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.
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
