Like Venus Fading

My mother loved to remind me that she had arrived with two mouths to feed in addition to her own, but no contacts, no job, and only fifteen dollars saved from giving recitations. But for all her complaints about this period in our lives, we were never so hungry that we grew weak. In fact, as soon as I started caring about my figure, I was glad that an empty stomach felt normal to me.

Mamie said that church was the only safe place to begin in a new city, so it was as well that we arrived on a Saturday night with Sunday morning just an arm’s length away.

The next morning while Lil and Mother snored, I ran to the only window to see what surprises the dawn had brought. Like a kid heading for a stocking at Christmas, I expected bliss. I expected to see oranges growing on trees and the big cactus plants that Hortense had described. I expected a great open range, but our dormitory overlooked the back wall of the next bungalow where an overturned trash can was surrounded by garbage. We had slept in a rabbit warren with walls that had never been painted and warped floorboards rife with splinters. A Salvation Army hostel would offer far better these days. But I was young and everything was new and exciting.

Mother was either brave or crazy to face that Sunday in a strange metropolis with two children and no prospects. Maybe that’s why Mamie had said, ‘Ruthie, go straight to church, ’cause Los Angle-less is teeming with okies and thieves, syphilitics and who knows what. And see how they did poor Mabel Normand.’ She was Mamie’s favourite biograph star who clowned with the Keystone Cops and had reputedly died from morphine addiction earlier that year. Mamie had said, ‘Find you some honest church folk and you can’t go too far wrong.’ And mother never challenged Mamie’s word.

Lilian and I sat in that women’s dormitory on those old slats nailed together to make a bed, watching Mother dress carefully for church. As she took her time adjusting her slip and stepping into her brown chemise, I couldn’t resist asking, ‘Can’t I come too?’ Those churches were my stage and I needed to perform, to drink in those stares and be bathed in compliments.

‘Who’ll stay with Lil if you don’t?’

On the journey from Mississippi, my sister had suffered boils under both arms accompanied by a low-grade fever. It annoyed me when she got sick, because I was expected to treat her extra nice, and if playing nursemaid to her meant missing the first church meeting in what was a strange, new place, I didn’t want to. In fact I was temporarily wary of her because she said that the Pope hated Methodists.

While Mother arranged her hat, I was brimming with questions and was still young enough to believe that my mother had every answer. But she was feeling her way in the dark and lacked the cunning of a truly devious woman. However, with us to feed she ploughed on and combined her naïveté with plain old fashioned ignorance to potent means; to know nothing can be more powerful than knowing something. If I had to classify her as a cat, a Persian or Siamese wouldn’t do. No, Ruthie Mae Matthews was a barn cat with kittens.

When Mother returned from church hours later with a long face, Lilian was sleeping.

I knew better than to ask what Mother had seen and done now, because, on the journey to Los Angeles Lilian had burdened her with, ‘What’s going to happen?’ ‘What are we gonna do?’ and I was the one who got it for asking the when-where-and-how of Mother’s plans. She had finally hissed in a dangerously low voice that nobody else could have deciphered, ‘Irene, you put your mouth in all my business! Mamie’s right! I need to take a switch to you and Lilian more often … See kids in Sippy with rags on their back and hands raw from picking cotton. I can’t be messin’ with you, this here’s the Depression!’

This was the reply I had got for asking, ‘How will you find a church when we get to California?’

I hated getting told off more than I hated cod liver oil or going to bed while it was light. Mother’s scolding made me feel small and humiliated, whereas I liked to think that I mattered, that I was important in the scheme of things.

Anyway, when Mother unpinned her hat and threw it on a bed in that dormitory, after a good deal of moping and sighing, she produced an envelope with three names on it. When she said that the minister she met didn’t think there was a Catholic church in the vicinity, I sensed that my sister was awake.

Lilian turned her face to the wall and gave no indication that she heard Mother say, ‘That minister say his niece gives tap dancing to little girls on Sat’days. Her name’s Louise Taylor … He thinks she don’t charge but a nickel a lesson.’

My sister pretended to be asleep and Mother knew as well as I did that she was having one of her moods.

11

That summer we moved to Los Angeles, Lilian made sure that Mother never forgot that she wanted to go back to Camden. Like a pitbull, my sister could grip the past between clenched teeth. She daydreamed about the nuns and Camden’s changing seasons; the conkers in spring and the june bugs of summer. She even harped on about the scrapple Mother used to buy. Just about everything we’d left behind was deemed irreplaceable.

Admittedly, she was ten that summer of ’30 and had more of a past to cling to than I did, but for some reason she seemed to have pasted all her hopes on a Camden life. Like a toddler clinging to a worn-out teddy. And further to provoke me, she pretended that every shadow was Miss Hortense with the police, coming to drag Mother to prison.

So Lilian didn’t want to adjust and nabbed every chance to question or whine, throwing the thorny head of Christ and the Virgin Mary into every conversation. Even when Mother mentioned tap again.

‘We can’t afford tap and school uniforms,’ Lilian said.

But me? Irene Matthews? I had delusions and had an image of myself writing Miss Hortense a letter to inform her that I was in Hollywood studying tap. I was the same little girl who only ten months earlier had slept on a pile of newspapers, and despite Mother being KO’d every round by poverty and fear, I sensed there was hope in dancing and some victory in the fact that she was even thinking about it. I’d seen the famous Bill Robinson tapping in a film short and watched some big boys on Buchanan Street try to imitate his moves, and the thought of tap excited me more than church recitals. So when my sister told Mother, ‘I don’t want to dance,’ they were both startled when I suddenly laid into Lil, pounding her with both fists.

The nuns had made me think that anger was wicked and Mother had passed her impoverished notion on to me that tempers were the luxury of the rich, so I don’t know where my sudden eruption had come from, but I was seething. ‘You do wanna tap, Lili, and don’t ever say you don’t!’

My mother was more taken off guard than my sister and although I got slapped by them both, I was glad that I’d made my point.

What followed two days later is what I sometimes imagine is the day my career began.

We had been in Los Angeles for under a week and when the heat in that dormitory became intolerable, Mother took us for walks. One blistering afternoon she pointed to a shopfront on the opposite side of the street. ‘I betcha that’s where Reverend Walters from my new church say his niece works.’

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

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

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 …