IT WAS THE night that Frankie was coming to meet her folks. Margy was on her feet two blocks before Maujer Street in agony as to whether the motorman would stop at that corner. For once, she wanted to save time. Fortunately, another passenger wanted to get off at that block and while the motorman might ignore one passenger’s desires, he couldn’t possibly ignore two.
She got home ten minutes earlier than usual. She needn’t have hurried. Flo had everything under control. The chopped meat, onions and potatoes were in the frying pan. The flat was immaculate.
“Oh, everything looks so nice, Mama,” said Margy. “And you look nice, too.”
Indeed, Flo looked nice. She had on a freshly laundered house dress and she had shampooed her hair that morning. Flo was only thirty-nine and still slender and shapely. She would have looked young and pretty if it hadn’t been for the bitter look on her face.
“And that ain’t all,” said Flo. “Look!” She opened the icebox. Alone on the top shelf was a small, round, high, creamy cheesecake and a half-pint bottle of coffee cream. “Real cream for coffee when he comes.”
“You shouldn’t’ve,” protested Margy. “Frankie’s used to condensed milk in his coffee just like us.”
“If he’s coming here with the idea that we’re shanty Irish trash, he’s going to find himself mistaken,” said Flo.
“Why, Mama, he never had any such idea.”
“What other idea could he have? A girl lets him meet her on the sly without her parents knowing. She takes jewelry from him when she hardly knows him and keeps it from her mother. So he can’t have much of an opinion of her and her family.”
“I would’ve brought him home to meet you long ago only I was afraid you’d carry on.”
“Am I carrying on now that I know he’s coming?” asked Flo.
Yes! Margy wanted to shout. Instead she said, “Aw, Mama, you got everything fixed so nice and you’re so swell about entertaining him, don’t spoil it all now.” Somehow, this got to Flo and she said nothing more.
Henny got home early. He had saved time by doing the opposite of Margy, riding a block past his corner, which saved some minutes spent in futile argument with the motorman. He ate quickly, ignoring the newspaper for once, and then put on a clean shirt, collar and tie. He got his vest out of the closet, brushed it and hung it on the back of a chair.
Margy washed, put on fresh makeup and a new white Georgette blouse. By eight o’clock the three clean Shannons were sitting stiffly and silently in their kitchen waiting to receive the suitor. When the bell rang at a quarter past eight, the Shannons as one got to their feet, and while Margy pressed the button that opened the downstairs door, Henny got into his vest and Flo led the way to the parlor.
Margy, watching Frankie come up the stairs, saw him through her parents’ critical eyes and decided that he’d do. He had had his suit pressed and a bay-rum barbershop smell preceded his entrance.
She introduced him self-consciously before she took his hat and placed it in the exact middle of the bed in the adjoining room. Frankie came with gifts: a box of peanut brittle for his future mother-in-law, a couple of two-for-a-quarter cigars for Henny and a corsage of lavender sweet peas tied with tinsel ribbon for Margy.
Flo thanked him stiffly but Margy knew she was pleased. Henny made much of the cigars assuring Frankie that he was a young man who certainly knew his tobacco. But Henny didn’t smoke cigars. He placed them in his vest pocket intending to present them to his foreman in hope of gaining some small concession in exchange. Margy beamed with pride as she pinned the corsage to the left shoulder of her blouse. Flo passed the box of candy around. The peanut brittle came in for sprightly praise. They talked about the gifts as long as they could. Then the conversation died. No one said anything for a long time.
Henny, knowing it was his duty as host to keep the talk flowing, put his stiff curved hands on his knees, leaned forward, cleared his throat, looked directly into Frankie’s eyes and asked:
“Do you think light wines and beer will ever come back?” It was a frequent question in those days. Frankie looked confused but pulled himself together.
“You can search me,” was his considered opinion.
Flo put in her two cents’ worth. “Maybe the young man ain’t interested in blind tigers.”
“Pigs,” corrected Henny.
“Saloons, tigers, speakeasies, cider stores, call them blind pigs, even,” conceded Flo. “All mean the same thing—a place where a man gets drunk and spends his hard-earned money.” She looked directly at her husband.
His eyes fell. He wanted to explain that he never got drunk; that he spent very little money in saloons; that he went there merely to relax in talk with other men. But out of consideration for their guest, he said nothing. He tried a different conversational approach.
“Me, I’m all for keeping the law. But they got no right to take a workingman’s beer away from him. Prohibition was put over on us while our boys was dying in the trenches. That reminds me: Was you with the Rainbow Division, Mr. Malone?”
“I never saw action,” admitted Frankie. “I happened to be in second-year High when the war broke out.”
“You should have known,” Flo reproached her husband.
“I only thought . . . so many of our Brooklyn boys was with the Rainbow Division,” apologized Henny, “that I thought you was one of them.”
“I was only a kid myself,” put in Margy brightly. “So dumb, I hardly knew there was a war on. But I saw Rudolph Valentino in the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and that showed that war is a terrible thing.”
All agreed that war was a terrible thing and again the talk died out. Margy revived it. “Still and all,” she said, “there were the poems that came out of the war. I love the one about the poppies growing between the crosses row on row.”
“My favorite,” said Frankie, “is, ‘I Have a Rendezvous With Death.’”
They urged him to recite it but he begged off saying he didn’t know all the words. Henny came out of a deep study.
“Rondy-voo?” he asked, puzzled.
“It means a date,” said Margy.
“It means we all got to go someday,” amplified Flo.
“Knock wood,” suggested Frankie.
The quartet beat a brief tattoo on the arms of their chairs. There was a solemn pause—the pause that precedes a dissertation on death. Henny took matters into his own hands and rejected death as a conversational theme. He brought the talk back to poetry.
“There’s a piece, not about the war exactly, but I like it anyway. It goes something like this:
In all my life, I’ve got to see
A poem as lovely as a tree.
His wife and daughter looked at him in blank astonishment. They had never heard the word, lovely, come from his lips. They looked at him so strangely that he felt he had to apologize.
“Only reason I read it when it was in the Brooklyn Eagle was that the feller what wrote it was a Brooklyn boy what got killed in the war. They got a legion post named after him, now: The Joyce Kilmer Post they call it.”
Margy was proud of her father for knowing that. “You know a lot of things, Papa,” she said.
“Oh, I get around,” said Henny debonairly.
Flo pressed her lips together so that she wouldn’t say, Yes, around to saloons and wherever else bums hang out.
“Brooklyn is a wonderful place in many ways,” expanded Henny, heady with his daughter’s compliment. “There’s many a famous person come from Brooklyn.”
“And most of them are ashamed of it, too,” said Flo making ashes out of his pride.
“That’s because some dumb people don’t realize Brooklyn’s a fine city.”
“This part of Brooklyn ain’t fine,” said Flo, “the way the neighborhood’s run down.”
“This neighborhood ain’t all of Brooklyn, I’ll let you know,” said loyal Henny.
“Well, it’s all the Brooklyn we’ll ever know,” said Flo. She stood up and asked to be excused and left the room abruptly. Frankie looked puzzled.
“Mama went out to make coffee,” explained Margy.
“Oh! For a minute I thought something out of the way was said,” said Frankie.
They had about run the gamut of conversational topics. They had discussed the fiery question of the day. The right of a strong minority to inflict prohibition on an unwilling majority. Henny had made a brief statement concerning the rights of the workingman. They had acknowledged the horrors of war and the beauty of poetry; the inevitability of death, and had skirmished briefly with the subject of civic pride. There remained three more general topics of conversation to get them through the rest of the evening: Religion, politics and the weather. Henny tackled politics.
“If it’s not a personal question, Mr. Malone,” he asked politely, “I’d like to know whether you’re a Republican or whether you vote the Democrat ticket.” His voice capitalized Democrat but put Republican in the lower case.
“I cast my first vote this coming election,” said Frankie proudly, “and of course, I’ll vote the straight Democratic ticket.”
“That’s fine,” approved Henny. “Then I take it that you got no use for that man in the White House—Harding.”
“No use at all,” pronounced Frankie.
Henny got up and shook the boy’s hand. They were one against the Republican party. After a while Flo appeared in the alcove.
“There’s coffee,” she announced.
They went out into the kitchen. There was a fresh cloth on the table. Instead of the usual custom of placing the cut cake in the center of the table where all could reach for a piece to eat with their hands, Flo had set out cake plates and forks. Margy was proud of her mother for knowing and doing the right thing. Frankie stood in the middle of the kitchen and looked around.
“May I wash my hands?” he asked politely.
Margy, knowing that his request was a delicate way of asking where the bathroom was, was filled with consternation. They had no bathroom! Literal Flo produced a small enameled basin which she placed in the sink, handed the boy a clean towel and told him there was hot water in the kettle.
Frankie held the towel in his hands and looked frustrated. Henny drew him into the bedroom next to the kitchen.
“The toilet’s in the hall,” said Henny in a hoarse whisper heard by the two women in the kitchen. “I’ll get you the key.”
“I just want to wash my hands,” lied Frankie in a clear loud voice.
The two men came out of the bedroom. Frankie’s face was brick red with embarrassment. He washed his clean hands at the sink and dried them thoroughly. They sat down to coffee and cake.
Frankie, trying desperately to ingratiate himself with Margy’s parents, praised the cheesecake claiming it was creamier than the kind sold on his block. He asked where the bakery store was, saying he intended to buy a duplicate cake to take home to his mother.
Flo was anxious to know the boy’s religion. To that end, she asked him bluntly what church he attended. He told her St. Cecelia’s.
“We go to St. Catherine’s ourselves,” she said, implying that people who went elsewhere just didn’t count. “I mean, Margy and me go,” she added giving her husband a bitter look.
“Sunday’s the one day in the week when a workingman can sleep late,” said Henny defensively.
“You could go to twelve-o’clock Mass,” said his wife.
“That’s High Mass and too long.”
Before Flo and Henny could get off on an argument, Frankie announced his impending departure.
“I guess I better make a break,” he said, “and not wear out my welcome by staying too long.”
They trooped back to the parlor. Margy held his hat while he made his polite farewells.
“I enjoyed the conversation,” he said, “and the coffee and cake.” Feeling that this was inadequate, he added, “You certainly have a nice home here, Mrs. Shannon.”
Then it came!
“I’m glad you realize that, Mr. Malone,” said Flo. “You can understand, then, that Margy’s in no hurry to leave her home and get married until she can have even a nicer home than this.”
Frankie’s face colored quickly. “I happen to come from a pretty nice home myself, Mrs. Shannon,” he said with dignity.
Margy, trying desperately to change the conversation called out: “Look! It’s beginning to sprinkle.” All went to look out of the window at the light rain which had begun to fall.
“What’s a little rain?” asked Frankie.
“But you’ll ruin your press,” she said.
“I happen to have another suit home, strange as it may seem,” said Frankie coldly.
Stiff goodnights were exchanged. Margy walked down the stairs with Frankie. As they reached the bottom, Mrs. Shannon called over the banister:
“Thanks for the peanut brittle and all.”
“You’re welcome, I’m sure,” he called back.
When they reached the vestibule he would have left her without a good-night kiss but she held him there in the dark cubicle. All doubt of her love for the boy vanished when she realized how vulnerable he was to hurt and how she had hurt him indirectly through her parents. She decided that she wanted to stand between him and hurt for the rest of their lives.
“It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter,” she soothed him. “Mama’s that way to everyone.”
“That crack about taking you out of your rich home,” he said.
“She didn’t mean anything.”
“Oh, no?”
“Well, even if she did, what does it matter? I’m the one you’re marrying, not her. And I think you’re wonderful.”
“Thanks for nothing.”
She held him tightly, murmuring comforting words. He stood unyielding in her arms. Finally she said:
“And we’ll be married very soon.”
That won him over. His arms went around her and he whispered against her hair, “I’ll show them! I’ll show them all someday.”
“I know. I know you will,” she whispered back in fierce faith.
They gave promises to each other.
He finished off the evening by passing fair judgment on Margy’s parents. “Your old man’s not a bad guy,” he said. “But your mother . . .” He decided to be charitable. “Well I guess she’s got her troubles,” he conceded.
“They’re really all right,” she said. “It’s just that you have to get used to their ways.”
“It was sure hard talking to them,” he said. “I don’t mind saying I was nervous.”
“You know,” said Margy, “I was wondering when we’d get around to talking about the weather.”
“You had a hell of a time bringing it in, all right.”
“I thought I’d die.”
“Come to think of it, we all had a hell of a time, didn’t we?”
Suddenly the strain of the evening was lifted and they started to snicker as they recalled the more humorous aspects of the visit. The snickers changed to giggles and the giggles to laughter. Margy laughed so hard that she became weak and had to hold on to Frankie. They laughed until they cried.
The laughter came up the stairs—through the closed doors of the flat. The father and mother, hearing the young laughter, exchanged a slow look of defeat.