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?
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.
