Like Venus Fading

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?

Mother was fat and Miss Hortense was thin.

Hortense dozed under her satin quilt while Mother rushed to work six days a week in all kinds of weather and got neither holiday nor holiday pay.

While Hortense spent as much time in quiet prayer as a nun, Ruthie Mae Matthews, who was a very old twenty-five, worked hard to feed us from the Herzfelds’ table.

Some great artist should have painted Miss Hortense kneeling in the back pew at St Anthony’s. Her jet hair as thick as a horse’s tail was always covered by a white lace mantilla which had belonged to her grandmother.

Along with high mass on Sunday, with its incense and candlelight and the Latin chants, she was the pomp and show business in my life, and considering that we hardly had furniture and slept on stacks of newspapers which Mother cleverly arranged like a low mattress, it’s a wonder that Lilian and I knew how to make Miss Hortense’s bed.

But we loved handling the satin quilt with the matching pillow case and polishing her dresser which meant that one of us got to lift the white kid gloves with the pearl buttons which rested upon it. My sister and I wouldn’t have handled Miss Hortense’s things with greater care had she been Mary Pickford.

I understood why Father Connolly sought her company and Mack gave her those pork chops.

Several times she visited our room to listen to the radio, but she didn’t speak enough English to appreciate the seven-o’clock comedy hour, so Mother would tune into some music.

Miss Hortense always arrived with her own chair and a Chester-field cigarette for Mother, although neither of them smoked. Mother would slip the cigarette into a cigar box where she kept our baptismal papers, and the four of us would arrange our chairs around Mr Herzfeld’s radio, sitting as attentively as an audience at a piano recital.

The music we listened to was invariably interrupted by loud crackling, because reception was poor at night, but it didn’t faze us. And if there was a piece of strudel to split between us, Miss Hortense would only accept the smallest piece which she’d nibble and say, ‘We have a party.’

Mother’s eyes bulged with shock and envy the evening that Miss Hortense told us as she was leaving, that she was going to be taking singing lessons in Philadelphia. Mother yelped, ‘Singing lessons!’ as though she had been asked to pay for them.

Miss Hortense had her hand on the radio console which was so warm it added to the heat of that summer’s night, while the sounds of boys playing stickball below in the street drifted up through our open windows.

Lifting her tiny foot to adjust the ankle strap of her high heel, she said, ‘I went to see about English lessons, but I can take singing lessons for less.’

My heart leapt and I thought that I was in the presence of a saint. I could see her on posters and imagine her on advertisements draped in furs.

For all the nonsense which will be remembered as my life, who will ever know the impact that Hortense Alvarez made. It’s now conceivable to me that Father Connolly was in love with her. After all, he was only a man and men of all persuasions fall in love, though priests aren’t meant to. So at six, before I had enough savvy to shade the grey into black and white situations, I would have called his sin love, but now I’d see it as human nature taking control.

3

Hortense.

Mack.

In my child’s world, they were family. And I was as hungry for the caramels he would slip me as he was for the sordid pleasures he took for them.

That first time he touched me must have been some weeks before the stock market crashed. At the end of summer. When the nights still twinkled from the fluorescent lightning bugs that Lil and I used to catch, and the mornings brought a few hours of dry relief to those last, long, humid days.

Trying to keep up with Lilian, wanting to learn to whistle because she could, is what I partly think led me to his store that afternoon.

For as long as I can remember, I struggled to keep up with Lilian. That’s how I got old before my time. Desperate to do everything that she could. At six I was struggling to be eight and a half like her.

All that summer, Mother had been talking about us being the angels in St Anthony’s big Christmas pageant. It was months away, but she was always looking for ways to impress Mrs Herzfeld, whose four girls all did well at school. But it was Miss Hortense who came up with the cockamamie idea that we should learn to whistle ‘Silent Night’ instead of singing it. Mother got as excited as a kid about that. So by the time the fall term began, whistling at the Christmas pageant was all that I could think about.

And there was autumn, that foolhardy autumn, rushing into a head-on crash with the Depression.

The elm beside the church was shedding leaves by late September and Mother was dressing us each morning in the high socks handed down by Mrs Herzfeld. But they were too big to stay up on my bony legs.

Socks. Were they part of the reason I ended up alone that rainy afternoon in Mack’s?

Lilian was off school that day with what Mother feared was mumps, and I walked home from school amongst a gang of the other kids.

Although my socks kept slipping down into my shoes, I was scared to bend over and pull them up, in case one of the boys teased me about my legs. So when I felt a drop of rain on my forehead, my socks were clumped around my ankles. As it suddenly pelted down the other children ran, but my socks slowed my pace.

It felt good to be in the rain as I dawdled home. I remember taking a deep breath and pretending that I was exhaling cigarette smoke.

I felt grown. Bold. Out there on my own … Six years old …

When I passed a robin on a water hydrant who seemed to be whistling at me, I tried whistling back, puffed out my cheeks and blew, but all that came forth was my breath.

I’d often heard Mack whistle through the broken floorboards in Miss Hortense’s room, so, sticking my copybook under the sweater of my uniform, I headed straight for his store like somebody with a mission.

Mother was at work, my sister was in bed, and with my socks around my ankles, what immediately came to mind was Mother’s daily ‘Don’t you girls go talking to strangers.’ But Mack O‘Brien was no stranger. He was the man she gave the rent to. The landlord who could make her bottom lip tremble over a dime.

Did I decide to ask him for a whistling lesson to satisfy my mother’s pitiful ambition to brag to Mrs Herzfeld that we had been chosen for the Catholic Christmas pageant?

Did I head for that store to tempt that man, or did evil coax me to slip there alone? I was quiet and shy, maybe even a little mousey and normally took pride in following rules and doing exactly as I was told. But to blame myself is easier than blaming Mother. Yet I have a vague recollection that she’d told me to stop by Mack’s after school.

I recall what I did but never remember exactly why. Just like that night before I was found on the kitchen floor … I can pull the oddest details out of the hat but am hazy about the crucial facts.

It’s possible that what I remember as a perfumed downpour in ’29 was just another Jersey drizzle. Maybe I’m trying to make something monumental of a bad luck day.

A small bell attached to Mack’s door jingled when it opened or closed. Tinkled like a Christmas bell. It was the only nice thing in the store apart from the silver cash register which Mrs O’Brien bragged was antique. As the bell jangled above my head, I was greeted by the smell of his open jar of striped candy canes wafting from the counter, mingling with the scent of rotting bananas.

I couldn’t have felt more anxious had I gone in there to steal. My heart was throbbing. Nose started running. Legs felt shaky … I was like somebody experiencing a heavy dose of stage fright.

Mack’s tap was dripping in the back room and rain was spitting on his display window. Somebody had drawn an ‘eight’ in the dust on an empty bottom shelf and my own fingers nervously rubbed the rough cover of my yellow copybook.

Mack was seated behind his marble counter. With an elbow resting on the till, he was grumbling loudly to himself about shank.

Of course he was crazy, but I didn’t know it. Back then I thought storekeepers were mini-gods, along with priests and policemen.

Mother thought Mack was good with kids, because he would tease Lilian about her braids sticking out or he’d jibe Willie Ruttles about the racket Willie’s scooter made on the cobblestones. But when I walked in out of the rain that day, Mack didn’t acknowledge me.

I stood in the doorway staring at him, recalling how Father Connolly had said that when Mack’s father-in-law, Tommy Sullivan, had had the store, there was no cleaner grocery in Camden. Father and Tommy had been schoolboys together in some Irish fishing village and had moved to the States around the same time. Father would say in his sing-songy way, ‘Tommy was a fair landlord and the finest grocer to come out of County Mayo. Even before I took over his parish, he gave more than a tenth of his income to the Sisters of St Anthony’s.’

I stood with my mouth open, thinking of how to ask Mack to show me how to whistle, but what came out was, ‘What’s a shank, Mr Mack?’

Peering at me from behind the cash register with his hairy hands planted either side of the counter, he rose to answer my question. His glasses magnified his sunken eyes. ‘A shank, Irene? That same word stumped me on my first day apprenticed to a butcher on Rathbone Street. I was just a kid.’

It always pleased me that he knew my name.

As he spoke I inched further into the store which not only smelled of rotting bananas, but of the pickle barrel and those peppermints.

The stench in Mack’s was a constant source of speculation between my mother and Miss Hortense, because Mack didn’t sell bananas any more than he sold fresh meat. Miss Hortense was sure that the rotten banana smell was Tommy Sullivan, trying to materialize after Mrs O’Brien left the store door ajar to admit her father’s spirit on All Souls’ Day. Mother thought it was a rat decaying under the counter.

With the blind half drawn, it was hard to see the dust on the shelves of canned goods. It also made it harder to spot the cobwebs which hung like cheesecloth above the door that led to the storeroom.

The only thing he wiped was the counter which he swabbed occasionally with a grimy rag. Otherwise, he expected the stock and shelves to mind themselves.

The old feather duster, which never left its hook by the double doors, had belonged to his father-in-law. Like the broom propped in the alcove against a jumble of wooden clothes pegs, tapered candles, tins of rat poison, boxes of nails and Dutch Boy cleanser. Leftovers from the days when Mrs O’Brien’s father had sold hardware as well as food.

The sawdust on the floor, caked with dirt and dust, made Miss Hortense sneeze. So, often when she had needed something, I was sent with her shopping list scribbled on a torn piece of brown paper bag. Those regular trips down our dim, narrow staircase and out the door which was ten steps from Mack’s gave me the same odd feeling that I had in his store that afternoon as the rain fell.

When Mack explained what a shank was, it must have been mid or late September. Hardly a matter of weeks between my request for a whistling lesson and the end of Mrs O’Brien’s life; between hope for the future and the Depression.

He pointed to my exposed shin saying, ‘That’s your shank and if you come closer, you can feel mine.’

Mack drew up his pants leg. His ghostly skin looked so white to me. And hairy. I couldn’t have been more interested had he offered to let me stroke a live mink. I touched the orange fuzzy hairs with my index finger and allowed him to run his thumb along mine while he quizzed me about school.

I said, ‘I’m the youngest girl in Sister Elizabeth’s class.’

Mack teased, ‘Does that make you ten?’

‘I’m six … seven on 11 November. On Armistice Day.’

He pulled up my socks. ‘11 November?’ he said. ‘So that’s how come there’s a parade downtown! It’s your birthday!’

I didn’t expect to be lifted up, but I liked seeing the store at that height. Up with the cans of potted meat that I had seen him take down for Miss Hortense whenever I’d come as errand girl. His thick fingers curled around my thighs, but I was embarrassed to ask him to put me down. He hugged me so close that my instinct told me to wriggle free.

So close that the only air left to breathe was heavy with his smelly breath … When he finally put me down, some sweat from his forehead was on my leg but I didn’t dare wipe it and just clung to my copybook.

He patted me on the behind and said, ‘When Ruthie gets home, tell her Mack said everything’s okay.’

He’d been smart to treat me to a caramel. Unlike a mint, it left no scent of our encounter on my breath.

That September of ’29 turned out to be the last time Mother paid him rent. I recall standing with her in his store and she was holding my hand. Mack’s voice was high pitched and he had a habit of starting a sentence without finishing it, but whenever he spoke to her, she’d get so anxious, she’d finish them for him. I remember him saying ‘Your Irene …’ and leaving my name to dangle in the stinky air.

Mother clutched my hand tighter and pulled me nearer and her normally lazy speech was punctuated by a note of alarm. ‘She ain’t but six! She’s my baby!’ Then she fell silent, head bowed like an obedient child. And while I looked from her to him I felt something was wrong but I knew better than to ask what.

While Mack was telling her that he loved to sit me on his lap and recall his days in Patterson as a butcher’s apprentice, Mother’s palm grew sweaty. ‘She don’t fidget,’ he’d said, ‘and asks intelligent questions.’

Of course I used to sit still while his dinky grew hard under the weight of my behind.

Was it in ignorance that Mother imagined that I would have no aversion to Mack’s breath or the way that he would sit me too squarely on his lap? Not on one knee but drawn back against his blubbery belly so that all I could think about was his belt buckle pressing against my spine.

That afternoon, Mack closed the shop after his wife had emptied the cash register and drove home, leaving him to pull the blind down before slamming the door on the dust, the food, the odours and those caramels which were flat and round with a vein of white sugar running through them.

Were we playing out our part in the great scheme of things? Maybe, like Charlie used to say, we’re all just dominoes … maybe Mack had to do what he did to twist me towards becoming what I became.

Anyway, sitting out here tonight I’d be lying if I claimed that I ever lost sleep over him.

4

When the O’Malleys opened a grocery store two blocks away, across from the Italian bakery, people like Mother still bought a few items on credit from Mack but O’Malley’s attracted the neighbourhood’s Irish customers.

So, while I waited impatiently for my seventh birthday, praying for the days to gallop by, Mack, with business lagging, would lure me with caramels to his storeroom every time I played Miss Hortense’s errand girl.

Worried that Lilian might spot candy juice in the corners of my mouth, I’d stand at the bottom of the stairs to gobble that caramel before running back up with Miss Hortense’s items.

Mack told me about his plan to give away items to customers spending over fifty cents, and though I couldn’t read the sign when he placed it amongst the dead flies and the faded Corn Flakes boxes, I knew it said something about his offer.

When Mother received a free bar of Sunlight soap, I expected Miss Hortense to receive something better. A can of condensed cream or even a tin of kerosene. Some lanolin or a bottle of Karo Syrup, because she was a regular, thanks to me. But Mother was speechless when she heard that Miss Hortense had received two pork chops.

And what upset Mother most was who told her the news.

She had arrived home early from work that evening, hanging her coat on the back of the door as the six o’clock whistle blew.

I helped her slip off her shoes which she always removed before her hat. Lilian and I knew better than to try and talk to her till she’d had her cup of sweet tea, but we also knew when she switched on the radio and hummed along with a tune that she was in a good mood.

The afternoon’s rain had sweetened the evening air and the sunset was dark apricot. While Lilian studied her catechism, I slid my chair nearer the radio. Mother hadn’t noticed that my hair was still damp, because earlier I’d gone to the butcher for Mack. I was eager to explain, though she looked too tired for details, and I prayed that we could get through the evening without her noticing that my shoes had got wet.

Mother still had her hat on when Mrs O’Brien rapped at our door. ‘Ruthie, I want you out!’ she yelled like someone might yell ‘Fire!’. Within that second our peaceful lives felt as overturned as dirty clothes tossed from a laundry basket. Mrs O’Brien had never been to our room before and to hear her snap at my mother from the doorway made me wish for my funeral. Casket. Hearse. Mourners. Death seemed easiest.

Though I’d told no one about my visits to Mack’s storeroom, I sensed from his wife’s violent rap on our door that he must have. My ears started ringing and I thought I would vomit as my lips quivered, my mouth went dry, and my knees seemed to buckle under me.

Today kids have rights, but in those days white people could do anything to coloured children, and I burst into tears, believing that I would be jailed or killed and damned to Lucifer’s cauldrons by every caramel that Mack had given me.

Whenever I cried, whatever the circumstances, I have to admit that Lilian used to rush to console me. So while Mother stood at the door face to face with Mrs O’Brien, Lilian’s solidarity made me feel all the more guilty as she whispered, ‘Don’t cry … Don’t cry … That old witch can’t hurt Mother!’

I sobbed louder, staining my sister’s red sweater with tears and needing the toilet so badly that I was ready to pee myself.

‘Hush up, Irene!’ my mother yelled over her shoulder. Her being much wider than Mrs O’Brien, all that I could see of Mack’s wife in the doorway was the feather in her hat as her voice spat out an ultimatum that threw a pall over our room. ‘Out!’ shouted Mrs O’Brien, ‘I want you out of here before Thanksgiving.’

From the way that Mother stood with her shoulders drooping, her large arms folded in front of her and her flat feet planted too firmly on the floorboards, it was obvious that she was too weary to face an assault. There was a litany of reasons why she might have looked so beaten. Perhaps the Herzfeld girls had been bickering with each other all day or Mr Herzfeld had complained again about Mother’s cooking.

Miss Hortense said her rosary before night fell, and nothing could disturb her religious meditations. Not even the sound of Mrs O’Brien yelling, ‘Not only did Irene collect those chops from the butcher, but she delivered them to that snotty little hussy down the hall!’

A surge went through me as I was restored from darkness to light, realizing that Mrs O’Brien had only come to complain about my trip to the butcher for Mack.

Lilian held me tighter and I found enough confidence to explain that when Miss Hortense had sent me to Mack’s to buy crackers earlier, he’d sent me over to Enright’s Butcher’s for her gift.

I was too terrified of my mother’s reaction to mention that I’d gone in the rain and I was also afraid that Mrs O’Brien might guess that the free caramel Mack had given me wasn’t the first I’d swallowed.

When I’d set off, the distance had been less worrying than the big street I had to cross and the drunks that I expected to encounter on the way. But what made me certain that I could survive the long walk was that that morning before school I’d stuck what I believed to be a lucky penny in my shoe. My mind focused upon it as I made my way to the butcher’s, hopping and skipping to quell my fear as I was pelted by rain.

I can still remember the feel of the penny against the ball of my right foot as I skipped along. It must have been about four in the afternoon. There were no children out and clouds filled the sky. While I thought about the penny, the story of a chick named Henny Penny snuck into my mind. Having heard the story on the radio and seen an illustration of Henny Penny in a storybook at school, I suddenly felt that I was that yellow chick who had run around the farmyard to alert the animals that the sky was falling as a black cloud pursued him. A line from the story repeated in my head: ‘The sky is falling … the sky is falling …’