Praise

From the British reviews for Like Venus Fading:

‘A remarkable tale … This is a brilliantly written and intricately constructed novel by an author at the height of her powers. At times harrowing and at others wryly funny, it’s a story of emancipation and, above all, of hope. If there’s a lesson to be drawn from it, it’s that all of us, if we choose, can paint the stars.’

TIM HULSE

‘Marsha Hunt’s America, superbly described in Like Venus Fading, is urban, dangerous, unparochial. This tale of Irene O’Brien and her process of reinventing herself after a supposed overdose touches cleverly on many twentieth-century myths. The dark subtext is abuse, the gleaming theme survival.’

JANE HARDY, Sunday Times

‘Like Venus Fading covers a vast geographical and social landscape, from the deep South to northern California, and a turbulent period of American history. But this broad canvas does not obscure the more tightly-observed scenes … our interest in [Irene’s] fate determines whether we want to turn the page, and the writing is good enough to ensure that we do … a challenging, thought-provoking book.’

PENNY FOX, Glasgow Herald

‘A vivid, magnetic novel … a mix of the story of Marilyn Monroe and the perceptions of Alice Walker, in a gritty, readable style that gives us Hollywood and ethnic America from a unique angle. Marsha Hunt is not afraid to face the unfaceable.’

MICHELENE WANDOR, Ham & High

‘Gripping, poignant and brilliantly written … Marsha Hunt is hailed by critics as a writer at the height of her powers and here that praise is completely justified.’

JENNY PARKIN, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

From the Irish Reviews:

‘A tautly written page-turner, Like Venus Fading tells the story of Irene O’Brien, a child from the slums of 1920s New Jersey who becomes America’s first black screen goddess, but at a terrible cost.’

LIAM FAY, Sunday Times

‘A powerful, horrifying story … But the tale is so sweetly told it seduces the reader into paying full attention to the subtleties of its flavour.’

DJINN GALLAGHER, Sunday Independent

‘A vividly written tale of abuse, identity, endurance and resurrection.’

DONAL O’DONOGHUE, RTE Guide

‘Hunt is a breathtaking writer and her story of Irene O’Brien, a poor little black girl from the South who finds triumph and tragedy in Hollywood, is stunningly well told … a wonderfully vivid, imaginative, memorable book.’

MADELEINE KEANE, Image

For Alan

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Praise

Dedication

The End

PART I Irene Matthews

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

PART II Irene Lomax

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

PART III Irene O’Brien

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

PART IV Venus Johnson

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Keep Reading

About the Author

Other Books By

Copyright

About the Publisher

‘And her joy was nearly like sorrow.’

JOHN STEINBECK

The Grapes of Wrath

The End

Los Angeles. 6 September 1965. Sweltering.

There’s a dull stench. I think it’s the garbage. But it’s me.

The sun feels hot. Is it afternoon? No birds sing.

Why can I hear but not see?

The two ambulance men mistake me for dead.

The one popping chewing gum jabs my right nipple. ‘This can’t be the Irene O’Brien,’ he says. ‘Irene’s got bigger titties.’

I try to scream but nothing comes out.

The gum chewer coughs. ‘Wouldn’t no movie star be livin’ here.’

Tell me about it. Thanks to bankruptcy, my puny, one-bedroom apartment was on the wrong side of Sunset.

‘Let’s dump her at the hospital and drop by the Fat Burger.’

‘This here’s a morgue job,’ says the one with the deep voice.

‘Where’s the body bag?’

‘You left it downstairs. Throw a sheet over her. Fuck rules.’

I imagine that I am lying face up. But a newspaper picture I later saw showed me curled on my side on the kitchen floor. Stark naked. Which had never been my style. I always sleep in nightgowns and had put one on the night of 5 September before crawling into bed with a nightcap.

The gum chewer says, ‘Spooky that her hair’s all over the floor.’

I try to scream again but can’t get my lips to move.

‘Irene O’Brien. She was a credit to the race till she started fucking honkies.’

‘Shit … you ain’t had nothing but white pussy since I known you. Grab the stretcher.’

‘Stub out that cigarette,’ says the deep voice. ‘You droppin’ ashes on her head.’

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

Irene Matthews

1

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

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?

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 …’

When I rounded a corner and spotted Enright’s, I saw it as shelter and ran in, more to seek safety than to do that errand for Mack.

Drenched and panting, I clutched his note so tightly that my fingers ached.

I’m not one for gasping. Hell, I didn’t gasp when I heard that I was up for that Oscar … nor when the doctor confirmed that there was something wrong with my little Nadine. But I definitely gasped that afternoon in Enright’s … Sucking my breath in hard at the sight of Mrs O’Brien standing there in a raincoat waiting to be served. Two women were ahead of her who both turned to look down at me when she snapped, ‘Mercy, Irene! Trust your mother to send you out in this storm.’

It was Mrs O’Brien’s sugary voice, reserved for Mack’s Irish customers. I wouldn’t have believed that she was addressing me had I not heard my name.

She’d called me I-rene with the stress on the ‘I’, but I-reen is correct.

And without meaning to, I actually looked into her eyes.

They were blue. A clear aquamarine. They sparked anger that went way, way back. Somewhere deep.

Mack’s wife. Nola O’Brien. More important to him than I was.

She spoke so loudly that the butcher and his boy and the two female customers heard her. ‘Your mother has owed me fifty cents since the first of the month. I knew she was lying when she claimed she didn’t have it, and it’d better not be my money she’s wasting on meat.’

Her husband had on several occasions fingered me in his dank storeroom, but I had yet to figure out that I had good reason to be fighting mad at her for that. All I knew was that Mrs O’Brien was calling Mother a liar, and insulting somebody’s mother in those days was a battle cry.

Scared to raise my head, with my eyes glued to Mrs O’Brien’s galoshes and my heart pounding, I found the gumption to say, ‘Leave my Mother alone!’ Coward that I was, I probably only said it above a whisper, but somebody heard, an old craggy woman in a headscarf who whacked me on the head with the handle of her umbrella saying, ‘No-account little niggers make you forget yourself.’ When my arms flew to protect my head, I dropped Mack’s note and, wet and wounded, I howled like a baby.

To be honest, I really thought I had no right to be in Enright’s, because he was a white butcher and his customers were white.

Mrs O’Brien leered over me like she’d been smelling my scent on her husband’s fingertips. As I bent to pick up Mack’s note which had fallen by her foot, she kicked my hand away and reached down herself.

Her eyes flashed like a cat ready to take on a dog, and I was too terrified to swallow.

When she snorted, ‘Kidneys!’ only a crack of lightning could have made me jump more.

Before I could run Mrs O’Brien grabbed me, thrusting me violently towards the meat chopping block. Then she snapped, ‘Mr Enright, give this child a couple pork chops. With the kidneys, and don’t give her your best.’ My pulse was pounding in my ears and I was gulping big sobs.

I blubbered half the way home, but the rain had stopped and when I spotted a rainbow, I forgot that I’d been hit. I’d heard about rainbows and seen them in storybooks but had never seen one for real and the sight now filled me with overwhelming glee. Of course this sudden mood switch, this inability to hold onto torment, is a sign of a weak character, a failing that Mother always said came from my father.

Any normal child would have probably delivered the chops to Miss Hortense in tears, devastated and confused, but I skipped into Mack’s, collected the soda crackers that Miss Hortense had originally sent me for and popped that caramel in my mouth before hearing the bell tinkle as I shut the door. I had completely forgotten that I’d seen his wife.

Two hours later, when Mrs O’Brien was shouting at our door, Mother blocking my view, I couldn’t see the way Mrs O’Brien brandished Mack’s note.

For such a skimpy piece of paper with so little on it, it carried an uncommon weight and was to be brandished again by Mack’s lawyer. The newspaper report claimed that Mrs O’Brien mistook the note as evidence that Mack was involved in an illicit, sordid relationship with a coloured maid from Los Angeles named Hortense Alvarez.

Coloured being the operative word.

But the newspapers always mash up the facts and Mexicans do have some colour.

5

I don’t know why Mother and Lil weren’t enough family for me.

I don’t know why I made so much of Miss Hortense.

But I don’t want to recall what should have been, I want to look at what was … And Miss Hortense filled a need that I must have had, a need to have a fancy woman to muse upon. Maybe that’s all goddesses have ever been. Did I come into this world incomplete until I could connect with a woman whose beauty seemed beyond reach? Although my mother had some virtues, fancy wasn’t one. Nor did I expect it to be.

Even her name, Ruthie Mae Matthews, conjures up the image of somebody who puts hands to the plough (and her maiden name, Ruthie Mae Higgins, even more so).

Mother was fifteen when she ran away from her home in Mississippi, and Daddy was a Pullman porter on the train she caught. It turned out that he had two ways of trapping naïve country girls: some got his compliments, others his lemon drops. But Ruthie Mae Higgins sampled both.

At that green age she could milk a cow, slaughter a hog and beat grown men picking a bale of cotton. But that is as much of her early life as she ever mentioned after she caught Daddy’s train whistling its way towards Chicago.

I never met him and Mother rarely talked about him except to brag to other women that he was a Creole with hazel eyes who looked trim but broad-shouldered in his starched white porter’s jacket. She spied him first while she was seated alone in the crowded coloured section.

She didn’t explain why she let a stranger old enough to be her father lure her to Philadelphia, but I guess she was open to any offer and his of a job taking care of his ancient aunt Lucy was all the coaxing Mother needed.

John Randolph Matthews.

He had women in half the cities that the trains stopped in, so I still can’t decide if it was immoral that he married Mother even after she fell pregnant. For some reason, he moved her to Camden before she started showing and then stayed gone, apart from an occasional reappearance. So between having Lilian, a stillbirth and then producing me, Mother started to take in ironing. That’s how she met the Herzfelds. Then, when Daddy disappeared altogether, they offered additional hours until gradually she cooked and cleaned for them full time.

An orphan would have had more to say about their childhood than Mother revealed about hers, and in later years, anyone would have thought that she’d been born a Herzfeld. They represented safety and salvation and I wonder if domestics like her felt that they had two homes, two families … In Mother’s case, I imagined she endured life with us but lived with them. Under the Herzfelds’ roof from sun-up to sun-down, Mother must have felt kind of rich. Until she entered their back door, donned her fresh apron and gave the milkman his order, she was a Miss Nobody. Or worse, a ‘coloured’ Miss Nobody with no husband.

The Herzfelds were the nearest Mother got to owning a house, a car and three radios. She presumed they were nearly royalty because their eldest took violin lessons, and the fact that they knew people who could afford a night out in New York to catch a vaudeville show made my mother think that our future was secure.

When she scrubbed the ring of dirt away after Mrs Herzfeld’s bath or scraped the mud off Mr Herzfeld’s shoes, Ruthie Mae Matthews felt as significant as a clock’s hands. Because her ‘white folks’ gave her status even though they didn’t pay much.

The night that Mrs O’Brien gave Mother notice, created a sudden trauma in our lives, so of course my sister and I eavesdropped from behind our door when Mother went to Hortense’s to tell her the news.

‘Hortense, you gonna let her call you a Comanche nigger and husband stealer! Whatch’you gonna do, girl!’

Surprisingly, Miss Hortense merely decided to pack her things and go; it happened so fast that I had no time to adjust to the idea of losing her. With childish glee, two nights later, I watched her and Mother remove Hortense’s bed, bedding, dresser and chair to our place. But when, the following morning, she pulled the door of her room to for the last time my eyes were wells of tears.

‘Smile Irene!’ She was chirpy. ‘Things will get better for you.’

Lilian refused to stand out in the cold morning air to wave Hortense goodbye with me, but I was not on that sidewalk alone. Was it a mere coincidence that Father Connolly happened by as the ice man arrived to taxi her with her trunk to the ferry?

I can still see her smiling down at me, her cheeks rouged. ‘You could work for the stars, Irene,’ she said, before patting the ice man’s old pony.

6

Miss Hortense wasn’t just the glitter in our drab lives – some deity who merely slipped off to Mass each morning in hose washed each night and dried on the cord above the bath – sometimes she explained things to me in her baby English. And that’s what I missed most that chaotic October after she left.

Though people on our block gossiped about daily headlines, front-page news passed us by until the stock market crashed and the banks failed.

They called that Black Tuesday. That was the day when sane men leapt from windows and workers lost hope, the day the poor got poorer, and people with their savings invested in stock went broke. But it was the following day which brought our corner to a standstill because Mack was arrested for Mrs O’Brien’s murder. Being six, I imagined that it was the O’Brien murder which threw the entire world into chaos.

I recall Mack’s arrest like it happened yesterday. Being late October a chill had sunk its teeth into the afternoon and Lil and I took our time walking home from school. As we approached our corner, we saw a police car pull up outside the store and before we could reach it, a crowd had gathered. Kids and grownups, some strange, some familiar, appeared from nowhere and Lil and I got pinned in our doorway. Taller kids blocked our view and adult voices floated back over our heads. Even Mr Lucas, the arthritic janitor from St Anthony’s, hobbled up the street to join the excitement, pushing his way to the front where the big boys made silly jokes. When one kid yelled, ‘Won’t be no singing in Sing Sing for Mack,’ Jet the local drunk who’d been banned from Mack’s store cheered. Then one girl asked if the store had been robbed, but the old Polish woman who worked for a man who lived opposite the O’Brien’s claimed that Mack’s wife had been stabbed to death outside her kitchen door.

For some reason a swell of laughter went up from the crowd before she added, ‘Cops been over our way asking questions.’

Every night that Mother had come in from work and counted the days we had till Thanksgiving to find a new home, I had prayed that something bad would happen to Mrs O’Brien. But it scared me to hear that she’d been murdered, because what if my mother had done it? My heart was pounding like a tomtom when the police drove Mack off in handcuffs; as that old janitor shouted, ‘Everybody’s gone loco, including the President!’

It was dusk before Mother’s footsteps plodded up our creaking staircase and before she could turn her key in the door, Lilian opened it. But Mother already knew about Mrs O’Brien and she couldn’t kick her shoes off fast enough to cut a step of Charleston, the weight of her round body causing the windows to rattle. When she kissed Lilian’s crucifix, I felt surer of her guilt, despite her asking us a few times, ‘Do folks think he did it or not?’

My sister christened that day Killer Wednesday and suddenly kids at school were also calling it that. But I personally made no reference to Mack or Mrs O’Brien as I was sure somehow that some nun would spot my guilt. Smell caramels on my breath. But what I imagined that I was guilty of I can’t say.

The Crash couldn’t erase the holy days which followed Hallowe’en, but Mack’s disappearance shrouded them for me, especially after some official boarded up the store windows and pasted a NO TRES-PASSING sign on the door underwritten with small print, big words that even Lilian couldn’t pronounce.

To see grown people sitting on the sidewalk with their heads in their hands or hear women weeping during mass as the days trundled along had me thinking that Mrs O’Brien had many mourners. And when Mrs Carrington, the neighbourhood widow, started wandering up and down our street moaning, ‘God wouldn’t do this,’ it never occurred to me that they were under duress because of the Crash.

Since nobody collected our rent after Mack’s arrest, Mother felt like she was winning, until the bank foreclosed on Mr Herzfeld. She couldn’t believe that her White Hope had been ambushed by Wall Street. Then a few days later, the Herzfelds let Mother go: the evening Mrs Herzfeld announced, ‘We won’t be needing you any more’, my mother’s world collapsed.

Initially, I think she enjoyed waking late and seeing Lil and me off to school. She certainly never burdened us with worries, although she must have been desperate. Yet by some act of faith she produced a cake with a candle for my seventh birthday.

Those November afternoons my sister and I would get in from school to find Mother seated at the window spying on neighbours she knew by sight but not name. She said what made it worth working at the Baptist church for no money was that she met other women who’d lost jobs.

But mother missed the Herzfelds. Probably missed the sight of their cosy fire that she complained about having to clean, and probably missed the luxury of their fancy bathroom and their kitchen which she said had too many gadgets.

Mother pretended that she was glad when Mr Herzfeld collected his Motorola, because Hortense’s things took up so much space, but entertaining ourselves without it was hard.

In spite of these sudden changes, our room looked almost fancy with Miss Hortense’s bed in it, especially after that big pile of newspapers had gone to the rag and bone man.

By Thanksgiving Mother had somehow started slipping to the Herzfelds’ at daybreak to do their laundry and cook for a paltry few leftovers, but thankfully Mr Herzfeld had the grace to stop her visits. He sent her home with two apples, a slice of stale pumpernickel and an egg, wrapped in her blue apron.

The next day I nibbled my apple segment under a December sky as bright as Mother’s apron.

That sliver of apple tasted sublime.

There are fewer glowing moments in my childhood than Lilian liked to record, but I don’t pretend that I was in a perpetual state of gloom. I had a child’s ability to assume that clouds drifted away.

In fact, Mrs O’Brien’s murder may have had a positive effect, because I probably imagined that the baddies sometimes get it in the end.

Christmas that year turned out to be one of my happiest, happier even than the Christmas after my marriage, because the postman had arrived in the snow on 24 December with a two-by-ten-inch parcel. Having never received mail, I couldn’t believe that a package arrived with my name and Lilian’s crudely printed on the brown paper wrapping. To tell the truth that meant more to me than the two wooden flutes we found inside, with the small tag signed, ‘from Saint Nicholas’.

Lilian thought it was from Daddy, but Mother said, ‘That’s ain’t Mr Matthews’ writing. That’s from Hortense, and I can’t understand why she didn’t write nothing about when she’s coming for her furniture.’ I smiled for two whole days.

7

Mother rarely smiled after the new decade got under way and any small sound in the room seemed to annoy her. It never crossed my mind until now that she was not only worried and bored but irritable from a lack of food.

The mere sight of Lil and me must have reminded Mother that we needed food when she could no longer rely on credit at Mack’s for a pound of sugar or a can of sardines.

She stayed out, walking around Camden to seek comfort from the faces of other jobless people whose miseries mirrored hers. After dark, she’d slip home and hardly look at us before unlacing her shoes and saying, ‘Why ain’t you two in bed!’

This was less punishing because we were using Hortense’s things, Lilian and I curling up under that pink satin comforter like kittens, and if we were allowed to whisper, Lil would teach me a difficult prayer or relate details from her first Holy Communion ceremony. She had worn a short veil along with a hand-me-down dress, socks, and shoes that had once been part of Mabel Herzfeld’s summer wardrobe.

From the moment that I had seen Lilian when she was seven in a veil, I couldn’t wait for my turn.

‘Patience, Irene,’ Mother had chided. ‘Your communion’s in 1930, and you’ll look as pretty in that dress as Lilian. It’ll only need starch and an iron.’ But seeing me eye that white ensemble too often, Mother put it away in a cardboard box, after returning the veil, on loan from St Anthony’s. I knew better than to mention the words Holy Communion again but I continued to dream about mine, sitting in that short section of our L-shaped room where Mother undid crocheted doilies so that she had some thread to crochet again.

Without the Herzfelds, Mother was lost. She’d dust Miss Hortense’s dresser till it shone like glass and wash our few clothes so often that the bathroom looked like a washhouse.

Being winter, Lilian and I retreated to church and school, where the nuns’ stern white faces and monotonous, subdued voices kept control. Sweeping through school in their black habits, they monitored our every move.

Lilian and I were Catholics because Daddy had been, and while Mother was Methodist, non-practising in those days, she kept us at St Anthony’s in case he ever came back.

Some church life in Camden during those harsh times would have done her some good. She faked an interest in getting herself baptised whenever she bumped into Father Connolly, but Mother refused to study the catechism and saw no point in a Pope. However, she was proud that we were Catholics for some reason.

Lilian got her best grades in religion and loved going to confession. She even set up an altar in our room using an orange crate that Mack had given her which she draped with a yard of blue velvet donated by Miss Hortense and a replica of the Virgin Mary won in the third-grade spelling bee. Lil’s altar even had a red novena candle on it got from goodness knows where. It sat on a doily that Mother had crocheted, but since Mother was afraid of fires, the candle was never lit. Wanting to contribute something, I gave Lilian a tiny white feather I’d found in church. It had probably fallen off some lady’s hat. It lay upon the little white Spanish missal which Hortense had left behind.

Lilian’s eyes, as dark and round as mother’s, would study that altar until she looked mesmerized. Mother should have noticed that Lilian was going overboard. But maybe she couldn’t think beyond our next bowl of grits.

I used to blush when people back then confused my sister and me, because Lilian’s hair was longer and her skin was shades paler than mine so I considered her pretty.

We both got Daddy’s nose and Mother’s lips, but any fool would have envied my sister her hair, which reached below her shoulders. It irritated Lilian when I reached her size because people mistook us for twins, although looking alike was a bonus when we started singing together.

She’d say, ‘Irene, how come you’re as tall as me?’

But the truth is that I was never tall, Lilian was just short.

It was during our last six months in Camden that I seemed to shoot up. My skin itched like I was growing out of it and Mother would get vexed with me scratching and say, ‘Irene, can’t you set still? I don’t for the life of me know how you got like your Daddy.’ So I’d creep out to play, but downstairs, all I wanted to do was sit in the doorway of Mack’s store and watch the people passing. They rarely smiled back in ’30, because there was nothing to smile about.

The Depression was a snowfall in summer. It fell upon the rich and poor, and froze stout hearts overnight.

8

Mother said we were lucky to get hominy grits for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and she couldn’t afford an omnibus across town. We saw whole families out begging on Wells Avenue and I always went to bed thinking, ‘Will we be next?’

Lilian used to kneel before her altar and say the rosary with such intensity, believing that could save the world, and one night she told Mother that she wanted to become a Sister of Mercy so that she could help all the beggars. Mother laughed like Lil had told a joke. ‘Things gonna work out. You watch … one of these mornings you, me and Reenie gonna take off for Sippy. I’m thinking about heading for Mamie’s, if she’ll still have me.’

I was working in my copybook and was alarmed by my sister’s violent response. She yelled, ‘I’ll never go back to Sippy!’

Sippy was Mississippi and Lil had always avoided talking about it, but I gathered that something bad had happened there when Mother had taken us to visit her friend Mamie and Mamie’s brother Buster when I was two and a half and my sister was five.

Lil was normally a quiet child so it unnerved me to hear her scream, ‘You promised we’d never go back to Buster’s.’

Mother’s nostrils flared and I knew she was losing her patience. ‘It ain’t Buster’s no more. It’s Mamie’s, and you’ll go where I tell you to!’

That was the early spring of 1930 and I might have jumped to my sister’s defence had I known that this so called ‘aunt’ would try to build her nest in our lives.

While Lil and I were at school on the last day of April, Mother sold Miss Hortense’s things without warning us. To return home to find the sun lighting bare floorboards was shocking.

The place where we normally sat to do our homework, warmed by the afternoon light, was empty, and our voices echoing disturbed me more than my sister’s tears. Lilian drew the school books she was carrying to her chest as if to shield her heart from the bleakness. The room was empty apart from a trunk we’d never seen before and Lilian’s altar upon which Mother had lit the novena candle.

Despite the heavy rings under her eyes Mother looked self-satisfied, producing some dollars from her pocketbook, saying, ‘Good thing I kept Hortense’s dresser polished … It fetched way more than the bed, so I got enough for tickets and then some.’

‘Stealing,’ I said under my breath, staring in horror at the spot where Hortense’s bed had been.

‘We’re moving, huh?’ Lil asked, probably hoping that Mother had landed a job with Mrs Herzfeld’s cousin in Philadelphia.

‘Sippy,’ said Mother.

That nasal Jersey twang of Lilian’s bounced from wall to wall. ‘What about catechism? What about school!’

‘We can’t set ’round here waitin’ to die!’ Mother snarled, rushing to lower the open window so our voices wouldn’t peal into the streets. ‘Do y’all know how tired I am. Holes in my shoes, my pockets. Next there’ll be a hole in my head!’ She was twenty-five and had lost so much weight from our hominy grits diet that her dress hung inches too long and was practically touching the floor.

My sister screamed again, ‘But you promised we’d never go back. And I won’t! Not ever!’

I had been too young to understand anything during that first trip to Mississippi in 1925, but it was easy enough over the years to piece together the tragedy. I heard Mother’s version, Lil’s and, of course, Mamie McMichael’s, who eventually accompanied my sister and I when we sang as a duet. But not one of them could be counted on to tell the truth …

The story began with Mother meeting Mamie in Camden when Mother was pregnant with Lilian and Daddy’d started his long disappearing acts. Visiting a little storefront church for solace, Mother had met Mamie, who was fifteen years her senior and was the guest pianist, on a visiting exchange from Mississippi.

When Daddy discovered that Mamie had coaxed Mother to recite Bible tracts, he accused them both of being bull dykes and forbade Mother to attend any church that wasn’t Catholic.

Mother obeyed but happened to bump into Mamie five years later in ’25 when Daddy was gone again. Mamie’d warned, ‘Bad men get worse. Leave him and take them kids back to Mississippi.’

Mamie had such a soft spot for Mother she assured her that she could earn pocket money there, giving Bible recitations in small churches where Mamie and her brother Buster played. She even paid for Mother’s train journey and ours.

In the many versions of this story I’ve heard, I’ve never found out where Mamie was that day Buster collected us from the station. He arrived with the mule and cart they normally used to transport their piano and Lil, like any five-year-old, was over herself with excitement.

Buster was a handsome, young World-War-I veteran. Dark skinned like Mamie, but way better looking. He bragged about his army experience, but resented that the local reserve board had refused him a disability pension for the headaches he’d suffered from being gassed in France while digging latrines.

The ten acres he shared with Mamie were on the north side of a big cotton plantation, worked by tenants so poor they considered Buster and Mamie to be rich. But the farm was paltry – chickens, turkeys, guinea fowl and a few hogs and goats in pens. Yet Buster expected to impress Mother with the two-room house and outdoor toilet which he’d built to resemble a proper A-frame house.

With Lilian perched on his shoulder when he showed it to Mother who had me in her arms, he teased, ‘Y’all’s behind-the-chairs won’t set on no finer commode than that from here to Little Rock.’

It was a little shotgun house with the kitchen cluttered with pots, pans, sheet music and war mementoes, including a gas mask. Mother recalled how ashamed she was that we ate like we were starving, gobbling his peach preserves and government-surplus peanut butter after eating half of the fat back and greens which had been simmering on the stove. So when Buster promised Lil pancakes and sorghum syrup for breakfast, Mother said, ‘You better stop or I won’t never get her back up Jersey way.’

Next thing, Buster sat himself at the piano and created a song, a ragtime thing with some made-up lyrics about not letting Lil go back to Jersey.

Mother said everything in the kitchen was swinging and she got Lilian to dance, because Lil could always cut a shimmy.

We must have all been having a ball in that Delta heat until I strained to fill my diaper and Mother rushed me to the outhouse. While she held me over the toilet, a car rolled into the yard and backfired. Mother thought nothing about it, beyond wondering who Buster and Mamie knew who could afford an automobile. But it soon drove off again and next she heard Lilian calling. When Mother made her way to the front yard with me trailing behind, she found Lil standing over Buster who was sprawled motionless on the ground. His face and hair were covered in dust and blood and Lil was shooing the flies off him. Mother used to say, ‘What was I meant to do? I was young and stupid and there he was on the ground with his eyes swole like two baseballs and blood streaming from his nose and mouth. I thought he was dead.’

Of course she started bellowing, because she never could cope with the sight of blood, and when she bellowed, Lilian joined her and then I started.

She didn’t know if she’d walked into some kind of feud, but the whole scene petrified her, and there were no neighbours for miles. So grabbing us kids she ran in the house, shouting at my sister, ‘Did you see what happened? Who done it!’ But Lilian was crying hysterically by then and couldn’t get a word out.

No phones. No neighbours. No real knowledge of Mamie or her brother. She was in a completely strange place with two little children, and a man she’d just met was in a heap on the ground. Mother was frantic that the culprits would return while Buster was laying out in his front yard with his chin split open and flies settling on his bloodied face.

She didn’t even know where the water pump was to get water to clean his wounds, so she tied me to a chair with an apron she’d spotted and grabbed the pot of greens. Lilian followed her back outside where one of the roosters was pecking at Buster’s trouser leg. Using the pot liquor and one of my diapers to wipe some of the blood from his face, all Mother could do was cry and say, ‘You’ll be all right. Just tell me what happened.’ He never spoke.

Lil was just learning to count that summer and wasn’t able to say whether Buster had been attacked by three or four, men or boys. All she knew is that while Mother had me in the outhouse, some white men had driven up and called Buster to the porch. He had told her to stay in the house so she’d watched from the door.

What had she seen? Did Buster resist being beaten and kicked to the ground? Who did what? Were words exchanged? At five years old Lil had no clear answers. ‘One hit him with the stick and the others were kicking him,’ she’d cried. The tyre mark across his shirt suggested that the car may have driven over him.

Mother couldn’t move him so she placed an apron she found in the house over his face to keep the flies off it and made a promise to Lil: ‘Let the Good Lord get us back to Jersey and we’ll never come to Mississippi again.’

When Mamie arrived in the late afternoon to find her brother unconscious in the yard, she hardly seemed surprised. ‘He pestered them bosses over at the reserve board for his disability pension and when they turned him down, he started putting it around that he was gonna write to Washington.’ Mamie was a big woman, tall, broad and heavy hipped. Not the sort to back off a fight, but she sat on the porch and removed her hat and earrings and slung them on the ground.

Mother said Mamie had then pumped Lilian with questions that no child of five could have managed, like what kind of car had come and what ages were the men.

In later years, whenever my sister wanted sympathy, she used to tell the Buster McMichael story. But she was thin on facts.

When he died that evening, without regaining consciousness, Mamie’d said, ‘I hope his uniform still fits, cause he’d want to be buried in it.’

Five years later in our room above Mack’s, Mother said, ‘You’re going to Sippy, Lil, like it or not.’

So that’s where we headed with the proceeds from the sale of Miss Hortense’s furniture. May 1, 1930. And my sister thought our lives were ending. In some ways they were.

We took the bus south and although Mother tried to look happy and tell us that living with Mamie was going to be good for us, I faced the prospect with as much dread as my sister, because she was the leader then. Lilian was going to turn ten that June and kept reminding me that I was going to miss my Holy Communion.

‘Can’t I take it in “Sippy”?’ I asked Mother when we settled on the bus.

But Lilian pinched me to be quiet.

On the bus one woman talked about President Hoover as though he were God or a magician, but nobody could fix what had taken years to happen.

Our driver between North and South Carolina was one of those men born heartless or else his generosity had been stretched to the limit.

It was getting dark when he tried to get rid of a dirty, blond, sunburnt woman who boarded the bus at a deserted stop with four children and no tickets. He expected some of his passengers to help him, but everybody just sat there tight lipped. The grown ups were watchful, knowing they could be in her shoes.

The woman, whose old-fashioned straw sun bonnet shadowed her sunken cheeks, pleaded in a flat, southern drawl. ‘We gotta get to Knoxville.’

With one arm, she cradled a baby on her hip, while her bow-legged toddler clung to the frayed hem of her floral dress. His dirty diaper was around his knees, and mucus streamed from his nose. Her two eldest boys, probably younger than I was, had struggled to climb on board with a burlap sack the size of a pillow case. The small cardboard suitcase in her free hand was more worn out looking than Mother’s big carpet bag which had a piece of clothesline for a handle.

When a pot fell out of their burlap, making a racket as it clanged down the bus steps, the driver threatened to push the five of them off. Though I didn’t know where or how it would come, my every muscle was braced, anticipating violence.

Mother poked Lilian in the side and mouthed, ‘White trash,’ which made my sister and I smile for the first time in two days.

We were one of only three coloured families uneasily parked at the back of the bus. Scared to even whisper, because to remain invisible was the nearest thing we had to self-defence. Mother admitted years later that she’d been afraid that the driver was going to tell the woman that she could have our seats and that we’d be the ones turfed off.

During that journey I got my first glimpse of the way that twilight gradually blackens green hills. I still had the childish audacity to feel occasional pangs of joy at the sight of a baby lamb with its mother. I saw the silhouettes of herds of horses and cows as darkness fell. What I couldn’t see was that my childhood was nearing its end.

As the bus bumped along, Mother’s head bobbed in sleep. She was leaving Camden behind, but Lilian and I took it with us. I worried from time to time whether Mack would somehow tell her about the caramels.

I kept thinking about the previous morning when I’d sat at my desk in St Anthony’s, fidgeting with the empty inkwell and a girl told Sister Elizabeth that she’d dreamt that Mack had cut off Sister Octavia’s head. Then the Italian boy who had arrived in the middle of the term from New York raised his hand to say that he had had a nightmare too. But none of them could have been as scared as I was, expecting each night to be strangled in my sleep by Mrs O’Brien’s ghost.

9

Mississippi was the crud between my toes from walking barefoot on the dry, crusty soil. And Mississippi was learning to stand back far enough when the man made soap by adding lye to the hog grease. ‘Stand back, gal,’ he’d say, ‘If this lye catches you, it’ll burn so bad you wish you was in hell.’ Mississippi was also Mother’s coy laughter when a ninety-year-old from Mamie’s church patted her behind and told her, ‘You’re the juiciest Lucy I seen outside Biloxi.’ And Mississippi was the wasted hope that Mother could make enough to feed us, by giving recitations up and down the Delta.

She had been gone too long to appreciate flattery from a hardworking cotton picker and she felt superior to the sharecroppers who raised their broken straw hats to her whenever she crossed their tenant farms. She had thought that she was back to stay, but when women at the small churches where she’d recite would complain about the white families they served, Mother would describe the Herzfelds as saints and brag about their mahogany highboy heavy with crystal and silver, like somebody homesick.

Once Mamie heard Mother say, ‘Jews. I’d work for ’em any day, rather than these Mississippi crackers.’ Mamie scoffed, ‘Ruthie, there ain’t no Jews ’round here. And nobody cares that you was Jew-rich up Jersey way. If you want coloured folk to give you a dime at prayer meetings, keep that Jew talk to yourself.’

Mamie McMichael was dangerous.

She talked a lot about God but she was more fixated by money and getting back what she thought she was owed by the local whites.

On moral grounds Lilian refused to eat the chicken that Mamie stole from the cotton planter near her farm. Mamie scolded after beating my sister, ‘That bastard owes me. Since I was a bitty thing, he been fixing the scales that weighs cotton that my folks bent over ’til they couldn’t stand up. But them ole nuns didn’t teach you ’bout that.’

Lilian still said her rosary every night, kneeling before her small altar set up in Mamie’s kitchen. Arranged with the same items that she’d had in our room above Mack’s, it made Mamie’s place more like home, although Mother had burned the novena candle down to nothing the night before we’d left Camden.

Had Mother not whispered to Mamie about ‘the landlord and his wife’, I might have forgotten about Mack altogether, because there was a lot to discover in Bofield, and Mamie’s home-made peanut brittle was as satisfying as caramels. Some mornings before the sun became a hot poker, I’d wander off alone to look for rabbits or search for grasshoppers in the tall, scorched crabgrass. Even lugging buckets of water from the pump to the kitchen seemed like fun as long as Mother didn’t make me do it. But during those three and a half months that Mamie’s ten acres became my wonderland, I was most awed by the way her fingers produced songs on the piano. She’d ask Mother to sing along. ‘Ruthie,’ she’d beg, ‘anybody that can recite like you, got to have some music in ’em. Let’s hear the chorus of “Gracious Lord”,’ she’d say and bang out a minor chord.

Mother found every excuse from ‘Woke up with a frog in my throat’ to ‘I can’t waste time singing when I’ve got passages to learn.’

Her recitations were more popular with me that Mississippi summer than anybody, apart from that ninety-year-old man whose name I never knew but who turned up to sniff around Mother in the yard like a mangy old Tom cat. Her figure was filling out again from Mamie’s fatback, beans and rice. Listening to my mother learn her Bible passages was better than radio, because she’d let me interrupt. She didn’t know the meaning of every verse she recited, but she chose the easiest pieces which she’d practise aloud on the porch while I fought back the blue flies and picked at the scabs I got from scratching my mosquito bites.

I heard Mother practising her pieces so often that I knew some and could mouth the words with her. My favourite was the story of Hannah asking the Lord for a son. First chapter of the Book of Samuel. Mother repeated it so often it hypnotized me like a Latin mass. Mother’s bible stories were easier for me to follow than the catechism at St Anthony’s.

If the sun wasn’t too high or the mosquitoes too hungry on Mamie’s porch, Mother would let me climb onto her lap and make requests. ‘Do the one about Hannah.’ If she hadn’t already, she’d clear her throat and swim fearlessly into the verse with a power that she displayed at no other time. It was like sitting on a mountain that speaks. ‘There was a certain man of Ramathaimzophim of the hill of the country of Ephraim whose name was Elkanah, the son of Jeroham, son of Elihu, son of Tohu, son of Zuph, an Ephramite …’ She could lower her voice until the syllables swayed back and forth with the ease of a porch glider; slow, so slowly the cadences would rise and fall. Forward then backward, high, then low, carving a road into my psyche like the radio jingles did. ‘Whose name was Elka-nah, the son of Jero-ham, son of Eli-hu, son of Tohu.’

Mother’s voice was as round as her belly, as soft as her lap, as smooth as her hair when greased and straightened with tongs. So I was often lulled to sleep by her reciting the story of Hannah as I had been in the days when Lilian was learning to recite Hail Holy Queen. Repeating the lines over and over, Lil would entrance me with the phrase ‘Poor banished children of Eve’.

During those mornings when I trekked through the open fields alone, I would often repeat Mother’s verses, and once Lilian heard and challenged me in Mamie’s front yard: we were to see who could say all the names in Hannah’s story, and the winner could tickle the loser to death. But we never got that far because Mamie, in the yard feeding the turkeys, heard us. She yelled, ‘C’mere, Reenie.’ I thought I was in trouble for making fun of the way Mother recited ‘Elka-nah, the son of Jero-ham’ and the rest. But Mamie said, ‘Come on in and do that again.’ When she grabbed my arm to pull me into the kitchen, I looked less frightened than Lilian who was terrified of her.

Mamie’s gruffness was straightforward, but unlike Mother she would slap us without warning. So when she sat at the kitchen table and told me to stand by the stove, I didn’t know what to expect. I hoped that my Mother would rescue me but suspected that she was out back picking runner beans.

I began meekly and Mamie snapped, ‘Speak up!’

‘There was a man of Ramathaimzophim of the hill of the country of Ephraim …’

‘Do it like your mama does … Go ’head … like you did in my yard.’

I knew where Mother paused for effect and recited as she did. And Mamie applauded and laughed until tears streamed down her dark cheeks and glistened on that black mole beside her nose. The more I recited, the more she laughed and her frolicking spilled into the yard until Lilian stuck her head in the screen door. ‘Set down,’ Mamie told her.

I was a show-off but everything I did my sister tried to do better, and that afternoon was no different. Competition was fierce but whereas Lilian knew the words, I knew Mother’s phrasing.

Mamie McMichael had an instinct for what would please a crowd. To her everyone, kids, grown-ups, old people, was a potential audience. I’ve seen her arrive at a church for the first time, ask some deacons to help bring her piano from the rig, and proceed to organize the service. Merely after eyeing a congregation, Mamie would whisper something like, ‘Ruthie, do “Punishment and Blasphemy” or “Hezekiah’s Prayer”.’ Once I heard her warn in a church, ‘Whatever you do, don’t do no Proverbs, ’cause this minister only knows Psalms and Proverbs, so these folks can’t take ’em from nobody else.’

When Mamie took Mother aside after hearing Lil and I do some of Mother’s verses, Mamie said, ‘Mark my words, them children could make us rich.’

The nuns had trained us well to learn by rote and the radio had taught us to listen. Mamie was impressed that we learned Bible verses and the little hymns she taught us so quickly. We’d stand at her piano and try the odd harmony and she’d get excited. ‘Ruthie,’ she’d tell Mother, ‘folks will love these girls at church. All you have to do is press their hair and get some ribbons.’

Mother beamed like a natural-born stage mother but said, ‘They too young to hot-comb their hair.’

As it turned out, performing in those small churches was no different from standing before a cluster of parents at a St Anthony’s pageant. My sister and I wore enormous red bows in our hair but Lil made me refuse to wear her white Holy Communion dress. ‘Suppose it gets ruined,’ she’d whispered so that Mother couldn’t hear. ‘You’d have nothing for your Communion.’

Of course, I hadn’t forgotten that I’d missed mine. In fact it’s what troubled me most nights. That and Mother selling Hortense’s things …

If Lilian kept the torch of our Roman faith burning, Mamie McMichael kindled another flame. She kept us thinking about our presence before a crowd. How to smile and charm and to test our new-found skill, was like a fix. We learned to pick out eyes in the churches and work to them. We learned to modulate our voices and sell songs, even if they were only children’s hymns, and the buzz of getting ready for our performances was more fun than any game of chase or ‘Simon Says’. Performing is a vanity, but Mamie taught us that it was righteous. Being examined and admired and then getting paid by a ‘little collection from the congregation’ hit my sister like an addiction. Maybe that’s why she turned to drink after we split in ’42 and she couldn’t get a singing job.

Sure, Mamie gets some credit for my success, but it was the dollar signs rather than God that interested her. Yet tonight I’d give anything to hear her play that version of ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’ that she’d arranged for Lil and me. Nobody could play it like Mamie McMichael.

It was soon after Mamie’s mule had to be shot when Mother announced that we were moving to Los Angeles, and Lil and I were speechless, because California hadn’t been mentioned since it fell from Miss Hortense’s lips. But after our two short months of performing in churches, Mamie had devised a plan which meant moving west, and while the details were never shared with us, we were about to live them.

We were luckier to get out of Mississippi than I realized, because for decades to come what had happened to Buster would be nothing out of the ordinary. In fact when Mamie would down a glass of sweet Mogen David wine once in a while, she’d reminisce about old times and end up saying, ‘Least they didn’t slice off Buster’s dick, and they left his eyes.’

10

Mamie believed that I owed her everything for my success because I couldn’t credit the white men who made me bend over or lay down before they would provide a few yards of the sticky tarmac that led me to stardom. Acting schools should offer a course in how best to be degraded by the studio bigwigs. It would be way more useful than Shakespeare. But if Mamie were alive, she’d chastize me for suggesting that anything more than luck and talent helps girls get ahead. She’s owed, but less for her music than for lending Mother the fare that got us to California that August of 1930.

Our trip from Mississippi took days longer than Mother had expected, because we kept missing connections, and although I can’t recall our eight-day journey or name the states that we passed through, I’m positive it was in Texas Mother, Lil and me huddled together like three hobos waiting for a bus that didn’t come until dawn. When we finally reached Los Angle-less as Mamie pronounced it, it was a Saturday night and the slim crescent moon didn’t light our way from the bus station to downtown. Before the Koreans and the Mexicans took over that part of town, anybody not white was welcome. Mamie had warned Mother that the city was as segregated as any below the Mason-Dixon line, so we arrived fully aware that our ‘place’ in the scheme of things was going to be ‘no place’. When we couldn’t find a ‘Coloureds Only’ sign on any of the toilet doors in the train depot, Mother made us pee behind a bush outside.

My only memory of our evening arrival is that my sister and I were about to squat behind a bush with its dark leaves and pink flowers, and just as I untied the string on my bloomers to pull them down, a man’s voice suddenly boomed from nowhere, ‘What are you darkies doing over there?’ Mother and Lilian both deny this ever happened, but I will never forget that deep voice with its southern twist calling us darkies, which was half-way polite back then.

Darkies. The three of us had been scorched blue-black by the Mississippi sun, with grains of the Delta grime still caked between our toes. Of course, there would come a time when I would believe I was above toe jam, but those delusions were twenty years down the road. In fact, in 1930 I can’t claim that any of us bathed every week. We probably smelled, but then so did a lot of other people back then.

Only God can really explain why Mother had brought her two little coloured girls to the city that Miss Hortense had called ‘the palace of endless dreams’.

A heatwave was warming up for Sunday but that Saturday night a desert chill had settled in and Mother’s teeth were chattering by the time we found a rooming house which had a small women’s dormitory that was empty but for us.

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 …

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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