A/N: Thanks to Jan Levine and to Kathy B for the beta! Flashback appears in Chapter 48, p427 (Harper 75th anniversary edition, 2018). The graduation play passage appears in Chapter 39, p321. This fic was written for Lyricalnights in the 2024 Yuletide fanfiction exchange.

"And Youth, what is thy ambition?"

"...I would be a healer. I would take the broken bodies of men and mend them."

..."That's what thou would'st be. But see! This is what thou shalt be."

—Betty Smith, "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn"

What Thou Shalt Be

Beth had been spending part of the summer with her grandparents in Miami Beach since she was ten years old. In the five years since, she couldn't recall a Saturday when Grandpa hadn't gone off fishing with some of his friends and Grandma hadn't taken her to the library to read the newspapers. Not the Miami papers—she had the Herald and the News delivered to the front door. Not just the ones from New York and Michigan—which would have made more sense, since Grandma had grown up in Brooklyn, gone to college in Michigan, gotten engaged to a boy from Ypsilanti and made a life there before Grandpa had retired and they'd moved to Florida. No, Grandma read papers from all over the country: the South, the Midwest, New England… even places like Alaska and Hawaii! And she could go through a newspaper fast. Beth had watched her skim the pages, picking out one article in this section, another in that, finishing an edition in fifteen minutes or less! Of course, she didn't read word-for-word in that short a time, and she usually limited herself to 'just about a dozen or so' (which was really closer to 20 papers), but she always seemed to find the important things.

Today, as usual, Beth went into the stacks, grabbed a book of her own—today it was a new book called The Outsiders that had just come out last spring—and sat down at the table beside her grandmother to read.

Frances Nolan Harwood's eye moved down the page expertly, stopping and locking on a familiar name in the Daily Iowan. It wasn't a long article, just a couple of paragraphs buried near the back of the first section, but the name still jumped out at Frances as she skimmed. When it did, she let out a low whistle.

Startled, her granddaughter looked up. "What is it, Grandma?" she asked, and Frances smiled.

"Oh, just a name from my past," she said with a laugh. "Come here."

Beth obeyed and peered at the newspaper over her grandmother's shoulder. "Blake won't run for Senate in 1968," she read aloud. "The Allamakee County DA announced Saturday that he will not be entering the race next year…" She looked up quizzically. "I didn't know you'd ever been to Allamakee County."

Frances shook her head. "I never have," she said, pushing her reading glasses up into her short, bobbed hair. "I met Ben back…" Her eyes opened wide. "Gosh, it's been over fifty years, now."

"Fifty?" Beth echoed. Despite her silver hair, Grandma always seemed soyoungto Beth. She knew all the latest trends and didn't mock them. She was just as likely to hum a song from the Billboard Hot 100 as a jazz or swing standard. She signed petitions against the war in Vietnam, campaigned for civil rights, and wasn't afraid to put political commentary into the plays she wrote—one of which was currently playing off-Broadway, and another one was almost certainly being performed in some touring company, repertory theater, or amateur production somewhere, as was the case every year. Oh, she baked cookies and crocheted and did other things that grandmothers were expected to do, but more often than not, she would instead take Beth to the movies or the Bass Museum and pick up some dessert from a pastry shop on the way home. Somehow, when Grandma did turn her hand to baking and needlecrafts, it always felt to Beth as thoughthatwas a role she played to blend in.

Frances nodded with a knowing smile. "It makes me sound ancient, doesn't it?"

Beth shook her head at once. "No, of course not. I-I mean, I just…fifty years ago?"

"I'm not pushing up daisies yet!" Frances laughed. "Though, I know to you, anyone over… thirty must seem to if they've already got one foot in the grave! It was like that for me when I was fifteen, too."

Beth tilted her head and tried to picture her grandmother at fifteen. Somehow, she could only visualize Grandma's head—tortoise shell cat-eye glasses, laugh lines, and chin-length silver bob—mounted on one of her own mini-dress-and-shorts ensembles. The image forced a giggle past her lips. "Sorry!" she apologized at once, but her grandmother didn't seem offended.

"I suppose to you, I would've seemed an old fifteen if you'd known me back then. Of course," she went on, "if you'd lived in the tenements like I did, you'd've been older, too."

Beth's forehead furrowed. "Tenements?" she repeated.

"Slums, if you like," Frances explained. "But to me, they were just… home. Oh, don't look at me like that!" she exclaimed. "It wasn't always the easiest life, but it wasn'tbad. And anyway," she went on, her voice taking on a dreamy quality, "that's where I met Ben…"

She'd been so scared, Francie remembered. Well, scared, but excited, too! She'd never thought she could go to college, not when she hadn't even gone to high school, but even if she had, times were hard, and for all Mama had said she'd been saving up so Francie could go, with Papa gone and four mouths to feed including Baby Laurie, she hadn't quite believed that the money would still be there. Especially since it didn't look now like she would ever get to go to high school, so why would Mama have let the money stay there when they needed it? But Mama had given her the sixty-five dollars when Francie had explained to her about summer school college, and now Francie stood in a crowded bookshop, trying to buy her textbooks for the coming semester.

"Beginning French!" she shouted to the clerk. Then she checked herself. She wasn't eleven anymore and this wasn't Losher's Bread Factory. They had enough books for everyone and she didn't have to go shouting and shoving to make sure she got hers.

"Beginning French," she repeated speaking more softly, but clearly. "And elementary chemistry, please."

"New or second-hand?" the clerk asked, and Francie blinked.

"Why, I don't know," she admitted, suddenly flustered. "Which am I supposed to have?"

"New," the clerk informed her promptly, but before Francie could nod her agreement, someone tapped her on the shoulder and she found herself staring into a pair of warm hazel eyes beneath dark wavy hair that was combed into a pompadour. He wore a flannel blazer, white shirt and navy tie over navy pegtop trousers and looked, in Francie's opinion, quite dashing.

Francie was suddenly conscious of how drab and mousey she must look, and she shoved her hands behind her back before he could see how ragged her fingernails were.

"Get second-hand," he told her with a dazzling smile. "Serves the same purpose as new and half the price."

"Thank you," she said, trying not to think about how there was nothing second-hand about his clothing—as opposed to her own attire, which had once been an old dress of Aunt Sissy's that she had made over for Francie after she'd had to quit school. (Francie had collapsed in Aunt Sissy's apartment one day after she'd been working in the flower factory for about a week, lamenting about how she felt like such a baby in her checked gingham when she saw how the other workers dressed. Aunt Sissy had told her not to worry, fetched a tape measure from her bureau and taken Francie's measurements, and told her to come back in a week. Aunt Sissy had done a wonderful job, even making certain that the neckline was high enough and the bodice loose enough to pass Mama's scrutiny.) Until this very moment, Francie had been very happy with the dress, but now, before this smiling young man, Francie was suddenly aware of how shabby it must look. Why it was almost threadbare about the elbows!

Her cheeks burning, she turned back to the clerk. "Secondhand," she said firmly. She looked down at her list to see what else she needed. "American Plays Eighteen-Fif—"

There was another tap on her shoulder. "Uh-uh," the dashing young man said. "You can read them in the library before and after classes and when you get cuts."

Had he guessed how poor she must be? He wasn't acting as though he pitied her or thought himself above her. He was just smiling at her, friendly-like. Francie smiled back shyly. "Thanks… again," she said.

He touched his fingers to the brim of an imaginary hat. "Anytime," he said, and sauntered away.

She watched him leave the store, a bundle of books he must have already purchased tucked under his arm. Once again, she noticed how handsome he was.

College sure looked like it was going to be wonderful…

"That was Benjamin Blake?" Beth asked, grinning.

"That was Benjamin Blake," Frances nodded. "He was one of those who always seemed so sure of who he was and what he was going to accomplish that he made you sure of it, too." She shook her head a bit, smiling wistfully. "He had his whole life mapped out: regular high school during the year, college credits in the summer to get a jump on getting a degree. He also worked at a law firm in the afternoons… research, filing, drawing up briefs… Whatever it was you could do at those places without being a lawyer yourself, he was doing it… making the connections he knew he'd need down the road. They were going to help him write the bar exam, and then he was going to go out and work for some elderly relative with a country law practice he was going to take over once that relative retired." She chuckled. "I suppose it's not a surprise I remember all that. Back then, I was… well, I think the term they used in some of my literature books was 'smitten.'"

"So, you loved someone else… before Grandpa?" Beth asked, her grin widening.

Frances shook her head. "I don't think I'd call it love," she said seriously. "Not really. I was fifteen; he was nineteen. I didn't have a lot of experience with beaus. I'd never had one. Unless you want to count Albie Seedmore taking me to the matinee after graduation that one time."

"Albie…?" Beth frowned. "B-but I thought you met Grandpa at Ann Arbor and you got engaged just before you graduated."

"I did," Frances nodded. "Albie Seedmore asked me to go with him when I graduated from elementary school."

"Oh." Beth sighed with relief. "Sorry."

"No, I'm glad you asked me instead of jumping to conclusions," Frances said. "At any rate, thinking back now, I don't believe I did love Ben. Oh, he was handsome, and smart, and, well, I'd never met anyone who not only knew what he wanted out of life, but actually had a plan to get it." She shook her head. "I had wishes… dreams… but I guess I never really thought about how I was going to make them come true. I'd read so many books, seen so many plays, where everything just miraculously dropped into the heroine's lap because she was in the right place at the right time. Or sometimes, she selflessly gave her lunch to a starving beggar who turned out to be a millionaire who'd lost his memory and once he got it back, he went searching for the only person who'd ever shown him any kindness and when he found her, of course he proposed to her at once and she accepted and lived happily ever after…"

Beth giggled. "No, really?"

"Are you telling me you didn't buy into that story about the prince who tore the kingdom apart looking for the only girl whose feet fit the glass slipper she'd left behind? It's a good thing shoes were all made to order back then, or she'd have found shopping for them a horror today, what with such an unusual foot size and all…"

Beth was laughing harder and trying to stop, which only made things worse. "Grandma!"

"I'm sorry," Frances said, still smiling, though her eyes were serious. "I know. You're not supposed to look too hard at those stories. Or those plays, for that matter, but I can't deny that they did shape a lot of my thinking when I was growing up. There was this one where a girl who was too weak to grind coffee was hired by a shop that needed her to do it. Of course, when the dreadful moment arrived, and it was 'grind or get fired', the hero leaped onto the scene, ground the coffee, and proposed marriage so she wouldn't have to worry about the next customer."

Heads were starting to turn disapprovingly in their direction, as Beth's giggles grew louder and Frances pushed the paper aside and gently suggested that they head back home. On the way, she continued, "I tried writing another ending; one where she was fired and ended up having to find other work, because that was real life. Those books and plays, they painted a pretty picture, but I was starting to see where the colors were a bit thin and starting to peel away. Until Ben, though, it hadn't really occurred to me that instead of waiting for things to happen to me, I could try to find out how to make them happen. Oh, I had short-term goals: go to summer school college, take some classes. But I was taking them because they interested me, and they were given at convenient times. I wasn't thinking of what I might do once I had those credits under my belt. Ben showed me how to do that," she added softly.

She sighed. "According to what I read in that article, though, Ben's plans didn't quite come out the way he'd wanted. He did become a lawyer, and he took over his cousin's practice, but he never was able to get elected to the House of Representatives." At Beth's inquiring look, she added, "His overall goal was to become state governor, you see. But it looks as though his political goals didn't get as far along as he'd hoped." She sighed. "Well, life throws you a Christmas tree sometimes, and all you can really do when it does is brace yourself and hope you're still standing after it hits."

"Huh?" Beth blinked at her. "Christmas tree?"

"It's heavier than a curve ball."

"What?"

Frances chuckled. And then, her eyebrows shot up and she smiled. "When we get home, Beth," she said abruptly, "I'm going to want your help looking for something. I'm not sure if I still have it, but if I do, it'll be in one of those boxes in the other spare room, and it'll take less time to find it if we're both searching."

"Find what?" Beth asked, trying to parse why her grandmother seemed so excited. "Grandma, what are you hoping to find?"

"Oh, just a few things I'm thinking about, now that we're talking about the olden days," Francie said with a mysterious chuckle. "I think you'll enjoy them."

The "other spare room" was a junk room. When Grandma and Grandpa had bought the house, they'd made sure that it had three bedrooms and a fold-out couch in the den, so that they could easily accommodate visiting family members, but somehow, they never seemed to have more than one guest at a time, and the other bedroom had gradually accumulated cardboard boxes, kitchen appliances that never seemed as useful as they had before purchase, books that would probably never be reread but would never be sold—just in case one did want to reread one, and other things that probably would have been relegated to an attic, if the house had had one.

"I could organize this for you," Beth offered. "It might take a few more vacations, but I could help you clear out the old clothes and the other stuff nobody's ever going to use."

"No," Grandma said. "Leave it. It makes me feel rich."

"But you are—" Beth stopped. "I mean, you're not poor."

Frances wasn't offended. "I used to be," she said. "I suppose having more things reminds me I'm not. I don't make a lot of big purchases, but little extravagances, like a new scarf I don't actually need, or getting a little ice cream on my apple pie makes me realize that Icanafford these things."

And yet, Beth realized, while Grandma might dress like Jackie Kennedy, she bought most of her fashionable suits and dresses in thrift shops, even now, while tutting at the prices in the boutiques. Her car was a 1957 Packard Clipper that 'got her from Point A to Point B… eventually.' She cooked simple meals with basic ingredients at home, but usually finished off with a fancy bakery dessert at least once a week. And she almost always had five or ten dollars to give to a charity when asked. Beth supposed that made Grandma thrifty, but not miserly.

"Your great-grandmother had an interesting idea about what made someone wealthy," Grandma remarked. "She thought it was the greatest extravagance to have something you could afford to waste. So, in our flat in Brooklyn, there was always a pot of coffee on the stove. We got a cup with condensed milk each meal, and if we didn't feel like drinking it, we could just spill it out. And the rest of the time, we could have it black whenever we wanted it. Mama said that as long as we had something to waste, we weren't truly poor."

"I'm sorry I didn't get the chance to meet her."

"You did," Grandma said with a sad smile, "though I'm not surprised you don't remember. You were only about a year or so old when she passed away."

"That doesn't count," Beth said. "I mean, she might've met me, but it's not really meeting if you don't know you are, is it?"

Grandma chuckled. "I guess that's one way to see it," she acknowledged. She flipped open the lid of a box and gasped. "Oh my goodness!"

"Grandma?" Beth was at her side in an instant, though in the process, she caught her foot on a trunk and nearly went sprawling.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to startle you," Grandma said at once. "I'd clean forgotten about this."

Beth looked down at the square manila envelope and read aloud, "Contents: one sealed envelope to be," her eyes widened as the rest of the words spilled out of her, "opened in 1967? Grandma!"

"I know," Grandma said. "Fairly serendipitous of us to come across it this year, wouldn't you say?"

"But what's inside?"

Grandma shrugged. "It's 1967, isn't it? Why don't we go into the kitchen and I'll put the kettle on and we can find out over a nice cup of tea. We'll bring the box with us," she added. "I think when we go through it, we might find what I was looking for all along."

Beth's eyes lit up when Grandma spooned strawberry Whip 'n Chill into two dessert glasses and set them down on the table. "It's almost as good as whipped cream on strawberry Jell-O," Grandma said, "but I must admit this looks fancier."

Beth started to reach for the box, but grandma stopped her. "Let me," she said. "The paper's pretty fragile after all this time."

"Okay," Beth said, only mildly disappointed. She held her breath as Grandma lifted out the manila envelope, then reached inside and extracted a smaller envelope. She examined the sealed flap and then brought it carefully to the tea kettle, letting the steam do its work. The front of the envelope was facing Beth and the girl could read the inked inscription: Frances Nolan, age 15 years and 4 months, April 6, 1917. After a moment, Grandma moved the envelope away from the steam and set it face-down on the table. She carefully ran a knife under the flap and gave a slight sigh of relief, when the flap lifted free. "Well?" Beth asked.

"Well," Gran said, "here we are." She extracted a folded-over sheet of newsprint and gently spread it out. The headline was only a single word, but it was a full six inches high.

"War," Beth read aloud.

"I tore that out of the newspaper the day we got into it," Grandma nodded. "I was working for a clipping bureau then. I'd go over the newspapers for the states they assigned me, looking for articles for our clients."

Beth frowned. "People paid you to read newspapers?"

"Skimming, more like." She smiled. "Where did you think I'd learned to do it? A lot of our clients were writers and actors who wanted to see what the papers were saying about their work, without having to buy and read a whole stack of 'em. That was what they paid the bureau for. And then, on April 6, 1917, I sat down at my desk, looked at the first paper in my pile, and that headline screamed out at me and I just wanted to try to fix everything in my memory. So I saved the paper and a few other things, besides." She reached into the envelope again and brought out another fragment of newsprint. Her face fell. She turned the envelope over the table and shook it gently. A penny dropped onto the table with a soft clink. So did a small folded-over packet of white paper, and a few more drifting shreds of newsprint. Grandma sighed. "I guess I should have known," she said sadly.

"Grandma?"

"Oh, there was this poem I'd taken from one of the Oklahoma papers, written by a Brooklyn boy. I'd been carrying it around in my purse for a while and, every now and then, I'd take it out and read it. I'm afraid it got a bit battered over time, and…" she gestured to the paper fragments on the table, "this is all that's left of it."

Beth looked at one of the larger pieces. Aloud, she read, "he stuff that is coar…?"

"Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse," Grandma recited. She paused, concentrating, and then added, "and stuff'd with the stuff that is fine." She sighed. "There was a bit that came before that part, something about being old and young and foolish and wise… but I don't remember it all now." She shook her head. "Pity."

"What's this other thing?" Beth asked, reaching for the packet. Grandma said nothing, but her smile told the girl that she was welcome to open it and find out. "A kiss…" Beth said inquiringly, looking at the lipstick imprint, "fingerprints, and… hair?"

"All mine," Grandma nodded. "Interesting. I never stopped to wonder if it would keep its natural color, or go gray like the rest of mine."

Beth touched the brown lock gently. She reached behind her and pulled her long ponytail forward, comparing its color to that of the hair before her. "It's the same brown exactly," Beth said, smiling.

"Well," Grandma replied with a laugh, "I always did think we were rather alike. Here," she went on. "Let's go through the rest of the envelope."

True to the contents listed on its front, the envelope also held Grandma's elementary school diploma and four stories. "Can I read them?" Beth asked hesitantly.

Grandma considered. "Let me look them over first," she said. "I wrote these when I was fourteen. At the time, I thought that they were wonderful, but I'm a little older and a little wiser and maybe they aren't nearly so good as I remember."

Beth frowned. "I'd still like to read them," she said.

"Well, let me at least type them up," Grandma said. "I couldn't bear it if the paper crumbled away or got torn."

"I understand," Beth said. "I guess that's okay." It was better than not getting to read them at all anyway.

Grandma reached into the box again and beamed. "This was what I was looking for!" she exclaimed, hauling out a small sheaf of yellowed lined paper.

"What is it, Grandma?"

"My graduation play," Grandma said. "Or, at least, it would have been, if my English teacher hadn't rejected it for… reasons that were entirely appropriate, though I didn't think so at the time."

"What do you mean?"

Grandma laughed. "Well, I wrote it around the time that I started losing patience with the fairy tale endings and melodramas we were talking about earlier. I had this brilliant idea of having different boys and girls say what they wanted to become, and then having Fate dump a bucket of cold water on their dreams and tell them what they'd actually end up becoming. Here," she said, turning the page and pressing her finger down on a particular passage. "I have one youth saying, 'I would be a healer. I would take the broken bodies of men and mend them.' And then," she continued with an impish smile, "I have Fate respond, 'That's what thou would'st be. But see! This is what thou shalt be.' And then we see an old man soldering the bottom of an ash can." She sighed. "I hated my teacher. The way she talked about poverty and drinking and… well, the things I grew up with and didn't see as ugly… I guess it was just easy for me to think that this," she shook the pages for emphasis, "was a work of genius and she was too small and short-sighted to recognize it, but it's really just… me being cynical and thinking I was grown-up."

Beth frowned. "I don't understand."

"Growing up in the tenements, everyone had dreams of getting rich and getting out. Most of us didn't," she added with a rueful smile. "I saw my mother grow harder and tougher every year, and I saw my father grow softer and sadder. They were young once. They had dreams. Fate… had other ideas. I thought that was what life was: losing your dreams and facing hard reality. I just," she reached over and squeezed Beth's hand, "didn't realize that losing one dream didn't mean another one wouldn't take its place. Or how good it feels when you manage to beat the odds every now and again and win something. If you always win, it's not the same, you see."

Beth nodded. "I think I do," she said dubiously.

"No, you don't," Grandma said tolerantly. "But that's all right. You will."

She reached for the Herald again and ran her fingers gently over the article she'd read earlier. "I wonder if Ben learned," she said.

"Learned?"

"That when life gets up and gets in the way of your dreams, that doesn't necessarily mean you failed. I hope so."

"Grandma?"

Grandma's expression was serious. "Ben planned things out too well, I think. He never considered that his dreams wouldn't come true and neither did anyone who met him. I wonder now—does he think he's a failure because he 'only' got to be the DA for Allamakee County and never made it to the State Assembly, much less governor? Or does he look at how far he came and everything he did achieve and realize that he's got a lot to be proud of and nothing to be ashamed of?"

"Did you love him?" Beth asked.

Grandma frowned. "I thought I did," she said slowly. "When I was seventeen and on my way to college. But as much as I admired him, and no matter what they say about opposites attracting, I think at the end of the day, he was a planner and I was a dreamer. I learned how to plan. Elsewise, I don't think I'd ever have tried college," she added with a laugh. "But I don't know that Ben ever learned to dream. In the long run," she sighed, "I don't believe I could have been happy with a man who couldn't dream, not even a little." She smiled warmly at her granddaughter. "I guess that's why I fell in love with your grandfather."

"Did you ever tell Ben?" Beth asked. "Or did you just stop writing to him?"

"Oh, I told him," Grandma said. "I wasn't engaged to him when I went to college. Ben said I was too young to know my own mind, but if I still felt that I wanted to marry him when I finished, we'd get engaged."

"But he knew his mind when he was seventeen," Beth snorted.

Frances shrugged. "Sometimes, I wonder whether he still would have wanted to marry me when I was twenty, if I'd been willing. Perhaps, by then, he'd fallen in love with another girl. Would he have married me anyway, like he'd promised to, or would he have told me the truth and apologized for his feelings having changed? I don't know. He never answered my letter." She paused for a moment and took a spoonful of Whip 'n Chill. "But since we did have a an understanding of sorts," she continued, "I thought he deserved the courtesy of knowing I'd found someone else.

"Of course," she went on, "there's no way to know that Ben's ideas didn't change either. He always seemed so sure of where he was going, while I had so many ideas about who I was going to be, I couldn't quite seem to settle on one. Some of those ideas bore fruit," she added. "A lot didn't, but that's okay, too. Having dreams and then finding out that Fate has something else in mind… that's not nearly so dreadful as it seemed to me some fifty-odd years ago." Her expression turned pensive. "I sometimes wonder how my father's life would have turned out if he'd realized that."

"Grandma?"

Grandma shook her head. "No point belaboring what can't be changed," she said with a sigh. "But maybe it would be a good thing for you to read those stories after all. I'll try to type them up for you tonight."

"Okay," Beth said. "Thanks, Grandma. Grandma?" Beth hesitated. "Could you… maybe tell me some more about what it was like for you growing up?"

"Growing up?" Grandma asked. "You mean, in the tenements?"

Beth nodded. "Everything. The tenements, the war, school… All of it."

Grandma smiled. "Well, it was a different time, that's for sure. But some things haven't changed. I lived in Brooklyn and, for all its hustle, it could be a quiet place, too. Serene even…"

Beth scraped her chair closer to her grandmother's and nodded encouragingly.