Mrs O’Brien leered over me like she’d been smelling my scent on her husband’s fingertips. As I bent to pick up Mack’s note which had fallen by her foot, she kicked my hand away and reached down herself.
Her eyes flashed like a cat ready to take on a dog, and I was too terrified to swallow.
When she snorted, ‘Kidneys!’ only a crack of lightning could have made me jump more.
Before I could run Mrs O’Brien grabbed me, thrusting me violently towards the meat chopping block. Then she snapped, ‘Mr Enright, give this child a couple pork chops. With the kidneys, and don’t give her your best.’ My pulse was pounding in my ears and I was gulping big sobs.
I blubbered half the way home, but the rain had stopped and when I spotted a rainbow, I forgot that I’d been hit. I’d heard about rainbows and seen them in storybooks but had never seen one for real and the sight now filled me with overwhelming glee. Of course this sudden mood switch, this inability to hold onto torment, is a sign of a weak character, a failing that Mother always said came from my father.
Any normal child would have probably delivered the chops to Miss Hortense in tears, devastated and confused, but I skipped into Mack’s, collected the soda crackers that Miss Hortense had originally sent me for and popped that caramel in my mouth before hearing the bell tinkle as I shut the door. I had completely forgotten that I’d seen his wife.
Two hours later, when Mrs O’Brien was shouting at our door, Mother blocking my view, I couldn’t see the way Mrs O’Brien brandished Mack’s note.
For such a skimpy piece of paper with so little on it, it carried an uncommon weight and was to be brandished again by Mack’s lawyer. The newspaper report claimed that Mrs O’Brien mistook the note as evidence that Mack was involved in an illicit, sordid relationship with a coloured maid from Los Angeles named Hortense Alvarez.
Coloured being the operative word.
But the newspapers always mash up the facts and Mexicans do have some colour.
I don’t know why Mother and Lil weren’t enough family for me.
I don’t know why I made so much of Miss Hortense.
But I don’t want to recall what should have been, I want to look at what was … And Miss Hortense filled a need that I must have had, a need to have a fancy woman to muse upon. Maybe that’s all goddesses have ever been. Did I come into this world incomplete until I could connect with a woman whose beauty seemed beyond reach? Although my mother had some virtues, fancy wasn’t one. Nor did I expect it to be.
Even her name, Ruthie Mae Matthews, conjures up the image of somebody who puts hands to the plough (and her maiden name, Ruthie Mae Higgins, even more so).
Mother was fifteen when she ran away from her home in Mississippi, and Daddy was a Pullman porter on the train she caught. It turned out that he had two ways of trapping naïve country girls: some got his compliments, others his lemon drops. But Ruthie Mae Higgins sampled both.
At that green age she could milk a cow, slaughter a hog and beat grown men picking a bale of cotton. But that is as much of her early life as she ever mentioned after she caught Daddy’s train whistling its way towards Chicago.
I never met him and Mother rarely talked about him except to brag to other women that he was a Creole with hazel eyes who looked trim but broad-shouldered in his starched white porter’s jacket. She spied him first while she was seated alone in the crowded coloured section.
She didn’t explain why she let a stranger old enough to be her father lure her to Philadelphia, but I guess she was open to any offer and his of a job taking care of his ancient aunt Lucy was all the coaxing Mother needed.
John Randolph Matthews.
He had women in half the cities that the trains stopped in, so I still can’t decide if it was immoral that he married Mother even after she fell pregnant. For some reason, he moved her to Camden before she started showing and then stayed gone, apart from an occasional reappearance. So between having Lilian, a stillbirth and then producing me, Mother started to take in ironing. That’s how she met the Herzfelds. Then, when Daddy disappeared altogether, they offered additional hours until gradually she cooked and cleaned for them full time.
An orphan would have had more to say about their childhood than Mother revealed about hers, and in later years, anyone would have thought that she’d been born a Herzfeld. They represented safety and salvation and I wonder if domestics like her felt that they had two homes, two families … In Mother’s case, I imagined she endured life with us but lived with them. Under the Herzfelds’ roof from sun-up to sun-down, Mother must have felt kind of rich. Until she entered their back door, donned her fresh apron and gave the milkman his order, she was a Miss Nobody. Or worse, a ‘coloured’ Miss Nobody with no husband.
The Herzfelds were the nearest Mother got to owning a house, a car and three radios. She presumed they were nearly royalty because their eldest took violin lessons, and the fact that they knew people who could afford a night out in New York to catch a vaudeville show made my mother think that our future was secure.
When she scrubbed the ring of dirt away after Mrs Herzfeld’s bath or scraped the mud off Mr Herzfeld’s shoes, Ruthie Mae Matthews felt as significant as a clock’s hands. Because her ‘white folks’ gave her status even though they didn’t pay much.
The night that Mrs O’Brien gave Mother notice, created a sudden trauma in our lives, so of course my sister and I eavesdropped from behind our door when Mother went to Hortense’s to tell her the news.
‘Hortense, you gonna let her call you a Comanche nigger and husband stealer! Whatch’you gonna do, girl!’
Surprisingly, Miss Hortense merely decided to pack her things and go; it happened so fast that I had no time to adjust to the idea of losing her. With childish glee, two nights later, I watched her and Mother remove Hortense’s bed, bedding, dresser and chair to our place. But when, the following morning, she pulled the door of her room to for the last time my eyes were wells of tears.
‘Smile Irene!’ She was chirpy. ‘Things will get better for you.’
Lilian refused to stand out in the cold morning air to wave Hortense goodbye with me, but I was not on that sidewalk alone. Was it a mere coincidence that Father Connolly happened by as the ice man arrived to taxi her with her trunk to the ferry?
I can still see her smiling down at me, her cheeks rouged. ‘You could work for the stars, Irene,’ she said, before patting the ice man’s old pony.
Miss Hortense wasn’t just the glitter in our drab lives – some deity who merely slipped off to Mass each morning in hose washed each night and dried on the cord above the bath – sometimes she explained things to me in her baby English. And that’s what I missed most that chaotic October after she left.
Though people on our block gossiped about daily headlines, front-page news passed us by until the stock market crashed and the banks failed.
They called that Black Tuesday. That was the day when sane men leapt from windows and workers lost hope, the day the poor got poorer, and people with their savings invested in stock went broke. But it was the following day which brought our corner to a standstill because Mack was arrested for Mrs O’Brien’s murder. Being