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Oh, what a wonderful day was Saturday in Brooklyn. Oh, how wonderful anywhere!
Since the beginning of time, everyone, especially the Irish, had loved and cared for the singer in their midst.
The Nolans just couldn’t get enough of life. They lived their own lives up to the hilt but that wasn’t enough. They had to fill in on the lives of all the people they made contact with.
She was all of these things and of something more that did not come from the Rommelys nor the Nolans, the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only—the something different from anyone else in the two families. It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life—the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.
Sometimes Johnny went into one of his dances on the little platform that he pretended was a stage. He was so graceful and handsome, so loving, so full of the grandness of just living, that Katie, watching him, thought she would die of being happy.
“And you must tell the child the legends I told you—as my mother told them to me and her mother to her. You must tell the fairy tales of the old country. You must tell of those not of the earth who live forever in the hearts of people—fairies, elves, dwarfs and such. You must tell of the great ghosts that haunted your father’s people and of the evil eye which a hex put on your aunt. You must teach the child of the signs that come to the women of our family when there is trouble and death to be. And the child must believe in the Lord God and Jesus, His Only Son.” She crossed herself. “Oh, and
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“the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination. I, myself, even in this day and at my age, have great need of recalling the miraculous lives of the Saints and the great miracles that have come to pass on earth. Only by having these things in my mind can I live beyond what I have to live for.”
It is a good thing to learn the truth one’s self. To first believe with all your heart, and then not to believe, is good too. It fattens the emotions and makes them to stretch. When as a woman life and people disappoint her, she will have had practice in disappointment and it will not come so hard. In teaching your child, do not forget that suffering is good too. It makes a person rich in character.”
“If there was only one tree like that in the world, you would think it was beautiful,” said Katie. “But because there are so many, you just can’t see how beautiful it really
His life was finished before it had a chance to begin. He was doomed and no one knew it better than Johnny Nolan.
Katie had a fierce desire for survival which made her a fighter. Johnny had a hankering after immortality which made him a useless dreamer. And that was the great difference between these two who loved each other so well.
Sissy had two great failings. She was a great lover and a great mother. She had so much of tenderness in her, so much of wanting to give of herself to whoever needed what she had, whether it was her money, her time, the clothes off her back, her pity, her understanding, her friendship or her companionship and love. She was mother to everything that came her way. She loved men, yes. She loved women too, and old people and especially children. How she loved children! She loved the down-and-outers. She wanted to make everybody happy. She had tried to seduce the good priest who heard her
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All of us are what we have to be and everyone lives the kind of life it’s in him to live.
She is my own sister but people talk about her. She is a bad girl and there is no getting around that. When she dies, her soul will wander through Purgatory through all eternity. I have often told her that and she always answers that it wouldn’t wander alone.
Maybe after a while she’ll get out of Purgatory because even if they say she is bad, she is good to all the people in the world who are lucky enough to run across her. God will have to take that into consideration.”
The sad thing was in the knowing that all their nerve would get them nowhere in the world and that they were lost as all people in Brooklyn seem lost when the day is nearly over and even though the sun is still bright, it is thin and doesn’t give you warmth when it shines on you.
It was the first of many disillusionments that were to come as her capacity to feel things grew.
She loved him and she loved the piano. She could find no excuse for her easy tears.
A person who pulls himself up from a low environment via the bootstrap route has two choices. Having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion and understanding in his heart for those he has left behind him in the cruel upclimb.
It would seem as if all the unwanted children would stick together and be one against the things that were against them. But not so. They hated each other as much as the teacher hated them.
Each single combination of numbers was a new set-up for the family and no two stories were ever the same.
He showed her the park and how she could walk through it diagonally to go to school. “That should make you happy. You can see the seasons change as you come and go. What do you say to that?” Francie, recalling something her mother had once read to her answered, “My cup runneth over.” And she meant it.
It was a good thing that she got herself into this other school. It showed her that there were other worlds beside the world she had been born into and that these other worlds were not unattainable.
Election Day seemed the greatest holiday of all to Francie. It, more than any other time, belonged to the whole neighborhood. Maybe people voted in other parts of the country too, but it couldn’t be the way it was in Brooklyn, thought Francie.
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.
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.
“They think this is so good,” she thought. “They think it’s good—the tree they got for nothing and their father playing up to them and the singing and the way the neighbors are happy. They think they’re mighty lucky that they’re living and that it’s Christmas again.
What was Mama talking about? Spring had just started. The winter would never come again.
She found she was becoming dissatisfied with the way things just happened in the nick of time.
“You’ll be all right, girlie. I’m going to give you something to put you to sleep. When you wake up, just remember that you had a bad dream. That’s all it was; a bad dream. Hear?”
“Ghosts are not always those who pass through closed doors,” said Mary Rommely. “Katie has told how her husband used to talk to this saloon man. In all those years of the talking, Yohnny gave away pieces of himself to this man. When Katie called on her man for help, the pieces of him came together in this man, and it was Yohnny within the saloon man’s soul that heard and came to her help.”
“If what Granma Mary Rommely said is true, then it must be that no one ever dies, really. Papa is gone, but he’s still here in many ways. He’s here in Neeley who looks just like him and in Mama who knew him so long. He’s here in his mother who began him and who is still living. Maybe I will have a boy some day who looks like Papa and has all of Papa’s good without the drinking. And that boy will have a boy. And that boy will have a boy. It might be there is no real death.”
“Well,” Francie decided, “I guess the thing that is giving me this headache is life—and nothing else but.”
There was a legend in the neighborhood that any three wishes made on that day, would come true. One had to be an impossible wish, another a wish that you could make come true yourself, and the third had to be a wish for when you grew up.
She began to understand that her life might seem revolting to some educated people. She wondered, when she got educated, whether she’d be ashamed of her background.
Oh, the novel. I dashed it off at odd moments. It doesn’t take long to write things of which you know nothing. When you write of actual things, it takes longer, because you have to live them first.
“Just as you get on the bridge, there’s a bank with a big clock. People stand up to look at the time so’s they know whether they’re early or late for work. I betcha a million people look at that clock every day,” figured Neeley.
All she’d notice was that some things were strange because they reminded her of Brooklyn and that other things were strange because they were so different from Brooklyn. “I guess there is nothing new, then, in the world,” decided Francie unhappily. “If there is anything new or different, some part of it must be in Brooklyn and I must be used to it and wouldn’t be able to notice it if I came across it.” Like Alexander the Great, Francie grieved, being convinced that there were no new worlds to conquer.
“And that’s where the whole trouble is,” thought Francie. “We’re too much alike to understand each other because we don’t even understand our own selves. Papa and I were too different persons and we understood each other. Mama understands Neeley because he’s different from her. I wish I was different in the way that Neeley is.”
“The difference between rich and poor,” said Francie, “is that the poor do everything with their own hands and the rich hire hands to do things. We’re not poor any more. We can pay to have some things done for us.” “I want to stay poor, then,” said Katie, “because I like to use my hands.”
All women go through a black-lace-drawers time. You came to it earlier than most and you’ll get over it sooner.
“What do we drink to?” asked Francie. “To a hope,” said Katie. “A hope that our family will always be together the way it is tonight.”
“Neeley, if you had to die, wouldn’t it be wonderful to die now—while you believed that everything was perfect, the way this night is perfect?”
“There’s no other place like it,” Francie said. “Like what?” “Brooklyn. It’s a magic city and it isn’t real.”
It’s mysterious here in Brooklyn. It’s like—yes—like a dream. The houses and streets don’t seem real. Neither do the people.” “They’re real enough—the way they fight and holler at each other and the way they’re poor, and dirty, too.” “But it’s like a dream of being poor and fighting. They don’t really feel these things. It’s like it’s all happening in a dream.”
“It’s only your imagination makes it different. But that’s all right,” he added magnanimously, “as long as it makes you feel so happy.”
Neeley’s different. He’ll always play what he likes and not care two cents whether anyone else likes it.”
Life’s funny,” Katie went on. “A couple of accidental things come together and a person could make a lot out of them.
Francie had a vision. Fifty years from now, she’d be telling her grandchildren how she had come to the office, sat at her reader’s desk and in the routine of work had read that war had been declared. She knew from listening to her grandmother that old age was made up of such remembrances of youth.
She decided to fix this time in her life exactly the way it was this instant. Perhaps that way she could hold on to it as a living thing and not have it become something called a memory.
