“It was an awful lot of water and very little coffee.”
—A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
Not everything that grows is good.
Take Jonny’s drinking. Not so terrible when it’s just the newlyweds, sharing a night shift as janitors at the elementary school. He wears his dancing shoes, she, her high-laced kid boots and a cherry wool fascinator. She saves bits of chalk from the wastebaskets. He dusts, then plays, the piano in the assembly room. The couple is charmed by the tiny chairs and desks, which make them feel grown-up, though they are shy of twenty. They make love on the chintz-covered sofa in the teacher’s lounge as they wait for coffee to boil on the hot plate. They drink it with condensed milk, and the sandwiches Katie has packed — bologna on rye. Most of Brooklyn is unlucky and asleep. Most would die for a taste of such ardor.
And Johnny drinks other things. Scotch. Beer. Katie tends to him. But when the baby comes, he is drunk somewhere else. And when another comes the following year, he grabs the bottle like it’s the branch of the tree that will break his fall. His daughter learns that when he is drunk, most folks read him as sober — quiet and deliberate. When he is sober, he is loose, joyful, singing “Molly Malone” on his dark walk home from a stint as a singing waiter.
In the morning, coffee. For all of them, their rare indulgence. While Katie skimps on food and coal, saves pennies for a someday house, she doesn’t blink when Francie lets her mug go to waste. The girl loves the taste but not as much as she loves the warmth, the smell. It’s weak, but it’s real. And with a lump of chicory in the pot to make it better, bitter, darker. Her ritual – to let it cool beside her in its own time, and then to pour it down the throat of the kitchen sink. Johnny balks, but Katie insists on the girl’s right to waste something, to feel rich for a minute.
I’m nursing a lukewarm light roast at my neighborhood coffee shop, not grading the student essays stacked before me. For decades, coffee has always, for me, meant Francie and Katie. Reading the book as a child, I felt my own capacity to be a hard and practical mother, and I promised myself that if I was, I would allow my children coffee, whether they wanted it or not. It would be a thing they could point to when they wondered about my love. (Thus far, they find it about as appealing as antibiotics, so if anything, it’s made them wonder more.) I’m thinking of mother and daughter, and I go online to locate the exact scene where Francie dumps her share. Before I can find it, I find something better. The family name, which I have forgotten somehow. Nolan. My son’s name. My son, who has been told that he is no one’s namesake.
So he’s named after all of them. Johnny, the talented dreamer, drinker.
Katie, once soft, pity lost on her. Neely, hearty, impulsive. And Francie, bright, tender, a story-maker. All along I thought that I just liked the sound of the name, the almost-symmetry, the shape of the word in my mouth. But this.
The Nolans keep me up, keep me company. This favorite family of mine, newly fresh in my imagination. How many nights did I read that book by flashlight, trying to calm my fears? How many times did I weep, knowing that Francie was my dearest friend? How could I have forgotten what they called themselves when I say their shared name a thousand ways to my child? When I fill my kitchen with the scent of coffee every morning?
These days I take it with whole milk, no sugar, though for a time I drank it black, and then a stretch of foolishness, French vanilla from a machine in the school library. I had to learn it. My mother never touched it, and for my father only instant, with a teaspoon of sugar. Instant lacks true aroma, and if it gave him coffee breath, I wouldn’t know. He wasn’t close enough on those off-to-work mornings for me to notice, though at times the air held a trace of his Gillette Foamy or Old Spice Body Talc as he went from the kitchen to the porch to the still-dark world.
So we weren’t a family who smoothed one another’s messy morning hair or hugged without occasion or sipped hot beverages together. So we gulped cold, sweet things out of disposable cups we abandoned on bookcases, and ate entire columns of Pringles, alone, in front of the television. Who’s to say that’s not a dream home? But after dad’s stroke, at the rehab center, there is real coffee, endless coffee, Green Mountain Premium Something or Other and in this new place I drink it with my father by a window.
Dad requests “unleaded” at lunch and dinner. My first visit, it takes a minute to see that the sugar packets and little creamers are out of the question for his weakened hands. He takes it black, and I take a chance, making it sweet and light for him without a word. I lift the cling wrap from the yellow wedge of cake that has gone untouched. He thanks me, digs in. Had he been hoping I would do these things for him, or has learned to take whatever he can and not worry too much about what’s left or what’s next? Is this plenty?
He tells me about Felix – the name he has given to the left side of his body, the weak and uncooperative side. If he remembers his Latin, and he does, he knows the name means lucky, happy. Maybe not terribly lucky, but lucky enough. He talks to Felix in physical therapy. Leg extensions from the wheelchair. Short walks on the arm of some pretty-enough therapist. Come on Felix, he calls to the foot that forgets. Let’s go, Felix! I chime in. When have I cheered for my father before today? When has he heard me do so? When he got his Masters diploma, that crowded auditorium, those itchy tights. Or those evenings he schooled the Jeopardy contestants from the recliner; and that time when he beat my sister in a race on the beach, shirtless, barefoot in those orange swim trunks, his pride at such a thing too big, but I fed it, whooped and hollered like a child from some other generation.
Mostly, I called to him at night. He slept across the hall from us, would fall asleep with no trouble. And because I was too old to be scared, and too scared to put my bare feet on the floor swirling with demons, I called out to him, “Goodnight, Dad!” as if he hadn’t been asleep for an hour, or two, as if this were just my regular evening John-boy. And it could take a few tries. My sisters would grumble beside me, kick their blankets off, turn away, but he would eventually answer, and never with anger, “Okay! Goodnight, now.”
Even so, sleep couldn’t beat my growing anxiety. Out came a book, a burning-out flashlight. On the cover, Francie, in sepia, lit by candlelight. Swirling cursive. I can smell the old pages. I can remember the exact weight, how I kept cracking the spine. It took two hands to keep open – one of those too-fat and too-narrow paperbacks, the print tiny, the pages prone to loosening themselves like maple leaves, so self-assured in their worth they could reject the order they’d inherited.
And what did I keep, after all? Not the arcs or the hurts, not the finely-timed departures. I kept the coffee, the forgiveness, the mounting hunger for all kinds of nourishment, sweet and bitter, right and wrong. I kept the song, the name.
Dad’s mother was a drinker. That’s what my Aunt Julie says. My father doesn’t remember, and doesn’t deny it. He seems wistful for his child mind that could come of age and never have to notice. What he remembers is Mary Riley sitting with a perpetual cup of tea, her little afternoon pick-me-up. What he remembers is that she served the same to a series of neighborhood women who wept at her kitchen table. That she knew how to listen, how to be a woman steeped in anybody’s heartache. None of it better or worse.
She would have been a friend to someone like Katie Nolan, doomed to love a drunk, raw-knuckled from scrubbing tenement stairwells, pregnant again, aware that her love for her children is uneven, unremarkable, addictive, irreversible. My grandmother would have shooed my father away, Time to go, Paul. She would have taken Katie’s hand. Not one for metaphor, she would have ignored the tree outside, wrestling its way out of the sour earth. She would have closed the curtains, cut and sewn from a worn day dress, and put the kettle on. She’d find a heel of rye, maybe some bologna or a wedge of cheese, a few shortbreads. She’d tell Katie to stay as long as she needs, to keep her heart warm. To tend the forever loneliness with whatever she can reach. No need to make sense of life, to make believe it means something more. Let the Lord sort it out when the time comes. He could afford to do a little more around here, to tell the truth.
