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.
I now realize that that picture had just been a location shot, but as a kid I imagined that Miss Hortense and Chaplin were really connected. And since he was featured on posters outside the Biograph, I thought he was more important than the President. It filled my head with fantasies, and I secretly expected him to come knocking for Miss Hortense any day.
Mother used to say, ‘Hortense ain’t all that to look at, even with her fox stole slung over that velvet dress to draw attention to her bosom. She tiptoes round like she thinks she white, but a Mexican ain’t nothing.’
To brush against Miss Hortense’s black velvet dress was like brushing against mink and hearing her warble ‘Ave Maria’ behind her closed door added something exotic to our otherwise dismal treks to the toilet where the only excitement was to sometimes get a splinter in my foot.
Her old kerosene burner was the sole object in her room which I didn’t wish was mine. It smelled like burning hair and sat near the window above a bucket of water she kept to rinse her china cup and saucer which she drained of watery weak coffee or strong green tea several times a day.
Some Saturdays when we cleaned her room Miss Hortense would dawdle for a few minutes and speak to Lil and me in that broken English. But I saw her as mysterious and magical rather than a stuck-up, independent spinster which is how Mother sometimes described her … And she alone may have inspired Mother’s sideways assault on Hollywood, because she said that if Hortense could get into movies, anybody could.
Lil and I knew what was in her bureau, because on Saturdays we handled her most intimate things.
I had watched Lilian giggle until tears ran down her cheeks the first time we found Miss Hortense’s corset.
But no letters ever arrived for Hortense and her past remained her own. Except for the picture with Chaplin, which she probably left out for a reason.
We believed that she had no friends other than Father Connolly who would climb the stairs to reach her even when he said his arthritis had him too stiff to bend his knees.
It was shocking to hear his laughter behind her door, because when he served at the altar, or when he limped down the halls of St Anthony’s Elementary School, I imagined that to be joyless was part of a priest’s calling. But in Miss Hortense’s room his laugh would erupt like a volcano. Like a blast of dynamite that was sparked by her giggle which was silvery. As delicate as my glass chime in a night breeze.
The Mexican señorita and the old Irish priest.
Far from home in Camden, New Jersey.
With the view of the skyscrapers in Philadelphia to remind them that there was a lot more to life than what was on offer at that corner of Buchanan and Prince.
Father Connolly’s green eyes must have often fallen on that photograph of Miss Hortense dressed in a frilly white blouse and ankle-length skirt in that group shot with Charlie Chaplin. And she must have told him like she’d told us, ‘Tell no-one.’ And maybe like Lilian and I, he carried it to the window to examine it better, as frustrated as we’d been that the sepia image of those seven people standing in a line wasn’t sharp enough. Five men and two women on a studio