she really wanted to address. ‘Pamala, I mean Dennis, I mean Marsha.’ She did this so often that my aunt and grandmother caught the habit of it, too.
Fits and fights over whose turn it was in the only bathroom filtered downstairs into the kitchen through a crack in the floorboards to mix with the snitch of swearing that came with a last-minute touch-up with the straightening comb as one of the women singed her scalp in the rush of confusion.
‘Was the cat fed?’ ‘Have you got your milk money?’ ‘Who took my last piece of chewing gum?’ ‘Put your front-door key in your pocket …’ I can’t think how anybody arrived in one piece ready to start the day. Luckily the long journey to school on the trolley had a calming effect.
There was nothing that I thought I needed that I didn’t have except an atomic-bomb shelter stocked with neat little shelves of canned goods and folded army blankets and candles and a flashlight. Lots of people had converted their basements like this in case the Russians bombed us, a threat often implied in the Junior Scholastic and the Weekly Reader which we got at school. Instead, our basement was like an overstuffed attic with that oval portrait of my grandmother always in the way. Things were put down there when they had no other home and part of it was used as a laundry room. It was doubtful that it would ever become a bomb shelter, or even get a facelift of knotty pine walls and be called a den.
This is where my mother was one day, sorting out the coloureds from the whites to do a wash load, when I was called down to speak with her.
Ikey was standing on the platform near the washing machine when I bounded down the staircase. It was one of those old-fashioned washing machines that look a bit like a white pot-bellied stove with a separate wringer attached on top. No one ever went down to the basement unless they were doing the wash, and this made it the only place in the house you could be guaranteed a bit of privacy. It was lit by a bare bulb which hung down from the ceiling and cast spooky shadows.
When Ikey told me that Blair had been killed early that morning in a car accident, she wasn’t crying. She was just piling the clothes into the washing machine. (I’ve detested doing laundry ever since.) Because she didn’t really look up at me, I could tell that it was one of those times when I wasn’t allowed to ask questions. If I blinked fast I could always keep back the tears so I tried that while I stood by the bottom stair waiting to be told what to do.
My father had never written to me. I couldn’t rush upstairs to look at his handwriting.
There was no school that day because of a teachers’ meeting, so Dennis and I went to the little green next to the library. It wasn’t raining. The leaves had fallen.
Later that afternoon I was allowed to go to a friend’s house. She had a Persian cat that had its own birth certificate, which I thought was the most wonderfully chic thing I’d ever heard of. My friend’s mother must have found it very disarming when I looked up at her and said that my father had died that day. I didn’t make a big deal of it, because I didn’t want any sympathy. I just wanted to tell somebody.
No flowers arrived. And Blair wasn’t mentioned again until my mother had to go to Boston for the funeral.
The mornings came and went with nothing to mark the change. This was something else that I was to learn not to talk about. I got so good at keeping secrets that I eventually learned to keep them from myself.
Music rescued me from secrets and silences just around that period. My mother had taken me to see Johnnie Ray once when I was about five. He was performing in a cinema with the curtains drawn across the silver screen so that it could double as a live theatre. He was supported by the Four Aces or the Diamonds – one of those groups with a name like a suit of cards. They came on before the main attraction wearing blue iridescent suits and sang. Three of them gathered around one microphone singing harmonies to the melody and managed at the same time to snap their fingers, smile and do little dance steps in unison. The lead singer had his own microphone and spoke to us between the songs while one of the three in back clowned around a bit as part of the act. The other two just sang and I suppose they did that well enough or the audience wouldn’t have clapped so much.
Ikey had told me before Johnnie Ray appeared that he was deaf, so I felt very sorry for him when he came out with his hearing aid in his ear and sat down at the black baby grand piano. Our seats were in the balcony. It was dark everywhere except on the stage and we could see him perfectly, singing and swaying back and forth on his stool as he played the piano.
His blond hair was swept back and parted. Only one lock in the front moved, however much he threw himself around as he sang ‘The Little White Cloud That Cried’. A few women sitting near us were crying and so was Johnnie. I imagined he was crying because he was deaf, which did seem very sad to me, but I didn’t know what on earth those women were crying about.
The Uptown theatre in Philadelphia was rather famous for showcasing better-known Melangian performers. My mother said it was too dangerous to go there. Fights sometimes broke out in the audience, and on a few occasions gangs had scuffles outside after a show. So I didn’t go to any more concerts, but when people like Eddie Fisher, Dean Martin or Sammy Davis Jr sang on the radio, I imagined them appearing on a darkened stage just like Johnnie Ray.
I had to rely on radio, television and my brother’s collection of records for my music. When we moved to Mount Airy, it was not yet the kind of neighbourhood where people sang on the street corners, although we could often get within listening distance of the landlady’s Holy Roller meeting, as a few spirituals filtered out to the street.
Music seeped in and around me at home for as long as I can remember and this may have been the initial reason for my passion for it, but I can say without doubt that it was ‘seeing’ music that eventually made it stick to me like cement glue.
A stocky, rather ordinary man with slick dark hair named Bob Horn hosted the 3 pm music show from our local TV station – Bandstand. He played the latest single record releases and talked to an invited group of guests after they had mimed to their record. He also introduced the teenage studio audience.
If I rushed home from school I could catch all but the first half-hour of Bandstand. Tearing out of my fourth-grade class as soon as the final bell rang, I’d nearly get myself run over by the cars on Germantown Avenue because I’d spotted my trolley coming and couldn’t wait for the traffic lights to change.
Unfortunately, the programme time interfered with my friendship with the open-air girls and their after-school teas as well as my ballet practice at home to my scratchy 78 record of Chopin’s Polonaise. Watching Bandstand made me want to practise the mambo and the bunny hop instead, because that was what the fourteen- to eighteen-year-old audience was doing. That, and the bop. I’d been dancing since the hucklebuck, but never with the frenzied fever to get it right. I suppose that having a teenage brother and sister introduced me to teenage tastes early, but it was music that whipped me into my premature adolescence.
I was still wearing braids when I started bopping about the dining room in front of the television imitating teen attitudes with my head filling with notions about ‘earth angels’, ‘thrills on Blueberry Hill’ and other fairy-tale romances nailed to a four-four beat. I felt I was missing a ponytail, bobby socks, a cardigan sweater worn backwards and a felt skirt with a curly-haired poodle on it wearing a diamond-studded collar. I also had to find a partner to dance with as Dennis refused and Pam would arrive home loaded with homework and disappear straight upstairs to study.
Five afternoons a week for at least an hour each day I was mesmerized by Bandstand. I gave my undivided attention to the vision and sound of what they were calling rock and roll, which sounded like a pokier version of the rhythm and blues I’d heard on jukeboxes on the reservation
