A smaller, sadder tree in Brooklyn

Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a beloved American classic. Its story of an Irish-American girl growing up in poverty in 1900s Brooklyn has charmed readers for over 80 years.

Tomorrow will be better is one of Smith’s three other novels, all less well known. This one, published in 1948, is also the story of an Irish-American girl growing up in Brooklyn around 1920, and also features the detailed descriptions of life that made A Tree Grows in Brooklyn so vivid.

Margy Shannon was christened Margaret, but

No matter what name you have, in Brooklyn they change it to end with y or ie.

Margy is an only child, sixteen years old at the start of the novel. Like many young people of the time, she has left high school after a couple of years to get a job, contribute to the family income, and start ‘leading a life of her own’. She works as a mail reader for a Mail Order House.

As is typical for Smith’s novels, it is the level of detail that immerses the reader in the place and times.

She earned twelve dollars a week. Like her father, she placed her sealed pay envelope on her mother’s outstretched palm each Saturday afternoon. That was the tradition; a decent husband or good child brought home the pay envelope unopened.

Flo gave Margy two dollars out of her envelope. Out of this Margy paid carfare to and from work and bought the daily bologna sandwich and cup of coffee which was the routine lunch of most of her coworkers. That left fifty cents a week for everything else: the hot dog she and a girl friend indulged in when they took a Sunday trolley ride […] or the cup of hot chocolate with fake whipped cream.

Margy’s family is one of many hardworking, tired, Irish-American immigrants in Brooklyn; barely getting by, counting every penny, worn down by the daily struggle, but still in hope that their child will have a better life. Her mother Flo expects that this will be attained via marriage, and therefore it is vital that Margy should remain chaste until her marital step up the economic ladder.

[Flo] If you run around and some man gets you in trouble, don’t come crying home to me.

Margy’s own aspirations center on a home and children, and a husband she can love. She is a little taken by her boss Mr Prentiss, but there is a vast gulf of class., money and age between them.

If only it had been that I went to college like he did — or that I was a supervisor here. Then maybe he’d give me a second thought But in the first place, he’s too old.

Margy is not beautiful and cannot afford to dress well. Frankie Malone, a thin dark Irish boy who goes to her school, seems the best bet, so she skulks around places where he might be, walks past his house, tries to speak flirtatiously to him when she gets the opportunity, and finally manages to wangle a date.

Margy is at the center of this novel, but some chapters drift into Flo’s reminiscences of her own teenage life, Frankie’s large family squeezed into a small apartment, Margy’s pretty friend Reenie, and Mr Prentiss’ life with his doting, smothering mother. While these chapters did broaden the picture of the period and the people, they also made the book less focused.

Where this book diverges from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is in its inherent hopelessness. Every character’s story is one of youthful hope eventually sinking into a quicksand of tired hopelessness. This is likely realistic, but also depressing. Despite its title, tomorrow never does seem to be better for these characters.