A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [97]
One day after one of those “rescues” Francie asked Mama:
“When explorers get hungry and suffer like that, it’s for a reason. Something big comes out of it. They discover the North Pole. But what big thing comes out of us being hungry like that?”
Katie looked tired all of a sudden. She said something Francie didn’t understand at the time. She said, “You found the catch in it.”
Growing up spoiled the theater for Francie—well, not the theater exactly, but the plays. She found she was becoming dissatisfied with the way things just happened in the nick of time.
Francie loved the theater dearly. She had once wanted to be a hand-organ lady, then a schoolteacher. After her first Communion, she wanted to be a nun. At eleven, she wanted to be an actress.
If the Williamsburg kids knew nothing else, they knew their theater. In those days, there were many good stock companies in the neighborhood: Blaney’s, Corse Payton’s and Phillip’s Lyceum. The Lyceum was just around the corner. Local residents called it first “The Lyce,” and then changed that into “The Louse.” Francie went there every Saturday afternoon (except when it was closed for the summer) when she could scrape up a dime. She sat in the gallery and often waited in line an hour before the show opened in order to get a seat in the first row.
She was in love with Harold Clarence, the leading man. She waited at the stage door after the Saturday matinee and followed him to the shabby brownstone house where he lived untheatrically in a modest furnished room. Even on the street, he had the stiff-legged walk of the old-time actor and his face was baby pink as though he still had juvenile grease paint on it. He walked stiff-leggedly and leisurely, looking neither to right nor left and smoking an important-looking cigar which he threw away before he entered the house, as his landlady did not permit the great man to smoke in her rooms. Francie stood at the curb, looking down reverently at the discarded butt. She took the paper ring off it and wore it for a week, pretending it was his engagement ring to her.
One Saturday, Harold and his company put on The Minister’s Sweetheart in which the handsome village minister was in love with Gerry Morehouse, the leading lady. Somehow, the heroine had to seek work in a grocery store. There was a villainess, also in love with the handsome young minister, and out to get the heroine. She swaggered into the store in her un-villagelike furs and diamonds and regally ordered a pound of coffee. There was a dreadful moment when she uttered the fatal words, “Grind it!” The audience groaned. It had been planted that the delicate beautiful heroine wasn’t strong enough to turn the great wheel. It had also been planted that her job was contingent on her being able to grind coffee. She struggled like anything but couldn’t get the wheel to go round even once. She pleaded with the villainess; told her how much she needed the job. The villainess repeated, “Grind it!” When all seemed lost, Handsome Harold entered with his pink face and his clerical garb. Taking in the situation, he threw his wide minister’s hat clear across the stage in a dramatic but unseemly gesture, stepped stiff-leggedly to the machine and ground the coffee and thus saved the heroine. There was an awed silence as the odor of freshly ground coffee permeated the theater. Then bedlam broke loose. Real coffee! Realism in the theater! Everyone had seen coffee ground a thousand times but on the stage it was a revolutionary thing. The villainess gnashed her teeth and said, “Foiled again!” Harold embraced Gerry, making her face upstage, and the curtain came down.
During intermission, Francie did not join the other kids in the interim pastime of spitting down on the plutocrats in the thirty-cent orchestra seats. Instead, she pondered over the situation at curtain. All very well and good that the hero came in