Marsha Hunt - Like Venus Fading

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 lot in Hollywood. No fancy scenery. No trees. No animals. No props. Just six white faces and Hortense Alvarez. Right there in that line with the great Charlie Chaplin.

Mother always wondered what Hortense was living on and interrogated me, because Lilian was more interested in her catechism.

Mother’s questions usually came when my back was to her while she greased and braided my hair; my thin, kinky braids which to my great dismay barely reached my shoulders.

I’d grit my teeth, anticipating Mother’s yanks with the comb. Her breath warm against the back of my ear.

‘Irene, now where’s she getting the money to dye her hair? Couldn’t nobody’s hair be that black. It ain’t natural … And what about all that to-ing and fro-ing to church? Father Connolly wouldn’t be slipping by here if she wasn’t putting something in that collection box every day.’

Who could blame Mother for her agitations?

Mother was fat and Miss Hortense was thin.

Hortense dozed under her satin quilt while Mother rushed to work six days a week in all kinds of weather and got neither holiday nor holiday pay.

While Hortense spent as much time in quiet prayer as a nun, Ruthie Mae Matthews, who was a very old twenty-five, worked hard to feed us from the Herzfelds’ table.

Some great artist should have painted Miss Hortense kneeling in the back pew at St Anthony’s. Her jet hair as thick as a horse’s tail was always covered by a white lace mantilla which had belonged to her grandmother.

Along with high mass on Sunday, with its incense and candlelight and the Latin chants, she was the pomp and show business in my life, and considering that we hardly had furniture and slept on stacks of newspapers which Mother cleverly arranged like a low mattress, it’s a wonder that Lilian and I knew how to make Miss Hortense’s bed.

But we loved handling the satin quilt with the matching pillow case and polishing her dresser which meant that one of us got to lift the white kid gloves with the pearl buttons which rested upon it. My sister and I wouldn’t have handled Miss Hortense’s things with greater care had she been Mary Pickford.

I understood why Father Connolly sought her company and Mack gave her those pork chops.

Several times she visited our room to listen to the radio, but she didn’t speak enough English to appreciate the seven-o’clock comedy hour, so Mother would tune into some music.

Miss Hortense always arrived with her own chair and a Chester-field cigarette for Mother, although neither of them smoked. Mother would slip the cigarette into a cigar box where she kept our baptismal papers, and the four of us would arrange our chairs around Mr Herzfeld’s radio, sitting as attentively as an audience at a piano recital.

The music we listened to was invariably interrupted by loud crackling, because reception was poor at night, but it didn’t faze us. And if there was a piece of strudel to split between us, Miss Hortense would only accept the smallest piece which she’d nibble and say, ‘We have a party.’

Mother’s eyes bulged with shock and envy the evening that Miss Hortense told us as she was leaving, that she was going to be taking singing lessons in Philadelphia. Mother yelped, ‘Singing lessons!’ as though she had been asked to pay for them.

Miss Hortense had her hand on the radio console which was so warm it added to the heat of that summer’s night, while the sounds of boys playing stickball below in the street drifted up through our open windows.

Lifting her tiny foot to adjust the ankle strap of her high heel, she said, ‘I went to see about English lessons, but I can take singing lessons for less.’

My heart leapt and I thought that I was in the presence of a saint. I could see her on posters and imagine her on advertisements draped in furs.

For all the nonsense which will be remembered as my life, who will ever know the impact that Hortense Alvarez made. It’s now conceivable to me that Father Connolly was in love with her. After all, he was only a man and men of all persuasions fall in love, though priests aren’t meant to. So at six, before I had enough savvy to shade the grey into black and white situations, I would have called his sin love, but now I’d see it as human nature taking control.

Hortense.

Mack.

In my child’s world, they were family. And I was as hungry for the caramels he would slip me as he was for the sordid pleasures he took for them.

That first time he touched me must have been some weeks before the stock market crashed. At the end of summer. When the nights still twinkled from the fluorescent lightning bugs that Lil and I used to catch, and the mornings brought a few hours of dry relief to those last, long, humid days.

Trying to keep up with Lilian, wanting to learn to whistle because she could, is what I partly think led me to his store that afternoon.

For as long as I can remember, I struggled to keep up with Lilian. That’s how I got old before my time. Desperate to do everything that she could. At six I was struggling to be eight and a half like her.

All that summer, Mother had been talking about us being the angels in St Anthony’s big Christmas pageant. It was months away, but she was always looking for ways to impress Mrs Herzfeld, whose four girls all did well at school. But it was Miss Hortense who came up with the cockamamie idea that we should learn to whistle ‘Silent Night’ instead of singing it. Mother got as excited as a kid about that. So by the time the fall term began, whistling at the Christmas pageant was all that I could think about.

And there was autumn, that foolhardy autumn, rushing into a head-on crash with the Depression.

The elm beside the church was shedding leaves by late September and Mother was dressing us each morning in the high socks handed down by Mrs Herzfeld. But they were too big to stay up on my bony legs.

Socks. Were they part of the reason I ended up alone that rainy afternoon in Mack’s?