A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [47]
“But he’s got to be told….”
“If I hear that you nag him, I’ll get him away from you. I swear it. Even though I am your sister.”
Katie knew that she meant it and was a little frightened. “I won’t then,” she mumbled. “Not this time.”
“Now you’re growing up into a woman,” approved Sissy as she kissed Katie’s cheek. She felt sorry for Katie as well as for Johnny.
Katie broke down then and cried. She made hard ugly noises because she hated herself for crying, yet couldn’t help it. Sissy had to listen, to go through again all she had gone through with Johnny, only this time from Katie’s angle. Sissy handled Katie differently than she had handled Johnny. She had been gentle and maternal with Johnny because he needed that. Sissy acknowledged the steeliness that was in Katie. She hardened to that steeliness as Katie finished her story.
“And now you know it all, Sissy. Johnny’s a drunk.”
“Well, everybody’s something. We all got a tag of some kind. Take me, now: I never took a drink in my life. But do you know,” she stated with honest and consummate ignorance, “that there are some people who talk about me and call me a bad woman? Can you imagine that? I admit that I smoke a Sweet Caporal once in a while. But bad….”
“Well, Sissy, the way you carry on with men makes people…”
“Katie! Don’t nag! All of us are what we have to be and everyone lives the kind of life it’s in him to live. You’ve got a good man, Katie.”
“But he drinks.”
“And he always will until he dies. There it is. He drinks. You must take that along with the rest.”
“What rest? You mean the not working, the staying out all night, the bums he has for friends?”
“You married him. There was something about him that caught your heart. Hang on to that and forget the rest.”
“Sometimes, I don’t know why I married him.”
“You lie! You know why you married him. You married him because you wanted him to sleep with you but you were too religious to take a chance without a church wedding.”
“How you talk. The whole thing was that I wanted to get him away from someone else.”
“It was the sleeping. It always is. If it is good, the marriage is good. If it is bad, the marriage is bad.”
“No. There are other things.”
“What other things? Well, maybe there are,” conceded Sissy. “If there are other good things too, that’s so much velvet.”
“You’re wrong. That might be important to you, but…”
“It’s important to everybody or should be. Then all marriages would be happy.”
“Oh, I admit that I liked the way he danced, how he sang a song…the way he looked…”
“You’re saying what I’m saying but you’re using your own words.”
“How can you win out with a person like Sissy,” thought Katie. “She’s got everything figured out her way. Maybe her way is a good way to figure things out. I don’t know. She is my own sister but people talk about her. She is a bad girl and there is no getting around that. When she dies, her soul will wander through Purgatory through all eternity. I have often told her that and she always answers that it wouldn’t wander alone. If Sissy dies before I do, I must have masses said for the repose of her soul. Maybe after a while she’ll get out of Purgatory because even if they say she is bad, she is good to all the people in the world who are lucky enough to run across her. God will have to take that into consideration.”
Suddenly Katie leaned over and kissed Sissy on the cheek. Sissy was astonished because she could not know Katie’s thoughts.
“Maybe you’re right, Sissy, maybe you’re wrong. With me it comes down to this: Aside from his drinking, I love everything else about Johnny and I will try to be good to him. I will try to overlook…” She said no more. In her heart, Katie knew that she was not the overlooking kind.
Francie lay awake in the washbasket set up near the kitchen range. She lay sucking her thumb and listening to the conversation. But she learned nothing from it being but two years old at the time.
12
KATIE WAS ASHAMED TO STAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD AFTER Johnny’s great spree. A good many of the neighbors