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As they lift my body, a siren blares with the sound getting closer until it halts abruptly outside my building.
The gum chewer says, ‘Check the window. Ain’t no coincidence that two ambulances get called out to the same corner at the same time.’
‘Betcha Claudeen at the office double-booked again. See her butt in that tight skirt today? She can call out ten ambulances.’
Suddenly from down in the street there is loud raucous laughter. The gum chewer says, ‘That’s Bobby Lee out there clowning. Don’t nobody else laugh that loud… He’s on duty with tired-ass Charlie Adams.’
‘Yell down and say we’re on the case.’
‘No wait. Let Charlie dump her at the morgue, so Bobby can eat with us.’
My neighbourhood was normally as quiet as a suburb. All white till I moved in. I figured the young professionals were peering from their windows. Blue eyes alarmed.
Then the poodle in 2c started barking.
It’s hard to believe that happened almost thirty-five years ago. Here it is, 1998, and who’d believe I’m still kicking?
Tired-ass Charlie Adams.
What would have happened had he not come along? I can still see him drawing on a joint and saying ‘Now is won spelt backwards. This minute, this second. That’s what matters. The past is memories and bullshit.’
Since he was destined to die young, Charlie should probably have been a musician. He would have made a great Mingus or a Thelonious chasing his angst back and forth through a melody.
On the surface he came across as a draft dodging militant, a college boy with half-baked philosophies. But like Mother used to say, ‘The good Lord comes in many guises.’
* * *
Just yesterday in a Berkeley bookstore, I heard somebody mention Irene O’Brien and the sales assistant quipped, ‘Killed herself back in the sixties.’
It was all I could do not to tap him on the shoulder and say, ‘No, I even messed that up.’
Charlie gave me the best advice when he said don’t look back. Yet sometimes when I sit out on this roof like tonight, it’s hard not to remember the things I made myself forget. Memories are so elusive. A bit like the stars when I’m painting them at dawn. Clear as day one minute, then I turn my back and they’re gone.
PART I (#ulink_af44e79f-d3c7-56b6-b9a1-62d26ddd7f3c)
Irene Matthews (#ulink_af44e79f-d3c7-56b6-b9a1-62d26ddd7f3c)
1 (#ulink_316c17d5-3d9c-5ef7-a56e-8bf39c7c070a)
People refer to ’29 as the start of the Depression, but it’s firm in my memory as the year Mack O’Brien got arrested for killing his wife.
I guess I was Mack’s bit on the side, though I was only six and he was forty-five. Had I been older, I might have realized that his wife suspected he was up to no good, because twice that October I’d stood outside their corner store and heard Mrs O’Brien drill him. Once she’d yelled, ‘I know what you’re up to!’ But she didn’t really raise hell until he slipped two free pork chops to Hortense Alvarez, our neighbour down the hall, whom Mother accused of flaunting her large bosom.
I don’t tell my age, but it’s relevant that I was born 11 November 1922, because that same day four years earlier, World War I had ended. So most neighbourhoods held their annual block parties around my birthday. Whole streets decorated. Red, white and blue streamers, our Stars and Stripes billowing on flagpoles. Victory blowing in the wind and we kids bragging that we’d won that war. Patriotism was powerful back then.
Miss Hortense, as my sister Lilian and I called her, lived in a room above Mack’s grocery like we did. But whereas ours was L-shaped and overlooked Buchanan Street, Miss Hortense lived at the back near the toilet. She had two windows like ours, but hers glimpsed Philadelphia’s skyline on the opposite side of the Delaware River.
Mother rented our room from Mack. Two dollars a week, I think she paid. She kept it spick-and-span and considered that corner of Camden, New Jersey to be her slice of paradise, because growing up like she did in a Mississippi backwater, any place north of the Mason-Dixon Line was heaven.
Miss Hortense, who I idolized, was from Rosarita Beach, Mexico, having come to Camden via Los Angeles. She’d done some walk-ons on the silent screen which Mother said gave her airs.
I adored Hortense and she used to half tolerate me running up to greet her in the street. Occasionally she’d even let me hold her hand. ‘Irene,’ she’d say, ‘you got sense, and if you don’t get fat like your mother, you gonna be a pretty woman. Finish the school, then go straight away to California. You could be a maid to one of them big, big stars.’
I can remember daydreaming about how I’d become a maid in a uniform like a pretty brown-skinned one I’d once seen on the silent screen. No Aunt Jemima in a head-rag but a credit to the race.
Lilian used to believe that living above Mack’s had been the best time of our lives. But after I became a name, I slipped back to our old neighbourhood to discover that our corner of Prince and Buchanan had nothing to recommend it. Rows of poky, brick-faced, two- and three-storey houses with little two-by-four windows. Dusty sidewalks littered with rubbish. Kids looking like they didn’t have homes and old people sitting on stoops brushing away the flies.
Mother had been so grateful because the area had a handful of Negro families dotted amongst the poor whites: new immigrants who probably didn’t understand about segregation.
Camden, New Jersey. Connected to Philly by the Delaware River Bridge which I’d thought was majestic. The nuns had me believing that bridge was the hub of the universe.
Lil and me with Mother.
It’s hard to believe that we three once shared a bed, a pile of newspapers padded with blankets. Covered with a blue and pink floral bedspread in summer and our coats in winter. No lamp or side table.
I thought we were rich because the Herzfelds that Mother worked for had loaned her their old Motorola radio. To start, it needed a hard whack and had a loud, annoying hum. But even that became as much comfort to me as the crooners crackling from it. Rudi Vallee, Vaughn DeLeath, The Rhythm Boys … Lil and I used to stand side by side, shoulders touching, straining to imitate their old-timey harmonies.
We ate and did homework at a square pine table in a corner. We had three wooden chairs and I’d sit there with my copybooks gazing out that window.
I was content. Especially when Lilian and I sat opposite each other devouring goodies Mother brought from work. The Herzfelds employed her at four dollars a week plus leftovers, and we ate so well from their table that we hardly spent much in Mack’s.
I remember being six like it was yesterday.
I see myself standing by the head of Miss Hortense’s bed one Saturday morning in my red and white polka-dot dress. A flimsy little seersucker that Mrs Herzfeld had given to Mother because it had peach stains down the front.
Each Saturday while Miss Hortense was at ten o’clock mass, Lilian and I cleaned her room and changed the bedclothes.
That particular Saturday, although it was still summertime, she’d gone out wearing her black velvet cloak. Not that we dared question why, because kids asked nothing back then.
Miss Hortense made some remark about being chilly, but we were having a heatwave. Through the hole in her floorboards we could hear the ice man complaining to Mack that it was so hot that his blocks of ice were melting faster than he could deliver them. Hortense’s was directly above Mack’s storeroom and as Lilian and I folded the dirty sheet, we could hear the white voices mingling and Mack intermittently whistling, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ and ‘Smile’.
Called himself Irish but was New Jersey born like me.
Miss Hortense’s room was stuffy as a closet that Saturday in ’29 and I recall just how Lil and I stood either end of the ray of sunlight, struggling to fold Hortense’s sheet without letting it touch the floor.
Mother had gone to work at 6 AM, because Mrs Herzfeld was holding her nephew’s bar mitzvah. This meant extra hours for Mother and the likelihood of kosher treats that night for us.
I was practically nursed on pickled herrings and potato latkes and still get cravings for strudel, thanks to the Herzfelds’ preferences. And their lemon cake! It makes my mouth water just to think about it, although it was the one dessert that Mrs Herzfeld was stingy with. Mother always came home with crumbs instead of slices.
My sister and I actually preferred those odd Saturdays when Mother left at dawn, because we didn’t have to wash first thing and heard at least two radio shows before doing chores for Miss Hortense.
Lilian, being devout in those days, always reminded me to be thankful for Mr Herzfeld’s old set which was plugged into the light socket in the middle of our room. We never minded walking around it. Being small for our age, the radio was taller than us.
The day that Miss Hortense went out in her velvet cloak, we had listened to Storybook Hour when we got up.
Our Saturday-morning job made me feel grown up, although Mother kept the proceeds, and we never expected otherwise. But had I known that those were as much of the halcyon days as I was going to get until I turned nearly forty-three, I might have been upset that I wasn’t in the street playing hopscotch or bouncing a ball.
Had we known that all we took for granted would soon fade, we might have savoured each second and not killed the flies that plagued us. Lilian probably wouldn’t have slapped me for accidentally ripping the arm off her paper doll, and I might have appreciated the boiled eggs Mother had left for breakfast. Maybe Mack would even have forgiven the ice man for bringing his order two days late.
Mack and Mrs O’Brien owned our building and another identical to it a block east of Prince. But they lived over on Hanover which had trees and neat A-frame houses with porches, front lawns and hedges, and a few families even had cars.
Mrs O’Brien only had part-time help and their neighbourhood wasn’t as fancy as the Herzfelds’, who not only employed Mother full time but needed a Saturday yardman as well.
Mother used to say, ‘Mis’ Herzfeld cares more about them flower beds than them four girls.’
Mack and Mrs O’Brien were childless and had inherited their properties from her father, Tommy Sullivan, who’d died in ’25.
Even our priest, Father Connolly, complained about the store.
In their dirty window display, sun-bleached Corn Flakes boxes leaned this way and that. Dead flies and soot had been collecting around them for so long that Mother had finally said, ‘Lemme clean your window for free.’
Of course, Mrs O’Brien had snubbed the offer like she’d always snubbed Mother, who nevertheless grinned and fawned. Petrified that we’d be evicted.
Mother died a little every time she saw Mrs O’Brien. Both Mack and his wife got a kick out of seeing Mother crawl when she was as little as a dime short with the rent. So, little though I was, I tried to do my share to keep Mack happy. At least that’s why I tell myself I let him feel in my bloomers.
To any fool who’d listen, and it was most often me, Mack would explain that he was a butcher by trade and was saving to buy a real butcher’s shop, kitted out with a walk-in cold store, chopping blocks, hanging rails and dark green awning. He’d describe how he was going to unwind this awning that would shade his name painted in a semi-circle on the window. He even talked about getting one of the fancy meat grinders which I told him that I’d seen in the kosher butcher where Mother shopped for the Herzfelds.
I used to stand in Mack’s watching him scratch his behind and listen to his big talk. ‘Irene,’ he’d say, ‘you’ll sweep my floor and be delivery girl. But you’ve got to get bigger before you can clean butcher’s knives.’ I used to daydream of wearing a blood-stained butcher’s apron and despaired that this wouldn’t happen after Mack was accused of murdering Mrs O’Brien.
While he supposedly ran the store, her sole duty was to arrive in her fox-fur stole to empty the cash register after a day of lounging at home. She used to mosey in at five during winter and six in summer when Mack stayed open longer.
The kids in the neighbourhood called her Humpty Dumpty but she wasn’t exactly egg-shaped. She had thick, reddish-brown hair, the same colour as her stole, and might have been attractive had her teeth not been rotten.
Mack said she’d kill me if I told anybody what we did in his storeroom, but I might have told anyway had Mrs O’Brien lived longer, because I was a blabbermouth.
How was I to know that his game in the dark was wrong?
I actually thought I was the one who would go to hell for not sharing the measly caramels he gave me with Lilian.
At six, I missed the plot.
For instance, I couldn’t figure out why Mrs O’Brien got so upset because Mack gave Miss Hortense two free chops. I couldn’t understand how they had caused so much havoc. Especially since I had collected and delivered them. But now, I understand that it matters to a wife if her man is giving things to another woman. Particularly one as pretty as Hortense was.
Right up to the Second World War, amongst the clippings which mother saved about Lilian and me, she kept the headlines of the Philadelphia Inquirer which had featured Mack’s trial. I finally convinced her to throw it out by claiming that the picture didn’t do him justice. I said, ‘Mother, he looks terrible with those little teeth and big gums.’ He wasn’t wearing his glasses or calico apron which he double tied around his belly … And his straw boater had slid back exposing his bald head.
Me and Mack … whose vile breath reeked of garlic salami.
He did more than anybody realized to prepare me for the Hollywood relays. Who could have trained me better to endure the humiliations of fat-bellied old men who belched and farted as they reached inside me, searching for what they’d lost? Still, it disturbs me less for myself than for the world to think that all those years ago, when people still supposedly had some morals, a forty-five-year-old with a wife needed to sneak into the shadows of a nasty storeroom to slide his finger between the bony legs of a six-year-old.
But what really stings me is suspecting that Mother knew.
Before the War, she used to reminisce about Camden with an air of innocence and say, ‘I keep meaning to find out what happened to Mack. He stayed locked up all those years and then they decided that he didn’t do it. But during the summer of 1930 before I was eight, when Mother moved us to Los Angeles, I had already eased him out of my mind.
Forgot him. Forgot his storeroom. Became the Olympic champion of blotting ugliness from my mind. ‘What You Can’t Forgive, Forget’ became my motto.
Yes, so I forgot Mack, like I forgot Daddy.
Denial was my partner in crime, whereas my sister, Lil, is probably still recovering from the shock of Pearl Harbor. Still contemplating who she could have been or should have been … The queen of ‘If Only …’
Had I stopped to look back, to examine the hurts and debris I left behind, I doubt that I would have had the courage to carry on. But suddenly tonight I finally feel safe.
Nothing soothes me like being out in this night air listening to the wind rustle the pines while I’m under this canopy of stars. If I close my eyes, it could be the ocean I hear, waves crashing against rocks. I can sit out here on this roof garden with the dark surrounding me and the dog snoring at my feet and I am not lost.
The way Venus is juxtaposed to the moon and Orion is outshining the Big Dipper makes me feel brave enough to recall what I’ve buried in the cellars of my mind.
In a few hours, Daylight Saving begins, and tomorrow’s Palm Sunday, the day Christ entered Jerusalem victorious. Is that really why I got off so easy? Because he died for my sins?
2 (#ulink_795632d3-e641-562b-9f9e-9e9bfbef2914)
Hortense Alvarez couldn’t have been more than a bit player during the silents … Not with her dark complexion … Yet the photograph she had of herself in a group with Charlie Chaplin in his tramp outfit made Lilian and me take her for a movie star.
I now realize that that picture had just been a location shot, but as a kid I imagined that Miss Hortense and Chaplin were really connected. And since he was featured on posters outside the Biograph, I thought he was more important than the President. It filled my head with fantasies, and I secretly expected him to come knocking for Miss Hortense any day.
Mother used to say, ‘Hortense ain’t all that to look at, even with her fox stole slung over that velvet dress to draw attention to her bosom. She tiptoes round like she thinks she white, but a Mexican ain’t nothing.’
To brush against Miss Hortense’s black velvet dress was like brushing against mink and hearing her warble ‘Ave Maria’ behind her closed door added something exotic to our otherwise dismal treks to the toilet where the only excitement was to sometimes get a splinter in my foot.
Her old kerosene burner was the sole object in her room which I didn’t wish was mine. It smelled like burning hair and sat near the window above a bucket of water she kept to rinse her china cup and saucer which she drained of watery weak coffee or strong green tea several times a day.
Some Saturdays when we cleaned her room Miss Hortense would dawdle for a few minutes and speak to Lil and me in that broken English. But I saw her as mysterious and magical rather than a stuck-up, independent spinster which is how Mother sometimes described her … And she alone may have inspired Mother’s sideways assault on Hollywood, because she said that if Hortense could get into movies, anybody could.
Lil and I knew what was in her bureau, because on Saturdays we handled her most intimate things.
I had watched Lilian giggle until tears ran down her cheeks the first time we found Miss Hortense’s corset.
But no letters ever arrived for Hortense and her past remained her own. Except for the picture with Chaplin, which she probably left out for a reason.
We believed that she had no friends other than Father Connolly who would climb the stairs to reach her even when he said his arthritis had him too stiff to bend his knees.
It was shocking to hear his laughter behind her door, because when he served at the altar, or when he limped down the halls of St Anthony’s Elementary School, I imagined that to be joyless was part of a priest’s calling. But in Miss Hortense’s room his laugh would erupt like a volcano. Like a blast of dynamite that was sparked by her giggle which was silvery. As delicate as my glass chime in a night breeze.
The Mexican señorita and the old Irish priest.
Far from home in Camden, New Jersey.
With the view of the skyscrapers in Philadelphia to remind them that there was a lot more to life than what was on offer at that corner of Buchanan and Prince.
Father Connolly’s green eyes must have often fallen on that photograph of Miss Hortense dressed in a frilly white blouse and ankle-length skirt in that group shot with Charlie Chaplin. And she must have told him like she’d told us, ‘Tell no-one.’ And maybe like Lilian and I, he carried it to the window to examine it better, as frustrated as we’d been that the sepia image of those seven people standing in a line wasn’t sharp enough. Five men and two women on a studio lot in Hollywood. No fancy scenery. No trees. No animals. No props. Just six white faces and Hortense Alvarez. Right there in that line with the great Charlie Chaplin.
Mother always wondered what Hortense was living on and interrogated me, because Lilian was more interested in her catechism.
Mother’s questions usually came when my back was to her while she greased and braided my hair; my thin, kinky braids which to my great dismay barely reached my shoulders.
I’d grit my teeth, anticipating Mother’s yanks with the comb. Her breath warm against the back of my ear.
‘Irene, now where’s she getting the money to dye her hair? Couldn’t nobody’s hair be that black. It ain’t natural … And what about all that to-ing and fro-ing to church? Father Connolly wouldn’t be slipping by here if she wasn’t putting something in that collection box every day.’
Who could blame Mother for her agitations?
