Like Venus Fading. Marsha Hunt
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 Hortense went out in her velvet cloak, we had listened to Storybook Hour when we got up.
Our 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