A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [46]
She lay awake, holding him in her arms and staring into the darkness. She felt towards him as she would have felt towards her babies had they only lived to know her warm love. She stroked his curling hair and smoothed his cheek gently. When he moaned in his sleep, she soothed him with the kind of words she would have spoken to her babies. Her arm cramped and she tried to move it. He woke up for a moment, clutched her tightly and begged her not to leave him. When he spoke to her, he called her mother.
Whenever he woke up and got afraid, she gave him a swallow of whiskey. Towards morning he woke. His head was clearer but he said it hurt. He jerked away from her and moaned.
“Come back to Mama,” she said in her soft fluttering voice.
She opened her arms wide and once more he crept into them and rested his cheek on her generous breast. He wept quietly. He sobbed out his fears and his worries and his bewilderment at the way things were in the world. She let him talk, she let him weep. She held him the way his mother should have held him as a child (which she never did). Sometimes Sissy wept with him. When he had talked himself out, she gave him what was left of the whiskey and at last he fell into a deep exhausted sleep.
She lay very still for a long time not wanting him to feel her withdrawing from him. Towards dawn, his tight holding of her hand relaxed; peace came into his face and made it boyish again. Sissy put his head on the pillow, expertly undressed him and put him under the covers. She threw the empty whiskey bottle down the airshaft. She figured that what Katie didn’t know couldn’t possibly bother her. She tied her pink ribbons carelessly and adjusted her waist. She closed the door very softly when she went out.
Sissy had two great failings. She was a great lover and a great mother. She had so much of tenderness in her, so much of wanting to give of herself to whoever needed what she had, whether it was her money, her time, the clothes off her back, her pity, her understanding, her friendship or her companionship and love. She was mother to everything that came her way. She loved men, yes. She loved women too, and old people and especially children. How she loved children! She loved the down-and-outers. She wanted to make everybody happy. She had tried to seduce the good priest who heard her infrequent confessions because she felt sorry for him. She thought he was missing the greatest joy on earth by being committed to a life of celibacy.
She loved all the scratching curs on the street and wept for the gaunt scavenging cats who slunk around Brooklyn corners with their sides swollen looking for a hole in which they might bring forth their young. She loved the sooty sparrows and thought that the very grass that grew in the lots was beautiful. She picked bouquets of white clover in the lots believing they were the most beautiful flowers God ever made. Once she saw a mouse in her room. The next night she set out a tiny box for him with cheese crumbs in it. Yes, she listened to everybody’s troubles but no one listened to hers. But that was right because Sissy was a giver and never a taker.
When Sissy came into the kitchen, Katie looked at Sissy’s disordered clothing with swollen and suspicious eyes.
“I’m not forgetting,” she said with pitiful dignity, “that you are my sister. And I hope you remembered that, too.”
“Don’t be such a heimdickischer ass,” said Sissy, knowing what Katie meant. But she smiled deeply into Katie’s eyes. Katie was suddenly reassured.
“How’s Johnny?”
“Johnny will be fine when he wakes up. But for Christ’s sweet sake, don’t nag