56
SATURDAY! THE LAST SATURDAY IN THEIR OLD HOME. THE NEXT day was Katie’s wedding day and they were going straight to their new home from the church. The movers were coming Monday morning for their stuff. They were leaving most of their furniture for the new janitress. They were taking only their personal belongings and the front-room furniture. Francie wanted the green carpet with the big pink roses, the cream-colored lace curtains and the lovely little piano. These things were to be installed in the room set aside for Francie in their new home.
Katie insisted on working as usual that last Saturday morning. They laughed when mother set out with her broom and pail. McShane had given her a checking account with a thousand dollars in it as a wedding present. According to Nolan standards, Katie was rich now and didn’t have to do another lick of work. Yet, she insisted on working that last day. Francie suspected that she had a sentimental feeling about the houses and wanted to give them a last good cleaning before she left.
Shamelessly, Francie searched for the checkbook in her mother’s purse and examined the only stub in the fabulous folder.
No: 1
Date: 9-20-18
To: Eva Flittman
For: Because she’s my sister
Total: 1000.00
Amt this ck: 200.00
Bal fwd: 800.00
Francie wondered why that amount? Why not fifty dollars or five hundred? Why two hundred? Then she understood. Two hundred was the amount Uncle Willie was insured for; what Evy would have collected had he died. No doubt Katie considered Willie as good as dead.
No check had been made out for Katie’s wedding dress. She explained that she didn’t want to use any of that money for herself until after she had married the giver. In order to buy the dress, she had borrowed the money she had saved for Francie, promising to give her a check for it as soon as the ceremony was over.
On that last Saturday morning, Francie strapped Laurie into her two-wheeled sulky and took her down on the street. She stood on the corner for a long time watching the kids lug their junk up Manhattan Avenue to Carney’s junk shop. Then she walked up that way and went into Cheap Charlie’s during a lull in business. She put a fifty-cent piece down on the counter and announced that she wanted to take all the picks.
“Aw, now, Francie! Gee, Francie,” he said.
“I don’t have to bother picking. Just give me all the stuff on the board.”
“Aw, lissen!”
“Then there aren’t any prize numbers in that box, are there, Charlie?”
“Christ, Francie, a feller is got to make a living and it comes slow in this business—a penny at a time.”
“I always thought those prizes were fake. You ought to be ashamed—fooling little kids that way.”
“Don’t say that. I give them a penny’s worth of candy for each cent they spend here. The pick is just so’s it’s more interesting.”
“And it makes them keep coming back—hoping.”
“If they don’t go here, they go across to Gimpy’s, see? And it’s better they come here because I’m a married man,” he said virtuously, “and I don’t take girls in my back room, see?”
“Oh, well. I guess there’s something in what you say. Look! Have you got a fifty-cent doll?”
He dredged up an ugly-faced doll from under the counter. “I only got a sixty-nine-cent doll but I’ll let you have it for fifty cents.”
“I’ll pay for it if you’ll hang it up as a prize and let some kid win it.”
“But look, Francie: A kid wins it. All the kids expect to win then, see? It’s a bad example.”
“O, for sweet Christ’s sake,” she said, not profanely but prayerfully, “let somebody win something just once!”
“All right! All right! Don’t get excited, now.”
“I just want one little kid to get something for nothing.”
“I’ll put it up and I won’t take the number out of the box, either, after you go. Satisfied?”
“Thanks, Charlie.”
“And I’ll tell the winner the doll’s name’s Francie, see?”
“Oh no, you don’t! Not with the face that doll’s got.”
“You know what, Francie?”
“What?”
“You’re getting to be quite a girl. How old are you now?”
“I’ll be seventeen in a couple of months.”
“I remember you used to be a skinny long-legged kid. Well, I think you’ll make a nice-looking woman some day—not pretty, but something.”
“Thanks for nothing.” She laughed.
“Your kid sister?” he nodded at Laurie.
“Uh-huh.”
“First thing you know she’ll be lugging junk and coming in here with her pennies. One day they’re babies in buggies and the next day they’re in here taking picks. Kids grow up quick in this neighborhood.”
“She’ll never lug junk. And she’ll never come in here, either.”
“That’s right. I hear you’re moving away.”
“Yes, we’re moving away.”
“Well, the best of luck, Francie.”
She took Laurie to the park, lifted her out of the sulky and let her run around on the grass. A boy came by selling pretzels and Francie bought one for a penny. She crumbled it into bits and scattered it on the grass. A flock of sooty sparrows appeared from nowhere and squabbled over the bits. Laurie stumbled about trying to catch them. The bored birds let her get within inches of them before they lifted their wings and took off. The child screamed with delighted laughter each time a bird flew away.
Pulling Laurie along in the sulky, Francie went over for a last look at her old school. It was but a couple of blocks from the park which she visited every day, but for some reason or other, Francie had never gone back to see it since the night she graduated.
She was surprised at how tiny it seemed now. She supposed the school was just as big as it had ever been only her eyes had grown used to looking at bigger things.
“There’s the school that Francie went to,” she told Laurie.
“Fran-nee went to school,” agreed Laurie.
“Your papa came with me one day and sang a song.”
“Papa?” asked Laurie, puzzled.
“I forgot. You never saw your papa.”
“Laurie saw Papa. Man. Big man.” She thought Francie meant McShane.
“That’s right,” agreed Francie.
In the two years since she had last looked on the school, Francie had changed from a child to a woman.
She went home past the house whose address she had claimed. It looked little and shabby to her now, but she still loved it.
She passed McGarrity’s saloon. Only McGarrity didn’t own it any more. He had moved away early in the summer. He had confided in Neeley that he, McGarrity, was a man who had his ear to the ground and was therefore in a position to hear prohibition coming. He was getting all set for it, too. He bought a large place on the Hempstead Turnpike out on Long Island and was systematically stocking its cellars with liquor against the day. As soon as prohibition came, he was going to open up what he called a Club. He had the name picked out: The Club Mae-Marie. His wife was going to wear an evening dress and be a hostess, which was right up her alley, McGarrity explained. Francie was sure that Mrs. McGarrity would be very happy as a hostess. She hoped that Mr. McGarrity would be happy some day, too.
After lunch, she went around to the library to turn in her books for the last time. The librarian stamped her card and shoved it back to her without, as was usual, looking up.
“Could you recommend a good book for a girl?” asked Francie.
“How old?”
“She is eleven.”
The librarian brought up a book from under the desk. Francie saw the title: If I Were King.
“I don’t really want to take it out,” said Francie, “and I’m not eleven years old.”
The librarian looked up at Francie for the first time.
“I’ve been coming here since I was a little girl,” said Francie, “and you never looked at me till now.”
“There are so many children,” said the librarian fretfully. “I can’t be looking at each one of them. Anything else?”
“I just want to say about that brown bowl…what it has meant to me…the flower always in it.”
The librarian looked at the brown bowl. There was a spray of pink wild aster in it. Francie had an idea that the librarian was seeing the brown bowl for the first time, also.
“Oh that! The janitor puts the flowers in. Or somebody. Anything else?” she asked impatiently.
“I’m turning in my card.” Francie pushed the wrinkled dog-eared card covered with stamped dates across the desk. The librarian picked it up and was about to tear it in two, when Francie took it back from her.
“I guess I’ll keep it after all,” she said.
She went out and took a last long look at the shabby little library. She knew she would never see it again. Eyes changed after they looked at new things. If in the years to be she were to come back, her new eyes might make everything seem different from the way she saw it now. The way it was now was the way she wanted to remember it.
No, she’d never come back to the old neighborhood.
Besides in years to come, there would be no old neighborhood to come back to. After the war, the city was going to tear down the tenements and the ugly school where a woman principal used to whip little boys, and build a model housing project on the site; a place of living where sunlight and air were to be trapped, measured and weighed, and doled out so much per resident.
Katie banged her broom and pail in the corner with that final bang that meant she was through. Then she picked up the broom and pail again and replaced them gently.
As she dressed to go out—she was going for a last-minute fitting of the jade-green velvet dress she had chosen to be married in—she fretted because the weather was so mild for the end of September. She thought it might be too warm to wear a velvet dress. She was angry that the fall was so late in coming that year. She argued with Francie when Francie insisted that fall was here.
Francie knew that autumn had come. Let the wind blow warm, let the days be heat hazy; nevertheless autumn had come to Brooklyn. Francie knew that this was so because now, as soon as night came and the street lights went on, the hot-chestnut man set up his little stand on the corner. On the rack above the charcoal fire, chestnuts roasted in a covered pan. The man held unroasted ones in his hand and made little crosses on them with a blunt knife before he put them in the pan.
Yes, autumn had surely come when the hot-chestnut man appeared—no matter what the weather said to the contrary.
After Laurie had been tucked into her crib for her afternoon nap, Francie packed a few last things in a wooden Fels-Naptha soap box. From over the mantelpiece, she took down the crucifix and the picture of her and Neeley on Confirmation Day. She wrapped these things in her First Communion veil and placed them in the box. She folded her father’s two waiter’s aprons and put them in. She wrapped the shaving cup with the name “John Nolan” on it in gilt block letters, in a white georgette crepe blouse which Katie had put in the “give-away” basket because its lace jabot had torn badly in the wash. It was the blouse Francie had worn that rainy night when she stood in the doorway with Lee. The doll named Mary and the pretty little box which had once held ten gilded pennies, were stowed away next. Her sparse library went into the box: the Gideon Bible, The Complete Works of Wm. Shakespeare, a tattered volume of Leaves of Grass, the three scrapbooks —The Nolan Volume of Contemporary Poetry, The Nolan Book of Classical Poems, and The Book of Annie Laurie.
She went into the bedroom, turned back her mattress and took from under it a notebook in which she had kept a desultory diary during her thirteenth year, and a square manila envelope. Kneeling before the box, she opened the diary and read a random entry dated September 24th, three years ago.
Tonight when I took a bath, I discovered I was changing into a woman. It’s about time!
She grinned as she packed the diary in the box. She looked at the writing on the envelope.
Contents:
1 sealed envelope to be opened in 1967.
1 diploma.
4 stories.
Four stories, which Miss Garnder had told her to burn. Ah, well. Francie remembered how she had promised God she’d give up writing if He wouldn’t let Mother die. She had kept her promise. But she knew God a little better, now. She was sure that He wouldn’t care at all if she started to write again. Well, maybe she’d try again some day. She added her library card to the contents of the envelope, made an entry for it on the envelope and put that in the box. Her packing was finished. All her possessions, except her clothes, were in that box.
Neeley came running up the stairs whistling “At the Darktown Strutters’ Ball.” He burst into the kitchen peeling off his coat.
“I’m in a hurry, Francie. Have I got a clean shirt?”
“There’s one washed but not ironed. I’ll iron it for you.”
She put the iron on to heat while she sprinkled the shirt and set up the ironing board on two chairs. Neeley got the shoe-shine kit from the closet and proceeded to put a higher shine on his already flawlessly polished shoes.
“Going somewhere?” she asked.
“Yup. Just got time to catch the show. They’ve got Van and Schenck and boy, can Schenck sing! He sits at the piano like this.” Neeley sat at the kitchen table and demonstrated. “He sits sideways and crosses his legs, looking out at the audience. Then he leans his left elbow on the music rack and picks out the tune with his right hand while he sings.” Neeley went into a fair imitation of his idol singing “When You’re a Long, Long Way from Home.”
“Yup, he’s swell. Sings the way Papa used to…a little.”
Papa!
Francie looked for the union label in Neeley’s shirt and pressed that first.
(“That label is like an ornament…like a rose that you wear.”)
The Nolans sought for the union label on everything they bought. It was their memorial to Johnny.
Neeley looked at himself in the glass hanging over the sink.
“Do you think I need a shave?” he asked.
“Not for five years, yet.”
“Aw, shut up!”
“Don’t-say-shut-up-to-each-other,” said Francie, imitating her mother.
Neeley smiled and proceeded to scrub his face, neck, arms, and hands. He sang as he washed.
There’s Egypt in your dreamy eyes,
A bit of Cairo in your style….
Francie ironed away contentedly.
Neeley was dressed at last. He stood before her in his dark blue double-breasted suit, fresh white shirt with the soft turned-down collar and a polka-dot bow tie. He smelled fresh and clean from washing and his curly-blond hair gleamed.
“How do I look, Prima Donna?”
He buttoned up his coat jauntily and Francie saw that he wore their father’s signet ring.
It was true then—what Granma had said: that the Rommely women had the gift of seeing the ghosts of their beloved dead. Francie saw her father.
“Neeley, do you still remember ‘Molly Malone’?”
He put a hand in his pocket, turned away from her and sang.
In Dublin’s fair city,
The girls are so pretty…
Papa…Papa!
Neeley had the same clear true voice. And how unbelievably handsome he was! So handsome that, even though he wasn’t sixteen years old yet, women turned to look after him with a sigh when he walked down the street. He was so handsome that Francie felt like a dark drab alongside of him.
“Neeley, do you think I’m good-looking?”
“Look! Why don’t you make a novena to St. Theresa about it? I think a miracle might fix you up.”
“No, I mean it.”
“Why don’t you get your hair cut off and wear it in curls like the other girls instead of those chunks wound around your head?”
“I have to wait until I’m eighteen on account of Mother. But do you think I’m good-looking?”
“Ask me again when you fill out a little more.”
“Please tell me.”
He examined her carefully, then said, “You’ll pass.” She had to be satisfied with that.
He had said he was in a hurry, but now he seemed reluctant to go.
“Francie! McShane…I mean Dad, will be here for supper tonight. I’m working afterwards. Tomorrow will be the wedding and a party in the new house tomorrow night. Monday, I have to go to school. And while I’m there, you’ll be getting on that Wolverine train for Michigan. There’ll be no chance to say good-bye to you alone. So I’ll say good-bye now.”
“I’ll be home for Christmas, Neeley.”
“But it won’t be the same.”
“I know.”
He waited. Francie extended her right hand. He pushed her hand aside, put his arms around her and kissed her on the cheek. Francie clung to him and started to cry. He pushed her away.
“Gee, girls make me sick,” he said. “Always so mushy.” But his voice was ragged as though he, too, was going to cry.
He turned and ran out of the flat. Francie went out into the hallway and watched him run down the steps. He paused in the well of darkness at the foot of the stairs and turned to look back up at her. Although it was dark, there was brightness where he stood.
So like Papa…so like Papa, she thought. But he had more strength in his face than Papa had had. He waved to her. Then he was gone.
Four o’clock.
Francie decided to get dressed first, and then fix supper so that she’d be all ready when Ben came to call for her. He had tickets and they were going to see Henry Hull in The Man Who Came Back. It was their last date until Christmas because Ben was leaving for college tomorrow. She liked Ben. She liked him an awful lot. She wished that she could love him. If only he wasn’t so sure of himself all the time. If only he’d stumble—just once. If only he needed her. Ah, well. She had five years to think it over.
She stood before the mirror in her white slip. As she curved her arm over her head in washing, she remembered how she had sat on the fire escape when a little girl and watched the big girls in the flats across the yards getting ready for their dates. Was someone watching her as she had once watched?
She looked towards the window. Yes, across two yards she saw a little girl sitting on a fire escape with a book in her lap and a bag of candy at hand. The girl was peering through the bars at Francie. Francie knew the girl, too. She was a slender little thing of ten, and her name was Florry Wendy.
Francie brushed out her long hair, braided it and wound the braids around her head. She put on fresh stockings and white high-heeled pumps. Before she slipped a fresh pink linen dress over her head, she sprinkled violet sachet powder on a square of cotton and tucked it inside her brassiere.
She thought she heard Fraber’s wagon come in. She leaned out of the window and looked. Yes, the wagon had come in. Only it wasn’t a wagon anymore. It was a small maroon motor truck with the name in gilt letters on the sides and the man making preparations to wash it wasn’t Frank, the nice young man with rosy cheeks. He was a little bandy-legged draft-exempt fellow.
She looked across the yards and saw that Florry was still staring at her through the bars of the fire escape. Francie waved and called:
“Hello, Francie.”
“My name ain’t Francie,” the little girl yelled back. “It’s Florry, and you know it, too.”
“I know,” said Francie.
She looked down into the yard. The tree whose leaf umbrellas had curled around, under and over her fire escape had been cut down because the housewives complained that wash on the lines got entangled in its branches. The landlord had sent two men and they had chopped it down.
But the tree hadn’t died…it hadn’t died.
A new tree had grown from the stump and its trunk had grown along the ground until it reached a place where there were no wash lines above it. Then it had started to grow towards the sky again.
Annie, the fir tree, that the Nolans had cherished with waterings and manurings, had long since sickened and died. But this tree in the yard—this tree that men chopped down…this tree that they built a bonfire around, trying to burn up its stump—this tree lived!
It lived! And nothing could destroy it.
Once more she looked at Florry Wendy reading on the fire escape.
“Good-bye, Francie,” she whispered.
She closed the window.
HTML style by Stephen Thomas, University of Adelaide.
Modified by Skip for ESL Bits English Language Learning.