A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [60]
Katie spoke. Her voice had some of the old soft tenderness in it which Johnny had been missing in the last year or so. “Is that an Irish song, Johnny?”
“Scotch.”
“I never heard you sing it before.”
“No, I guess not. It’s just a song I know. I never sing it because it’s not the kind of song people want to hear at the rackets where I work. They’d sooner hear ‘Call Me Up Some Rainy Afternoon.’ Except when they’re drunk. Then nothing but ‘Sweet Adeline’ will do.”
They were quickly settled in the new place. The familiar furniture looked strange. Francie sat on a chair and was surprised that it felt the same as it had in Lorimer Street. She felt different. Why didn’t the chair feel different?
The front room looked pretty after Papa and Mama got it fixed up. There was a bright green carpet which had great pink roses. There were starched cream-colored lace curtains for the windows, a table with a marble top for the center of the room and a three-piece green plush parlor suit. A bamboo stand in the corner held a plush-covered album in which were pictures of the Rommely sisters as babies lying on their stomachs on a fur rug, and patient-looking great-aunts standing at the shoulders of seated, big-mustached husbands. Little souvenir cups stood on the small shelves. The cups were pink and blue and had gold-encrusted designs of blue forget-me-nots and red American Beauty roses. There were phrases like Remember Me and True Friendship painted in gold. The tiny cups and saucers were memories of Katie’s old girl friends and Francie was never permitted to play house with them.
On the bottom shelf stood a curly, bone-white conch shell with a delicate rosy interior. The children loved it dearly and had given it an affectionate name: Tootsy. When Francie held it to her ear, it sang of the great sea. Sometimes for the delight of his children Johnny listened to the shell, then held it dramatically at arm’s length, looked at it meltingly and sang:
Upon the shore I found a shell.
I held it to my ear.
I listened gladly while it sang,
A sea song sweet and clear.
Later, Francie saw the sea for the first time when Johnny took them to Canarsie. The sea was remarkable only in that it sounded like the tiny sweet roar of Tootsy, the conch shell.
16
THE NEIGHBORHOOD STORES ARE AN IMPORTANT PART OF A CITY child’s life. They are his contact with the supplies that keep life going; they hold the beauty that his soul longs for; they hold the unattainable that he can only dream and wish for.
Francie liked the pawnshop almost the best—not for the treasures prodigiously thrown into its barred windows; not for the shadowy adventure of shawled women slipping into the side entrance, but for the three large golden balls that hung high above the shop and gleamed in the sun or swayed languorously like heavy golden apples when the wind blew.
There was a bakery store to one side of it which sold beautiful charlotte russes with red candied cherries on their whipped cream tops for those who were rich enough to buy.
On the other side was Gollender’s Paint Shop. There was a stand in front of it from which was suspended a plate with a dramatically mended crack across it and a hole bored into the bottom from which hung a heavy rock suspended on a chain. This proved how strong Major’s Cement was. Some said the plate was made of iron and painted to resemble cracked china. But Francie preferred to believe it was a real plate that had been broken and then made whole again by the miracle of the cement.
The most interesting store was housed in a little shanty which had been there when the Indians prowled through Williamsburg. It looked queer among the tenements with its tiny small-paned windows, clapboards and steep slanting roof. The store had a great small-paneled bay window behind which a dignified man sat at a table and made cigars—long thin dark-brown ones which sold four for a nickel. He chose the outside leaf