Like Venus Fading

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The costume store was unlike the familiar brick buildings in Camden and different from the little wood-framed shotgun houses that I’d seen in Mississippi. It had smooth adobe walls and a roof of red clay tiles and was sandwiched between identical buildings on either side.

Sun baked the sidewalk and burned the back of my neck as I stood with my hand in Mother’s, afraid that she wouldn’t suggest that we cross the street where only a few old Model Ts were rattling up and down.

Together we ambled over to peek into the small display window. Pressing my nose against the glass, I strained on tiptoe to see the masks, feather head-dresses, pink toe shoes with satin ties and stiff white tutus.

I must have been salivating like an old sheep dog when we entered the small shop. It smelled like a second-hand clothes store, packed as it was with slightly musty old costumes for rent.

As I prayed that my sister wouldn’t mention uniforms or ask Mother any impertinent questions, my heart started to play leapfrog. I felt like a rich kid in a toystore, because my Mother assumed a self-important air, when she told the elderly male assistant that she wanted to see two pairs of tap shoes. I didn’t dare smile, because there was something sobering about the moment. Mother didn’t look nervous and didn’t seem embarrassed to ask for assistance which she normally was in stores, and I guess Lil sensed that something radical was happening, because even she kept her mouth shut.

The shoes that I was given to try on were black with round toes. I can’t recall if I sat to try them on or stood up while somebody helped me slip my foot into them, all I know is that when I walked across the costume store in them anybody would have thought that I’d tried on some wings. My whole body responded to those shoes and it was like I was a mummer in the Thanksgiving parade. I seemed to lean back and strut. The ease of the leather and the comfort – I was like a grown woman appreciating the caress of French glove leather …

When I went bankrupt thirty-five years later and one of my creditors accused me of having a shoe fetish, I told the judge about my experience with Mother in 1930, during the Depression, when I was fitted for the first time with shoes, the cheapest tap shoes, which hadn’t been shaped first by Mabel Herzfeld’s feet. Or by my sister’s.

Pretty shoes always helped me look other people in the eye.

As Lil and I left that store with our new shoes in a bag, my face must have ached from smiling. Those shoes were a rebirth.

When the whole country was littered with the jobless and homeless, Mother, a baby-faced coloured girl from the backwoods with two kids to feed and no prospects, must have sensed that she had accomplished something momentous.

Even my sister became putty in Mother’s hands and did all she could to be helpful.

That’s how we ended up in that crowded public school near Reverend Walters’s church.

One night in ’63 when it suddenly hit me that Mother was the reason I could dance but couldn’t spell, I tried to stab her.

Those were the days when mothers were getting blamed for everybody’s neuroses, but that wasn’t the only reason that I suddenly saw her as Satan. She thought I had gone crazy.

One of the most humiliating things about my supposed suicide wasn’t just the photo of me naked, ten pounds overweight, it was the suicide note that I’d supposedly written, which made me sound like a pea brain. Somebody had mastered my handwriting, which I’d hidden from fans after my husband had made fun of it: ‘Irene writes worse than my granny, who never finished fourth grade.’

Neither did I really.

Sure I made it back and forth to school for a day here and a day there, but I was always behind and grew shrewd at hiding that I knew less than the other kids, whereas Lilian … her extra years with the nuns stood her in good stead for life.

I told Charlie that only she would have gone to all that trouble with my suicide note but he couldn’t figure out her motive.

In Hollywood to be forty-two, unbankable and bankrupt was a reason for suicide, so somebody guessed that I was a suitable case, and I guess I was sort of addicted to sleepers, like most stars I knew in the 60s. If we didn’t want to deal with life, it was natural to want to sleep for fourteen, fifteen hours at a stretch. But Charlie refused to bring sleepers into the house.

Marijuana, yes. LSD, yes. Morphine, even. But sleeping pills, no.

12 (#ulink_f32d5ad0-2105-5bec-9713-bc15c4a1433d)

Louise Taylor’s Saturday-morning tap-dancing class was held in the room behind her father’s bar and grill, sadly bulldozed after the war in a rezoning scheme. Mr Taylor’s brother, Derville, also had his shoeshine stand there, so it was a busy corner. Sociable. Where people who didn’t go to church could meet. Laugh and gossip and show off their week’s pay in some loud Saturday-night togs.

Louise, who we all called Miss Taylor, had been a chorine at the Cotton Club in Harlem the year before, but I didn’t know that was something for her students to brag about. I didn’t know that the Cotton Club was the night spot where New York’s arty set, like Carl van Vechten and F. Scott Fitzgerald, went to rub shoulders with what they called the Darktown Strutters, and it would be years before I discovered that real Harlemites turned their noses up at the Cotton Club …

Miss Taylor was all of eighteen, though her flapper’s bob made her look older, especially the first time I saw her in that deep-rose sack dress. Her pockmarked skin, a pale olive colour, wasn’t the sole reason she could have passed for white; she also had straggly light brown hair and a completely flat backside.

Inching my way into the shabby back room for my first tap lesson, my head was as full of fantasies as the other eight girls. Including Lil. I’m sure we all imagined that we would emerge from day one like the sophisticate that Miss Taylor was. (I didn’t think she was gawky like my sister claimed. In fact, I saw Louise as stylish and graceful. Her flat chest and boyish hips suited the Jazz-Age clothes she wore, and her long, sure stride was sort of elegant. Although it’s true that in those days it was considered unfortunate for a girl to be so tall.)

I loved Miss Taylor for having such lean, muscular calves, because for the first time my own seemed less pitiful. They were the thinnest in her class but she’d remind us all, ‘Bless the Lord for your legs, and oil those feet!’

She couldn’t afford a pianist so she produced rhythms for us to dance to with a long baton that she beat against a wooden mallet. Class lasted forty minutes and we knew it was nearly over when she clapped her hands and wiped the moustache of perspiration from her top lip. That was the signal for us to close our eyes and listen to her dance, before we put on our street shoes for home. To have us hear the rhythm of her feet rather than watch them move was her own progressive idea … Her steps were as rhythmic as a typist reeling off sixty words a minute. Clack-clack-clickety-clack-clack. Clack-click-clackety-clack-click. The syncopation was like fireworks and got under my skin so, I couldn’t wait to imitate the sound with my own feet.

I didn’t have what they call a natural talent, but I tried to make up for it in sheer determination. It was during Miss Taylor’s fourth session that I discovered that by concentrating on my rhythm, I could manipulate her smile. To get her to glance at me was like eating Mack’s caramels at the bottom of the stairs. I didn’t want to share her attention … Had Mother known, she would have whipped me without my understanding why. She would have said that I had to share everything with Lil, but that’s not quite how the showing-off thing works. So I kept the admiration that I’d spotted in Miss Taylor’s eyes to myself.

I’ve since seen men study me with that glance, those starry eyes that soon go hand-in-glove with infatuation. Whereas Louise’s seemed to say something like, ‘When you try, I find you adorable.’

I did everything to get her undivided attention, and what started as a game became a compulsion. Some of her girls wanted to be dancers, but little Irene wanted to be noticed. So, wherever and whenever I could, I’d slip on my tap dancing shoes to practise … Clack-clack-clickety, clack-clack-clack. It’s a wonder that Mother didn’t go mad.

Los Angeles erased my vaguest need to return to Camden. Especially after Mother got us a ride to Venice Beach to celebrate my eighth birthday. I smelled the ocean before I heard it, and heard it before I saw it; the Pacific gets credit for being my first glimpse of what other people refer to as ‘Nature’. The waves. The vastness. I squealed louder than a baby gull when I saw the way that water spread out to meet the sky. It was a clear November day and I threw my arms out to spin ’round and ’round.

Like this display of stars tonight, the ocean made me feel that I was everything and nothing.

The day I turned eight, had anybody told Mother that twenty-six years on she’d be waiting backstage with me at the Oscars to hear if my name was called for best supporting actress, she would never have believed it. Because in 1930 all I seemed destined to be was another little nappy-headed child; Negroes had as much hope of taking on Hollywood as a roach. In fact, on my eighth birthday, Mother couldn’t believe that we were allowed to take our shoes off and walk the beach that Armistice Day. So we didn’t.

After Lil and I had been taking tap for several weeks, it was the Saturday before Thanksgiving, Miss Taylor brought a short but imposing-looking friend to watch our class. I noticed the woman eyeing me, so I sensed that something was up, and sure enough, after class, Louise called me aside and said, ‘Would you and your big sister like to split a sweet potato in Daddy’s place?’

Not a slice of cake or pie.

A sweet potato. And how lucky we were to get the offer.

We may have been taking tap, but food was still a treat and hard to come by.

That occasion marked the first time Lil and I went to an eating place, and as Louise led us to the booth which her father had motioned her to take, I couldn’t have been more nervous had I been asked to take communion at a high mass. I dared not look at Lilian for fear of giggling. I was giddy with self-importance. Anybody would have thought I was about to dine at the Ritz.

It was so hot that Saturday that two men, perched on stools at the counter, were in undershirts. With pots of collards and potatoes simmering on the stove it was hotter inside than out.

Lil and I each got half of a bright, orange sweet potato smeared with butter and, as we nibbled timidly, afraid to look up, Louise passed me a slip of paper with joined-up writing scribbled on it and said, ‘I’ll be going back East at Christmas and my friend who came to class today said to give y’all’s mama this.’

I couldn’t yet read joined-up writing anyway, but Lil and I didn’t consider inspecting it until Miss Taylor had waved us goodbye. I feared it was about money, because money was always the worse thing that I could think of – owing it. Needing it. The word money seemed to be on grown-up lips all the time and it had a harrowing effect on me.

When I tried to goad my sister into reading the contents to me, she said, ‘This is Mother’s and you know it’s a sin to read her mail.’

I wonder what would have happened had I listened to her?

It’s possible that had we not known what those few words had said the course of our lives might have been different.

The sun was glorious that afternoon and we had a lot to be thankful for by all accounts. It was a Saturday. No school, a tap class, that warm feeling of tummies satisfied with a sugary sweet potato. And we’d just been sitting like grown-ups in Taylor’s Café and Grill. With our tap shoes under our arms, it should have been enough for us two to hold hands and dawdle to the room that was temporarily home.

But that note had tickled my curiosity.

‘If I could read joined-up writing, I’d read it to you. Suppose it’s about money?’

My sister put her tap shoes on the ground and opened the note reluctantly. It went against her nature to do anything sinful. We could have been in the middle of an orange grove and she wouldn’t have picked fruit off the ground even if we were starving.

Nonetheless, that afternoon she read that note from Bessie Lovell to our mother: ‘I give classes for a dime per session and can offer Irene a place.’

Refolding it along the creases, Lil said, ‘I’ll get in trouble for reading this, so we have to act surprised when Mother tells us what it says.’

Although I denied it until I had more than she did, I guess as kids I was as jealous of Lilian as she became of me. I’m ashamed to say it, but hair and skin colour mattered so much to me that I envied her braids being an inch longer than mine and her skin being a couple of shades fairer. It’s strange, because I was jealous and yet proud of her at the same time. She always seemed to get the best of everything, whether it was the socks handed down to us by Mrs Herzfeld or the compliments Mother received about us when we did our church recitals. But tap had been different.

Although Mother got the note, she just looked at it and tucked it in her bra with, ‘Y’all go out and play.’

Every day I waited for the glory of hearing that I had been singled out for tap lessons, but the glory never came, because Mother never mentioned it. After two more sessions with Miss Taylor, dancing was to end for me for a couple years.

Is it that Mother couldn’t afford the dime or decided that if both Lil and I couldn’t receive tap lessons from Bessie Lovell, neither of us would have them?

I wish I had the answer.

What I know is that I blamed Lil. First I shunned her and by the time I was ready to make up, she wouldn’t play with me. If we walked down the street together, I would lag behind so that I didn’t have to speak to her or vice versa. In time I couldn’t remember what our feud was about, but we were enemies.

Overnight, she stopped playing big sister, never taking my side when she normally would with Mother or other children in the street. A chasm grew between us which became too great to bridge.

She would mention Camden and I would tease her for it. I would talk about Miss Taylor, and Lil would laugh about Louise’s slightly bowed legs.

Tap dancing had started a family feud.

13 (#ulink_d0c7dc60-7b41-5acc-981f-880709e4c7a9)

During the past two days, when I least expect it, faces that I hardly recognize float through my mind. A disturbing number have appeared. People who were of no consequence. Some I can’t identify. Yesterday, while I was having my lunch, for no reason I recalled the face of the Mexican kid who manned the cash register at the late-night drugstore on Hollywood Boulevard where I used to get my tranquillizers. That was thirty-odd years ago and he was irrelevant even back then, but his image came to me so sharply, I wonder if it means something.

Then last night, while I was trying to read my book, in comes the face of that old woman who used to clean the toilets at St Anthony’s. I don’t think I ever said two words to her when I was at school there, so why, nearly seventy years later, should her face come to me out of the blue? Crystal clear, it was.

I’ve heard that this sort of thing happens to people before they go.

Dammit, I hope I’m not dying.

Who’d look after the dog …

This morning, when I took her for her walk, I was watching her do her business and in came the face of that Japanese butler who gave Mother her first full-time job after we got to Los Angeles. I couldn’t decide whether I was glad to be reminded of him or not, because there were times, back before the war, when I used to wonder if, in the short time she’d known him, he hadn’t had a worse affect on Mother than Mamie.

Having met him only once when I was eight, it’s eerie that I could envision him so precisely. I actually saw the fine black hairs which he had missed shaving on his Adam’s apple. Had they been there when I’d met him in 1931?

He appeared in my mind as a complete figure, not just a face. Bowing from the waist he was and smiling, without showing his teeth. His white jacket had a high collar and looked very stiff, somehow formal, although the cut was sort of sporty. He could have been a waiter in a Chinese restaurant …

I think his full name was Ben Toguri but Toguri was all Mother called him. His boss was a German architect Dieter Meyerdorf, who was renting that house east of Hollywood for a year. It was beyond Griffith Park which was still a wilderness back then though a stone’s throw from down town. The district that became Los Feliz, where people built big fancy houses with acres of land around them.

Mother had landed that job on the rebound, because arriving without a uniform to help serve at Meyerdorf’s New Year’s Eve party, the catering boss relegated her to dishwashing. She said even in the kitchen she looked out of place in her brown chemise, so it was her miracle that she was singled out for a full time job.

What really happened is that the other catering staff, refined in their fancy black uniforms, snubbed her. She got on with her work and Toguri noticed her because of it.

The guests at that party left after dawn and Mother stayed on her feet until noon, mopping up booze and scraping off food which had been mashed into the carpets. Having never seen caviar or profiteroles, lobster or mango, she couldn’t put a name to half what she was scooping up.

In the large Spanish courtyard with its huge stone fireplace Meyerdorf had had a five-piece ragtime band entertain his dazzling guests. When the band broke for intervals two Mexican guitarists serenaded the couples dancing beside the swimming pool.

Mother said the noise and bustle had made her head swim. The catering staff snickered in the kitchen about the tuxedoed guests who stubbed their cigars out on the hardwood floors or flicked their cigarette butts into the floodlit fountain. Not that Meyerdorf had noticed, because early in the evening before the throngs had arrived, he’d slipped in a puddle of champagne and had had to be put to bed, where he was followed by a stream of girls who made appearances naked on his bedroom balcony which overlooked the courtyard.

Toguri ran the house but kept his gloved hands clean, noticing that Mother never took hers out of the dishwasher. When the party finally ended, he sent her to clean the tier of terraces either side of the elaborate landscaped garden. When he offered work for the following day, she didn’t say that Meyerdorf’s place was a three-mile walk from our room, because she was afraid that would stop him from hiring her.

Mother had never even seen pictures of a house like that. Put together with more money than sense, it was pure Hollywood.

Of course she mistook the brass for gold and couldn’t understand how anybody lived with so many modern paintings. ‘Look like somebody just threw the paint at them,’ she said and proper antiques puzzled her. She thought everything, including the Italian marble, was to be scrubbed with Dutch Boy cleanser and thought Toguri was crazy for making her take a ladder around the house to polish the towering palms with milk. He laughed when she offered to repair the tapestry that hung in the hallway and tried to explain that being so old it was meant to look frayed.

Toguri must have had his hands full training her to clean the place and she brought home new terms at a fast rate. Ming vase. Persian rug. Victorian lace. Japanese silk. Egyptian cotton.

Every time she left for work I imagined her walking to a fairytale palace. Sometimes she’d describe how she’d perspire, polishing the dining-room table. It seated twenty-four and had a crystal chandelier hanging above it, which she was told never to touch. Every chance she got to shine Meyerdorf’s two-foot-high solid silver crucifix, she prayed while she rubbed that God would protect her from breaking anything in that house.

She loved doing Meyerdorf’s dressing room because she said, ‘That was the safest place to work. I could drop a sock or a pair of suspenders without worrying.’

That Los Feliz job got her humming again. It was as if the richness of her surroundings gave her new confidence. She wasn’t just a cleaner, she cleaned for somebody wealthy, and that helped her hold up her head. She started laughing again. It was hard to believe that she was the same Ruthie Mae Matthews who had been too timid to look Father Connolly in the eye if she passed him on the stairs. It was impossible to see her as the woman who, a year before, had sat in our L-shaped room above Mack’s undoing crocheted doilies so that she’d have yarn for crocheting the next day.

I can’t remember what Lilian and I used to do for the hours Mother wasn’t home. All that California sunshine allowed us more street life, but I was a loner, especially after Lilian seemed to have no more time for me. I know that I had a skipping rope and used to wander the streets collecting bits that I dreamed of selling to the rag-and-bone man.

Toguri may have been in his late twenties like Mother, because he had youthful interests. He liked to Charleston and kept the radio blaring, because with Meyerdorf gone, Toguri was his own boss. He remained in the house alone when Meyerdorf was away and grew dependent on Mother to help stave off the dullness of those Southern Californian afternoons when big houses can feel like cemeteries. Places for dead people. The posse of Mexican gardeners, who spoke no English, were employed by the owners to maintain the garden three days a week, but Toguri and Mother were the only people who entered the house.

She worked every day but Sunday and came home with Toguri’s copy of the newspaper to pore over every line, scrutinizing the obituaries and want ads as carefully as the front page, preparing herself for the following day, in case Toguri might want to discuss something he’d read. But when I used to see her studying the want ads, I was afraid that she had to find a new job. I stayed confused and worried about bills like I was the one paying them.

Toguri was second-generation Japanese from Toronto and filled her head with new words and bizarre notions that she wanted to impose upon us. ‘I want you girls to breathe deeply when you’re out walking. Fill your lungs with fresh air and take time to observe nature. Stop when you see a eucalyptus tree. Break off a leaf and smell it. The world is beautiful and you take it too much for granted.’ That was surely Toguri talking … Negroes in our neighbourhood were on the breadline and Mother was picking up a Japanese inflection. She was like a teenager who starts running with a fast crowd, but Lilian and I still needed her. We still needed a home but didn’t have one, moving from one rooming house to the next and living out of her carpet bag.

She’d come back late with fanciful talk about some radio programme that Toguri had had her listening to which was of no interest to us. Her manner grew so stiff and detached that she thanked us for everything from scrubbing floors to making her sweet tea. ‘Good evening, girls,’ she’d say in a slight daze. Like a walking zombie she was some nights, but what could we say? Little girls weren’t bold and never speaking until spoken to was a virtue. I thought the world was for grown-ups and knowing that people were out panhandling made my generation obedient. But Hollywood has always been wild and for all I know, Mother could have been at Meyerdorf’s smoking opium every day. I’ve lived long enough to know that kids never know what’s really going on, because more often than not, people make a point of not telling them.

Mother had described Toguri to us as handsome but on the only occasion when Lilian and I met him, I took more notice of his graceful, birdlike movements than his face. He flitted across the carpeted floors, his feet in black slippers, never making a sound.

He greeted us at the front door, giving a slight bow as though we were Meyerdorf’s guests. Mother had already lectured us so long and hard that I was afraid to breathe. Tying the ribbons in my hair, she’d said, ‘Don’t touch nothing, don’t sit on nothing, and don’t dare take nothing to eat.’

I imagined that I looked beautiful because I was wearing Lilian’s communion dress, but the moment we entered Meyerdorf’s hallway, I was faced with a full-length mirror, and the truth stared back at me. An enormous red ribbon flopped over my brow and that dress hung on me like a teepee. My legs were pretzel sticks and I nearly cried because I felt so betrayed by my image.

Owning a pair of tap shoes, having a mother who worked for a rich man, having known a woman who was a friend of Charlie Chaplin’s, having been praised for my Bible recitations, I was a child with delusions and to discover that I looked like a little brown clown wounded my pride. But Lil and I sang for Toguri that afternoon anyway. Our a cappella harmonies were improved by the echo in the courtyard. ‘These two are better than the Cochrane Twins on Children’s Hour