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.
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.
