Like Venus Fading

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

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