Like Venus Fading

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.