A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [87]
The day before Thanksgiving, there were exercises in Francie’s room. Each of four chosen girls recited a Thanksgiving poem and held in her hand a symbol of the day. One held an ear of dried-up corn, another a turkey’s foot, meant to stand for the whole turkey. A third girl held a basket of apples and the fourth held a five-cent pumpkin pie which was the size of a small saucer.
After the exercises, the turkey foot and corn were thrown into the wastebasket. Teacher set aside the apples to take home. She asked if anyone wanted the little pumpkin pie. Thirty mouths watered; thirty hands itched to go up into the air but no one moved. Some were poor, many were hungry and all were too proud to accept charitable food. When no one responded, Teacher ordered the pie thrown away.
Francie couldn’t stand it; that beautiful pie thrown away and she had never tasted pumpkin pie. To her it was the food of covered wagon people, of Indian fighters. She was dying to taste it. In a flash she invented a lie and up went her hand.
“I’m glad someone wants it,” said Teacher.
“I don’t want it for myself,” lied Francie proudly. “I know a very poor family I’d like to give it to.”
“Good,” said Teacher. “That’s the real Thanksgiving spirit.”
Francie ate the pie while walking home that afternoon. Whether it was her conscience or the unfamiliar flavor, she didn’t enjoy the pie. It tasted like soap. The Monday following, Teacher saw her in the hall before class and asked her how the poor family had enjoyed the pie.
“They liked it a whole lot,” Francie told her. Then when she saw Teacher there looking so interested, she embellished the story. “This family has two little girls with golden curls and big blue eyes.”
“And?” prompted Teacher.
“And…and…they’re twins.”
“How interesting.”
Francie was inspired. “One of them has the name Pamela and the other Camilla.” (These were names that Francie had once chosen for her non-existent dolls.)
“And they are very, very poor,” suggested Teacher.
“Oh, very poor. They didn’t have anything to eat for three days and just would have died, the doctor said, if I didn’t bring them that pie.”
“That was such a tiny pie,” commented Teacher gently, “to save two lives.”
Francie knew then that she had gone too far. She hated whatever that thing was inside her that made her invent such whoppers. Teacher bent down and put her arms around Francie. Francie saw that there were tears in her eyes. Francie went to pieces and remorse rose in her like bitter flood waters.
“That’s all a big lie,” she confessed. “I ate the pie myself.”
“I know you did.”
“Don’t send a letter home,” begged Francie, thinking of the address she didn’t own. “I’ll stay after school every day for…”
“I’ll not punish you for having an imagination.”
Gently, Teacher explained the difference between a lie and a story. A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn’t tell it like it was; you told it like you thought it should have been.
As Teacher talked, a great trouble left Francie. Lately, she had been given to exaggerating things. She did not report happenings truthfully, but gave them color, excitement and dramatic twists. Katie was annoyed at this tendency and kept warning Francie to tell the plain truth and to stop romancing. But Francie just couldn’t tell the plain undecorated truth. She had to put something to it.
Although Katie had this same flair for coloring an incident and Johnny himself lived in a half-dream world, yet they tried to squelch these things in their child. Maybe they had a good reason. Maybe they knew their own gift of imagination colored too rosily the poverty and brutality of their lives and made them able to endure it. Perhaps Katie thought that if they did not have this faculty, they would be clearer-minded; see things as they really were, and seeing them loathe them and somehow find a way to make them better.
Francie always remembered what that kind teacher told her. “You know,