birth to twins after only ten minutes of labor. She sprinkled the whole business with holy water that was supposed to have come from a well in Jerusalem from which it was said that Jesus had once quenched His thirst. She explained to the frantic boy that this charm would cut the pains and assure him of a fine, well-born baby. Lastly she grabbed her crocodile satchel—familiar to everyone in the neighborhood and believed by all the youngsters to be the satchel in which they had been delivered, kicking, to their mothers—and she