A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [49]
After supper, Katie read the babies to sleep. She read a page of the introduction to Shakespeare and a page of begats from the Bible. That was as far as she had gotten to date. Neither the babies nor Katie understood what it was all about. The reading made Katie very drowsy but doggedly she finished the two pages. She covered the babies carefully, then she and Johnny went to bed too. It was only eight o’clock but they were tired out from moving.
The Nolans slept in their new home on Lorimer Street which was still in Williamsburg but almost near where Greenpoint began.
13
LORIMER STREET WAS MORE REFINED THAN BOGART STREET. IT WAS peopled by letter carriers, firemen and those store owners who were affluent enough not to have to live in the rooms in back of the store.
The flat had a bathroom. The tub was an oblong wooden box lined with zinc. Francie couldn’t get over the wonder of it when it was filled with water. It was the largest body of water she had seen up to that time. To her baby eyes, it seemed like an ocean.
They liked the new home. Katie and Johnny kept the cellar, halls, the roof, and the sidewalk before the house spotlessly clean in return for their rent. There was no airshaft. There was a window in each bedroom and three each in the kitchen and front room. The first autumn there was pleasant. The sun came in all day long. They were warm that first winter, too. Johnny worked fairly steadily, did not drink much and there was money for coal.
When summer came, the children spent most of the day outdoors on the stoop. They were the only children in the house, so there was always room on the stoop. Francie, who was going on four, had to mind Neeley, who was going on three. She sat for long hours on the stoop with her thin arms hugging her thin legs and with her straight brown hair blowing in the slow breeze that came laden with the salt smell of the sea, the sea which was so nearby and which she had never seen. She kept an eye on Neeley as he scrambled up and down the steps. She sat, rocking to and fro, wondering about many things: what made the wind blow and what was grass and why Neeley was a boy instead of a girl like her.
Sometimes Francie and Neeley sat regarding each other with steady eyes. His eyes were the same as hers in shape and depth but his were a bright clear blue and hers a dark clear gray. There was steady unbroken communication between the two children. Neeley spoke very little and Francie spoke a lot. Sometimes Francie talked and talked until the genial little boy fell asleep sitting upright on the steps with his head against the iron rail.
Francie did “stitching” that summer. Katie bought her a square of goods for a penny. It was the size of a lady’s handkerchief and had a design outlined on it: a sitting Newfoundland dog with his tongue lolling out. Another penny bought a small reel of red embroidery cotton and two cents went for a pair of small hoops. Francie’s grandmother taught her how to work the running stitches. The child became adept at stitching. Women passing would stop and cluck in pitying admiration at the tiny girl, a deep line already showing at the inner edge of her right eyebrow, pushing the needle in and out of the taut material while Neeley hung over her to watch the bright sliver of steel disappear like magic and then come back up again through the cloth. Sissy gave her a fat little cloth strawberry for cleaning the needle. When Neeley got restless, Francie let him push the needle through the strawberry for a while. You were supposed to stitch a hundred or so of these squares and then sew them together to make a bedspread. Francie heard that some ladies had actually made a bedspread that way and that was Francie’s great ambition. But