A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [84]
Katie’s contempt for the politicians did not interfere with her making her yearly call. She put on her brushed and pressed gray suit with all the braid on it and tilted her jade-green velvet hat over her right eye. She even gave the penman, who set up temporary shop outside headquarters, a dime to make a card for her. He wrote Mrs. John Nolan with flowers and angels crawling out of the capitals. It was a dime that should have gone into the bank, but Katie figured she could be extravagant once a year.
The family awaited her homecoming. They wanted to hear all about the call.
“How was it this year?” asked Johnny.
“The same as always. The same old push was there. A lot of women had new clothes which I bet they bought on time. Of course, the prostitutes were the best dressed,” said Katie in her forthright way, “and like always, they outnumbered the decent women two to one.”
25
JOHNNY WAS ONE FOR TAKING NOTIONS. HE’D TAKE A NOTION THAT life was too much for him and start drinking heavier to forget it. Francie got to know when he was drinking more than usual. He walked straighter coming home. He walked carefully and slightly sidewise. When he was drunk, he was a quiet man. He didn’t brawl, he didn’t sing, he didn’t grow sentimental. He grew thoughtful. People who didn’t know him thought that he was drunk when he was sober, because sober, he was full of song and excitement. When he was drunk, strangers looked on him as a quiet, thoughtful man who minded his own business.
Francie dreaded the drinking periods—not on moral grounds but because Papa wasn’t a man she knew then. He wouldn’t talk to her or to anybody. He looked at her with the eyes of a stranger. When Mama spoke to him, he turned his head away from her.
When he got over a drinking time, he’d take a notion that he had to be a better father to his children. He felt that he had to teach them things. He’d stop drinking for a while, take a notion to work hard and devote all his spare time to Francie and Neeley. He had the same idea that Katie’s mother, Mary Rommely, had about education. He wanted to teach his children all that he knew so that at fourteen or fifteen, they would know as much as he knew at thirty. He figured they could go on from there picking up their own knowledge and, according to his calculations, when they reached thirty, they would be twice as smart as he had been at thirty.
He felt that they needed lessons in—for what passed in his mind—geography, civics and sociology. So he took them over to Bushwick Avenue.
Bushwick Avenue was the high-toned boulevard of old Brooklyn. It was a wide, tree-shaded avenue and the houses were rich and impressively built of large granite blocks with long stone stoops. Here lived the big-time politicians, the monied brewery families, the well-to-do immigrants who had been able to come over first-class instead of steerage. They had taken their money, their statuary and their gloomy oil paintings and had come to America and settled in Brooklyn.
Automobiles were coming into use but most of these families still clung to their handsome horses and magnificent carriages. Papa pointed out and described the various equipages to Francie. She watched in awe as they rolled by.
There were small lacquered dainty ones lined with tufted white satin, with a large fringed umbrella that was used by fine and delicate ladies. There were adorable wicker ones with a bench along each side on which lucky children sat while they were pulled along by a Shetland pony. She stared at the capable-looking governesses who accompanied these children—women from another world, in capes and starch-stringed bonnets who sat sideways on the seat to drive the pony.
Francie