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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.

"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."

This that I see now, she thought, to see no more this way. Oh, the last time how clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn't held it tighter when you had it every day.
What had Granma Mary Rommely said? "To look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory."

"It's sure a good break for Mama. Of course he isn't Papa...
"No. No one will ever be ... Papa. But aside from that, he's a nice man, though."
"Laurie's going to have a mighty easy life all right."
"Annie Laurie McShane! She'll never have the hard times we had, will she?"
"No. And she'll never have the fun we had, either."
"Gosh! We did have fun, didn't we, Neeley?"
"Yeah!"
"Poor Laurie," said Francie pityingly.

"God rest her soul," echoed the Nolans.
"I have been waitin' many years and now the time has come when 'tis no longer disrespect to the dead to speak out.
"Katherine Nolan, I'm askin' to keep company with you. Object, a weddin' in the fall."
Katie looked quickly at Francie and frowned. What was the matter with Mother anyhow? Francie wasn't even thinking of laughing.

Katie held the coffeepot in one hand and the saucepan of hot milk in the other and poured both into the cups simultaneously. "I remember," she said, "when there was no milk in the house. Your father would put a lump of butter in his coffee—if we had butter. He said that butter was cream in the first place and just as good in coffee."
Papa...!

Then a thunderous thought came to her.
"My grandparents never knew how to read or write. Those who came before them couldn't read or write. My mother's sister can't read or write. My parents never even graduated from grade school. I never went to high school. But I, M. Frances K. Nolan, am now in college. Do you hear that, Francie? You're in college!
"Oh gosh, I feel sick."

"Don't say that!" said Sissy sharply. "We're not living in adultery. We're living in bigamy."
"And it's got to stop right now, see? You're widowed from the first one and you're going to get a divorce from the second, and then you're going to marry me again, see?"
"Yes, John," she said meekly.
"And my name ain't John!" he roared. "It's Steve! Steve! Steve!”

"Jesus Christ died on the cross for people like you," he announced passionately, "and now you won't show a new girl where the terlet is." Francie stared at him, astonished. Then she couldn't help it—it had sounded so funny—she burst out laughing. Everything changed then. A murmur ran round the table.
"She laughed!"
"Hey! The new girl laughed!"

She picked up the flowers-two dozen dark red roses on a sheaf of ferns. She cradled them in her arm, the way the other girls did, and pretended for a moment that they were hers. She looked for the owner's name on the card. But her own name was on the card! Her name! The card said: For Francie on graduation day. Love from Papa. Papa!
The writing was in his fine careful hand . . .

"Why, Katie? Why?" demanded Evy patiently.
"A song that Johnny sang once," explained Katie.
As Francie wrote the name, she heard the chords; she heard her father singing, "And "twas there that Annie Laurie."... a song, he said, that belonged to a better world," Katie went on.
"He would have liked the child named after one of his songs."
"Laurie is a pretty name," said Francie.
And Laurie became the baby's name.

"You said we could choose our own subjects."
"But poverty, starvation and drunkenness are ugly subjects to choose. We all admit these things exist. But one doesn't write about them."
"What does one write about?" Unconsciously, Francie picked up the teacher's phraseology.
"One delves into the imagination and finds beauty there. The writer, like the artist, must strive for beauty always."
"What is beauty?"

"Well," Francie decided, "I guess the thing that is giving me this headache is life and nothing else but."
"Don't be silly," said Mama quietly, still leaning back with her eyes closed. "Aunt Sissy's kitchen was too hot. I have a headache, myself." Francie jumped. Was it getting so that Mama could look right into her mind even with her eyes closed?

"You just can't do it, Sissy. There's no way," said Katie.
"There's only one thing to do," said Evy. "Take Francie out of school and let her get working papers."
"But I want her to graduate. My children will be the first ones in the Nolan family to get diplomas."
"You can't eat a diploma," said Evy.

"I'm going to bring it home in ten days. Just as soon as it grows fingernails." She put that in on the spur of the moment.
"What's gotten into you, Sissy? You know God-damned well you didn't have a baby this morning."
"I had a baby. It weighed three pounds. They took it to the incubator so that it wouldn't die and I'm going to get it back in ten days."
"I give up! I give up," he shouted and went out and got drunk.

June 22. Mama turned my mattress today and found my diary and read it. Everywhere I had the word drunk, she made me cross it out and write sick. It's lucky I didn't have anything against Mama written down. If ever I have children I will not read their diaries as I believe that even a child is entitled to some privacy. If Mama finds this again and reads it, I hope she will take the hint.

And Francie had seen it all; had seen it all. She had heard every word.
She remembered how Joanna had smiled at her and how she had turned her head away without smiling back. Why hadn't she smiled back? Why hadn't she smiled back? Now she would suffer she would suffer all the rest of her life every time that she remembered that she had not smiled back.

The children should have returned exhilarated and with a deep and abiding love for the sea and he should have returned with a fine mess of fish. Why, oh why hadn't it turned out the way it did in a song? Why did there have to be his blistered hands and his spoiled suit and sunburn and rotting fish and nausea? Why didn't Little Tilly's mother understand the intention and overlook the result?

"Mama, when I make my Confirmation, can I take Mary for a middle name?"
"No."
Francie's heart sunk. "Why?"
"Because when you were christened, you were named Francie after Andy's girl."
"I know."
"But you were also named Mary after my mother. Your real name is Mary Frances Nolan."

"My brother is next. His arm is just as dirty as mine so don't be surprised. And you don't have to tell him. You told me." They stared at this bit of humanity who had become so strangely articulate. Francie's voice went ragged with a sob. "You don't have to tell him. Besides it won't do no good. He's a boy and he don't care if he is dirty." She turned, stumbled a little and walked out of the room.

Francie made a potsy. . . She shuddered in delighted horror when she heard the scrunch. Would the motorman be mad, she wondered, if he knew that she was making his trolley car work for her? She made the squares but could only write one and seven. She hopped through a game ardently wishing someone were playing with her as she was sure she won with less hops than any other little girl in the world.

Her life, too, was over before it began. But there the similarity ended. Johnny knew he was doomed and accepted it. Katie wouldn't accept it. She started a new life where her old one left off.
She exchanged her tenderness for capability. She gave up her dreams and took over hard realities in their place.
Katie had a fierce desire for survival which made her a fighter. Johnny had a hankering after immortality . . .

Who wants to die? Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating. It gets no sun, and water only when it rains. It's growing out of sour earth. And it's strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way."

"You'll never raise that one," they told her. "Her color ain't good. If the good Lord takes her, it will be for the best. What good is a sickly baby in a poor family? There is too many children on this earth already and no room for the weak ones."
"Don't say that," Katie held her baby tightly. "It's not better to die. . .

“You bought a bushel of coal for twenty-five cents. It is cold. You would start a fire in the stove. But wait! Wait one hour more.
Suffer the cold for an hour. Put a shawl around you. Say, I am cold because I am saving to buy land. That hour will save you three cents' worth of coal. That is three cents for the bank. When you are alone at night, do not light the lamp. Sit in the darkness and dream a while . . .

"That is what is called learning the truth. 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 suffering is good too.

"That is not so. Your children have not done better than you." Mary Rommely sighed. "That may be my fault. I knew not how to teach my daughters because I have nothing behind me excepting that for hundreds of years, my family has worked on the land of some overlord.
I did not send my first child to the school. I was ignorant . . .

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 fam-ilies. It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life-

He was a baby once. He must have been sweet and clean and his mother kissed his little pink toes. Maybe when it thundered at night she came to his crib and fixed his blanket better and whispered that he mustn't be afraid, that mother was there. Then she picked him up and put her cheek on his head and said that he was her own sweet baby.

Some people called it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement.